Posted on - No Comments on Contest submissions revisited

Contest submissions revisited

The streets may be icy, but here I am, all cozy and warm, going through the backlog of reader questions posted via the COMMENTS function while I was going over the Idol list for lo! those many weeks. My, there have been some great questions posted, and I’m pleased to be getting back to them. Some of my best blogs have come from reader questions, so keep sending ‘em in, everybody!

For those of you who don’t know how to post a question (skip this paragraph if you already do), go to the bottom of any post. There, after the “Posted in…” category information, you will find green type that says either “No Comments” or a number of posted comments listed. Click on the word COMMENT. This will both bring up a page with the blog in question and any comments that have already been posted. At the bottom of this new page, you will find a section entitled “Leave a Reply.” Fill in your chosen screen name (pseudonyms are dandy), your e-mail address (this is not posted; it’s just to cut down on spammers), and your website, if any (and if you want to share it). Then type your question or comment in the little box provided and hit the “Submit Comment” button.

It’s that simple! The nifty blogging program lets me know whenever anyone posts a comment, so feel free to comment on months-old posts.

All right, enough technicalities for today. On to the questions. Serenissima wrote:

“I was wondering if it would make sense to enter an annual contest with a revised version of a piece one had submitted before. Do organizations such as PNWA have the same judges from year to year?”

Here’s the short answer: yes, it would, and yes, they do. Next!

No, but seriously, it does make sense to enter a revised manuscript in a subsequent year’s contest: writers do it all the time. In a contest like the PNWA’s, where entrants receive feedback on their submissions, it’s actually encouraged.

Do read the rules of any contest VERY carefully before you pop your entry into the mail, though, because not all contests allow repeat submissions. In fact, it’s a great idea to go over the rules with the proverbial fine-toothed comb anyway, because the single best thing you can do to improve your chances of winning or placing in a contest is to follow the stated rules to the letter.

Why? Well, for a couple of reasons. First, you would be astonished – at least, I hope you would – at just how few of the entrants in any given contest seem to have READ the contest’s rules. Often, these rules are buried at the end of the entry materials, but by all means, seek them out. Follow them as if your life depended upon it, because let me tell you, a volunteer judge’s patience is likely to become scanty by his fifth entry of the evening.

Rule non-followers are very, very easy targets for a begrumbled judge’s momentary ire.

The second reason is rather more sinister, and definitely less widely-known. As with submissions at agencies and publishing houses, any well-respected contest (translation: a contest prestigious enough that it would help your writing career to win) receives so many well-written entries that choosing the finalists is generally quite hard. It saves judges a LOT of time if they can simply rule out the entries that did not follow directions; if an entry contains a disqualifying element, the judge is usually instructed to stop reading, and for most contests, a rule violation results in automatic disqualification.

Do the math: over the course of a few hundred entries, even a 5% disqualification rate would equal a substantial reduction in reading time. So how many entries would a contest have to get every year before adding additional rules designed to trip up the entrant would start to seem worthwhile?

I have to be honest with you: even as a contest judge, I often find contest rules poorly-written, difficult to understand, and sometimes downright arbitrary. It’s been my experience, though, that the more senseless the requirement, the more likely it is to be used to disqualify entries. In fact, it is not unheard-of for very popular contests to employ initial screeners, whose SOLE function is to check the entries for rule violations before the non-rule breaking entries are passed along to the judges.

Please, tread with care. If you find yourself too sorely tempted to skip any specific requirement listed – such as, say, the information that must appear on the title page, an often-fudged requirement – save yourself some time and money, and just don’t enter the contest. Use the money to take a writing class, or to enter another contest, because if you don’t follow the rules, your chances of winning plummet to practically zero.

On the re-entry issue, it pays to be a rule-hugger. Many contests specify that you cannot enter EXACTLY the same manuscript in subsequent years, but they usually leave it up to the author to decide just how much revision constitutes significant change. (If memory serves, the Faulkner contest is the only major one in the country whose rules actually specify how much must have changed from last year — although I do know a very good poet who won third place with identical poems in the Faulkner two years back-to-back. So I don’t know how seriously they enforce it.)

You’ve hit the nail on the head, though, Serenissima, in identifying the primary problem of the repeat entrant: the only way that she would get caught repeating a submission would be by a returning judge. Most contests’ judge rolls are swollen with those who have done it before – which is to say, the pool of those who have both the reading chops and the time to donate (in virtually every contest in the country, even the very expensive ones, the first-round judges are volunteers, not paid staff) is relatively small.

Judging is a big time commitment, after all, and not one to be undertaken lightly. In the PNWA contest, each first-round judge is asked to read at least 10 full entries, as well as provide both extensive written feedback for the entrant AND a separate write-up for the section chair; in years where there is a shortage of volunteers, they may read as many as 20 each. Multiply that by, say, a 25-page page limit, and judges are facing reading a fairly hefty book, cumulatively.

However, which judge gets which entry is randomly assigned, so the chances of a judge getting the same submission two years in a row are rather slim. It does happen, though — in fact, it has happened to me as a judge, and in that contest, I was not required to return the repeat entry for reassignment. Rereading isn’t necessarily a problem, especially in contests where entrants receive written feedback — seeing one’s advice followed is, after all, rather gratifying — but if the judge who gets an entry twice happens to be a habitual Big Old Grump, he might not be very nice about it.

My, did I just suggest that not everyone who volunteers to be a contest judge does so to assuage a rampant love of literature alone? Could I have been implying that some judges, such as the BOG mentioned above, do it because they like the power? And is it remotely possible that I might be hinting that if your entry ends up in the beefy hands of a BOG, you are likely to receive some pretty nasty criticism, whether or not BOG has seen it before?

Nah, I couldn’t mean any of that, could I? Every contest judge is an angel incarnate, and literary contests are judged on demonstrated writing talent alone. A judge’s personal bias, bad day, or annoyance at reading the same entry twice knocking a good entry out of prize consideration is as uncommon as — well, snow in Seattle in November.

In a nutshell: if the rules do not explicitly exclude resubmission, I say go ahead and resubmit. You can’t entirely rule out the possibility of your entry’s landing on the same BOG’s desk twice, but the chances of it are rather low. (And incidentally, readers: if you encountered a BOG who was gratuitously mean on your last year’s entry feedback forms, you should let the contest-giving organization know as soon as possible. The PNWA, at least, does try to weed out the BOGs. They’re bad for repeat business.)

As we get closer to PNWA entry time, would you like for me to run another series on contest dos and don’ts? Drop me a note via the COMMENTS function (now that everyone knows how to use it!), if so, and I’ll start cranking up the insight mill. And, as always, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on To pen name or not to pen name, part II

To pen name or not to pen name, part II

Yesterday, in response to a reader’s question, I went into the contentious issue of whether an author who writes in a number of different genres or book categories should use a unique nom de plume for each. As I pointed out yesterday, there are many in the industry who would say that unless your work sells awfully well, it simply doesn’t matter: unless the two books are likely to end up on the same bestseller table, who besides the alphabetizers at Amazon and a few scattered librarians is likely to notice?

Those who favor a different name for each book category would disagree: seeing the same name on disparate book spines can only lead to confusion, they aver. Not only does it make it harder for readers in a particular genre to track down the book they want online (for much the same reason that fans of an author named John Smith might have difficulties: a whole lot of hits would come up in a web search), but it also renders it less likely that an employee in a bookstore is going to be able to lead a curious potential customer to your book. 80% of the books sold in North America are still sold in bookstores, so word of mouth among bookstore employees is almost as important as it ever was.

Do you really, such arguers will ask an aspiring writer archly, want to make it harder for them to push your book?

It’s not quite this simple, however, and it’s probably no accident that defenders of the one-name-one-genre rule tend to be older people, ones who have been in the biz for 20 or 30 years. Quite a bit has changed in the interim: which books got face-out space on shelves, for instance, and positions on those tables near the cash registers, used to left up to the discretion of bookstore managers, but now, in the big chain stores, publishers rent that space in order to push their books. (I know; disillusioning, isn’t it?) And most buyers familiar with online shopping are too used to getting 3,000 hits on a single query to hold it against a particular author.

Also, computers have made it much, much easier for booksellers to track an individual author’s sales than in the bad old days – which makes it harder for distributors to push a second or third book to the big chains, if the author’s first book did not sell well. Or his most recent.

Which leads me to the most current reason semi-established writers adopt different names for themselves for new books, even if a subsequent book is in the same book category as earlier ones: to start fresh within the booksellers’ databases. It’s an industry-accepted means to clear the substantial stigma of a flop.

So the next time you pick up a book and think, “Gee, this new writer, George Washington, reminds me of Betsy Ross, that writer I liked five years ago. I wonder what ever happened to ol’Betsy,” maybe you shouldn’t wonder whether George was a writing student of hers in some obscure MFA program. Maybe you should wonder if Betsy had a name makeover instead.

All that being said, there are more one-name-one-genre advocates in the industry than those who advocate a more laissez-faire approach; unless a name is already fairly well established, many agents will advise writers to have different names for their fiction and nonfiction works, at least.

This does not apply to academic works, interestingly enough, from the industry’s point of view; frankly, practically no one in mainstream publishing follows academic publishing closely enough to notice if an author is getting published in both. Since there are an awful lot of professors who write fiction on the side, the more literary the book categories concerned (i.e., the better-educated the anticipated readership), the more acceptable keeping the same name is considered by agents and editors.

So it is indeed worth considering picking one name for each type of book you write. No one in the industry will fault you for doing it, certainly, and in a business that runs very heavily on name recognition, it’s not a bad idea to brand your mysteries differently from your literary fiction.

Which brings up an interesting question: given your druthers, which book cover would you rather have your real name gracing?

How do you pick otherwise? The standard wisdom dictates that if you already have articles on a subject published under a given name, every subsequent publication on that subject should be under that name. It establishes you as an expert – and that’s important for NF, for you will want to include these old clippings in your book proposals. If you have the luxury of publications under one name across a wide array of topics when you are moving on to books, figure out which articles had the widest readership, and keep the original writing name with those topics.

However, if your fiction and nonfiction is on similar subject matter, have a serious talk with your agent about whether you are more likely to retain your former readership under one name or two. Readers think a whole lot less about book categories than folks in the industry do: as much as publishing types like to tell one another that only a particular type of person buys a particular category of book, the fact is, the most cursory glance at how book buyers move around a bookstore will demonstrate that few readers look at only one or two shelves. If you are a good writer, your readers may well want to follow your work around the bookstore.

Recycle those past readers, I say.

So what does all this mean for strategizing your writing career? Well, obviously, if you are planning to write a book on a topic, it will be easier to sell to agents and editors if you have already published articles on the topic, under any name; equally obviously, if you are unfortunate enough to have released a book that did not sell well, you might not want to carry that contretemps into your next book’s marketing.

But regardless, naming decisions are generally made toward the end of the publication process, rather than the beginning: at the getting-an-agent stage, it matters far more that you HAVE past publications than which nom de plume you chose to slap upon them. Because even if you do decide to publish under several different names, it’s not as though you are going to keep your real identity a secret from your agent or editor, right?

You’re not Superman, after all. Although, come to think of it, have I ever seen you and Superman together?

Because, ostensibly, you would like your advance and royalty checks to be made out to the name your bank manager likes to call you, your real name AND any pen name you elect to use will be on the title page of any manuscript you submit to an agency or publishing house. (If you’re not sure how to pull this off gracefully, check out the Your Title Page category at right. There’s a standard formatting trick for this situation.) Trust me, if your agent thinks you should be marketing your next book under a new name, you’ll be the first person she’ll tell.

My advice: if you write across a number of genres or book categories, and are getting material published – hallelujah! – start establishing a different name for each type of unrelated work you write. That way, by the time you start publishing books in each of those genres or categories, your readers will already know your name(s).

After all, in the long run, isn’t your loyal fans being able to find your books far more important than what the industry wants you to do?

Keep up the good work!

P.S. Hey, if you live in the greater Seattle area, are even vaguely interested in children’s or YA fiction, and are not completely iced in this coming Saturday, December 2nd, why not check out the Secret Garden Bookshop’s 30th Annual Holiday Author Celebration? It runs from 10 am to 6 pm at 2214 NW Market Street (in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, so if you get a craving for lutefisk while you’re there, you’ll only have to step around the corner to get it), and they have an impressive array of well-respected writers all lined up to read their work – and chat with those who would like to emulate their successes.

Quite apart from the facts that this event is extraordinarily likely to be a lot of fun for kids and adults alike AND is a good opportunity for those of you with aspirations to write for the under-voting-age crowd to make excellent connections, the Secret Garden has a long track record of being simply marvelous about supporting local writers. It’s a genuinely marvelous independent bookstore, and that alone is worth celebrating! I’ll be there after 4:30 or so; if you can swing by to say hello, please do!

Posted on - No Comments on A writer by any other name…

A writer by any other name…

Oh, the luxury of having polished off a long series of posts! I get to write about whatever I want again. And what I want to do is revisit some of the many excellent questions readers have been posting as comments in recent weeks. My psychic detectors (and feedback from some readers) tell me that not everyone follows the comment strings — which, in many cases, would involve revisiting an already-read post — so I want to make sure that these important issues get addressed in the larger forum, too.

For instance, weeks back, inveterate wonderful question-formulator MooCrazy asked:

“Can a writer publish in different genres or on several different topics without diluting her ‘product’ and confusing the ‘customer?’ I think having been a free-lance magazine writer has resulted in my thinking that I can hop from one fascinating topic to the next. Please do a blog or series sometime about strategizing a writing career. Thanks!”

Moo, this is a great question, one that I know will speak to many, many writers. Most of us suffer from what Flaubert called, “the lust of the pen,” don’t we, an excited desire to write on a wide array of topics? Yet opinions differ widely within the industry about whether all of these literary effusions should be released under your primary handle: it really does depend upon both how well-known your writing is AND how common your name is. So lots of meaty discussion material here.

As with so much else that goes on in publishing, the prevailing wisdom varies on this point. Ask any given agent or editor whether a writer should (or could) use the same nom de plume across genres, and you will either be told that it just doesn’t matter OR that it would be absolute folly to use the same name on a horror novel and a mystery.

According to this latter school of thought, revealing that you have, like most mortal souls currently wandering the planet, a broad array of interests is a luxury reserved for only the best-known of writers: Anne Rice, for instance, or Stephen King. For lesser luminaries, this ilk advises, stick to one name per genre.

Well, that clears it up nicely, doesn’t it? Next!

No, but seriously, it’s worth looking into why each school of thought has its adherents before you make a decision on the subject. Publishing is a business, after all: presumably, if how we bill ourselves is of interest to the people who sell our books, it can only fascinate them for reasons related, however obliquely, to marketing. If using the names on our birth certificates for everything we write is going to be problematic, obviously, we should know about it.

About 75% of the authors I know who use pen names do so for non-marketing reasons, however. They may want to use their maiden names, perhaps, having spent their high school years fantasizing about how “Edna Curmudgeon” would look on a dust jacket. They may want not to use their current names, because they are writing a roman à clef, or because they have a nasty habit of incorporating their coworkers’ secrets into their novels, or because they really do not want their junior high school-age children to know that Mommy writes erotica. Sometimes, they just hate their birth names, or want to honor a passed-away grandmother. The reasons vary.

Or – and this is more common than one might suspect, given how hard it is for a writer to gain recognition in the first place – they want to retain their privacy. Now, there may be some very solid reasons for this; do you want, for instance, the signature you scrawl at book signings to be identical to the one that graces your checks? (I know a LOT of authors who develop a book signing-specific signature for this reason.) Do you want your readers to be able to look you up on the internet? In the local telephone directory? To be able to show up on your doorstep to argue with you about an ending they disliked?

Hands up, everyone who saw or read MISERY. (Speaking of writers with a history of writing under a number of different names.)

I have to say, having grown up around writers famous enough to have fans actually showing up on their doorsteps from time to time, I did have to think seriously about whether I wanted to publish under my real name. Both Philip K. Dick and Henry Miller, for instance, were well-established enough by the time I appeared on this terrestrial scene to attract the occasional stalker; I could tell you stories about science fiction conference incidents that would turn your hair gray overnight.

And, truth be told, I do have nonfiction published under several different names, so it would not be confused with my academic work. Most of the time, the objections to an academic’s publishing fiction under her real name comes from the academy side, not the publishing side, driven by the fear of being denied tenure, rather than confusing potential readers. Rumor has it, for instance, that there’s a quite prominent sociologist at a local university that shall remain nameless who writes steamy novels about her coworkers under an absurdly obvious pseudonym. But I digress.

However, once I decided to write a memoir, I made the decision: if I’m going to be honest about everything else in my life, why not own up to my real name? (Yes, believe it or not, Anne Mini is in fact the name on my birth certificate. My parents thought about my publishing career, too: according to family legend, they asked the maternity nurse to type out the name possibilities for me before they committed, so they could see what each would look like in print – and thus on a dust jacket.)

I’ve met a LOT of aspiring writers who fear the invasion of their privacy, but let’s be realistic about this for a moment: how many of your favorite authors would you recognize if you walked by them on the street? Most jacket photos are seriously outdated – sometimes for reasons of vanity, sometimes for reasons of economy, sometimes to make the author more fan-repellent – and let’s face it, few fiction writers are famous enough to be interviewed much on television. The chances of your being spotted just because you travel under your pen name are minimal. And if your name is a common one, changing it will not protect you.

Many writers change their names to make them either less common, less ethnic, or more memorable — the writer’s choice, mind you, rarely the agent or publisher’s. I happen to have been born with a very memorable name (a good indicator: how easy it was for kids to make fun of it in elementary school; I’ll spare you what they came up with for me), but if your name is, say, John Smith, you might want to punch it up a trifle. Ditto if you happen to have been christened Ernest Hemingway or Alice Walker – you really do want a name that readers will identify solely with you.

The ethnicity question is less straightforward. On general principle, I tend to frown upon writers (or actors, or directors, or politicians) Anglicizing their names, because collectively, it conveys the false impression that authors with non-northern European monikers are less worth reading. If you doubt the cumulative effect, think about the movie stars of yesteryear: to judge by their stage names, almost all of them hopped directly from the British Isles to Hollywood. And practically none of them, according to the names spelled out in lights, were Jewish, a fact that must have come as something of a surprise to their mothers.

The practice of automatic Anglicization is less common than it used to be, of course, but people still do it, alas. The usual argument is that more mainstream names are less likely to be mispronounced, and speaking as someone with Greek middle names, I guess I can understand that. Although my second middle name, Apostolides, is on every diploma I have ever received, and I always provided a phonetic transcription of it, every graduation of my life has been exactly the same: the degree-conferrer looks down at my diploma, pales visibly, looks up at me helplessly – and then announces me as only Anne Mini. Polysyllabic names are not for the faint of heart. And naturally, there is a good argument to be made in favor of your potential readers being able to walk into a bookstore and ask for your work by name, rather than stammering, “Do you have a book by Anne Apos…um…Apos…you know, that Greek lady?”

Does all of this seem incidental to the issue of whether or not it makes sense to use different pen names for different types of book? Actually, it isn’t: for those who say it doesn’t matter, the concerns above are the primary reasons for a writer to use an alternate name. Unless you sell a significant number of books in one genre, they argue, it’s not likely to confuse anyone who has ever done a computer search before to find you listed as an author in another genre.

If it excites comment at all amongst booksellers, they say, it will be of the “Margaret Atwood writes mysteries, too? No kidding?” variety, not the “Oh, my God, there’s a Margaret Atwood listed under fiction, and one under cookbooks! Am I going INSANE?!?” type.

Tomorrow, I’ll deal a bit more with the other, and rather more common, view on the subject. In the meantime, write widely, dear readers – and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on A writer by any other name…

A writer by any other name…

Oh, the luxury of having polished off a long series of posts! I get to write about whatever I want again. And what I want to do is revisit some of the many excellent questions readers have been posting as comments in recent weeks. My psychic detectors (and feedback from some readers) tell me that not everyone follows the comment strings — which, in many cases, would involve revisiting an already-read post — so I want to make sure that these important issues get addressed in the larger forum, too.

For instance, weeks back, inveterate wonderful question-formulator MooCrazy asked:

“Can a writer publish in different genres or on several different topics without diluting her ‘product’ and confusing the ‘customer?’ I think having been a free-lance magazine writer has resulted in my thinking that I can hop from one fascinating topic to the next. Please do a blog or series sometime about strategizing a writing career. Thanks!”

Moo, this is a great question, one that I know will speak to many, many writers. Most of us suffer from what Flaubert called, “the lust of the pen,” don’t we, an excited desire to write on a wide array of topics? Yet opinions differ widely within the industry about whether all of these literary effusions should be released under your primary handle: it really does depend upon both how well-known your writing is AND how common your name is. So lots of meaty discussion material here.

As with so much else that goes on in publishing, the prevailing wisdom varies on this point. Ask any given agent or editor whether a writer should (or could) use the same nom de plume across genres, and you will either be told that it just doesn’t matter OR that it would be absolute folly to use the same name on a horror novel and a mystery.

According to this latter school of thought, revealing that you have, like most mortal souls currently wandering the planet, a broad array of interests is a luxury reserved for only the best-known of writers: Anne Rice, for instance, or Stephen King. For lesser luminaries, this ilk advises, stick to one name per genre.

Well, that clears it up nicely, doesn’t it? Next!

No, but seriously, it’s worth looking into why each school of thought has its adherents before you make a decision on the subject. Publishing is a business, after all: presumably, if how we bill ourselves is of interest to the people who sell our books, it can only fascinate them for reasons related, however obliquely, to marketing. If using the names on our birth certificates for everything we write is going to be problematic, obviously, we should know about it.

About 75% of the authors I know who use pen names do so for non-marketing reasons, however. They may want to use their maiden names, perhaps, having spent their high school years fantasizing about how “Edna Curmudgeon” would look on a dust jacket. They may want not to use their current names, because they are writing a roman à clef, or because they have a nasty habit of incorporating their coworkers’ secrets into their novels, or because they really do not want their junior high school-age children to know that Mommy writes erotica. Sometimes, they just hate their birth names, or want to honor a passed-away grandmother. The reasons vary.

Or – and this is more common than one might suspect, given how hard it is for a writer to gain recognition in the first place – they want to retain their privacy. Now, there may be some very solid reasons for this; do you want, for instance, the signature you scrawl at book signings to be identical to the one that graces your checks? (I know a LOT of authors who develop a book signing-specific signature for this reason.) Do you want your readers to be able to look you up on the internet? In the local telephone directory? To be able to show up on your doorstep to argue with you about an ending they disliked?

Hands up, everyone who saw or read MISERY. (Speaking of writers with a history of writing under a number of different names.)

I have to say, having grown up around writers famous enough to have fans actually showing up on their doorsteps from time to time, I did have to think seriously about whether I wanted to publish under my real name. Both Philip K. Dick and Henry Miller, for instance, were well-established enough by the time I appeared on this terrestrial scene to attract the occasional stalker; I could tell you stories about science fiction conference incidents that would turn your hair gray overnight.

And, truth be told, I do have nonfiction published under several different names, so it would not be confused with my academic work. Most of the time, the objections to an academic’s publishing fiction under her real name comes from the academy side, not the publishing side, driven by the fear of being denied tenure, rather than confusing potential readers. Rumor has it, for instance, that there’s a quite prominent sociologist at a local university that shall remain nameless who writes steamy novels about her coworkers under an absurdly obvious pseudonym. But I digress.

However, once I decided to write a memoir, I made the decision: if I’m going to be honest about everything else in my life, why not own up to my real name? (Yes, believe it or not, Anne Mini is in fact the name on my birth certificate. My parents thought about my publishing career, too: according to family legend, they asked the maternity nurse to type out the name possibilities for me before they committed, so they could see what each would look like in print – and thus on a dust jacket.)

I’ve met a LOT of aspiring writers who fear the invasion of their privacy, but let’s be realistic about this for a moment: how many of your favorite authors would you recognize if you walked by them on the street? Most jacket photos are seriously outdated – sometimes for reasons of vanity, sometimes for reasons of economy, sometimes to make the author more fan-repellent – and let’s face it, few fiction writers are famous enough to be interviewed much on television. The chances of your being spotted just because you travel under your pen name are minimal. And if your name is a common one, changing it will not protect you.

Many writers change their names to make them either less common, less ethnic, or more memorable — the writer’s choice, mind you, rarely the agent or publisher’s. I happen to have been born with a very memorable name (a good indicator: how easy it was for kids to make fun of it in elementary school; I’ll spare you what they came up with for me), but if your name is, say, John Smith, you might want to punch it up a trifle. Ditto if you happen to have been christened Ernest Hemingway or Alice Walker – you really do want a name that readers will identify solely with you.

The ethnicity question is less straightforward. On general principle, I tend to frown upon writers (or actors, or directors, or politicians) Anglicizing their names, because collectively, it conveys the false impression that authors with non-northern European monikers are less worth reading. If you doubt the cumulative effect, think about the movie stars of yesteryear: to judge by their stage names, almost all of them hopped directly from the British Isles to Hollywood. And practically none of them, according to the names spelled out in lights, were Jewish, a fact that must have come as something of a surprise to their mothers.

The practice of automatic Anglicization is less common than it used to be, of course, but people still do it, alas. The usual argument is that more mainstream names are less likely to be mispronounced, and speaking as someone with Greek middle names, I guess I can understand that. Although my second middle name, Apostolides, is on every diploma I have ever received, and I always provided a phonetic transcription of it, every graduation of my life has been exactly the same: the degree-conferrer looks down at my diploma, pales visibly, looks up at me helplessly – and then announces me as only Anne Mini. Polysyllabic names are not for the faint of heart. And naturally, there is a good argument to be made in favor of your potential readers being able to walk into a bookstore and ask for your work by name, rather than stammering, “Do you have a book by Anne Apos…um…Apos…you know, that Greek lady?”

Does all of this seem incidental to the issue of whether or not it makes sense to use different pen names for different types of book? Actually, it isn’t: for those who say it doesn’t matter, the concerns above are the primary reasons for a writer to use an alternate name. Unless you sell a significant number of books in one genre, they argue, it’s not likely to confuse anyone who has ever done a computer search before to find you listed as an author in another genre.

If it excites comment at all amongst booksellers, they say, it will be of the “Margaret Atwood writes mysteries, too? No kidding?” variety, not the “Oh, my God, there’s a Margaret Atwood listed under fiction, and one under cookbooks! Am I going INSANE?!?” type.

Tomorrow, I’ll deal a bit more with the other, and rather more common, view on the subject. In the meantime, write widely, dear readers – and keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Let’s talk about this: what would be useful rejection information?

Let’s talk about this: what would be useful rejection information?

Since I’ve been talking for the last month about rejection criteria that is news to most querying writers, and yesterday about how little actual information the average agency tends to send back with a rejected manuscript, it’s pretty clear (to me, at least) that there is an awfully large communication gap between aspiring writers and the agents to whom they submit their work. Having talked about the issue with people on both sides of it, I have come to the conclusion that this lapse is actually quite frustrating for both sides: agents report feeling that writers don’t seem to understand just how little time they can devote to each query and/or submission; writers report that they feel that their work is being treated with disrespect, and that it’s hard to improve without getting actual feedback on what they’re doing wrong.

One aspect of this conflict particularly caught my attention: most of the agents with whom I have discussed this seem to believe that it’s the FACT of rejection that annoys writers so, rather than the form it takes. Simply put, many of them seem to feel that there is no way that they could reject a manuscript without angering its writer, and that form letters are, in part, a recognition of that reality. But is this true?

So let me turn the question out to you, dear readers: what kind of information would you LIKE to see in a rejection letter? Feedback on how to improve your querying style? A simple statement about why your work in particular is not for that agency? A photocopied form listing common problems, with the appropriate ones checked off?

Alternatively, are you of the school of thought that would prefer to be told no as quickly as possible, without fanfare, so you may move on to the next agency on your list? Would you prefer form letters that did not attempt any explanation at all, and spared you the usual platitudes?

And, finally: is there anyone out there who actually prefers form letters to a personalized response?

Now is your time to vent, everybody – but please, eschew profanity (I already get enough spam comments from porn-site teasers trying to post here, thank you very much), and for your own protection, let’s avoid naming specific agents. It’s just not that big an industry, and I don’t want to encourage you to be burning any bridges that might be useful to you down the line.

But seriously, if you were in their shoes, how would you do it differently?

Posted on - No Comments on Let’s talk about this: what would be useful rejection information?

Let’s talk about this: what would be useful rejection information?

Since I’ve been talking for the last month about rejection criteria that is news to most querying writers, and yesterday about how little actual information the average agency tends to send back with a rejected manuscript, it’s pretty clear (to me, at least) that there is an awfully large communication gap between aspiring writers and the agents to whom they submit their work. Having talked about the issue with people on both sides of it, I have come to the conclusion that this lapse is actually quite frustrating for both sides: agents report feeling that writers don’t seem to understand just how little time they can devote to each query and/or submission; writers report that they feel that their work is being treated with disrespect, and that it’s hard to improve without getting actual feedback on what they’re doing wrong.

One aspect of this conflict particularly caught my attention: most of the agents with whom I have discussed this seem to believe that it’s the FACT of rejection that annoys writers so, rather than the form it takes. Simply put, many of them seem to feel that there is no way that they could reject a manuscript without angering its writer, and that form letters are, in part, a recognition of that reality. But is this true?

So let me turn the question out to you, dear readers: what kind of information would you LIKE to see in a rejection letter? Feedback on how to improve your querying style? A simple statement about why your work in particular is not for that agency? A photocopied form listing common problems, with the appropriate ones checked off?

Alternatively, are you of the school of thought that would prefer to be told no as quickly as possible, without fanfare, so you may move on to the next agency on your list? Would you prefer form letters that did not attempt any explanation at all, and spared you the usual platitudes?

And, finally: is there anyone out there who actually prefers form letters to a personalized response?

Now is your time to vent, everybody – but please, eschew profanity (I already get enough spam comments from porn-site teasers trying to post here, thank you very much), and for your own protection, let’s avoid naming specific agents. It’s just not that big an industry, and I don’t want to encourage you to be burning any bridges that might be useful to you down the line.

But seriously, if you were in their shoes, how would you do it differently?

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Form-letter rejections revisited

Throughout my recent series on all of the many complex reasons that agents and their screeners often reject submissions based upon the first page alone (ulp!), I have caught myself thinking over and over again: how much better it would be for everyone concerned if those doing the rejecting took the ten seconds required to scrawl a reason on a form rejection before stuffing a manuscript back into a SASE. This does happen, on occasion: I’ve seen fairly detailed rejection excuses hand-written on the query letter itself, or with the cover letter for the submission.

But not often.

The vast majority of the time, even submissions that only missed being picked up by a hair will be greeted with that pet peeve of writers everywhere, the form letter rejection. If you’ve been brave enough to send your work out on a regular basis — and hurrah for you if you have — I’m sure you have received at least one of these annoying responses. They tend to run something like this:

“Dear author:
Thank you for submitting your work to us. Unfortunately, it does not meet our needs/does not fill an obvious market niche/I do not feel confident I can sell it at this time. Best of luck in your future writing career.”

Even though this response was clearly mass-produced, and thus could not possibly have been a heartfelt piece of reader feedback, getting it probably made you feel every bit as lousy as if it had been a personal response. Let me guess: you wavered between disbelief (“How could this happen to me? I slaved over that submission for months!”) to fury (“Did the agent even read it?”) to despair (“It must have been so bad that the agent couldn’t bear to comment upon it.”) But you kept your fluctuations to yourself, brave little trooper that you are, picked yourself up, and sent out another query immediately.

At least, I hope you did. Or perhaps you reworked the entire manuscript before you sent it out again. Or became too discouraged to send it out again at all.

What you probably didn’t do, unfortunately, is grab the form letter and go running to your writing buddies, to see if they had ever been brushed off in this way. And why not? Because there is a pervasive myth within the writing community that only poor writers get form letter rejections — which renders owning up to receiving one embarrassing.

The prevailing wisdom lags far behind the reality – and for good reason. If you’ve been to a few conferences, you have probably heard at least one agent assert the old truism that good writers don’t get form letter rejections; they get personalized rejections, thoughtful, in-depth analyses about what needs to change in the work before it is market-ready. The personalized rejection (known amongst my friends as “the rave rejection”) is thus a sort of twisted compliment, a reason to hope, a sign from an often-intimidating industry that a writer is doing something right.

In fact, I heard a fairly prominent agent (I name no names, of course, but if I did, his might rhyme with Meff Spinezam) spout this dogma as recently as last month: if you send out ten rejection letters, he told his already-discouraged audience, and get only form responses, there must be something wrong with your submission. Probably, he opined, the writing, but then, he is an agent who likes to receive the first five pages of the book along with the query –so he can put them through exactly the scrutiny we’ve been discussing in the Idol series. If your work were truly good, he said, some agent would have asked to see the book, or at the very least, a few of those rejections would have been personalized.

Perhaps he honestly does take the time to write personalized rejections to promising writers. If he does, however, he is out of step with the industry, which now rejects both very good and very bad queries and submissions with a single boilerplate letter.

Yet in the prevailing view, echoed by this agent, the form letter rejection is reserved for those benighted souls who haven’t the vaguest idea what they are doing. It is never, we are assured, sent to a writer with talent and a firm handle on craft. It is, these agents are fond of telling captive audiences at writers’ conferences — who are, after all, there to be told what they are doing wrong — the industry’s way of telling the author to go out and get some serious help, pronto.

Poppycock. If you had gone crying to your friends about your first form letter rejection, you would have found that every good writer you know has received scads of them. Including, incidentally, yours truly.

The fact is, form letter rejections have been the norm since the invention of the photocopying machine. They are used in order to save the rejecting agent or editor time — period. And yes, Virginia, it is positively common for an agent who enthused over a pitch at a conference to send precisely the same form rejection to the writer over whom she gushed as to a writer to whom her invitation to submit was at best lukewarm. Form letters save time precisely because they require so little energy to use.

Why is this desirable, from the agent’s point of view? Because in recent years, the sheer volume of queries the average agency receives has risen astronomically. In an agency that received fifty or a hundred queries per week (as was common twenty years ago), it would actually be possible for some kind soul to write a personal message back to every aspiring writer. In an agency that receives a couple of hundred queries per day, as the big agencies do, it would require a full-time employee just to tear open the query letters, sort them into possibles and impossibles, and send out one preprinted form letter to the folks in Stack A and another to the folks in Stack B.

And that’s assuming dealing with the incoming queries is all that particular employee has to do that day.

Let’s consider the math for a second. Presumably, any query or submission that does not meet agency criteria would automatically go into Stack B, the rejection pile, unread. There are apparently a whole lot of these: if you’ve been to more than one writers’ conference, I’m sure you have heard at least one agent’s tirade about how writers often don’t read the write-ups in the agent listings closely enough to send EXACTLY what the agency prefers in its submissions; it seems to be a rather wide-spread pet peeve.

Also going straight to Stack B would be any query letter that was obviously poorly written, or pitched a genre that the agency did not represent, or, to reproduce another pet peeve that one hears agents complaining of at conferences, begins “Dear Sir/Madam,” rather than being addressed to a specific name. (And yes, even agents who routinely send out “Dear Author” form rejections object to being addressed impersonally. Ironic, isn’t it?) All of these, then, would be returned in the accompanying SASE with the standard Stack B rejection letter, which probably resembles the one above.

But your work is better than that: you’ve written a good query letter; you’ve submitted only what they asked to see, and you did your homework about the agency. So how might your submission have ended up in Stack B as a form-letter receiver?

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: there are several possibilities that may well have nothing to do with the quality of your query. You may have addressed an agent who is no longer with the firm, for instance, or sent a submission in a category they no longer represent. Agents move around so much that it is very possible that the particular agent you have targeted will have moved on since the guide you used for research went to press. The agency may have listed more types of book than it actually represents — very small agencies are particularly prone to this, as they do not want to miss out on the next bestseller by listing too-narrow foci in the agency books. Annoying, yes, but not uncommon – and there is no way you could have known about it in advance.

The same holds true for submissions: what an agency was seeking three months ago at a conference may not be what it is seeking now. Think about those poor souls who were marketing memoirs when the A MILLION LITTLE PIECES scandal broke — over the course of a few days, memoirs went from hot to dangerous, in the industry’s collective mind. And I absolutely guarantee you that none of those submitters received a rejection that read, “Gee, we’re sorry, but we decided not to read your submission at all, because the market has just turned memoir-shy. Try again in a year or two.”

No, that would have been too time-consuming. So when they opened their mailboxes and read, “Dear author: Thank you for submitting your work to us. Unfortunately, it does not meet our needs at this time,” naturally, 99% of them thought the problem was with their work, not with the market.

Your writing life will be happier, I suspect, if you avoid the temptation of taking every rejection as if it were a well thought-out professional deliberation upon your future as a writer. Accept what the form letter says — that your work, for whatever reason, does not meet their needs at this time — and query another agent RIGHT AWAY.

As in before you expend a day – or a week, or a month – of your precious writing time seething about it. And before the evil little hobgoblins of self-doubt have a chance to whisper in your ear that the only reason you could possibly have received a form rejection is that your work is lousy. It’s not the only conceivably reason — in fact, it’s not even the most likely reason.

It is not, in fact, useful criticism of your work at all.

If learning that what has been making you miserable is in fact making millions of aspiring writers everywhere miserable makes you even more angry at the sight of the next form rejection than you had been before, you might want to try taking Carolyn See’s advice. Carolyn, whose MAKING A LITERARY LIFE certainly belongs on the bookshelf of every English-speaking writer, counsels writers to send thank-you notes to everyone who rejects them. Instantly, before the anger stops and the inevitable self-criticism begins. It can ease the process of banishing such disrespect from one’s mind.

I have to confess: although I find this advice excellent, I have never actually managed to bring myself to send a thank-you letter in response to a form-letter rejection — or, rather, have never managed to compose a thank-you letter that sounded remotely sincere, or indeed, less than quite sarcastic. I did, however, always force myself to send out a new query within an hour of opening a rejection.

You’ve got to get right back on that horse after a fall, or those hobgoblins are going to come a-running, telling you that you should never try riding again.

I knew to do this, because of a family story I heard many, many times while growing up. When my mother’s first husband was trying to break into the writing biz in the early 1950s, he routinely had fifteen or twenty short stories circulating amongst magazines at any given time. Back then, they did not have the luxury of photocopiers and computer printers: every fresh copy of a short story had to be retyped afresh before it could be sent out again.

One day, after a couple of years of hard writing and hopeful submission, my mother went to check the mail — and discovered 17 rejected manuscripts scattered all over the miniscule front porch, every single one of which containing a scrap of mimeographed paper that began, “Dear author: Thank you for submitting your work to us, but…” The tiny mailbox had not been able to hold that much negativity.

Did she and her husband sit down and cry? Did they take it as a sign from the universe that he would never get published? Did they rend their hair and trouble the heavens with their bootless cries?

No: they acted like writing professionals. They opened each envelope carefully, ironed the travel-wrinkled short story within into some semblance of respectability, and sent all 17 out again that very day.

The rejected party, incidentally, is now arguably the world’s most famous science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. And a movie version of one of those rejected stories did pretty well a few years back: it was called, if memory serves, THE MINORITY REPORT.

As Julius Caesar was fond of saying, don’t let the bastards get you down. Keep your work moving. And keep up the good work!

P.S.: Don’t forget — long-time reader and FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) Brian Mercer will be talking about his book, MASTERING ASTRAL PROJECTION on the radio show, The Darkness on the Edge of Town. The radio show will air THIS Sunday at 10 PM Central Standard Time at 1470 AM (for those of you in the greater Minneapolis area) or streaming live via the show’s website.

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Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XV: wrapping it all up and tying it with a nifty bow

Some exciting news today, campers: remember how I spent the month of October locked in my studio, making revisions on my novel, as requested by an editor at a major publishing house? No? Well, remember that long period when I was extremely grumpy? It has evidently borne some fruit: I have been asked to make a second set of revisions. Which, believe it or not, is good news; it means the editor liked my first set of revisions. Hooray!

Was that gasp I just heard the sound of a quarter of my readers clutching their hearts, crying, “Wait – a publisher can make an author revise a book TWICE before making an offer?”

Well, to tell you the truth, the second go-round is a touch unusual, but it’s not at all uncommon anymore for an editor to ask for some fairly hefty one-time revisions before there is even any talk of filthy lucre changing hands. And yes, in the past, it was traditional for a publishing house to buy the book first, before the fine-tuning began. So the next time anyone tries to tell you that the publishing industry is anything like it was even ten years ago, you know what to reply: the fiction market, and indeed the book market in general, is a lot tighter than it used to be.

All of which seems like a perfect lead-in to my last post on the Idol rejection reasons (if you do not know what these are, please see my post for October 31), because, really, it’s important to recognize that agents (most of them, anyway) don’t hold submissions to such high standards in order to be mean — they want to take on books that they know they can sell within today’s extremely tight market. It’s not enough for an agent to love your work; the agent needs to be able to place it at a publishing house for you.

And while, in the past, agents tended to be open to working with their clients in order to work out the technical kinks prior to submission to publishing houses, now most of them expect writers to submit manuscripts so clean and camera-ready that the agency screener could confidently walk them directly from the agency’s mail room to the desk of even the pickiest editor. Thus these last few weeks of weeding out the most common submission problems.

Today, however, we get the reward: the description of the kind of book that makes agents weak in the knees.

Surprisingly, agents tend not to talk too much about what they love about books at conferences — they tend to stick to describing what is marketable, because that is, after all, their bread and butter. But as those of you who have been querying strong, marketable projects for a while already know, agents often reject submissions for perfectly marketable books, a fact that is very confusing to those who have been taught (sometimes by agents at conferences) to believe that every agent is looking for the same thing, or to those who believe that a single rejection from a single agent means that everyone in the industry will hate a book.

Especially for first fiction, it’s not enough for an agent to recognize that a writer has talent and a book has market potential: they like to fall in love. If you’re a good pitcher, you already know the reaction I’m talking about: the eyes becoming moist with desire, the mouth appearing to go dry with lust. When an agent wants a project, the symptoms strongly resemble infatuation, and as the Idol series has taught us, it’s often a case of love at first sight.

As with any other type of love, every agent has his own particular type that is likely to make his heart beat harder, his own individual quirks and kinks. Just as an agent will train his screeners to rule out submissions containing his pet peeves, he will usually set some standards for the kind of project he would like to see forwarded to his desk. So, in a way, our old pal the underpaid, latte-quaffing, late-for-her-lunch-date screener is her boss’ dating service.

Here’s the list of what the Idol panelists said would light their fires sufficiently to ask for a second date — in other words, what would lead them to want to read beyond page 1 of a submission:

1. A non-average character in a situation you wouldn’t expect.
2. An action scene that felt like it was happening in real time.
3. The author made the point, then moved on.
4. The scene was emotionally engaging.
5. The narrative voice is strong and easy to relate to.
6. The suspense seemed inherent to the story, not just how it was told.
7. “Good opening line.”
8. ”There was something going on beyond just the surface action.”

“Hey,” I hear some of you out there saying, “isn’t there something missing from this list? Shouldn’t ‘This is a marvelous writer,’ or ‘That’s the best metaphor I’ve ever seen for a love affair gone wrong,’ or “Wow, great hook” have made the list? Shouldn’t, in fact, more of these have been about the craft of writing, rather than about the premise?”

Excellent questions, both. Would you like the cynical answer, or the one designed to be encouraging to submitters?

Let me get the cynicism out of the way first: they are looking for a book that can sell quickly, not a writer whose talent they want to develop over a lifetime, and that means paying closer attention to an exciting plot than to writerly skill. In essence, they are looking to fall in love with a premise, rather than a book.

The less cynical, and probably more often true, reason is that this is not the JV team you are auditioning to join: this is the big league, where it is simply assumed that a writer is going to be talented AND technically proficient. Unless an agent specifically represents literary fiction — not just good writing, mind you, which can be produced in any book category, but that specific 3-4% of the fiction market which is devoted to novels where the beauty of the writing is the primary point of the book — the first question she is going to ask her screener is probably not going to be, “Is it well-written?” Presumably, if a submission weren’t fairly well-written and free of technical errors, it would not make it past the screener. As we have seen before, the question is much more likely to be, “What is this book about?”

Before you sniff at this, think about it for a minute: the last time you recommended a book to someone, did you just say, “Oh, this is a beautifully-written book,” or did you give some description of either the protagonist or the plot in your recommendation? Even the most literary of literary fiction is, after all, about SOMETHING.

Ideally, any good novel will be about an interesting character in an interesting situation. Why does the protagonist need to be interesting? So the reader will want to follow her throughout the story to come, feeling emotionally engaged in the outcome. Why does the situation need to be interesting? So the reader will not figure out the entire book’s plotline on page 1.

If you have both of these elements in your premise, and you present them in a way that avoids the 74 rejection reasons I’ve been discussing throughout this series, most of the rest of the criteria on this love-it list will follow naturally. If the reader cares about the protagonist, the stakes are high enough, and the pacing is tight, the scene is much more likely to be emotionally engaging than if any of these things are not true. If you eschew heavy-handed description and move straight to (and through) the action, conflict is more likely to seem as though it is happening in real time, no one can complain that you are belaboring a point, and the suspense will develop naturally.

So really, all of this critique has been leading directly to the characteristics of an infatuation-worthy book.

Of course, all of this IS about the quality of the writing, inherently: in order to pull this off successfully, the writer has to use a well-rehearsed bag of tricks awfully well. Selecting the right narrative voice for a story, too, is indicative of writerly acumen, as is a stunning opening line. All of these elements are only enhanced by a beautiful writing style, of course.

However, most agents will tell you that lovely writing is not enough in the current market: the other elements need to be there as well. As well as a certain je ne sais quoi that the pros call an individual voice.

All of which is to say: submission is not the time to be bringing anything but your A game; there really is no such thing as just good enough in the current market. (Unless you’re already established, of course, or a celebrity, or you happen to have written the story that the agent always wanted to write himself, or…) Playing in the big leagues requires more than merely telling a story well — that’s the absolute minimum for getting a serious read within the industry.

Which brings me to #8, ”There was something going on beyond just the surface action.” Submission mail bags positively burgeon with clear accounts of straightforward stories, as well as with manuscripts where every nuance of the plot is instantly accessible to the reader as soon as it is mentioned. Books that work on a number of different levels simultaneously, that give the reader occasion to think about the world to which the book is introducing her, are rare.

That the Idol agents would be looking actively for such a book might at first blush be surprising. How much subtlety could a screener possibly pick up in a 30-second read of the first page of a manuscript?

Well, let me ask you: the last time you fell in love, how much did you feel you learned in the first thirty seconds of realizing it?

Pat yourselves on the back for making it all the way through this extremely sobering series, everybody: this was good, hard, professional work, the kind that adds serious skills to your writer’s tool bag. Be pleased about that – and keep up the good work!

P.S.: Hey, those of you interested in alternate realities: long-time reader and FAAB (Friend of Author! Author! Blog) Brian Mercer will be talking about his book, MASTERING ASTRAL PROJECTION on the radio show, The Darkness on the Edge of Town. The radio show will air on Sunday at 10 PM Central Standard Time at 1470 AM (for those of you in the greater Minneapolis area) or streaming live via the show’s website.

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Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XIV: the over-stuffed bird

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! The turkey is in the oven now, and I have taken a break between making the cardamom carrots and the cinnamon-honey sweet potatoes in order to write to you. So don’t ever think that you don’t rate.

Here is something for which we should indeed be thankful: I shall be going over the last of the Idol rejection reasons (see post of October 31, if this reference seems cryptic) today! Even in this extensive list of fairly subjective criteria, I have saved the most subjective for last – in fact, this set is so couched in individual response that I have reported them all within quotation marks. For these, my friends, are the rejection reasons defined entirely by the reader’s response to your work:

64. “Overkill to make a point.”
65. “Over the top.”
66. “Makes the reader laugh at it, not with it.”
67. “It’s not visceral.”
68. “It’s not atmospheric.”
69. “It’s melodramatic.”
70. “This is tell-y, not showy.”

“Unbelievable” also came up a lot, but usually in conjunction with other reasons. This is telling: basically, whether a situation is believable or not is largely dependent upon the reader’s life experience, isn’t it? Since my childhood strongly smacked at times of having been directed by Federico Fellini, I would expect that I would tend to find a broader array of written situations plausible than, say, someone who grew up on a conservative cul-de-sac in an upper middle-class suburb, attended to a minor Ivy, and was working at my first job in Manhattan while my parents paid a significant portion of my living expenses.

Which is to say, of course, that I would probably be a more sympathetic reader for most manuscripts than the average agency screener or editorial assistant. No matter how sophisticated you expect your target audience to be, remember, the first person who reads your submission at an agency or publishing house is probably going to be new to the milieu you are painting in your book. (Sometimes, this shows up in surprising ways. Recently, I found myself dealing with a well-respected publishing professional who was surprised to learn that couples often pay for their own weddings now, rather than relying upon their parents. Apparently, she was not yet old enough to have many friends well-heeled enough to run their own shows.)

However, the numbered reasons above speak to less personal-experiential approaches to judgment. #64, overkill to make a point, and #65, “over the top,” usually refer to good writing that is over-intense in the opening paragraphs. And this can be counter-intuitive, right, since most of us were taught that the opening needs to hook the reader?

The trick to opening with intensity is to get the balance right. You don’t want to so overload the reader with gore, violence, or despair that she tosses it aside immediately, nor do you want to be boring. Usually, though, it is enough to provide a single strong, visceral opening image, rather than barraging the reader with a lengthy series of graphic details.

Before half of you start reading the opening page of THE LOVELY BONES to me, allow me to say: I know, I know. I don’t make the rules, after all: I just comment upon them.

All I can say is this: there is no such thing as a single book that will please every agent and editor in the industry. If you are worried that your work might be too over the top for a particular agency, learn the names of four or five of their clients, walk into your nearest well-stocked bookstore, and start pulling books from the shelves. Usually, if your opening is within the intensity range of an agency’s client list, your submission will be fine.

#69, “It’s melodramatic,” and #66, “Makes the reader laugh at it, not with it,” are the extreme ends of the believability continuum. What’s the difference between melodrama and drama? The pitch at which the characters are reacting to stimuli – if your protagonist bursts into tears because her mother has died on page 1, that will generally feel real, but if she throws a tantrum because there is no milk for her cornflakes on page 1, chances are good that you’ve strayed into melodrama.

Need I even say that the rise of reality TV, which is deliberately edited to emphasize interpersonal conflict, has increased the amount of melodrama the average agency screener encounters in submissions on any given day?

Usually, melodrama is the result of the stakes of the conflict not being high enough for the characters. As a general rule of thumb, it’s dramatic when a character believes that his life, welfare, or happiness is integrally involved with the outcome of a situation; it’s melodramatic when he ACTS as though his life, welfare, or happiness is threatened by something minor. (And no, “But the protagonist’s a teenager!” is not an excuse that generally works within the industry.)

So if you open with a genuine conflict, rather than a specious one, you should be fine.

And this goes double if you are writing comedy, because the line between cajoling the reader into laughing along with the narrative and at it is a fine one. Overreaction to trifles is a staple of film and television comedy, but it’s hard to pull off on the printed page. Especially on the FIRST printed page, when the reader is not yet fond of the protagonist or familiar with his quirks – much sitcom comedy relies upon the audience’s recognizing a situation as likely to trigger character responses before the character realizes it, right?

Generally speaking, comedy grounded in a believable situation works better in a book opening than a scene that is entirely wacky, or where we are introduced to a character via his over-reactions. The more superficial a situation is, the harder it is for the reader to identify with the protagonist who is reacting to it.

#71, “It’s not visceral,” and #72, “It’s not atmospheric,” also share a continuum. The latter deals with a sense of place, or even a sense of genre: if a reader can make it through the first page and not be sure of the general feeling of the book, you might want to rework it before you submit. Not that you should load down your opening with physical description – that was a bugbear described earlier on the Idol list, right? Just provide enough telling details to make the reader feel as if he is there.

And, if you can, do it through action and character development, rather than straightforward narrative. That way, you will avoid pitfall #70,“This is tell-y, not showy.”

Let me let you in on a little secret gleaned from years of hanging out with agents and editors at conferences: after they’ve had a few drinks, most of them will start describing the manuscripts they long to pick up in much the same way as a hungry person describes meat. They want something they can sink their teeth into; they want a satisfying sensual experience; they want to savor flavors they’ve never tasted before. They want to be seduced, essentially, by the pleasurable shock of stepping into a ready-made world that is not their own.

Piece o’cake to pull that off on a first page, right?

The visceral details are often crucial to pulling off this magic trick. As I have bemoaned repeatedly in this very forum, the prominence of film and TV as entertainment has led to a positive plethora of submissions that rely exclusively upon visual and auditory details to set their scenes. (During the reign of radio, I am told, sound played a more important role in the average manuscript.) This may be hard to believe, but out of every hundred manuscripts a screener reads, perhaps two will include solid, well-described sensual details that are not based upon either sight or sound.

Movies and television limit themselves to these two senses for a very good reason: it’s all they have. But a book can work with all the senses – even that sixth one, the one that senses danger and picks up unspoken vibes. If you can work at least one of these other senses into the first few paragraphs of your submission, you will be sending a signal to that screener that perhaps yours is the book that will seduce her boss this week.

And that, my friends, is something to celebrate.

If you doubt your ability to do this, try this exercise: sit down late tonight and write a description of your Thanksgiving dinner using ONLY the senses of vision and hearing. Then set it aside and write another one that uses only smell, taste, touch, and interpersonal vibration. Tomorrow, read them both: which tells the story better? Which makes the reader feel more as though she had been sitting at the table with you?

Speaking of which, I have some sweet potatoes to season.

But before I go, since a lot of people like to take stock of their lives this time of year (partially, I suspect, to construct the dreaded New Year’s resolution), allow me to suggest something: when you are assessing how far you have progressed toward achieving your writing goals and what you would like to achieve by this time next year, don’t use the yardstick of an author who is already on the bestseller list. Chances are, it took that writer years of patient, frustrating effort to get to that point, and really, the ultimate goal of successful publication, or the interim goal of landing an agent, are not the only desirable achievements for a writer.

Here is the standard I like to use: am I a better writer than I was two years ago? (Two years is better than one year, as it often allows consideration of more than one project.) Have I added skills to my writer’s bag of tricks in the last two years? Have I found friends, connections, resources that can help me on my way in that time? If my work is being rejected, am I getting better rejections? And what can I decide to do in the year to come to improve my work still more?

I am very, very lucky, my friends: I started this blog 15 months ago, and it has undoubtedly made me a better writer, both because it has forced me to take a long, hard look at the premises under which our industry operates and because I have had the opportunity to answer questions from writers at all levels. I have met many wonderful writers, agents, and editors over the past two years, and I have taken continuing education classes to hone my skills. I have exchanged work with very good writers from backgrounds different from mine, and have benefited from their advice. I have finished manuscripts, and I have revised them.

And all of this, believe it or not, is actually a better indicator of my progress as a writer than the fact that I have sold a book to a publishing house in the last two years, or that I have a novel under serious consideration at another house right now. Why? Because these activities sharpened my writing and marketing skills; successfully marketing my books was my excellent agent’s achievement, ultimately. For all of this, I am grateful.

My gut feeling is that all of you who read this blog regularly have been doing some fairly hefty writer’s toolbag refurbishment, too. Don’t forget to pat yourselves on the back for that.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody, and keep up the good work!

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Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XIII: the writing itself

No, I did not run off to Latin America with the documentary film crew: I’ve just been rushed off my feet since I got back to Seattle. I got a real burst of energy from the realization that no matter happens from here on out with my memoir — on which: still no word from my publisher — part of my story will be out there for the world to hear. (If this comment seems cryptic to you, please see the MY MEMOIR’S SAGA category at right. It’s been quite a ride.) It’s a small step toward getting the truth out there, but at least it’s a step.

It’s a pretty odd sensation, having to wonder every time I open my mouth or set fingers to keyboard to communicate about my life whether THIS statement will be the one that causes the situation to escalate again. Bizarre, isn’t it, that there is some serious question over whether I own the story of my own life?

But honestly, I know several other memoirists in similar binds. Granted, my book has been carrying the additional burden of a threatened $2 million lawsuit, but this is such a hostile publishing environment for memoirists in general — for A Million Little Reasons — that the already tight memoir market has become practically moribund for the second half of this year.

Hands up, every memoir-writer out there who has been told within the last six months that no one is buying memoirs anymore. (Or rather, to be precise, that publishing houses are no longer buying them. Readers, if the industry figures are correct, still are buying memoirs at roughly the same rate as ever.) Or that any memoir that contains dialogue is now considered automatically suspect. It’s tougher than it was even a year ago, isn’t it?

Speaking of which, I would like to wrap up the last of the Idol rejection reasons (if you do not know what these are, please see my post of October 31) as soon as possible, so you can get on with sending out your last barrage of queries of the year this weekend.

Why the last? Well, you could keep sending ‘em out, but since the publishing industry more or less closes down between Thanksgiving and Christmas (YOU try getting an editorial committee together during that month, with all of the various religious observances), agencies tend to slow their response rate then, too.

How slow? Well, let me put it this way: if you send out your queries right now, you might conceivably hear back this year. But not necessarily.

However, if you want to get your work under an agent’s eyes prior to say, February, you should send it toute suite, for reasons that not even the most reactionary industry die-hard could not manage to pin on James Frey (who has been blamed for every other industry ill of the year). Actually, the January phenomenon is one of the few industry conditions caused by collective action amongst writers: practically every unpublished writer in America makes a New Year’s resolution to get his work out the door.

So guess what happens at the average agency on January 2? That’s right: an avalanche of queries, accompanied by submissions from all of those writers who were asked for their materials over the last year, but spent the intervening months going over it again and again to make sure it was perfect. (SIOA!)

Thus, as simple mathematics will tell you, the competition is greater between New Year’s and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day — the average New Year’s resolution lasts a grand total of three weeks — so it doesn’t make too much sense to query then. If our old pal, the underpaid (or unpaid intern) agency screener is grumpy on every other Monday of the year, just imagine how much grumpier she is likely to be with an extra mailbag’s worth of queries dumped on her desk every single day.

Why, there’s hardly room for her to set down her scalding-hot latte.

So let’s get on with the rejection reasons, shall we? As you may have noticed over the course of this series, most of these pet peeves are at the larger level – paragraph, conception, pacing, etc. – but today’s list falls squarely at the sentence level:

55. Took too many words to tell us what happened.
56. The writing lacks pizzazz.
57. The writing is dull.
58. The writing is awkward.
59. The writing uses too many exclamation points.
60. The writing falls back on common shorthand descriptions.
61. Too many analogies per paragraph.

Most of these are fairly self-explanatory, but I want to zero in on a couple of them before I talk about them in general. Objection #55 (took too many words to say what happened) is, of course, the offspring of our old friend, the thirty-second read, but to professional eyes, overly prolix text is not problematic merely because it takes too long to get the action going. To an agent or editor, it is a warning signal: this is probably a book that will need to be edited sharply for length.

Translation: this manuscript will need work. As we have learned over the course of this series, agents would much rather that any necessary manuscript reconstruction occur prior to their seeing the book at all, so this is a major red flag for them. It is likely to send them screaming in another direction.

Also, because so few submissions to agencies come equipped with a professional title page, most screeners will also automatically take the next logical (?) step and assume that a prose-heavy first page equals an overly long book. (Interestingly, they seldom draw the opposite conclusion from a very terse first page.) See why it’s a good idea to include a standard title page — if you do not know the other good reasons to do this, please see the YOUR TITLE PAGE category at right — that contains an estimated word count?

In short, it is hard to over-estimate the size of the red flag that pops out of an especially wordy first page. And in answer to the question that half of you howled at me in the middle of the last paragraph, for years, the standard agent advice to aspiring writers has been to keep a first novel under 100,000 words, if humanly possible.

Before any of you start rushing toward the COMMENTS function below to tell me that you asked an agent at a recent conference about your slightly longer work, and she said rather evasively that it was fine, 60,000 – 110,000 words is fairly universally considered a fine range for a novel. (This is estimated word count, of course, not actual; if you do not know why the pros figure it this way, or how to estimate the way they do, please see WORD COUNT at right.)

Shorter than 60,000, and it’s really a novella, which would usually be packaged with another work (unless the author is already very well-established); longer than 110,000, and it starts becoming substantially more expensive to print and bind (and yes, they really do think about that as soon as they lay eyes on a novel). Do check, though, about the standards in your particular genre and sub-genre: chick lit, for instance, tends to be under 90,000 words, and there are many romances and mysteries that weigh in at a scant 40,000 – 60,000.

#59 (too many exclamation points) and #61(too many analogies) are also sins of excess, but the conclusions screeners tend to draw from them are more about their perpetrators than about the books in question. To a professional reader, a manuscript sprinkled too liberally with exclamation points just looks amateurish: it’s seen as an artificial attempt to make prose exciting through punctuation, rather than through skillful sentences.

Since this particular prejudice is shared by most of the writing teachers in North America, agents and editors will automatically assume that such a manuscript was produced by someone who has never taken a writing class. Not a good one, anyway. And while that is not necessarily a bad thing (they often complain that they see too much over-workshopped writing), they tend, as a group, to eschew writers whom they perceive to still be learning their craft.

Yes, of course, we’re all still learning our craft as long as we live, but to be on the safe side, save the exclamation points for dialogue.

#61 (too many analogies), on the other hand, is often the result of having been exposed to too much writing advice. Most of us, I think, had similes and metaphors held up to us as examples of good writing at some point in our formative years, and I, for one, would be the last to decry the value of a really good analogy.

But too many in a row can make for some pretty tiresome reading. Take a gander at this, for instance: “Like a rat in a maze, Jacqueline swerved her panther of a sports car through the Habitrail™ of streets that is South London as if she were being pursued by pack of wolves howling for her blood. Her eyes were flint as she stared through the rain-flecked windshield, as reflective as a cat’s eye at night. She had left her heart behind at Roger’s flat, bloodied and torn; she felt as though she had put her internal organs through a particularly rusty meat grinder, but still, she drove like a woman possessed.”

Now, that’s not a bad piece of writing, even if I do say so myself, but it’s awfully analogy-heavy, is it not? Taken individually, there is nothing inherently wrong with any of the clauses above, but all in a row, such writing starts to sound a bit evasive. It reads as though the author is actively avoiding describing the car, the streets, or Jacqueline’s feelings per se. To a screener who is, after all, in a hurry to find out what is going on in the book, it can be a bit distracting.

#60, writing that falls back on common shorthand, could be interpreted as a subsection of the earlier discussion of clichés, but actually, you would have to read an awful lot of manuscripts before you started identifying these as tropes. The Idol agents specifically singled out the use of phrases such as, “She did not trust herself to speak,” “She didn’t want to look,” and a character thinking, “This can’t be happening” — all of which, frankly, from a writer’s POV, are simple descriptions of what is going on.

But then, so is the opening, “It was a dark and stormy night,” right?

To a professional reader, such phrases represent wasted writing opportunities. Yes, they convey what is going on concisely and clearly, but not in a way that hasn’t been done before. Remember, you want an agent to fall in love with YOUR unique voice and worldview, so using the phrases of others, even when apt, is not the best way to brand your work as your own.

Ultimately, though, all of today’s objections imply something to a professional reader that you might not want to convey: because virtually any good first reader would have called the writer’s attention to these problems (well, okay, perhaps not #60), they make it appear as though the screener is the first human being to read the submission. (Other than the author’s mother, spouse, lover, best friend, or anyone else who has substantial incentive not to give impartial feedback, that is.) To the pros, these mistakes make a submission read like a work-in-progress, not like one that is ready to market.

Uh-oh. Did that red flag just mean that this submission needs further work?

Remember, virtually every agent and editor in the industry perceives him/herself to be the busiest human being on the planet. (Try not to dwell on the extremely low probability of this being true; it will only confuse the issue.) Your chances of impressing them favorably rise dramatically if your work cries out, “I will not make inroads onto your time!”

Acknowledging that you need feedback to bring your work to a high polish does not make you a bad writer; it makes you a professional one who recognizes that there is more going on in a submission that your expressing yourself. It makes you a savvy one who knows that a book is a product to be sold, in addition to being a piece of art. It makes you, if I may be blunt about it, smarter than 98% of the aspiring writers who will be enthusiastically fulfilling their New Year’s resolutions by licking stamps for SASEs on January first.

Please, I implore you, do not make an agency screener the first impartial reader for your work. Frankly, they just are not going to give you the feedback you need in order to learn how to bring your book to publication. They don’t have – or believe they don’t have – the time.

Tomorrow (yes, I intend to blog on Thanksgiving, because I skipped a couple of days earlier in the week; turkeys cook for a long time), I shall finish up the last of the Idol rejection reasons. Hooray! In the meantime, keep up the good work!