Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: a professional-looking title page, part III

Book marketing 101: a professional-looking title page, part III

Well, so much for predicting how tired I would be: the very day after I said I didn’t want to abandon you all in mid-title page, I found myself too wiped out to do my promised next post on title pages. Mea culpa — but I think I shall be taking the next few days off from posting, until I figure out how to integrate it with the masses of sleep I seem to need at the moment.

Let me move on to the second style of title page quickly, though, while I am fresh from a nap.

Last time, I mentioned that there were two formats commonly used in professional title pages. The one I showed you last time, what I like to call the Me First, is actually rather more common in submissions to agents than submissions from agents to editors, but it is certainly acceptable.

While the Me First format is perfectly fine, the other standard format, which I like to call the Ultra-professional, more closely replicates what most agents want their authors’ ultimate manuscript title pages to look like. Take a gander:

snapshot-of-ultra-pro-title.tiff

Elegant, isn’t it? And yet very market-oriented, because all of the requisite information is so very easy to find. Here is a downloadable version of the same, for those of you who would prefer to have it on hand.

I probably don’t need to walk through how to construct this little gem, but as my long-term readers know, I’m a great believer in making directions as straightforward as possible. I like them to be easy to follow in the ten minutes after an agent has said, “My God, I love your premise! Provide me with the manuscript instantly!” Call me zany, but on that happy day, I suspect that you’re going to have a lot on your mind.

So here’s how to put this little gem together. Set up a page with the usual standard format for manuscripts defaults — 1-inch margins all around, 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier — then type in the upper right-hand corner:

Book category (If you’re unclear on what this is, are tempted to vacillate between several, or resent having to categorize your complex book at all, believe me, I sympathize — but please see the BOOK CATEGORIES category at right with all possible speed.)

Estimated word count (If you’re unclear on the hows and whys of estimation, please see the WORD COUNT category at right.)

Skip down 12 lines, then add, centered on the page:
Your title
(Skip a line)
By
(Skip a line)
Your name (or your nom de plume)

Skip down 12 more lines, then add in the lower right corner:

Your real name
Line 1 of your address
Line 2 of your address
Your telephone number
Your e-mail address

As you may see from the example, it looks nifty if the information in the top section and the information in the bottom one share the same left margin. Since some addresses are longer than others, using this format results in that left margin’s being set at different points on the page for different manuscripts. While Flaubert’s address is short, Edith Wharton’s is not, producing a cosmetically altered title page:

snapshot-edith-wharton-title.tiff

Again, there should be NO other information on the title page, just lots and lots of pretty, pretty white space. After you sign with an agency, your agent’s contact information will appear where your contact information does.

That’s it, my friends – the two primary options you have, if you want your title page to look like the bigwigs’ do. And believe me, you do. Try formatting yours accordingly, and see if your work is not treated with greater respect!

After my last post, forward-thinking reader Crista anticipated my next point, so I have already covered the issue of whether you should include a title page in an e-mailed submission. Since the comments are less easily searched than the text of my posts, I’m going to go over the logic a bit here as well.

The answer, in case you were wondering, is yes — it is an excellent idea to include a title page with an e-submission. It’s an even better idea to include it as PART of the manuscript attachment, rather than as a separate attachment.

A bit perplexed? You’re not alone. Let me deal with the whys first, then the hows.

As Crista rightly points out, an agent who sends you an e-mail to ask for a full or partial manuscript, like one who calls after reading your first 50 pages to ask for the rest of the book, obviously has your contact information already. So why repeat it by sending a title page?

The first reason — and not the least significant, in an industry that values uniformity of format — is that every professional title page includes this information. It’s what agents and editors expect to see, and believe me, any agent who accepts e-queries receives enough e-mail in a day to render the prospect of scrolling through those received a few weeks ago a Herculean task. Make it easy for her to contact you, and she’s more likely to do it.

Second, even if the agent or screener scrupulously noted all of your contact information from your query AND filed away your e-mail address for future reference, agencies are very busy places. Haven’t you ever accidentally deleted an e-mail you intended to save?

I tremble to mention this, but most of the agents of my acquaintance who’ve been in the game for a while have at least one horror story about reading a terrific piece of writing, jumping up to show it to someone else in the office — and when they’ve returned, not being able to find the mystery author’s contact information.

Don’t let them tell a story like this about you: Millicent is unlikely to scroll through 700 e-mails to track down even the most captivating author’s contact information. And even if an agent asks for an e-mailed submission, he will not necessarily read all of it on screen — once it’s printed out, it’s as far from the e-mail that sent it as if it had come by regular mail.

Besides, do you really want to begin your relationship with the agent of your dreams (or editor of your passions) by deviating from standard format, even virtually? As every successful civil disobedient knows, you are generally better off politely meeting expectations in matters of little moment, so you may save your deviations for the things that really matter.

As Flaubert famously advised writers, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Okay, so he wasn’t talking about title pages. But the same principle applies here: a title page — or lack thereof — does make a strong statement about the professionalism of the manuscript, regardless of context.

I wouldn’t advise sending the title page as a separate attachment, though: because viruses can be spread through attachments, folks in the industry tend not to open attachments they did not specifically ask to see. Instead, insert the title page at the beginning of your manuscript file.

Do I see a raised hand or twelve out there? “But Anne,” I hear some quick-on-the-draw readers cry, “won’t including it in the document make the title page look wrong? Won’t it automatically have a slug line, and won’t including it mess up my pagination?”

Good questions, all, but these outcomes are relatively easy to avoid in Word. To prevent a slug line’s appearing on the title page, insert the title page into the document, then go to the Format menu and select Document, then Layout. There should be an option there called “Different First Page.” If you select that, you can enter a different header and footer for the first page of the document, without disturbing the slug line you will want to appear on every other page.

Don’t include a slug line (AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/TITLE/#) on the title page, or a page number. Just leave the header and footer blank.

To ensure that the first page of text (which will be page 2 of the document, right?) is numbered as page 1, you will need to designate the title page as 0. In Word, you do this by going to the View menu, selecting Header and Footer, then Page Number Format.

While I’m on the subject of formatting, and now that I know how to insert snapshots of pages into this blog, I think that next time, I shall take reader Dave’s excellent suggestion and show you what a page of text in standard format looks like. I have long been yearning to show how to format the first page of a chapter correctly.

And that’s the kind of longing I have when I’m NOT feverish; there’s no accounting for taste, eh? Speaking of which, my couch is calling me again, so I am signing off for today. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: a professional-looking title page

Book marketing 101: a professional-looking title page

My, this has been a long series, hasn’t it? A lot of ground to cover. Before I move on to topics more closely related to the writing in your book, rather than the writing in your marketing materials — specifically, I would like to spend a substantial chunk of the next couple of months going over the most common writing problems agents and editors see in submissions — I want to spend today talking about the very first thing an agent or editor will see IN your submission: the title page.

And yes, Virginia, EVERY submission needs one, as does every contest entry. Even if you are sending chapters 2-38 after an agent has pronounced herself delighted with chapter 1, you should send a title page with every hunk of writing you submit.

I know, I know: pretty much nobody ASKS you to include one (although contests sometimes require it), but a manuscript, even a partial one, that is not topped by one looks undressed to folks in the publishing industry. So much so that it would be completely out of the question for an agent to submit a book to a publishing house without one.

Why? Because, contrary to popular belief amongst writers, it is not just a billboard for your book’s title and your chosen pen name. It’s the only page of the manuscript that contains your contact information, book category, and word count.

In words, it is both the proper place to announce how you may best be reached and a fairly sure indicator of how much experience you have dealing with the publishing industry. Why the latter? Because aspiring writers so often either omit it entirely or include the wrong information on it.

You, however, are going to do it right — and that is going to make your submission look very good by comparison.

There is information that should be on the title page, and information that shouldn’t; speaking with my professional editing hat on for a moment, virtually every manuscript I see has a non-standard title page, so it is literally the first thing I, or any editor, will correct in a manuscript.

I find this trend sad, because for every ms. I can correct before they are sent to agents and editors, there must be hundreds of thousands that make similar mistakes. Even sadder, the writers who make mistakes are their title pages are very seldom TOLD what those mistakes are. Their manuscripts are merely rejected on the grounds of unprofessionalism, usually without any comment at all.

I do not consider this completely fair to aspiring writers — but once again, I do not, alas, run the universe, nor do I make the rules that I report to you. If I set up the industry’s norms, I would decree that every improperly-formatted title page would be greeted with a very kind letter, explaining precisely what was done wrong, saying that it just doesn’t count this time, and inviting the writer to revise and resubmit.

Perhaps, in the worst cases, the letter could be sent along with a coupon for free ice cream. Chances are, the poor writer is going to be shocked to learn that the title page of which he is so proud is incorrectly formatted.

But I digress.

The single most common mistake: a title page that is not in the same font and point size as the rest of the manuscript.

Since the rise of the personal computer and decent, inexpensive home printers, it has become VERY common for writers to use immense type and fancy typefaces for title pages, or even photographs, designs, or other visually appealing whatsits.

From a creative point of view, the tendency is completely understandable: if you have 50 or 100 fonts at your disposal, why not use the prettiest? And while you’re at it, why not use a typeface that’s visible from five feet away?

For one extremely simple reason: professional title pages are noteworthy for only two things, their visual spareness and the consequent ease of finding information upon them.

It’s rare, in fact, that any major US agency would allow its clients to send out a title page in anything BUT 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier for a submission, since these are the standards for the industry.

Why these fonts? The logic is complicated here, but in essence, it boils down to an affection for the bygone days of the typewriter: Times is the equivalent of the old elite typeface; Courier is pica. (I know, I know: there are other explanations floating around the Internet, but as this is what people in the industry have actually said when asked about it for the last 25 years, I’m going to continue to report it here.)

More to the point, agents and editors are used to estimating word counts as 250 words/page for the Times family and 200/page for the Courier family. When a submitting writer uses other fonts, it throws off calculations considerably.

Mind you, in almost every instance, an actual word count will reveal that these estimates are woefully inadequate, sometimes resulting in discrepancies of tens of thousands of words over the course of a manuscript. But if you check the stated word counts of published books from the major houses, you’ll almost always find that the publisher has relied upon the estimated word count, not the actual.

Unless an agency or publishing house SPECIFICALLY states a preference for actual word count, then, you’re usually better off sticking to estimation.

I wish that this were more often made clear at literary conferences; it would save masses of writerly chagrin. When an agent or editor at conference makes everyone in the room groan by announcing that she would have a hard time selling a novel longer than 100,000 words, she is generally referring not to a book precisely 100,012 words long, but a 400-page manuscript.

Is that hoopla I hear out there the rejoicing of those of you who tend to run a mite long? Or perhaps those who just realized that unless an edit cuts or adds an entire page to the manuscript, it isn’t going to affect the estimated word count? These are not insignificant benefits for following industry norms, are they?

So let’s take it as given that your title page should be in 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier. All of it, even the title. No exceptions — and no pictures, designs, or other bits of whimsy. You may place the title in boldface, if you like, or in all capitals, but that’s as elaborate as it is safe to get.

DEFINITELY do not make the title larger than the rest of the text. It may look cool to you, but to professional eyes — I hate to tell you this, but better you find out from me — it looks rather like a child’s picture book.

Do I hear disgruntled voices out there? “Oh, come on,” I hear some of you saying, “the FONT matters that much? What about the content of the book? What about my platform? What about my brilliant writing? Surely, the typeface choice pales in comparison to these crucial elements?”

You’re right, of course — it does, PROVIDED you can get an agent or editor to sit down and read your entire submission.

Which happens far less often than aspiring writers tend to think. Ask any agent — it’s not at all uncommon for a submission to be rejected on page 1. So isn’t it better if the submission hasn’t already struck the screener as unprofessional prior to page 1?

Unfortunately, this is a business of snap decisions, especially in the early stages of the road to publication, where impressions are often formed, well, within seconds. If the cosmetic elements of your manuscript imply a lack of knowledge of industry norms, your manuscript is entering its first professional once-over with one strike against it.

It seem be silly — in fact, I would go so far as to say that it IS silly — but it’s true, nevertheless.

Even queries in the proper typefaces tend to be better received. If you are feeling adventurous, go ahead and experiment, sending out one set of queries in Times New Roman and one in Helvetica, and see which gets a better response.

As any agency screener will tell you after you have bought him a few drinks (hey, I try to leave no stone left unturned in my quest to find out what these people want to see in submissions, so I may pass it along to you), the Times New Roman queries are more likely to strike agents (and agents’ assistants, once they sober up again) as coming from a well-prepared writer, one who will not need to be walked through every nuance of the publication process to come.

Yes, I know — it seems shallow. But think of conforming to title page requirements in the same light as following a restaurant’s dress code. No one, not even the snottiest maitre d’, seriously believes that forcing a leather-clad punk to don a dinner jacket or a tie will fundamentally alter the disposition of the wearer for the duration of the meal. But it does guarantee a certain visual predictability to the dining room, at least insofar as one overlooks facial piercings, tattoos, and other non-sartorial statements of individuality.

And, frankly, setting such standards gives the maitre d’ an easy excuse to refuse entry on an impartial basis, rather than by such mushy standards as his gut instinct that the lady in the polyester pantsuit may be consorting with demons in her off time. Much less confrontational to ask her to put on a skirt or leave.

Sending your submission into an agency or publishing house properly dressed minimizes the chances of a similar knee-jerk negative reaction. It’s not common that a submission is rejected on its title page alone (although I have heard of its happening), but an unprofessional title page — or none at all — does automatically lower expectations.

Or, to put it another way, Millicent the screener is going to be watching the guy with the tie a whole lot less critically than the guy with the studded leather dog collar and 27 visible piercings, and is far less likely to dun the former for using the wrong fork for his salad.

Tomorrow, I am going to go over the two most common formats for a professional title page — and, if my newly-learned computer trick works, give you some concrete examples. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: synopses, part VIII, or, the long and the short of it

Book marketing 101: synopses, part VIII, or, the long and the short of it

For the last week or so, I’ve been going over prepping a synopsis for tucking inside a query envelope, adding to the partial an agent has requested that you send, plopping into a contest entry, or having at the ready in anticipation for such a request at a pitch meeting. As with the author bio, I strongly recommend getting your synopsis ready before you anticipate needing it.

Especially if you are intending to query or pitch at a conference anytime soon. You will be SUBSTANTIALLY happier if you walk into any marketing situation with your synopsis already polished, all ready to send out to the first agent or editor who asks for it, rather than running around in a fearful dither after the request, trying to pull your submission packet together. Then, too, giving some serious thought to the overarching themes of your book is an excellent first step in pulling together a pitch.

Even if you think that both of the reasons I have just given are, to put it politely, intended to help lesser mortals less talented than your good self, whatever you do, try not to save writing your synopsis for a contest for the very last moments before you stuff a submission or entry into an envelope. That route virtually guarantees uncaught mistakes, even for the most gifted of writers and savviest of self-promoters.

If you take nothing else away from the synopsis-writing part of the Book Marketing 101 series, please remember this: writing a synopsis well is hard; be sure to budget adequate time for it.

If the task feels overwhelming — which would certainly be understandable, faced with the daunting task of summarizing a 400-page book in just a few well-written pages — remind yourself that even though it may feel as though you effectively need to reproduce the entire book in condensed format, you actually don’t. The synopsis shouldn’t depict every twist and turn of the plot — just strive to give a solid feel of the mood of the book and a basic plot summary.

Show where the major conflicts lie, introduce the main characters, interspersed with a few scenes described with a wealth of sensual detail, to make it more readable.

Remember, too, that you should be shooting for 3 – 5 pages, unless you are SPECIFICALLY asked to produce something longer or shorter. If your draft persists in being less, and you are synopsizing a book-length work, chances are that you are not including the plot or argument in sufficient detail.

So go back and reread it: is what you have hear honestly a reader-friendly telling of your story or a convincing presentation of your argument, or is it merely a presentation of the premise of the book and a cursory overview of its major themes? For most too-short synopses, it is the latter.

If you really get stuck about how to make it longer, print up a hard copy of the synopsis, find yourself a highlighting pen, and mark every summary statement about character, every time you have wrapped up a scene or plot twist description with a sentence along the lines of and in the process, Sheila learns an important lesson about herself.

Go back through and take a careful look at these highlighted lines. Then ask yourself for each: would a briefly-described scene SHOW the conclusion stated there better than just TELLING the reader about it? Is there a telling character detail or an interesting plot nuance that might supplement these general statements, making them more interesting to read?

I heard that gasp of recognition out there — yes, campers, the all-pervasive directive to SHOW, DON’T TELL should be applied to synopses as well. The fewer generalities you can use here, the better, especially for fiction.

I’ll let those of you into brevity in on a little secret: given a choice, specifics are almost always more interesting to a reader than generalities. Think about it from an agency screener’s POV, someone who reads 800 synopses per week: wouldn’t general statements about lessons learned and hearts broken start to sound rather similar after awhile? But a genuinely quirky detail in a particular synopsis — wouldn’t that stand out in your mind?

And if that unique grabber appeared on page 1 of the synopsis, or even in the first couple of paragraphs, wouldn’t you pay more attention to the rest of the summary?

Uh-huh. It’s very easy to forget in the heat of pulling together a synopsis that agency screeners are readers, too, not just decision-makers. They like to be entertained, so the more entertaining you can make your synopsis, the more likely Millicent is to be wowed by it.

Isn’t it fortunate that you’re a writer with the skills to do that?

If your synopsis has the opposite problem and runs long, you should also sit down and read it over with a highlighter gripped tightly in your warm little hand. On your first pass through, mark any sentence that does not deal with the [primary] plot or argument of the book.

Then go back through and read the UNMARKED sentences in sequence, ignoring the highlighted ones. Ask yourself honestly: does the shorter version give an accurate impression of the book? If so, do the marked sentences really need to be there at all?

If your synopsis still runs too long, try this trick of the pros: minimize the amount of space you devote to the book’s premise and the actions that occur in Chapter 1. Yes, you will need this information to appear prominently in a synopsis you would send with a cold query letter, but as I mentioned yesterday, once you have been asked to submit pages, your synopsis has different goals.

You might want to consider minimizing the premise-setting section regardless; the vast majority of synopses spend to long on it. Here’s a startling statistic: in the average novel synopsis, over a quarter of the text deals with premise and character introduction.

Try trimming this down to just a few sentences and moving on to the rest of the plot.

If this seems dangerous to you, think about it: if the agent or editor asked to see Chapter 1 or the first 50 pages, and if you place the chapter BEFORE the synopsis in your submission packet, the reader will already be familiar with both the initial premise AND the basic characters AND what occurs at the beginning in the book. So why be repetitious?

Let me show you how it works (and yes, long-term readers, I have used this example before). Let’s say that you were Jane Austen, and you were pitching SENSE AND SENSIBILITY to an agent at a conference. (You should be so lucky!)

The agent is, naturally, charmed by the story — because you were very clever indeed, and did enough solid research before you signed up for your agent appointment to have a pretty fair certainty that this particular agent is habitually charmed by this sort of story — and asks to see a synopsis and the first 50 pages.

See? Advance research really does pay off.

Naturally, you dance home in a terrible rush to get those pages in the mail. As luck would have it, you already have a partially-written synopsis on your computer. In it, the first 50 pages’ worth of action look something like this:

ELINOR (19) and MARIANNE DASHWOOD (17) are in a pitiable position: due to the whimsical will of their great-uncle, the family estate passes at the death of their wealthy father into the hands of their greedy half-brother, JOHN DASHWOOD (early 30s). Their affectionate but impractical mother (MRS. DASHWOOD, 40), soon offended at John’s wife’s (FANNY FERRARS DASHWOOD, late 20s) domineering ways and lack of true hospitality, wishes to move her daughters from Norland, the only home they have ever known, but comparative poverty and the fact that Elinor is rapidly falling in love with her sister-in-law’s brother, EDWARD FERRARS (mid-20s), render any decision on where to go beyond the reach of her highly romantic speculations.

Yet when John and his wife talk themselves out of providing any financial assistance to the female Dashwoods at all, Mrs. Dashwood accepts the offer of her cousin, SIR JOHN MIDDLETON (middle aged) to move her family to Barton Park, hundreds of miles away. Once settled there, the Dashwoods find themselves rushed into an almost daily intimacy with Sir John and his wife, LADY MIDDLETON (late 20s) at the great house. There, they meet COLONEL BRANDON (early 40s), Sir John’s melancholy friend, who seems struck by Marianne’s musical ability — and beauty. But does his sad face conceal a secret?

Marianne’s heart is soon engaged elsewhere: she literally falls into love. Dashing and romantic WILLOUGHBY (26) happens to be riding by when Marianne tumbles down a hillside, spraining her ankle. Just like the romantic hero of her dreams, he sweeps her up and carries her to safety. Soon, the pair is inseparable, agreeing in every particular: in music, in poetry, in the proper response to life, which is to ignore propriety in favor of expressing unrestrained feeling. When Col. Brandon is abruptly obliged to cancel a party in order to rush off to London to attend to mysterious business, the lovers are perfectly agreed that stuffy old Brandon made up the urgency in order to spoil their pleasure.

All too quickly, however, it is Willoughby’s turn to be called away by mysterious duties, leaving a weeping Marianne courting every memory of their happy days together while Elinor wonders why the pair have not announced their evident engagement.

Edward comes to visit the Dashwoods, but he is sadly changed, morose and apparently afraid to be left alone with Elinor, despite Marianne’s continual and well-meaning efforts to allow the lovebirds solitude in which to coo. Edward is wearing an unexplained ring, human hair set in metal: he claims it is his sister Fanny’s but the Dashwoods are sure it is Elinor’s.

Now, all of this does in fact occur in the first 50 pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, at least in my well-worn little paperback addition. However, all of the plot shown above would be in the materials the agent requested, right? So, being a wise Aunt Jane, you would streamline your submission synopsis so it looked a bit more like this:

At the death of their wealthy father, ELINOR (19) and MARIANNE DASHWOOD (17) and their affectionate but impractical mother (MRS. DASHWOOD, 40) are forced to leave their life-long home and move halfway across England, to live near relatives they have never seen, far away from Elinor’s beloved EDWARD FERRARS (mid-20s). At the home of their cousins SIR JOHN (late 30s) and LADY MIDDLETON (late 20s), melancholy COLONEL BRANDON (early 40s), seems struck by Marianne’s musical ability – and beauty. But does his sad face conceal a secret?

Dashing WILLOUGHBY (26) happens to be riding by when Marianne tumbles down a hillside, spraining her ankle. Just like the romantic hero of her dreams, he sweeps her up and carries her to safety. Soon, the pair is inseparable, much to Col. Brandon’s chagrin. He rushes off to London to attend to mysterious business. All too quickly, however, Willoughby’s is called away, too. Marianne spends her days courting every tender memory of him, while Elinor wonders why the pair has not announced their evident engagement.

Elinor’s love life is less successful: when Edward comes to visit, he seems afraid to be left alone with her, despite Marianne’s continual and well-meaning efforts to allow the lovebirds solitude in which to coo. Does his silence mean he no longer loves Elinor?

See what space-saving wonders may be wrought by cutting down on the premise-establishing facts? The second synopsis is less than half the length of the first, yet still shows enough detail to show the agent how the submitted 50 pp. feeds into the rest of the book. Well done, Jane!

I feel another one of my pre-flight checklists welling up with me, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. Keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on Interesting legal talk for Seattle-area writers

Interesting legal talk for Seattle-area writers

I’m neither a lawyer nor play one on TV, but I do know that the more that writers know about the legal status of their books, the better off they are, in the long run. The Washington Lawyers for the Arts periodically gives lunchtime talks on issues of interest to writers — I would highly recommend this upcoming talk to Seattle-area writers, particularly those who tread the memoir path:

/snapshot-2007-06-13-13-55-54.tiff

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY BASICS

If you’re an artist, you can never know too much about the laws that protect your rights to your own work. Have upi attemded seminars in the past where the issues were too complex, and you felt lost? This session is designed especially for beginners. Signe Brunstad, a licensed attorney who teaches copyright and other intellectual property classes at the University of Washington and Seattle University law schools, will provide an overview comparing copyright, trademark, patent, trade dress and other forms of intellectual property protection for artists of all disciplines. She will explain how you acquire and register for each right, how long they last, how these rights are involved in the contracts you enter, and how much — or how little — it could all cost you.

Date:
Monday, September 17, 2007

Time:
11:45 am – 2:00 pm (program begins at noon; lunches welcome)

Location:
911 Media Arts Center
402 9th Avenue N
Seattle, Washington 98109

Fee:
In advance: $10 for artists and students
At the door: $15 for artists and students

Tickets may be bought through Brown Paper Tickets. To reserve a seat and pay at the door, RSVP at (206) 328-7053 or visit the Washington Lawyers for the Arts’ website.

Posted on - No Comments on Book marketing 101: scanning your query letter for problems, part III, or, far from the madding zombie crowd

Book marketing 101: scanning your query letter for problems, part III, or, far from the madding zombie crowd

For the past few days, I have been urging you to take a long, hard look at your query letter, to make sure that you are projecting the impression that you are an impressively qualified, impeccably professional writer waiting to be discovered — as opposed to the other kind, who in agents’ minds swarm to post offices around the world in legions like creatures in zombie films, droning, “Represent my book! Represent my book!”

(That would be the undead they’re thinking of storming post offices, mind you, not the 1960s band.)

Yes, I know that it seems impossibly nit-picky to concentrate this hard upon a page of text that isn’t even in your manuscript. I’m just trying to save you some time, and some misery — and a whole lot of rejection. So print up your latest query letter, please, and let’s ask ourselves a few more probing questions before we pop that puppy in the mail.

Everybody comfortable? Good. Let’s promote the heck out of your book.

First, please read the entire letter aloud, so it is clear in your mind — and to catch any lapses in logic or grammar, of course. I don’t care if you did it yesterday: do it again, because now you’re doing it in hard copy, where — long-time readers, chant it with me now — you’re significantly more likely to catch itty-bitty errors like missed periods.

Why aloud? Because it’s the best way to catch a left-out word or logic problem. Don’t feel bad if you find a few: believe me, every successful author has a story about the time that she realized only after a query or a manuscript was in the mailbox that it was missing a necessary pronoun or possessive. Or misspelled something really basic, like the book category.

And if you don’t read it aloud IN HARD COPY one final time between when you are happy with it on your computer screen and when you apply your soon-to-be-famous signature to it…well, all I can do is rend my garments and wonder where I went wrong in bringing you up.

All right, I’ll hop off the guilt wagon now and back onto the checklist road. (My mother’s favorite joke — Q: how many Mediterranean mothers does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: None. “Don’t mind me; I’ll just sit here in the dark, while you do what you want…”)

(6) Is the first paragraph of my query compelling? Does it get to the point immediately? If I were an agency screener, would I keep reading into the next paragraph?

I am dwelling upon the first paragraph of the query letter 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 and their screeners every day based upon the first paragraph alone. This is the primary reason I advise against e-mail queries, incidentally, except in the case of agents who specifically state they prefer them over the paper version: it’s too easy to delete an e-mail after reading only a line or two of it.

This may seem draconian, but think about it from Millicent the screener’s perspective: if you had to get through 200 queries before the end of the afternoon, would you keep reading the one in front of you if the first paragraph rambled? Or, heaven forefend, contained a typo or two?

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. Does it present the relevant information — why you are querying this particular agent, book category, title, etc. — in a professional, compelling manner?

Cut to the chase. All too often, when writers do not make their intentions clear up front — say, by neglecting to mention the book category — the letter simply gets tossed aside after the first paragraph.

All right, on to paragraph two:

(7) Is my brief summary of the book short, clear, and exciting? Have I actually said what the book is ABOUT?

Frequently, authors get so carried away with conveying 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 like your hallway pitch.

Here’s a quick way to tell if your letter is hitting the mark: unearth that book keynote you came up with earlier in this series for a pitch, and compare it with your summary paragraph in the query. Do they read as though they are describing the same book?

If you’re worried about leaving out salient points, here’s an idea: include the synopsis in your query packet. While you have an agency screener’s attention, why not have a fuller explanation of the book ready to hand? That’s 3-5 entire, glorious pages to impress an agent with your sparkling wit, jaw-dropping plot, and/or utterly convincing argument.

Did I hear a few gasps out there? “But Anne,” I hear timorous non-zombie voices cry, “the agency’s listing in the standard agency guide and/or website does not mention sending a synopsis with my query. I thought I was supposed to send only EXACTLY what the agent requested?”

Well caught, oh anonymous voices: sending only what is requested is indeed the rule for SUBMISSIONS. And obviously, you should check what the particular agency wants to see. If an agency asks for something special in its querying guidelines, such as the first 5 pages of your manuscript (the agency that represents yours truly encourages writers to send a first chapter, but that’s rare), you should send precisely that.

However, most agencies do not spell out so clearly what they want to see stuffed in that query envelope: even the most cursory flip through the Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents will produce many repetitions of the minimal phrase query with SASE that it becomes slightly hypnotic. In my experience, the Millicents at such agencies may not always read an included synopsis, but they don’t go around automatically rejecting queries that include them, either.

With one exception: if a synopsis is sent as an attachment with an e-mail query. Most agencies have policies against opening unrequested attachments, so if you include a synopsis with your e-query, add it in the body of the message, after the letter itself.

In a paper query, I think a good synopsis is usually worth including, provided that it is brief, well-written, and professional. (Don’t worry; I shall be going over how to write a killer synopsis next week.) Including it will free you to concentrate on the point of the query letter, which is to capture the reader’s attention, not to summarize the entire book.

Within the query letter itself, you honestly do have only have 3-5 sentences here to grab an agent’s interest, so generally speaking, you are usually better off emphasizing how interesting your characters are and how unusual your premise is, rather than trying to outline the plot.

Still tempted to spend the entire page recounting plot twists? Okay, let’s step into an agency screener’s shoes for a minute. Read these two summaries: seriously which would make you ask to see the first fifty pages of the book?

Basil Q. Zink, a color-blind clarinetist who fills his hours away from his music stand with pinball and romance novels, has never fallen in love — until he meets Gisèle, the baton-wielding conductor with a will of steel and a temper of fire. But what chance does a man who cannot reliably make his socks match have with a Paris-trained beauty? Ever since Gisèle was dumped by the world’s greatest bassoonist, she has never had a kind word for anyone in the woodwind section. Can Basil win the heart of his secret love without compromising his reputation as he navigates the take-no-prisoners world of the symphony orchestra?

Clear in your mind? Now here is entry #2:

BATON OF MY HEART is a love story that follows protagonist Basil Q. Zink, whose congenital color-blindness was exacerbated (as the reader learns through an extended flashback) by a freak toaster-meets-tuning-fork accident when he was six. Ever since, Basil has hated and feared English muffins, which causes him to avoid the other boys’ games: even a carelessly-flung Frisbee can bring on a flashback. This circle metaphor continues into his adult life, as his job as a clarinetist for a major symphony orchestra requires him to spend his days and most of his nights starting at little dots printed on paper.

Life isn’t easy for Basil. Eventually, he gets a job with a new symphony, where he doesn’t know anybody; he’s always been shy. Sure, he can make friends in the woodwind section, but in this orchestra, they are the geeks of the school, hated by the sexy woman conductor and taunted by the Sousaphonist, an antagonist who is exactly the type of Frisbee-tossing lunkhead Basil has spent a lifetime loathing. The conductor poses a problem for Basil: he has never been conducted by a woman before. This brings up his issues with his long-dead mother, Yvonne, who had an affair with little Basil’s first music teacher in a raucous backstage incident that sent music stands crashing to the ground. Basil’s father never got over the incident, and Basil…”

Okay, ersatz agency screener: how much longer would you keep reading? We’re all the way through a lengthy paragraph, and we still don’t know what the essential conflict is!

Tomorrow, I shall delve a bit more into the mysteries of that summary paragraph. I’m going to get back to editing now. Don’t mind me; I’ll just sit here in the dark. Go have your fun. And keep up the good work!

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Book marketing 101: Dear John, please don’t send a Dear Agent letter

Miss me over the holiday weekend? Actually, I didn’t refrain from posting because I was doing any of the standard Labor Day activities — all of the ambient barbequing in my neighborhood seemed to have triggered a headache of truly epic proportions. I know people want their briquettes to light, but honestly, is THAT much lighter fluid necessary?

Before I succumbed to the billows of smoke from up the hill, I had been talking about the most common problems found in query letters. Today, I’m going to get back to that rather grim task, in preparation for launching into a series of questions designed to help you see your query letter as Millicent and the other screeners of the agency world might see it.

Because, you see, they read hundreds of the darned things per week: even if only 20 of them share the same basic mistake — and trust me, more of them will — the 21rst query that carries even a shade of similarity is likely to trigger a knee-jerk reaction so strong that even Dr. Pavlov would shake is head and say, “No kidding? Just because the letter was addressed to DEAR AGENT, instead of an individual?”

Oh, yes, Dr. Pavlov, there are few epistolary errors that engender a stronger — or quicker — negative response than a DEAR AGENT letter. As in one that begins:

Dear Agent,
I haven’t the vaguest idea who you are or what you represent, but since the big publishing houses don’t accept submissions from unagented authors, I come to you, hat in hand, to beg you to represent my fiction novel…

Why, when there is so much to resent in this (probably quite honest) little missive, would the salutation alone be enough to get this query rejected without reading farther? Well, to folks who work in agencies, such an opening means only one thing: the writer who sent it is sending an identical letter to every agent listed on the Internet or in one of the standard agency guides.

Willy-nilly, with no regard to who represents what and consequently who is likely to be interested in the book at hand.

Which means, they reason, that it is unlikely to the point of laughability that the book being proposed is going to fit the specific requirements and tastes of any of the agents currently domiciled at the agency. And, most will additionally conclude, the writer hasn’t bothered to learn much about how the publishing industry works.

Now, neither of these conclusions may actually be fair or accurate in the case of a particular book. And honestly, since most agency screeners are simply told to reject a DEAR AGENT letter automatically, the Millicents of the world probably seldom give much thought to it at all — this is such a notorious agents’ pet peeve that I was rather surprised to realize that I’d never done a post exclusively on it before.

This knee-jerk response does have some rather sound logic underlying it, however, so rather than just stating that it’s always a bad idea to open a query with the generic DEAR AGENT salutation (which it is, oh, it IS!), I’m going to spend a little time talking about why.

First, agencies receive a LOT of this kind of letter, so many, in fact, that there’s it has an industry nickname. It’s called — wait for it — a DEAR AGENT letter. (Hey, I didn’t say that it was a startlingly original nickname, only that it existed.)

There’s a very good reason that they see so many of ‘em: scores of aspiring writers, impatient to get a response, will query every agency in creation their first time out. If you’re going to be popping 300 queries into envelopes, just photocopying the same letter 300 times can start to seem much more efficient than adding an individual salutation for each. Much less time-consuming, they think, patting themselves on the back for being clever.

And then they’re surprised when they receive 300 rejections. Or, if they did not include SASEs (usually because they haven’t done their homework well enough to know about them — and if you are unsure how to handle them, why they’re necessary, or what SASE stands for, please see the SASE GUIDELINES category at right.)

This kind of generic letter has, alas, become even more widespread with the rise of the Internet and the increasing acceptability of e-mailed queries. (Which I do not recommend, incidentally; they’re easier to reject. For a discussion of why, please see the E-MAILING QUERIES category at right.) Often, such blanket queries do not include any saluation at all.

Trust me on this one: few things annoy your average agent more than receiving an e-mail that indicates that it was sent not only to her, but to the three or four agencies that fall closest to hers in the alphabet.

Either way, they tend to find it a bit insulting to be treated as interchangeable with every other agent on the planet. Also, it’s rare that an agent works alone; there are usually several agents working at any given agency, each with her own idea of a dream book.

Why is does this render a DEAR AGENT letter a worse idea than it might otherwise be? By not specifying which individual a query is targeting, the querier is implicitly asking the SCREENER to make the decision about which is the most appropriate in-house agent for the book being proposed.

If that last sentence didn’t make you giggle at least a little bit, consider Millicent the screener’s job for a moment: hours and hours of query letters, hundreds of them, as if she were Santa Claus, until she begins to curse the legendary efficiency of the US Postal Service for not losing, say, a couple of dozen letters a day.

Preferably, the couple of dozen that begin DEAR AGENT.

It’s not just that the marketing error repetitions (like a letter that begins…well, you get the picture) would get on her nerves after a while; it’s the fact that — long-time readers, chant it with me now — her job is to reject as many of them as possible.

Why? Well, let’s assume that she’s working at a big agency, one with many agents representing a couple of hundred clients. In a good year, they might sell 75 or 100 titles, but let’s assume that they are looking to expand their client list — not a foregone conclusion, incidentally. (The standard agency guides will indicate which are not open to new clients.) Millicent’s agency is, due to client attrition, changing personal interests among the agents, new trends in the book market, etc.

So here’s a question to ponder (and a great one to stand up and ask a panel of agents at a conference, by the way): with a successfully productive client list, how many new writers do you think the agency will be picking up this year?

The answer really depends upon the individual agent, as much as upon the agency; it could be as few as just a few, or as many as a couple of dozen. A lot of factors affect such decisions. Has a particular agent just been promoted from assistant, and is looking to build her own client list? Is another’s child just about to enter an expensive private school, and he’s eager to increase his commissions? Have clients been leaving or — this is often a lifetime relationship we’re talking about here — passing away recently?

Or, to mention some reasons that an agency might be less client-hungry, is one of the member agents just about to have a baby, and is looking at taking a few months off — and thus are the other in-house agents going to be handling her clients while she’s on leave? Has one of their clients just hit the bestseller lists, and is both bringing in scads of money and requiring additional attention? Did half of a particular agent’s client list just suddenly present him with new novels within the last two weeks?

All of these influential matters, you will note, are utterly beyond a querying writer’s control, and 99% of the time, beyond her knowledge as well. Given that level of uncertainty, it might seem like a good idea to let Millicent, who at least knows what’s going on behind the scenes at the agency, decide which of the agents on staff might be the most open to your book, right?

Wrong; it’s not how Millie sees it. What she sees are 800-1000 query letters per week, for perhaps 10 or 20 new client slots per year. And while she was probably an English major, her math skills are certainly up to figuring out that she is going to need to reject the overwhelming majority of those queries without seeing any of the associated books at all.

Which means — and it pains me to say it, but it’s true — that easily-spotted mistakes in the salutation or first paragraph are a positive godsend to her. She doesn’t even need to read the letter to reject it. Next!

Do I hear some outraged sputtering out there? “But Anne,” I some voices in the wilderness cry, “doesn’t such an attitude virtually guarantee that many wonderful books will be rejected, just because their writers don’t know the ropes of the industry? Isn’t Millicent worried that she’ll accidentally reject the next DA VINCI CODE?”

In a word, no, because the sheer volume of submissions is so great. When she is wearing her submission-screening hat, she sees so many technically perfect submissions that she doesn’t need to fret that she might be rejecting a brilliant novel because it is incorrectly formatted, or because line 3 on page 1 contains a cliché, or any of the other hundreds of reasons that manuscripts routinely get rejected on page 1, right?

By exactly the same logic, the agency just receives too many queries for her to worry about the one that got away. (For a sobering — and, I think, enlightening — look at just how picayune some of those reasons can be, take a gander at the FIRST PAGES AGENTS DISLIKE category at right.)

In fact, the general assumption is that if a writer is talented enough, she’ll go off and learn the rules of submission and come back again. Which means that, essentially, Millicent will throw a DEAR AGENT letter back, regardless of the quality of the book bring proposed, on the same principle as a fisherman’s releasing a too-small trout: it’s not that they never want to see the book pitched again; they merely want to catch the writer again when s/he is older and wiser.

So it honestly does pay to do your homework and target a particular agent, rather than leaving the choice up to Millicent’s tender mercies.

Not to worry: after I finish going over how to weed out the most common query problems, I intend to spend a few days talking about how to find out who represents your kind of work, to maximize the probability that your queries will land on the right desks.

In the interim, let’s concentrate upon not being the fish that gets thrown back. Keep up the good work!