Author! Author!:: Anne Mini's Blog

Okay, take a deep breath, boys and girls: we’re going to tackle the rest of the fiction book categories today. (Don’t worry, I’ll get back to that jolly interesting stuff about my memoir being the target for an ill-conceived lawsuit threat at the end of the post. I just didn’t want to leave all of you anxious queriers out there in the lurch, category-less.)

Yesterday, for those of you who missed it (I posted considerably later than usual), I went through the standard general fiction categories. Picking a category for your work is important, because (a) you only get to pick one, no matter how badly you would like to form hyphenate composites like Erotica-Western (and who wouldn’t want to read THAT?), and (b) the category you pick will determine to a very great extent whether any given agent or editor will be even remotely interested in your work. Because yes, Virginia, there are professionals who will simply not read a query or listen to a pitch unless it is for a book in one of their chosen categories.

Furthermore, you cannot dodge this kind of negative snap judgment by avoiding making a choice at all amongst the dozens of available categories, or by hiding your choice in the middle of your query letter. Oh, no: agents expect to see a straightforward statement of your category in the first paragraph of your query letter, on the title page of your manuscript (I’ll show you how to format a title page next week, legal difficulties permitting), and in your pitch.

Agents and editors LIKE making snap judgments, you see. It saves them time.

There is an unfortunately pervasive rumor on the writers’ conference circuit that a genre label automatically translates into writing less polished than other fiction in professional minds. No, no, no: genre distinctions, like book categories, are markers of where a book will sit in a bookstore, not value judgments. Naturally, agents and editors expect a book to reflect the conventions of books within the stated genre, but believe me, an agent who is looking for psychological thrillers is far more likely to ask to see your manuscript if you label it PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER, rather than just FICTION.

Case in point: I once had the misfortune to be assigned at a writers’ conference to be critiqued by an editor who did not handle mainstream or literary fiction, which is what I was writing. Since he had been good enough to read my first chapter and synopsis, I sat politely and listened to what he had to say. What he had to say, unsurprisingly, was that while he found the writing excellent, but he would advise that I change the protagonist from a woman to a man, strip away most of the supporting characters, and begin the novel with a conflict that occurred two thirds of the way through the book, concerning the fall of the Soviet Union. “Then,” he said, beaming at me with what I’m sure he thought was avuncular encouragement, “you’ll have a thriller we can market.”

Perhaps I had overdone the politeness bit. “But it’s not a thriller.”

He looked at me as though I had just told him that the sky was bright orange. “Then why are you talking to me?”

The rumor that genre carries a stigma has resulted in a lot of good manuscripts that would have stood out in their proper genres being pitched as mainstream or even literary fiction. Thus, queries and pitches have been aimed at the wrong eyes and ears. By labeling your work correctly, you increase the chances of your query landing on the desk of someone who genuinely likes your kind of book astronomically.

So label your work with absolute clarity. Many first-time genre authors make the completely understandable mistake of simply labeling their work with the overarching genre: MYSTERY, ROMANCE, SCIENCE FICTION, etc. However, did you know that each of these categories has many, many subcategories?

The more specific you can be, the more likely your work is to catch the eye of an agent or editor who honestly wants to snap up your book. (Or so the professionals claim. Really, it’s a shortcut that enables them to weed out queries outside their area with a minimum of letter-reading; that’s why agents like to be told the category in the first paragraph of the letter. It saves them scads of time if you tell them instantly whether your book is a hardboiled mystery or a caper mystery: if it isn’t the variety they are looking for today, they can weed it out almost instantly.)

Let me state outright that the major genres all have wonderful writers’ associations which can undoubtedly give you more specific information than I can here. This list is intended to guide people’s first forays into picking a category.

Let’s start with SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY, because it is the genre closest to my heart. My first writing teacher was an extremely well-known science fiction writer, so my first efforts at short stories were naturally in that genre. It may amuse those of you who write SF (the professionals NEVER call it Sci Fi, incidentally) that Philip, arguably one of the best-selling SF writers of all time, told me from the very beginning that he thought I should not write in his genre, no matter how well I did it: it was, he said, too hard for any good writer to make a living at it.

But times have changes substantially since Philip was writing, and if you write SF or Fantasy, you have many options within the genre. You can, of course, simply list SCIENCE FICTION or FANTASY, if your work does not fall into any of the subcategories.

SCIENCE FICTION ACTION/ADVENTURE: The protagonist must fight incredible odds or impressive beasties to attain his (or, less frequently, her) goals. Eek — is that an Ewok behind that tree?

SPECULATIVE SCIENCE FICTION (what if X were changed?) and FUTURISTIC SCIENCE FICTION (what if my characters lived in a future society where X was different from now?) are often mistakenly conflated into a single category. Wait — is this a government plot?

ALTERNATE HISTORY: What if X had changed in the past? What would the present be like? Philip’s THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, predicated on the premise that the other side won World War II, is the usual example given for this subgenre.

CYBERPUNK: I have heard a lot of definitions for this subgenre, ranging from THE MATRIX to NEUROMANCER. Think technology-enhanced alternate realities with a dark twist.

DARK FANTASY: Fear skillfully woven into a what-if scenario. Until CYBERPUNK got its own following, its books tended to be marketed as DARK FANTASY.

COMIC FANTASY: Elves on ecstasy.

EPIC FANTASY: Wait — my friends the centaur, the half-human, half-canary, and a centipede have to save the universe AGAIN? If Tolkein were writing today, his LORD OF THE RINGS series would probably be marketed under this category.

If you are in serious doubt over where your SF/FANTASY book falls, go to any bookstore with a good SF/fantasy section and start pulling books off the shelves. Find a book similar to yours, and check the spine and back cover: the subgenre is often printed there.

VAMPIRE FICTION is sometimes categorized as fantasy, sometimes as horror. But there is something hypnotic about your eyes.

HORROR is its own distinct genre, and should be labeled accordingly. Never get into a car without checking the back seat, and for heaven’s sake, if you are a teenager, don’t run into the woods.

Okay, take another deep breath, because we are now going to delve into the many, many ROMANCE subcategories.

EROTICA is not your grandmother’s idea of pornography anymore. (Well, I guess it might be, depending upon what your grandmother was into.) Sexually-explicit writing where arousal is the point.

HISTORICAL ROMANCE has a zillion subcategories, primarily because its subcategories are often specific to period and locale. A few of the biggies: REGENCY, SCOTTISH, MEDIEVAL, TEXAS, WESTERN, MIDDLE EASTERN. ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND.

TIME TRAVEL: You have given up on the opposite sex in your own timeframe.

INSPIRATIONAL: If your romance novel is informed by spirituality, it belongs here.

CONTEMPORARY: Having a current-affairs issue at its core OR a protagonist who is a woman deeply devoted to her career.

FANTASY and CHICK LIT are hyphenates within the genre: basically, the conventions of these categories are grafted onto the ROMANCE genre. Natural choices, I think.

MULTICULTURAL: Not all of the people falling in love are white. Seriously, that’s what this means. I don’t quite understand this euphemism, since generally books labeled MULTICULTURAL are about a single culture, but hey, I don’t make the rules.

ROMANTIC SUSPENSE: this used to be called Women in Jeopardy or, more colloquially, Bodice Rippers. No comment.

PARANORMAL and GHOST ROMANCE are divided by a distinction I do not understand. Sorry. Check with Romance Writers of America.

CATEGORY ROMANCE: This is actually what many people think of automatically as a romance novel — the Harlequin type, written according to a very rigid structure.

Okay, hang in there, because here comes the last of the many subcategoried genres: MYSTERY. Again, I would urge you to consult the excellent resources provided by the Mystery Writers of America, if you are in serious doubt about which subgenre to select.

HISTORICAL: Again, self-explanatory?

COZY: An amateur sleuth is solving the crimes. VERY popular: about a quarter of the mysteries sold in North America fall into this category.

POLICE PROCEDURAL: The people who are supposed to be solving the crimes are solving the crimes.

LEGAL: A lawyer misreads his or her job description, and gets involved with solving a case.

PROFESSIONAL: A doctor, professor, reporter, etc. misreads his or her job description, and gets involved with solving a case.

PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR: A PI reads his or her job description correctly, and gets involved with solving a case.

PSYCHOLOGICAL or FORENSIC: A psychologist or forensic scientist plays around with his or her job description, refusing to leave the rest of the crime-solving to the police.

SUSPENSE: Wait, is ANYBODY going to solve the crime here? Hello? Is anybody else in the house? Hello?

THRILLER: AAAAH!

HARDBOILED: There’s this guy, see, who lives by his own rules. He ain’t takin’ no guff, see — except maybe from a beautiful dame with a shady past. Often, she has legs that won’t quit AND go all the way to the ground. (A genre with surprising longevity: in 2003, hardboiled mysteries were 5% of the mysteries sold.)

ROMANTIC SUSPENSE: This time, the beautiful dame with a past and the legs IS the protagonist.

COPS AND KILLERS: What it says on the box.

SERIAL KILLER: Baaad people.

CHICK LIT: With how much time the protagonist spends in bed, it’s AMAZING that she finds the time to solve the case AND coordinate her shoes with her Prada handbag.

BRITISH: You may be wondering why I asked you all here.

SPY THRILLER: You may be wondering why I have you tied to that chair, Mr. Bond.

NOIR: This loner drifts into town, where he collides romantically with someone else’s wife under magnificently moody lighting conditions. What’s the probability that he’ll get fingered for a murder he didn’t commit?

CAPER: The protagonists are non-career criminals, often with wacky tendencies. Can they pull it off? Can they?

The remaining genre categories, WESTERN and ACTION/ADVENTURE, speak for themselves. Or, more precisely, I don’t have anything smart alecky to say about them.

And that’s it. In my next posting, I’ll cover the nonfiction categories — and we’ll finally be done. Hurray!

To put my own adventures into perspective, the threat to my book, A FAMILY DARKLY, has now entered the LEGAL THRILLER stage of its development. Even as I write this, lawyers are scratching their learned heads over the puzzling allegations made about my memoir. Of particular interest is the issue of whether my telling the truth about a relationship that has been hush-hush since, oh, before the Bicentennial (yes, one of my claims to fame is that Philip K. Dick laughed like hell when I told him about having to dress up as a miniature colonial wife and wield a mean flatiron in an elementary school diorama on Housework Before Modern Technology) should seriously bother anyone now.

Also at issue: since the woman who, ahem, borrowed my mother’s first husband on a semi-permanent basis has written her own book about the break-up of one marriage and the establishment of the next, and Philip has written a fictionalized account of it, is there any logical or ethical reason that my mother’s side of things (as seen through my vision, darkly) should not see print? Can you, in fact, be a public figure and be selective about what is divulged about you after your death?

On the bright side, though, everyone concerned seems rather eager to get these issues resolved before A FAMILY DARKLY comes out, or to be more precise, before the marketing blitz for A SCANNER DARKLY begins. A big-budget film, I’m told, based upon Philip’s 1979 novel. Sort of the end of an era for me, to see concepts and characters I pictured in my head while Philip so much about during revisions, translated into big-screen images. Let no one say that the creative process isn’t often pretty surreal.

It may surprise you to learn — it surprised me, I’ll confess — that the author actually has very little to do with a lawsuit of this nature: it’s all handled by the publishing house and, at the moment, a wildfire of argument about whether my book should be censored amongst habités of the many PKD fan sites. It’s actually rather maddening, to be stuck on the sidelines while discussion rages over what is after all my baby.

I shall keep you posted, of course, on what happens. And in the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Heavens — I got so wrapped up in my own saga that I almost forgot that I promised you a posting on book categories! To return to a theme from last week, labels, like standard formatting rules, are very important to agents and editors: if they can’t place your work within a conceptual box, chances are they will reject your work as weird. (And remember, in industry-speak, weird is bad; fresh is good.) Thus, before you submit your work to any agent or editor, you will need to decide which box is most comfortable for your book.

To be precise, you will need to mention your book’s genre in your query letter, on the title page of your manuscript (upper right corner is standard), and anytime you pitch. Hard as it may be to believe, to professional eyes, the category is actually more important than the title or the premise. To an agent, the category determines which editors on her contact list she can approach with your book; to an editor, it determines which market niche it will fill. If your work is difficult to categorize, or straddles two categories, their brains go into a tailspin: on which shelf in Barnes & Noble can it rest?

To a lot of writers, particularly fiction writers, the requirement to pick a single category for a work that may legitimately appeal to three or four target audiences often seems, if not repressive, a little foolish. You may be an expansive, freewheeling soul who longs to transcend narrow conceptions of genre; you may have a great love of two distinct genres, and long to combine them; you may feel that the value judgments placed upon certain genres render it undesirable to pick the most obvious label. (Why, for instance, is women’s lit so often sniffed at, when thrillers — bought disproportionately by men, and thus could legitimately be named men’s lit — are not?) You may feel, and with some justification, that the agent you are querying has a far greater knowledge of the market, and is thus in a far better position than you to decide in which category your book belongs.

No matter which you are, you will need to pick a category for your book anyway. Sorry. If you shilly-shally, or even hesitate when you are asked at a conference, you run the risk of appearing uninformed about the industry. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there do exist agents so category-minded that they will automatically disregard any query that does not specify the book’s category clearly within the first paragraph.

This is serious business.

Okay, let’s tackle fiction first. Genre fiction has subcategories, just as general fiction does, so these lists will be quite extensive. Hey, don’t blame me: I’m just the messenger here.

In general fiction, the categories are:

FICTION: also known as mainstream. This is the bulk of the market, so do not be afraid of the plain-Jane moniker.

LITERARY FICTION: fiction where the writing style is a major selling point of the book. Assumes a college-educated audience.

HISTORICAL FICTION: pretty self-explanatory, no?

WOMEN’S FICTION: not to be confused with romance; WF is mainstream fiction specifically geared for a female readership. Since women buy the vast majority of fiction sold in North America, however, this category’s edges can get somewhat nebulous. Think of the YA-YA SISTERHOOD.

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION: Novels about what used to be called “career women.” If your protagonist is a doctor or lawyer who takes her work seriously, chances are that this is the category for you.

CHICK LIT: Assumes a female readership under the age of 40; always has a protagonist who is good in bed. In fact, some agents and editors refer to this category as GOOD IN BED.

LAD LIT: Similar to CHICK LIT, except the good-in-bed protagonist is a troubled young man; all of us have female co-workers who have dated the prototypes for these characters. The only example I have ever heard anyone use for this category is HIGH FIDELITY.

LADY LIT: Similar to CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION, but the protagonist is often independently wealthy, or regards her relationships as more important than her work; the protagonist is always older than a CHICK LIT heroine. (I swear I’m not making this stuff up.)

FUTURISTIC FICTION: Not to be confused with science fiction, which is its own genre, these are literary or mainstream books set in the future; I gather the point of this category is to permit agents to say to editors, “No, no, it’s not genre.” Think THE HANDMAID’S TALE.

ADVENTURE FICTION: Not to be confused with ACTION/ADVENTURE, this category encompasses books where the protagonists engage in feats that serve no business purpose, yet are satisfyingly life-threatening. If your protagonist surfs, mountain-climbs, or wrestles wild animals, this may be the category for you.

SPORTS FICTION: Similar to ADVENTURE FICTION, but focused on conventional sports.

POETRY: If you do not know what this is, go knock on your high school English teacher’s door at midnight and demand to repeat the 10th grade.

SHORT STORIES: a collection of them. Generally, authors who publish short story collections have had at least a few of them published in magazines first.

CHILDREN’S: another fairly self-explanatory one, no?

YOUNG ADULT: books written for people too old for CHILDREN’S, yet too young for FICTION. YA, unlike other categories, may often be successfully combined with genres: YA FANTASY, YA WESTERN, etc.

COMICS: exactly what you think they are.

GRAPHIC NOVEL: A book with a COMICS format, but a specifically adult-oriented plot line.

Whew! And that’s just the non-genre fiction categories.

Do allow me to reiterate: you only get to pick one for your book. If you are wavering between close categories — say, between CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION and CHICK LIT, do not be afraid to guess; there is quite a bit of overlap between categories, whether agents and editors admit it or not. Take a good look at your manuscript, decide whether sex or job is more important to your protagonist (if you are writing about a call girl, this may be an impossible determination to make), and categorize accordingly. If you’re off by a little, an agent who likes your work will tell you how to fine-tune your choice.

The distinction that seems to give writers the most trouble is between FICTION and LITERARY FICTION. Let’s face it, most of us like to think our writing has some literary value, and critical opinion about what is High Literature changes with alarming frequency. When asked, even most agents and editors have a hard time telling you precisely what the difference is — but, like art, they know literary when they see it. Yet ask any three agents whether THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, THE SHIPPING NEWS, and THE COLOR PURPLE are mainstream or literary, and you will probably get at least two different answers.

Lest you think, as many aspiring writers do, that all good fiction is literary, let me remind you that these are marketing categories, not value judgments. LITERARY FICTION is quite a small percentage of the fiction market, so do be aware that if you pick that category, you may be limiting your book’s perceived market appeal. When in doubt, FICTION is usually safe, because it is the broadest — and most marketable — category.

If you are in serious doubt whether your book is sufficiently literary to count as LITERARY FICTION, apply one of two tests. First, take a good, hard look at your book: under what circumstances can you envision it being assigned in a college English class? If the subject matter is the primary factor, chances are the book is not literary. I once mortally offended an English professor by bringing in an example from GONE WITH THE WIND, as mainstream a book as ever you would hope to see: “That’s mass market,” the professor snapped. “We don’t study that sort of thing here.” Ooh — touchy.

The other test — and I swear I am not suggesting this merely to be flippant — is to open your manuscript randomly at five different points and count the number of semicolons, colons, and dashes per page. If there are more than a couple per page, chances are your work is geared for the literary market. Mainstream FICTION tends to assume a tenth-grade reading level: LITERARY FICTION assumes an audience educated enough to use a semicolon correctly, without having to look up the ground rules.

Do be careful, however, when applying this second test, because writers tend to LOVE punctuation. Oh, I know this is going to break some tender hearts out there, but if you want to write fiction professionally, you need to come to terms with an ugly fact: no one but writers particularly LIKE semicolons. If you are writing for a mainstream audience, you should consider minimizing their use; if you are writing most genre fiction, you should get rid of them entirely.

If you don’t believe me, I implore you to spend an hour in any reasonably well-stocked bookstore, going from section to section, pulling books off the shelf randomly, and applying the punctuation test. If you are writing for most genre audiences (science fiction being the major exception), most agents and editors prefer to see simpler sentence structure.

Again, I don’t make the rules: I merely pass them along to you.

Tomorrow, I shall go into the genre categories and subcategories, as well as the nonfiction categories. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

I have been thinking again today about those of us who write about true events — and yes, alas, my publisher is still being sued over my memoir — and I want to speak about a topic that is discussed only very rarely amongst memoirists, and that in hushed tones and only amongst ourselves. It is, successful memoirists assert behind closed doors, extremely difficult to expose your own cherished notions of yourself and your past to outside scrutiny.

If you are brave enough to want to share your life story with the world, do keep in mind that you will be tying up your most cherished and hated memories with a nice red ribbon — and handing it to people whose life’s work is pointing out logical holes in stories. I’m not talking about predatory lawyers here, or even reviewers, but agents and editors.

Be prepared to answer questions from your agent and editor that most therapists would blush to ask. Do try to keep a sense of humor about it, because after all, you are the person who invited the scrutiny. (And do remember, as I did not, that you are under no obligation to show your manuscript to your kith and kin. As the lawyers say, it’s always better to ask forgiveness than permission. How I wish now that I had followed my own advice in this respect!)

The first serious barrage of ultra-personal questions about my memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK caught me totally by surprise, even after a lifetime listening to would-be biographers interview my mother about her glory days. When I first began shopping the book around, a good half of the publishing professionals I spoke to asked the same first question: was this book about a love affair that ended when I was 15?

Oh, please. As if no young woman ever had anything interesting to say that didn’t have something to do with sex.

If I had been a savvier marketer back then, I suppose I would have answered, “You’ll have to read the book and see,” but it’s pretty difficult to treat the story of your own life like a commodity. It’s hard not to take the prurient questions personally. They probably were not actually asking, “Were you a teenage slut?” but that’s certainly how I heard it.

Yet once you have written a memoir, your telling of your life IS a commodity. Like any other salesman with any other product, your agent has to understand it well enough (or repackage it well enough) to be able to sell it to editors. And your editor has to be able to sell his or her vision of it to his publisher, and the publishing house’s marketers to the world.

This may be self-evident logically, but emotionally, it is anything but. You learn a lot about yourself, and about how others see you. For a memoirist, the process of bringing out reminiscences is roughly akin to conducting a year’s worth of therapy by shouting deep, dark secrets across a crowded opera house to a hard-of-hearing therapist seated on the far side. His questions and your answers are essentially public — as is your story, the instant you start to market it. And, given the peculiarities of the NF market, perhaps even before you have written it.

There are easier things to do.

And you unquestionably have a higher chance of maintaining plausible deniability if you write your life as fiction. But some of us have led lives too wacky to make for realistic fiction. Just because something actually happened doesn’t mean it is believable on the pages of a novel.

Let me repeat that, because it’s the single biggest problem the memoir-writer faces: just because something happened doesn’t mean it is plausible. It is the memoirist’s job to make the improbabilities of life credible, by creating rich characters and compelling story arcs out of the materials real life has given him. A memoir is not a transcript of everyday life, because that would be unreadable — a good memoir is real life illuminated by an insightful eye and a heart not afraid to reveal its own foibles.

All this being said, if you are considering writing a memoir, I can’t encourage you enough to do it. There is liberation in shouting your deepest, darkest secrets across that crowded opera house that the veiled whispers of fact-based fiction simply cannot provide. Go ahead and shout — but only if you’re telling the truth as you know it. You may need to cling to the security of knowing you are being honest in the dark night of criticism to come.

Before I sign off for the day, I’d like to throw a question out to all of you truth-tellers out there: how do you work up nerve to write about matters you have never discussed with your family? Is there a line between what is legitimate to use in a memoir and what is too personal to tell, and if so, who gets to draw that line?

Please send your good ideas on this subject via the COMMENTS function, below. I would love to get your thoughts; obviously, these issues are very much on my mind at the moment. Let’s get a conversation going!

And keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

I am calmer today, thanks for asking; my sense of humor shows signs of only being sprained, rather than broken. If certain people want to launch frivolous lawsuits at my memoir because I tell the truth in it about someone who has been dead for 23 years, I have only two options: to make up lies that will please them, or to keep right on telling the truth. I prefer the latter, and I don’t see how I could, in all integrity, do anything else.

I’ll keep you posted on how all of this truth-telling works out for me.

It has made be think, though, about what I have been taught over the years by doubtless well-meaning teachers and writers about how to write the truth. In retrospect, I am honestly struck by how much of the advice was simply not useful at all. There is a great deal I wish I had known, and even more that I wish I had not needed to unlearn before I could finish writing my memoir. (Which WILL see print, I swear. I’m not going to be intimidated by bullies with buckets of money.) So what is the newly-minted memoirist to believe?

Case in point: the advice to write what you know.

We’ve all heard this, right? I assume so, because the result has been an apparently endless stream of short stories about upper middle-class teenagers with angst and very lovable English teachers. It has also — unfortunately for someone like me, who has written about a well-known literary figure survived by unfortunately testy heirs — has led to far too many biopics about writers where the Great One in question lives a life IDENTICAL to the world depicted in his work. So much for creativity: in the biopic universe, the work IS the life.

Personally, I like to give writers a bit more credit for imagination. I prefer to think, for instance, that Dorothy Parker occasionally had a happy love affair, that Ernest Hemingway was something more than a mindless thug fond of killing things, and that John Irving does not actually harbor a pet bear. I could be wrong about all this, of course, but I suspect I am not.

With a memoir, writing what you know seems like basic common sense, right? In a way, yes, but will everybody’s personal story make a good book, even in skillful hands? And is telling the unvarnished truth enough to make a book interesting to people who have never met you?

If you have had an extraordinary life, obviously you have good memoir material, but what about an ordinary life examined with sensitivity and insight? Surely, common experiences would resonate with more people than unusual ones? Think about ANGELA’S ASHES: there were quite a few kids who could have grown up to write similar memoirs, weren’t there?

Again: yes, but — there’s a fine line between speaking to shared experience and reproducing what has been written before. Despite what editors say at writers’ conferences about searching high and low for the next ANGELA’S ASHES, copycat books seldom sell well to the general public. (If you doubt this, take this quick quiz: close your eyes, turn around three times, and now name at least three of the BRIDGET JONES clones’ authors. Could you do it?) To paraphrase Mae West, a copy is forgettable, but the public loves an honest-to-goodness original.

Unfortunately, there are scads and scads of people in the publishing industry who seem to forget this. You may recognize them by their distinctive stripes: they are the agents who snap up a book that sounds like the currently hot thing, show it to one or perhaps two editors — then drop the book flat when it doesn’t sell instantly. They are the editors who will pitch a book to their colleagues as “the next X” (where X = current bestseller), acquire it enthusiastically — then lose interest in them as soon as fashion turns, leaving the poor author high, dry, and without any book promotion budget whatsoever. They are the marketing people who change their minds about what is marketable on a daily basis, and who eschew whimsy. I do not recommend their cultivation, unless you have a skin the approximate thickness of the average bark on a 100-year-old cedar; otherwise, it will only end in tears.

In my opinion, the reading public is actually less fickle than this, bless its collective heart. Once a reader finds a writer she likes, she tends to keep buying that writer’s subsequent books, with an unstinting loyalty rare in this hyper-competitive world. This sterling reader will often even go back and try to find earlier works by a favorite author, the ones that got dropped by a once-enthusiastic press when the time came to ante up for publicity or the ones that did not get stellar advance reviews. Honestly, I do not think authors spend enough time being grateful to readers of this caliber: they are the ones for whom it is genuinely a pleasure to write.

That being said, do bear in mind that this sterling reader probably spends a fair amount of time hanging out in bookstores and/or browsing on Amazon: to catch her eye with a book about a common experience, the writing has to be far above average, and the take has to be unusual.

This attitude, unlike the latest-hot-thing prejudice, expresses itself similarly in the reading public and amongst agents and editors. There’s simply a higher bar for originality for common experiences. At this point, there have been so many books about, say, a Baby Boomer caring for her dying parent(s), (or a 60’s radical simmering down over time, or a high-powered businessman coming to terms with his own mortality and learning in the process that there is more to life than money, or city folks learning the value of country ways, or the loss of anyone’s virginity) that the storytelling must necessarily be stellar to sell the book. By writing on a common subject, unfortunately, the author automatically runs the risk of the agent taking one look at the query, crying to the heavens, “Oh, God, not another book about X!” and hastily shoving it aside unread.

So how do you make your story stand out from the crowd? In my case, I had a built-in advantage: I spent much of my childhood in secret telephone confabs with a brilliant science fiction writer who was afraid to leave his house. That’s not the kind of thing that happens very often , I am told — and that is precisely what I would suggest you look for in your own story: what about you is absolutely unique?

In asking this, I am turning the standard advice on its head. I would advise you to write not just what you know, but what ONLY YOU know. In other words, what is the story that only you can tell?

It doesn’t have to be spectacular, just original and close to home. Think about Marjorie Rawlings’ children’s classic THE YEARLING. A simple, classic story, far removed from the potboilers that were selling well at the time. But these were characters that Rawlings knew and loved down to her bones — and thus, the reader learns to love them, too.

I would suggest that if you want to write a memoir, the people in your life need to spring off the page with all the intensity of fictional characters; if you want to write a novel, its characters need to leap into the reader’s mind with all the solidity of real people. And that will be hard, because you won’t want to step on the toes of the living or the memories of the dead — or, in my case, excite the lawyers of the heirs.

You’re too nice a person for that, right?

Ah, but your responsibility to your future reader demands that you are honest — that you write not the story that your family or your friends or your coworkers or the nearest person with a scary lawyer thinks will make them look good, but the story that only YOU know.

Necessarily, others will disagree with you; that’s the nature of differing points of view. But if you stick with the story you know in your gut to be true, and tell it from the perspective that only you can show, you’re bound to end up with an honest memoir or truthful-feeling novel.

And, unfortunately for the kith and kin of memoirists everywhere, there really isn’t any other way to write a good memoir. Honest, your honor: it just can’t be done any other way.

Keep up the good work, my friends.

– Anne Mini

Dearly beloved:

I had planned to write a long, lovely post today about how to prep your initial chapters for sending out to editors and agents, but I have received very upsetting news. Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I was waxing poetic about memoirists often being misunderstood, threatened, and occasionally even sued when they are telling the truth? Well..

I am hugely, horribly, terribly upset. Is there anything more awful, anything that makes you revert to a child-like breathlessness at the injustice of it all, as being attacked for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Okay, let me calm down and tell you what is going on. The Philip K. Dick estate has renewed its threat to sue if my memoir, A FAMILY DARKLY, is published. Yes, that’s right, the one that’s already available for pre-sale on Amazon, the one for which I won the PNWA’s Zola Award in 2004, the one that I’ve been running myself ragged to get out the door this year. My baby, in other words. To make matters worse, I was just finishing up the final edits!

The estate has known about the book for over a year, and has had the manuscript since June, but now, in September, they’re suddenly on the warpath; perhaps they believed that when they asked me for changes, their copy of the manuscript should have magically changed before their eyes, HARRY POTTER-style. I shan’t bore you with the details of what they’re claiming I have done, but it’s all terribly ugly; all in all, they generally assert that it’s the worst book since MEIN KAMPF, and I gather that they wouldn’t be terribly sorry to see me burned as a witch.

Let me translate that for those of you not accustomed to being sued by people with pots and pots of money: the underlying fear here is that my telling the truth (which actually isn’t anything horrible; just aspects of the man that hadn’t been written about before) might harm attempts to sell certain short stories by a famous science fiction writer who shall remain nameless to a gargantuan studio known for harboring a certain big-eared mouse. As nearly as I can tell, the objection seems to be that my memoir depicts Philip as funny — which he undoubtedly was. The prevailing fear seems to be that the mouse might prefer its late artistic geniuses devoid of colorful habits and waggish personalities.

As I understand it, the mouse — and the estate, which has never threatened to sue a biographer before, as far as I know — has no objections whatsoever to the many, many bios that depict the famous SF writer in question as a drug-addicted maniac; the idea that he might have had friends is apparently far more disturbing to rodential sensibilities than anything he might have ingested in his lifetime.

Oh, lordy. Preserve us from dealing with those with no sense of humor.

I hear you asking: wait, I thought it wasn’t legally possible to slander or libel the dead? And isn’t truth an absolute defense against libel? And aren’t good people everywhere generally dead set against the practice of censorship?

Well, yes, yes, and yes. Doesn’t seem to be stopping ’em, though.

I’m frantically searching my mind for some instructive tidbit I can glean from the horror of today, to pass along to aspiring memoirists, to help them along their path, but honestly, I’m too upset at the moment. Unless the moral is this: maybe it’s a waste of time and valuable energy to try to please people you can’t respect.

Because, honestly, I don’t know what I could have done to avoid this outcome, other than flatly lying, twisting the Philip I had known into a shape more palatable for relatives who had met him only three or four times in their lives. I spent MONTHS asking for input, dancing around egos, even making tiny, insignificant, silly changes that someone or other thought were monumentally important because she’d missed the point of this anecdote or that. I was incredibly accommodating — only to learn, via a letter on very expensive lawyerly letterhead, that the people I had been trying so hard to please had chosen to ignore all of the changes I had made at their request. I learn, only at this very, very late date, that they now claim that I didn’t tell them I was writing a book at all.

You’d think that the prize for best NF book would have tipped them off, but hey, some people need more obvious hints than others.

Dearly beloved, does this make any sense to you? It doesn’t to me, I confess, and I’m the one who’s been living through it.

I guess all I can add, when all is said and done, is this: even with all this furor, even staring in the face the very real possibility that my book may be yanked from the shelves for the most specious of reasons, I still feel it has all been worth it. There is nothing in the world that feels better than telling the truth, especially a truth that you’ve been holding in for a very, very long time.

I hope I’ll be able to be more upbeat tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work, and I’ll keep you posted.

– Anne Mini

Hi, gang —

For the past week, I have been talking about various circumstances that might lead to a good author receiving a form letter rejection. (If you missed my thrilling guided tour of the query letter, see earlier postings.) I would like to emphasize that the problems I have been pointing out for the last couple of days are by no means boneheaded mistakes: most of them are very sophisticated mistakes indeed, ones that require a lot of careful time, effort, and often following step-by-step directions in a writers’ magazine to make really well.

As I’ve said before, my goal here is to save you some time. Yes, the best way to learn is through direct personal experience, but I see no compelling reason that every English-speaking writer should have to make the same set of 23 mistakes before figuring out what agents and editors want to see. I’m trying to show you a few shortcuts.

Today, I want to talk about synopses, and no one’s gonna stop me. Not all agents want to see a synopsis along with the query letter (check the agent’s listing in one of the standard agent guides to make sure), but most do. Since literally every book will at some point require a synopsis, you might as well write a good one up front.

For the purposes of this discussion, I shall assume that you have already read up on them in one of the many excellent guides on the subject. (If anyone out there wants a blow-by-blow about how to write one from ground zero, send me a message via the COMMENTS function, below, and I’ll write a post on it.) Generally, a synopsis should run between 2 and 5 pages in length, double-spaced, with 1-inch margins. If yours is either longer or shorter than that, you might want to tinker with it until it fits within standard expectations before asking yourself the questions below.

Otherwise, read yours over IN HARD COPY, ALOUD. As regular readers of this blog are already aware, my professional editor hat gets all in a twist at the notion of any writer’s proofreading solely on a computer screen.

And don’t even get me started on the chronic inadequacies of most word processing programs’ grammar checkers! Mine disapproves of gerunds, apparently on general principle, strips accent marks off French words, and regularly advises me to use the wrong form of THERE. (If anybody out there does not know the ABSOLUTELY IMMUTABLE rules governing when to use THERE, THEIR, AND THEY’RE, drop me a comment, and I shall make everything clear.) Like a bad therapist, a poor grammar checker cannot be sufficiently disregarded, but even in the unlikely event that your grammar checker was put together by someone remotely familiar with the English language as she is spoke, you should NEVER rely solely upon what it tells you to do. If you’re in doubt, look it up.

There is another excellent reason to read the synopsis out loud: to make sure it stands alone as a story. Since part of the point of the synopsis is to demonstrate what a good storyteller you are, flow is obviously important. If you have even the tiniest reservations about whether you have achieved this goal, read your synopsis out loud to someone unfamiliar with your project — and then ask your listener to tell the basis story back to you. If there are holes in your account, this method will make them leap out at you. (Insofar as a hole can leap.)

Okay, let’s assume that you’ve read and reread your synopsis, and it is both grammatically impeccable and one hell of a good story; Will Rogers, Mark Twain, and Dorothy Parker would all gnash their venerable teeth, if they still had them, in envy over your storytelling skills. Now it’s time to start asking yourself a few questions:

(1) Is my synopsis brief and the length requested by the agent? Is it double-spaced, in 12-point type, with standard margins?

Yes, I know I mentioned all this already. Check again, because any of these problems will generally result in your synopsis being placed into the rejection pile, unread.

(2) Does the first page of the synopsis SAY that it’s a synopsis? Does it also list the title of the book? Is every page numbered? And does every page contain the slug line MY LAST NAME/TITLE/SYNOPSIS/#?

Again, this is nit-picky stuff — but people who work at agencies and publishing houses tend to be nit-picky people. (Try saying that four times fast!) The sooner you accept that, the happier your writing life will be.

(3) If I mention the names of places, famous people, or well-known consumer products, are they spelled correctly?

I did not realize until I started editing professionally just how common it is for writers to misspell proper nouns. Here again, I blame the demon word processing programs: mine has the infernal impudence to insist that Berkeley, California (where I happen to have been born) should be spelled Berkley, like the press. Trust me, any West Coast-based agent or editor will know which one it should be — and wonder why you don’t.

Yes, it is unfair that you should be penalized for the mistakes of the multi-million dollar corporations that produce these spelling and grammar checkers. Pacific Northwest-based editors have been known to throw spitballs at Microsofties; I content myself with occasionally sending them a roster of the fine English faculty at the University of Washington, with the suggestion that perhaps it was time to retake English 101. I know what the fate of people who propagate false spelling and grammatical information if I ran the universe — boiling oil would be amusingly involved — but alas, I am not so empowered. And look what the result has been: Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, living in a state with no personal income tax, and the world is full of bad grammar.

From your perspective as a querying writer, there can be very serious consequences to these grammatical and spelling oversights caused or at least encouraged by word processing programs: agents and editors cannot tell whether you as, say, a cookbook author, can’t spell to save your life, or haven’t bothered to proofread — or if some yahoo in Woodinville just couldn’t be bothered to check a dictionary to see how hors d’oeuvre is actually spelled by the French. (I had to enter that one in my custom dictionary.) To the agent or editor, YOU are invariably the one who looks unprofessional.

This doesn’t mean not to spell-check: you should. But you should never rely upon a spell-checker or grammar-checker alone. They’re just not literate enough.

If you have any doubt whatsoever about your own proofreading skills, lasso a friend with better ones. Hire a professional editor. But do not expect to get by with the level of perfection deemed good enough by those who design word processing programs.

(4) If I use clichés for comic effect, have I reproduced them correctly?

As I have mentioned before, I frown upon the use of clichés in print. (You can’t see me doing it, but I am frowning at it right now.) Part of the point of being a writer is to display your thought, not the truisms of others. And frankly, I think any good author should be able to make it through a 1-page query letter and a 2-5 page synopsis without quoting other people. Occasionally, however, there are reasons to utilize cliché — the best reason, of course, being to make fun of them.

You would not BELIEVE how common it is for writers to reproduce clichés incorrectly. (I would not believe it myself, if I had not been a judge in a number of literary contests.) And an incorrectly-quoted cliché will, I assure you, kill any humorous intention deader than the proverbial doornail. So make sure that your needles remain in your haystacks, and that the poles you wouldn’t touch things with are ten-foot, not 100-foot. (How would you pick up a 100-foot pole, anyway?) When in doubt, ask someone outside your immediate circle of friends — your own friends may well be making the same mistake you are.

(5) Does my synopsis present actual scenes from the book in glowing detail, or does it merely summarize the plot?

Too many writers forget that the synopsis is, in fact, a writing sample. It needs to shimmer with talent. “This happened, and then this, and then this,” is, alas, generally not the best way to shimmer.

Don’t worry about depicting every twist and turn of the plot — worry about giving a solid feel of the mood of the book within the context of a basic plot summary. Show where the basic conflicts lie, introduce the major characters, but make sure to pick a scene or two to present in a wealth of sensual detail. Show ’em what you can do.

(6) Have I left out anything crucial — like the ending twist?

This is yet another agents’ pet peeve. A lot of authors depict the plot in exquisite detail, and then leave the synopsis-reader flat. “I want to preserve the suspense,” these writers say. “I don’t want to give everything away.”

While I understand the innate storyteller’s instinct that prompts this strategy, I still think it is a mistake. Literally every agent I have ever asked about it has said that his or her reaction to such synopses is not a furor of excitement to find out how the book ends, but a snap judgment that the writer has not yet finished the book.

Trust me: these are not people who like to be teased.

(7) Is this a synopsis, or is it a marketing pitch?

Many synopses eschew plot in favor of discussions of the market’s crying need for their particular books, an elucidation of the target market, or — heaven help us — an in-depth personal discussion of the author’s motive for writing the book in the first place. If the book in question is NF, this can make some sense, but it’s a risky strategy: the synopsis is where people in the publishing industry expect to see a brief summary of the argument of the book.

For fiction, however, this approach can be fatal. Marketing suggestions belong in the query letter, not in the synopsis. Girls aged 10 to 14 may spent the entire rest of their lives influenced by the book you have written, but an agent will not want to learn that in the synopsis. The synopsis is for telling what the book is ABOUT.

It is also far from uncommon to write the synopsis as if it were the back cover blurb for the book, which has a different goal entirely. Yes, you are using the synopsis to market your work, but this is not the place to include blurbs, boast that this is the next WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, or state that it belongs on the bookshelf of every carpenter in America.

Stick to what the book is about.

Whew! That was a lot of work, wasn’t it? It’s worth it, though: not only will a stellar synopsis please an agent, and thus help you get signed, but it will also probably be gracing the desk of any editor your agent wants to interest in the book. After the editor falls in love with your book, your synopsis will be what is circulated amongst the other editors and higher-ups, not your manuscript itself (unless the publishing house in question is absolutely tiny, that is.) The thing is gonna get around.

Trust me, it’s worth the time to perfect it. The synopsis and the query letter are your calling cards, your introduction into a world that does not yet know what a talented, wonderful person you are. They’re tools: use them well.
Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Howdy, campers — I’m in a good mood today. A few weeks ago, the fine publishers-to-be of my memoir (A FAMILY DARKLY: LOVE, LOSS, AND THE FINAL PASSIONS OF PHILIP K. DICK, already available for presale on Amazon!) have moved the release of my book forward by almost two months, to earliest February, 2006. Freaked me out a little at first, but actually, I have always found the wait-in-patient-silence part of being a writer significantly harder to take than, say, tight deadlines.

So when the publicity department sent me an author questionnaire the length of the last HARRY POTTER volume, I was kind of psyched. I remain so, even while digging up the addresses of every bookstore I have ever visited in North America, unearthing copies of every piece I have published since I was old enough to vote, and attempting to clear my schedule of every conceivable obligation between now and next February. Fortunately, I had nice writing friends who trained me years ago to keep a writing resume and maintain meticulously-detailed contact lists, so I have most of the information already at my fingertips. Including, incidentally, some comic articles in Dutch; I don’t speak it myself, but apparently my voice translates well into the language of the Low Countries.

I mention all of this not to gloat, but to perform the same office for my loyal readers as kind souls did for me in days of yore: I urge you to start keeping records of every publication (regardless of whether you were paid for it or not), every speaking engagement (ditto — and giving a reading at a writer’s conference or one of the PNWA’s fabulous TWIO events definitely counts), and any experience remotely related to your writing or your subject matter. Get into the habit of adding to it automatically, so that it is never out-of-date. Trust me, you will need this information at the precise psychological moment when you are least likely to have access to your full brainpower: when you are living on caffeine and excitement in the months leading up to your first book’s publication, your memory will probably not be operating at peak efficiency.

Wait — who are you people? And why am I writing this?

It’s also a good idea to get into the habit of maintaining a database of people you will want to contact when the book comes out, as well as anyone who might conceivably be helpful in promoting it. Most of us do some form of this already, so we can readily access the addresses of our kith and kin for holiday cards (or on the outside chance that someday, we will need to crash on Cousin Marvin’s couch in Poughkeepsie). Start with the kith and kin, and just keep adding contact information for every new person you meet. If the idea of an Excel program seems like too much work, establish a box to accept every business card you ever get, as well as the odd scrap of paper bearing the vitals of that fabulous person you met at a writers’ conference. Anyone who might conceivably recognize your name on a dust jacket belongs on this list.

Frankly, ever since I signed my book contract, I have gleaned contact info from anyone who sounds even vaguely interested in the book. Cab drivers. Other passengers on buses. The woman who cuts my hair. It may seem a bit cheesy to include service providers, but hey, if your dentist does not like you well enough to consider buying your book, you may need to go back to charm school. Most people are genuinely intrigued when someone they know, however obliquely, actually manages to get something published — and I assure you, every writer you have ever met will want to know how you pulled it off. You’re gonna want to drop ’em all a postcard, preferably with your book cover printed on it.

It’s only neighborly.

Okay, back to practical matters. Yesterday, I urged you to take a long, hard look at the first paragraph of the query letter you’ve been sending out, to make sure you are projecting the impression that you are an impressively qualified, impeccably professional writer waiting to be discovered (as opposed to the other kind). Today, I want to talk about the body of the letter, the part where you talk about the book itself.

Is everybody comfortable, query letter in hand? Read the entire letter aloud, so it is clear in your mind (and to catch any lapses in logic or grammar), then ask yourself the following questions:

(9) Is my brief summary of the book short and clear? Have I said what the book is about?

Frequently, authors get so carried away with the premise of the book that they forget to mention the theme at all. Or they try to cram the entire synopsis into the query letter. Given that the entire query letter should never be longer than a page, your summary needs to be very short and sweet. Just the facts, ma’am.

Or not the facts, just the premise. You really only have 3-5 sentences here to grab an agent’s interest, so you might well be better off emphasizing how interesting your characters are, rather than trying to outline the plot. Read these two summaries: which would make you ask to see the first fifty pages of the book?

“Murgatroyd, a blind trombonist with a lingering adolescent passion for foosball, has never fallen in love — until he met Myrtle, the baton-wielding conductor with a will of steel. But what chance does he have? Myrtle’s just been dumped by the world’s greatest Sousaphinist; she has vowed never to look at the brass section again. Can Murgatroyd win the heart of his first love, without compromising his reputation as he navigates the take-no-prisoners world of the symphony orchestra?”

Snappy, isn’t it? The characters come off as quirkily interesting, and the basic conflicts are immediately apparent. Contrast this with the more common type of summary:

BATON OF MY HEART is a love story that follows Murgatroyd, who was blinded at age six by a wayward electrical wire. As a child, Murgatroyd hated and feared electricity, which causes him to avoid playing conventional sports: football fields are always brightly lit. This light metaphor continues into his adult life, where he performs in symphony halls with lights trained on him all the time. Life isn’t easy for Murgatroyd. Eventually, he gets a job with a new symphony, where he doesn’t know anybody; he’s always been shy. He makes friends in the woodwind section, but the people who play next to him remain aloof. A mysterious woman is hired to conduct the symphony. Murgatroyd is intrigued by her, because…”

Hold it a minute: We’re all the way through a lengthy paragraph, and we still don’t know what the essential conflict is!

(10) Is my summary in the present tense?

This is one of those industry weirdnesses: one-paragraph summaries, like pitches, are always in the present tense. Even if you are describing events that happened before the fall of the Roman Empire. Go figure.

(11) Does it emphasize the points that will make the book appeal to my target audience?

If you find being direct about it (“PIGSKIN SERANADE is designed to appeal to the romantic football-lover in all of us”) a trifle gauche — and actually, even if you don’t — it should be readily apparent to anyone who reads your summary what elements of the book are most likely to draw readers.

The easiest way to do this is to make sure that the tone of summary echoes the tone of the book. If you have written a comedy, you’d better make sure there’s at least one line in the summary that elicits a chuckle. If you have written a steamy romance, you’d better make sure there’s some sex in the summary. And so forth.

(12) Wait — have I given any indication here who my target audience is?

Most query letters include no reference whatsoever to the target audience, as though it were in poor taste to suggest to an agent that somebody somewhere might conceivably wish to purchase the book being pitched. But think about it: if an agent is going to spend only about thirty seconds on any given query letter before deciding whether to reject it out of hand, is there really time for the agent to think, “Hmm, who will buy this book?”

No.

(13) Have I mentioned the genre?

Like it or not, you do need to use some of your precious query letter space to state outright what KIND of a book it is: you’d be surprised at how few query letters actually mention whether the work being pitched is fiction or nonfiction. This is a business run on categories: pick one.

A lot of writers think they can fudge genres by listing several: comic romance, spiritual how-to, women’s thriller. Logically, these hybrids may make sense, but they look wishy-washy to professional eyes. An agent will have to tell any editor what genre your book falls into: it is really helpful if you are clear about it upfront.

The one exception: Literary/Mainstream Fiction. This one is okay, because no one is really sure where precisely the dividing line between the two categories lies, and occasionally, very literary works have huge mainstream appeal.

If you find all of this confusing, hold your horses until next week. In a future posting, I shall list all of the accepted publishing categories, and discuss the differences between them.

(14) Have I avoided using clichés?

I think this one speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

(15) Have I listed my credentials well? Do I sound as though I am a competent professional, regardless of my educational level or awards won?

If you have any background that aided you in writing this book, you need to make sure you mention it in your query letter. Period.

Truthfully, unless you are writing a book that requires very specific expertise, most of your credentials will not actually be relevant to your book. But do say where you went to school, if you did, and any awards you have won, if you have. If you are a member of a regularly-meeting writers’ group, mention that: anything that makes you sound like a serious professional is appropriate to include. Even your certificate in woodworking.

(16) Have I made any of the standard mistakes? Do I refer to “fiction novel” (a very common pet peeve among agents; in point of fact, all novels are fiction), or waffle about the genre? Is my query longer than a single page — or, if it isn’t, have I resorted to margin-fudging or an ultra-small typeface to make it so?

(17) Does my query letter read as though I have a personality?

This question surprises writers who have done their homework, the ones who have studied guides and attended workshops on how to craft the perfect query letter. The fact is, though, those guidelines are widely enough known now that a textbook-perfect letter can come across as, well, unimaginative. In a situation where you are pitching your imagination and perceptiveness, this is not good.

You need to make sure that you are not presenting a man without a face: your query letter needs to sound like you at your best. You need to sound professional, of course, but if you’re a funny person, the query should reflect that. If you are a person with quirky tastes, the query should reflect that, too. And, of course, if you spent your twenties and early thirties as an international spy and man of intrigue, that had better come across in your query.

There is no 100% foolproof formula, my friends, whatever the guides tell you. But if you avoid the classic mistakes, your chances of coming across as an interesting, complex person who has written a book worth reading goes up a thousandfold.

Tomorrow, on to the synopsis! In the meantime, keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

I’ve been talking for the last few days about rejection factors that are beyond your control, ones you would be well advised not to take personally. However, if after you have sent out dozens (or even hundreds) of query letters, you are receiving only rejections, form or not, it may be time to reexamine what you are sending out.

If you are not getting the responses you want, but are occasionally being asked to send the first fifty pages or a book proposal, chances are, your initial query is pretty good. You may not have focused your agent search tightly enough, but you’re exciting interest. If, however, you have sent out twenty or thirty queries and NO ONE has asked to see more, it’s worth taking the time to look at your query and synopsis through professional eyes, to figure out why.

You need not wade through that many rejections, of course, before you check your submissions for some of the red flags below. However, for most new writers, it takes quite a bit of rejection to open their eyes to the possibility that their work needs, well, work. Unfortunately, these writers all too often automatically assume that it’s the idea of the book being rejected, rather than a styleless querying letter or a limp synopsis, or, still worse, that somehow the rejecting agents are seeing past the initial packet to the book itself, decreeing from afar that the writing is not worth reading — and thus that the writer should not be writing. It’s contrary to the evidence, of course, but this particular fear leaps like a lion onto many fledgling writers, dragging them off the path to future efforts: it is the first cousin that dangerous, self-hating myth that afflicts too many writers, leading to despair, the notion that if one is REALLY talented, the first draft, the first query, and the first book will automatically traject one to stardom.

It almost never works like that: writing is work. Instead of listening to the growls of the self-doubt lion, consider the far more likely possibility that it is your marketing materials, not the chapters that the agents in question have not yet seen, that is conducive to rejection. Use that moment of worry to your advantage: I have found in my years as a freelance editor that having the edges of the faith that good writing always finds a home blunted a bit often makes a writer more receptive to constructive criticism. So go ahead and subject your marketing materials to serious critique.

Read over your query letter, synopsis, and first chapter; better still, read them over AND have someone you trust read it over as well, checking for logical holes and grammatical problems. The best choice for this is another writer, ideally one who has successfully traversed the perils of the agent-finding ravine. As much as you may love your mother, your spouse, and your best friend, they are, generally speaking not the best judges of your writing. Look to them for support and encouragement, not for technical feedback. Find someone whose opinion you trust — such as, say, a great writer you met at a conference — and blandish her into giving your query letter and synopsis a solid reading.

(Lest you think I am casting unwarranted aspersions upon your mother, your spouse, or your best friend, let me add that my own fabulous mother spent her twenties editing the work of Philip K. Dick; she is one of the best line editors I have ever seen, in my professional opinion, but as she is my mother, I would never dream of using her as my only, or indeed even my primary feedback source. That doesn’t stop her from line editing while she reads my work, as I do for hers — years of professional editing causes a particular type of myopia that prevents one from ever reading again without brandishing a vicious pen that attacks margins with the intensity a charging rhinoceros — but I respect my work enough to want first reader feedback from someone who was NOT there when I took my first toddling steps.)

As I mentioned yesterday, make sure that you read everything in hard copy, not just on a computer screen. Proofreading is far easier in hard copy. Once you have done this, and made sure your submission pieces say what you thought they were saying (you’d be surprised how many don’t), sit down with yourself and/or that trusted first reader and ask yourself the following questions.

(18) Is my query letter polite?

You’d be amazed at how often people use the query letter as a forum for blaming the agent addressed for conditions in the industry: my personal favorite began, “Since you agents have set yourself up as the guardians of the gates of the publishing world, I suppose I need to appeal to you first.” A close second: “I know that challenging books seldom get published these days, but I’m hoping you’ll be smart enough to see that mine…”

My friends, agents have to interact their clients quite a bit throughout the process; do make sure that you’re coming across as someone with whom it will not be painful to associate.

(19) Does my letter sound competent and professional, or as if I have little confidence in the work? Do I sound as though I know what I’m doing, or does it read as though I’m apologizing for querying at all?

While it is a nice touch to thank the agent at the end of the query for taking the time to consider your work, doing so in the first paragraph of the query and/or repeatedly in the body of the letter comes across as obsequious. Begging tends not to be helpful in this situation. Remember, reading your query is the agent’s (or, more likely, the agent’s assistant’s) job, not a personal favor to you.

(20) Does my book come across as marketable, or does it read as though I’m boasting?

I have literally never met an agent who could not, if asked, launch into a medley of annoyingly pushy, self-aggrandizing query letter openings. Trust me, they’ve already seen their share of, “This is the greatest work ever written!”, “My book is the next bestseller!”, and “Don’t miss your opportunity to represent this book!”

It doesn’t work.

(21) Do I make it clear in the first paragraph of the letter why I am writing to this particular agent — or does it read as though I could be addressing any agent in North America?

Agents complain vociferously and often about queries that read as though the writer simply used a mail merge to address letters to every agent listed on a particular website or in a given guide. There are hundreds and hundreds of literary agents — why did you choose this one, out of all others, to query?

Most agents are proud of their work: if you want to get on their good side, show a little appreciation for what they have done in the past. If the agent you are querying has represented something similar to your work in the past, definitely mention that in your query letter. (As in, “Since you so ably represented X’s book, I believe you may be interested in my novel…”)

There are many ways to find out what an agent has represented. Check the acknowledgments of books you like (authors often thank their agents), or check the agency’s website to see whom the agent represents. There are several online search engines that will permit you to enter an author’s name and find out who represents him; I use Publishers Weekly, as it is so up-to-date on just-breaking sales news. If all else fails, call the book’s publisher, ask for the publicity department, and ask who the agent of record was. I once had a charming conversation with an editor at a small Midwestern press, who confided to me that when she had acquired the book about which I was inquiring, the author did not yet have an agent. Sensing an opportunity, I promptly pitched my book to her — and she asked me to send her the first fifty pages right away.

Alternatively, if you have heard the agent speak at a conference, read an article she has written in a writer’s magazine, or even just noticed that your favorite author thanked her in the acknowledgments of a book you liked, mention that upfront. If you have no such personal reason, be polite enough to give a general one: “Since you represent literary fiction, I hope you will be interested in my novel…”

These are just the preliminary questions, of course, the ones that concern the first paragraph of your query letter. I have dwelt upon the first paragraph, because — oh, it pains me to be the one to tell you this, if you did not already know — countless query letters are discarded by agents every day based upon the first paragraph alone. Think about it: if you had to get through 200 queries before the end of the afternoon, would you keep reading if the first paragraph were not promising?

Oh, yes, you SAY you would. But honestly, would you?

Take a good, hard look at your first paragraph, and make sure it is one that will make the agent want keep reading. Again, it is really in your interest to adhere to the prevailing manners of the publishing world: for all intents and purposes, it is considered rather impolite to make a busy agent (or assistant) read the entire cover letter in order to find out what you want. All too often, when writers do not make their intentions clear up front, the letter simply gets tossed aside after the first paragraph. (This is the reason I advise against e-mail queries, incidentally, except in the case of agents who specifically prefer them: it’s too easy to delete an e-mail after reading only a line of it.)

Tomorrow, I shall deal with the questions you should ask about subsequent portions of your query letter — and yes, I know that it seems impossibly nit-picky to concentrate this hard upon a page of text that isn’t even in your book. I’m just trying to save you some time, and some misery — and a whole lot of rejection.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Hey ho —

Did you miss me? No, I didn’t take the long weekend off; as a matter of fact, I was working extra hard: I needed to do a final edit on my novel before my agent starts shopping it around. (Out comes the broken record again: most of the publishing industry was on vacation until today. Translation: there wouldn’t have been much point in my agent’s trying to market my novel last week, or even last month.) I sat down, much to the chagrin of my cats, and read every syllable of the book IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD.

You’d be amazed how many errors in grammar, spelling, and cadence you catch that way — and, speaking as a professional editor myself, there are problems that cannot be caught any OTHER way. Small monitors don’t let you see the entire page, which leads to uncaught word repetition; monitor light leads to eye fatigue, which automatically makes you read faster, and thus proofread less well. I have years of editing experience, a computer monitor the length of the average skateboard and twice as tall as my head, AND an agent with an excellent eye — and I still would not let any of my writing leave my house until I have proofed it in hard copy. I would urge you to do the same.

(A quick tip to self-editing novelists: always read your dialogue aloud, or have some nice person read it to you. Different characters should have different cadences, just as people do in real life, and the easiest way to tell if your characters sound too much alike is to hear them speak aloud. Also, if you discover a sentence that cannot be said in a single breath, chop it up: even the hyper-educated, people whose spoken words form themselves automatically into paragraphs, keep their sentences to under a breath in length. Happy editing.)

All right, back to the topic at hand. I talked last time about the many reasons your query might be met with a form letter rejection because of the structure of the agency system. Today, I would like to discuss factors even more mercurial, and even less under the writer’s control. I will speak, in short, of fashion.

At many of the larger agencies, assistants are told to look for very specific things in the queries they accept, and those things may change with great frequency, based upon what is selling well at any given moment. Remember a few years ago, when half the agents at any conference would say they were violently interested in representing chick lit, because BRIDGET JONES was on the bestseller lists? Depend upon it, this change in the marketplace happened too fast for agents to record it in their agent guide listings — so asking writers for it at conferences was the fastest way to scare up BRIDGET clones.

This was great for writers who already had been working on books that fell into the chick lit category, but hard on virtually everyone else. The publishing world does most assuredly experience fads, and unfortunately for all of us, no writer can accurately predict at the beginning of the writing process what will be the hot thing at the end of it. You need to write what you want to write, and hope that your timing will be good. To win at the fad game, an author always needs to be a year or two ahead of the curve.

I have a very distinct memory of a group meeting a few years ago at a conference that shall remain nameless with an editor who shall remain nameless from a major publishing house which — well, you get it. As we went around the table, pitching our books, the editor grew restive: a memoir about living with AIDS, a how-to book by the daughter of a con artist, a thriller that honestly sounded thrilling for a change, all flashed by without eliciting so much as an eyebrow twitch from the editor. The last writer, a sweet young thing who admitted she had not actually written any of the book she was pitching yet, talked about a story that sounded suspiciously like COLD MOUNTAIN, which had just made it big. (For those of you who weren’t paying attention, COLD MOUNTAIN was a surprise hit at a time when industry wisdom decreed that NOBOBY was buying historical romances anymore.)

The editor practically flew from her seat, exclaiming that she had been waiting for days to hear someone pitch a decent historical romance — because, she said, in the wake of COLD MOUNTAIN, they were so easy to sell. After gushing all over the nonplused sweet young thing (who I began to suspect of having made up the story on the spot), the editor turned to the rest of us. “I have some advice for you,” she said tartly. “Start reading the bestseller lists every week. Then start writing.”

It is a tribute to the good manners of writers everywhere that none of us at the table threw anything at her, for it was in fact a spectacularly poor piece of advice. Yet what would have been the point of excoriating her for her shortsightedness? It would have been like punishing a panda for liking bamboo: editors like to sell books.

Although she wasn’t articulate enough to explain it to us, what she really wanted us to have done is to have predicted today’s bestsellers a year and a half ago, and THEN started writing, so we would have been ready in time. How she expected us to do that — Ouija board? Tarot cards? Wandering around a well-stocked bookstore with a dowsing rod? — we shall never know.

And really, since most books are not actually published until more than a year after the contract is signed (you knew that, right?), what she wanted us to do was even more magical: to have predicted next year’s bestsellers three years ago, to have written one in record time, to have approached her about eleven months before COLD MOUNTAIN was slated to come out (i.e., about a month after the contract for it was signed), taken her in a time machine a year forward so she could see for herself that COLD MOUNTAIN was going to be a runaway bestseller, and blandished her into publishing our novel so it would come out at about the same time. Piece o’ cake.

I can assure you, my friends, that unless you are the next Amazing Kreskin, you will lead a far happier and more productive life if you do not try to second-guess the trends of several years from now. Accept that, and write books that YOU like.

Screenplays are particularly susceptible to being rejected because they are not the hot thing du jour. If a comedy about werewolves did exceptionally well at the box office over the weekend, you can bet your boots that all over Southern California, producers and script agents rushed into their offices Monday morning, crying, “Where is the next werewolf picture?”

You really will live a happier life if you just accept that this is beyond your control.

Sometimes, the focus du jour at an agency or publishing house is based upon personal preferences, over which you have even less predictive control than of market trends. If a given agent just had a baby, for instance, she might well be more interested in stories about young mothers; if her brother has just been diagnosed with cancer, she might well suddenly be in the market for books about that. I once heard a well-known editor say that she went through a year of snatching up anything about Paris because neither she nor her new husband had managed to garner enough time off work to go on their long-planned honeymoon there! Imagine the happiness of the struggling author who had toiled for ten years on her book about a hat maker in Paris, and happened to be in the right place at the right time!

This is a good reason to go to conferences: agents and editors will often spontaneously open up about this sort of preference. But never — well, hardly ever — will you see such spur-of-the-moment switches in taste written up in an agency guide. Just accept that there are some things you will never know.

Then again, you may just have caught the agent or assistant in a bad mood. I call this the grapefruit rule, lifted from how trial attorneys talk about the moodiness of judges: how your query strikes any particular reader is often dependent upon what the reader had for breakfast that day. We would all like to think that when we craft a thoughtful, innovative cover letter and send it along with a synopsis or a chapter or whatever the agent in question says he wants to see, it will be given a fair and impartial reading. But sometimes, your reader may have a tummy ache from a bad grapefruit, and is accordingly not to be pleased, even by the best book in the world.

If there is a way to avoid being the submission read immediately after the agent has scalded her tongue on a too-hot latte or right after having a fight with his ex, I don’t know about it. (Believe me, I would tell you if I did.) This is an instance where your fate is truly in the lap of the gods; my only advice is to be kind to children and poor people, and pray that you spent the entirety of your last life helping little old ladies across the street or rescuing people from collapsed mine shafts. Here, you really are relying upon your karma.

I mention all this to you not to urge you to hire a private detective to ferret out the personal preferences of your dream agent or editor, or to encourage you to burn sacrifices to Gladys, the goddess of easily-available parking spaces, to assure that your first reader at an agency arrives for work in a good mood. No, I am trying to help you see that sometimes, your query or your book gets rejected not because it isn’t good, but because it is not precisely the book that particular agent wants to see at that particular moment. Think of it as a big game of “What color am I thinking of?” where the winner gets an agency contract or a book published. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but honestly, sometimes rejection is that arbitrary.

You might have gotten a form letter rejection for any of these reasons, or for any of a hundred others that are utterly beyond your prediction and control. It does not mean that you are a bad writer, or that your book is a bad idea. It is just the way the game is played these days. If you really wow an agent’s assistant (who is usually the person screening query letters), you might get a note scrawled in the margins of the form letter, explaining why the agency isn’t asking to see your work. (I once got a “Wow! What a great query!” written on a form rejection, which was frustrating, yet pleasing at the same time.) Take that as a compliment, for it means that a rushed, overworked agent or assistant gave your query an extra thirty seconds of attention.

But whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up about what you cannot change. No matter how hard you try, you will not be able to anticipate what will strike the personal fancy of any particular agent or editor at the moment when your query is released from its envelope. I hope and pray that you will strike lucky, but in the meantime, all you can do is craft the book of your dreams, present it in a professional manner, and keep sending it out. And out, and out.

Hold your head high — and keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini

Since this is the season for sending out your work to agents from the PNWA conference (or, indeed, other summer writing conferences), some of you may find yourself puzzled at the differential between the agent’s (or editor’s) warm face-to-face response to your pitch and the rather tepid communications submissions, even accepted ones, tend to generate. It’s not uncommon for I speak to many authors every week to tell me, tears in their eyes, “But she loved my idea at the conference!”

Others may still be smarting from quick conference brush-offs, ranging from “I don’t handle that sort of book,” (spoken in a tone that implied that you should already have known that) to “Gee, that sounds interesting, but my client roster is totally full at the moment,” (so why come to a conference to solicit more?)

Still others of you may have spent the time since the conference perfecting your submissions, preparing to send them out. If you have been wading through the standard agents’ guides, your head may well be spinning at how different your dream agent’s pitch at the conference was from her stated preferences in the guide or on her website.

You may, in short, be wondering right about now what to believe of what you heard at the conference.

Honestly, most agents and editors who attend conferences are good at heart. They truly do want to help new authors. However, not all of them are necessarily there to discover the next Great American Novel: in fact, it’s rare for an agent to pick up more than a single author from any given conference — even a great one like PNWA — or for an editor at a major house to pick up anyone at all. (That, incidentally, is why the PNWA routinely asks the agents who speak at the conference to state clearly in their presentations whether they represent anyone locally: it gives aspiring writers an opportunity to see how open they are to conference discoveries.)

There are agents who pick up only one or two clients a year out of ALL of the conferences they attend. There is even an ilk who goes to conferences simply to try to raise authorial awareness of market standards, with no intention of signing any authors. (The ones who attend conferences just so they can visit their girlfriends in cities far from New York, or who just want a tax-deductible vacation in the San Juans, are beyond the scope of my discussion here, but I’m sure the karmic record-keepers frown upon them from afar.)

The fact is, sometimes a nice conversation at a conference is just a nice conversation at a conference.

You may have noticed that this ambiguity of intention occasionally gets reflected in the blurbs in agents; guides. How many of us have read that a particular agent is looking for new authors in a wide array of genres, including our own, only to be crushed by a form letter huffily announcing that the agency NEVER represents that kind of work?

I once made the mistake of signing with an agent (who shall remain nameless, because I’m nicer than she) who listed herself as representing everything from literary fiction to how-to books, but who in fact concentrated almost exclusively on romance novels and self-help books, two huge markets. I did not learn until the rather tumultuous end of our association that she had signed me not because she admired the novel she was ostensibly pushing for me, but because I had a Ph.D.: she hoped, she told me belatedly, that I would become frustrated at the delays of the literary market and write a self-help book instead.

Why would an agent advertise that she is looking for genres she does not intend to represent? Well, for the same reason that some agents and most editors go to conferences in the first place: just in case the next bestseller is lurking behind the next anxious authorial face or submission envelope. An agent may well represent cookbooks almost exclusively, but if the next DA VINCI CODE falls into his lap, he probably won’t turn it down. He may well reject 99.98% of the submissions in a particular genre (and actually state in his form rejections that he doesn’t represent the genre at all, as an easy out), but in his heart of hearts, he’s hoping lighting will strike. A broad advertiser is a gambler.

Yes, Virginia, that’s very, very annoying for the writers who believed his pitch.

So how does the new writer know what to believe? I wish I could give you a sure-fire way to tell, but frankly, I don’t know of one.

However, over the years I have gathered an accepted array of truisms that agents and editors tend to spout at eager authors they meet at conferences and in agents’ guides. I suppose they are not lies, per se, so much as polite exit lines from conversations, but from the writer’s point of view, they might as well be real whoppers.

Because I love you people, I have also included a translation for each that makes sense in writer-speak — and I suspect some of the translations may surprise you. Do keep this guide by you the next time you receive a rejection letter or go to a conference, so you can keep score.

Top Ten Lies Agents and Editors Tell Hopeful Authors

(with translations)

10. “There just isn’t a market for this kind of book right now.”

Translation: I don’t want to represent/buy it, for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with what is selling at the moment. Do not press me for my reasons.

9. “The market’s never been better for writers.”

Translation: I only represent previously published authors. Since it is now possible for an author to self-publish a blog or write for a website, I don’t think there’s any excuse for a really talented writer not to have a relatively full writing resume. (Note: this attitude is almost never seen in those who have ever written anything themselves.)

8. “I could have sold this 10/20/2 years ago, but now…”

Translation: You’re a good writer (or your pitch was good), but I’m looking for something just like the most recent bestseller. I’m not even vaguely interested in anything else. Actually, I am pretty miffed at you authors for not paying closer attention to the bestseller lists, because, frankly, you’re wasting my time.

OR: You’re a good writer, but I started being an agent/editor a long time ago, back when it was easier to sell books. Your work may have a political slant that has gone out of fashion, or it is too long, or it shares some other trait with a book I truly loved that I struggled to sell for a year to no avail. I don’t want to get my heart broken again, so I really wish you would write something else. Have you checked the bestseller list lately?

7. “We gave your work careful consideration.”

Translation: We spent less than a minute reading it — and by we, I really mean an underpaid summer intern who was looking for predetermined grabbers on the first page or in the query letter. Please do not revise and resubmit, because we’re really busy.

OR: If I had actually taken the time to read it, I might have had some constructive comments to make, but I simply haven’t the time. In my heart of hearts, I do feel rather guilty for not having done so; that is why I am making this defensive statement in my form-letter reply.

6. “The length doesn’t matter, if the quality is good.”

Translation: I don’t want to be the one to tell you this, but a first novel shouldn’t be more than 450 pages for literary or mainstream fiction, 250-350 for anything else. Frankly, I think you should have taken the time to check how long works in your genre are. However, if you’re a spectacularly talented writer, I would like a peek at your work, because maybe I could work with you to bring it under accepted limits.

OR I think the current length standards are really stupid, and I don’t want to give them more credibility by stating them here.

5. “We are interested in all high-quality work, regardless of genre.”

Translation: We actually represent only specific genres, but we are afraid that we will miss out on the next bestseller.

OR: We are an immense agency, and you really need to figure out who on our staff represents your genre. If I am feeling generous when you pitch to me, I will tell you who that is.

OR: We are a brand-new agency. We don’t have strong contacts yet, so we’re not sure what we can sell. Please, please send us books.

4. “I am looking for work with strong characters/a strong plot.”

Translation: I am looking for books easy to make into movies.

3. “We are always eager to find new talent.”

Translation: we are looking for the next bestseller, not necessarily for someone who can write well. (Yes, I know; this one is genuinely counterintuitive.)

2. “We are looking for fresh new approaches.”

Translation: This is a definitional issue. If it is a spin on something already popular or on a well-worn topic, it is fresh; if it is completely original, or does not appeal to NYC or LA states of mind, it is weird.

OR: We are looking for young writers, and think older ones are out of touch.

1. “True quality/talent will always find a home.”

Translation: But not with my agency.

OR: Because I love good writing, I really want to believe that the market is not discouraging talented writers, but I fear it is. Maybe if I say this often enough, the great unknown writer in the audience will take heart and keep plowing through those rejections until she succeeds.

There are two sentiments, however, that always mean exactly what they say: “I love your work, and I want to represent it,” and “I love this book, and I am offering X dollars as an advance for it.” These, you can trust.

Hope this helps. If you have other industry double-speak that should be added to this list, send ’em in, complete with definitions. I’ll post the best ones.

Hey, let’s make this a contest, so the winners can use it on their writing resumes: the First Annual Definitional Frenzy Award, judged by yours truly. Winners shall earn undying glory and another place to establish their web presences.

And please, don’t let all of this silliness depress you. There are good agents and editors out there, ones with integrity who genuinely want to help you sell your work. I am passing all of this along in the hope that knowing the tactics of some of the ones who aren’t so wonderful will help you figure out whose opinions are worth taking seriously — and whose should be brushed aside without further ado, so you can continue on your merry way.

Keep up the good work!

–Anne Mini