Online Style Guides

Yesterday as a result of a new story, I discovered that the Navy style guide is now online. If you write about SEALs or other sailors, this might be useful for dialogue and official jargon.

Here are some other links that might be useful if you're investigating questions of style.

AP Stylebook Online
AP advocates a style which is less formal than academic writing but not as casual as dialect. If you write for newspapers, magazines, or genre fiction publishers, you'll generally be safe with AP.

The Economist Style Guide
This concise guide is useful if you want a more thoughtful tone in your prose. Is your character highly educated? Is he a CEO or other money guy? This might come in handy.

Chicago
APA
MLA
The big three of academic style. Most of the ordinary manuscript format rules (double-spaced, one-inch margins, page numbers in corners, etc.) come from academic style.

Strunk & White
A general style guide aimed at ordinary writing. This is really basic stuff. No excuse for not knowing these rules. (I have special love for rule II.7, of course.)

Then there are the specialized style guides and online dictionaries. Is your character a doctor? Maybe you need to look at AMA style for that memo he writes in chapter six. Was he born and raised in London? Maybe you need this English slang dictionary. Is your hero a retired athlete? Here's a brief sports terms dictionary.

The point is that there are multiple layers to manuscript style. It needs an appropriate format to be ready for submission. It needs appropriate grammar and mechanics and usage within the text itself. And it needs characters who sound like the people the author intends them to be. Style guides can help the writer achieve all of these goals.

Theresa

Top Five Mistakes Authors Make in Proposals

I did this as a guest blog and am reposting here, so if you think you've read it before, well, you might have. :)

--

Let me start off with a dirty little secret: When you submit a proposal to editors or agents, you can't assume they'll read past the first page. I know, I know. It's not fair, etc. But let’s get real. They're really busy, and they have dozens, perhaps hundreds, of submissions a year. And their primary task in sorting through that slushpile is to reject most of the submissions so that they can go back to their real work (with the manuscripts they've already accepted).

Your job in submitting the proposal is to keep from giving them a reason to reject you quickly. You want the editor or agent to read through the whole proposal and ask for more, right? (Proposal for fiction is usually: Cover letter, short synopsis, first three chapters, but it's actually whatever they ask for in their guidelines.)

So here are the Top Five Mistakes that you might want to avoid:

1. Typos, especially in the query letter, and mechanical errors in the first page of the synopsis and chapters. I can hear you groaning. You KNOW this, right? You don't need to be told, right? Then why, I ask you, do I see so many submissions and contest entries with the sort of errors that make me cringe? I know, I know, those careless clueless submitters are not you. Agreed. But we don't know what we don't know, so if you're getting very quick rejections, you might go over your proposal word by word to make sure that you haven't got "Big Name Publishing Comporation" in the address heading of your coverpage, or "Napolean" seventeen times in your Napoleonic-era spy story. Typos jump right out and attack the eyes of editors and agents, and you don't want to cause that kind of anguish.

Typos aren't the only mechanical errors that make an editor or agent send a quick no. I've started keeping a list of what we call "the marks of the amateur," which clue us in quickly to the "not ready for primetimeness" of this submitter. That's mean, isn't it? But it's reality. So if you don't want to be typed as an amateur, it might help to find out what makes an editor brand a submission as from a newbie. For me, it's dialogue punctuation. I figure that if you've been reading for twenty or thirty years and have never noticed that there's a comma between the "she said" and the quotation mark, you probably aren't all that receptive to learning.

For a friend of mine who has served her time as an agent's assistant (facing hundreds of manuscripts, 99.9% of which she was supposed to divert – read "reject"-- before they got to the agent), the primary "mark of an amateur" comes when the author uses the character name in every sentence. "There's a reason they invented pronouns!" she points out. Her boss is famous for her sensitive "ear" for the melody and rhythm of prose, and nothing is as discordant as a constant repetition of a name.

Probably all editors and agents have their own "marks", whether they share them or not. How do you find out what they are? Well, first I'd suggest asking the editor or agent. They all have blogs these days. Send a question (anonymous if you think best) which says, "What mechanical error in a submission clues you in that this isn't an accomplished stylist?"

A few typos, even a couple grammar errors, will probably get by. But don't count on it. Just remember that an editor especially has to look forward to editing this book, and if there's a recurrent error in the first few pages, she's got to consider how much time it will take to fix every single dialogue passage, or switch out 90% of the hero's name checks with "he and him and his." You don't want the editor's dominant impression upon reading your proposal to be, "Life is too short."

2. The second mistake to avoid is coming across as crazy or obsessed, especially in the cover letter but also in the synopsis. While not every writer is crazy, I suspect just about every crazy person wants to be a writer, and their submissions slush up slushpiles. Most will get dinged because of mistake #1, but if they happen to be a very controlled obsessive, they might do everything right mechanically. Still the obsession will generally leak through in the cover letter, and if you're not crazy, you don't want to have the editor taking your impassioned and yet well-reasoned defense of the metric system as a signal that you are a crank.

Just remember that your cover letter is about your story, and your story is about the characters and what happens to them. Whatever obsession you have might have fueled the writing, and that's good. But keep the focus on the story, not your pet project.

For example, I've had several submissions where the cover letter goes into depth about the author's religious faith. If I worked at an inspirational or Christian publisher, this might be okay (I don't know). But it's beyond irrelevant to me in my job at a sexy romance house. I know that it's hard to know what's relevant or not to another person, but most aspects of your life are, take it from me, irrelevant. If the story is good, I don't need to know who your personal savior is. Of course, if the story is good, I suppose I should get beyond that fear of getting trapped in a relationship with someone who wants to save me, or sell me on the merits of metric. But an editor likely to have a heightened sensitivity to any "proselytizing" in the synopsis or chapters.

This is about the story. This isn't about your life or your passion or your obsession. Of course, what has made you you will come out in your voice, story choice, and characters, but let those do the talking for you.

3. A confusing and/or boring synopsis. Well, first, let me say that you don't know whether the editor or agent will read your synopsis first or your chapters first. There isn't any rule. I tend to scan the synopsis quickly, just to make sure it's the sort of book my publisher will publish. If it's not, I'll send a quick rejection saying just that.

(Don't bother to send it if it's not the sort of thing this publisher publishes. I don't care if it's the second coming of Harry Potter—if we don't publish children's books, we're not likely to change our whole business and marketing plan for your book. Or maybe we will, but trust me, I'm not the one you need to talk to if you want that. WAY above my paygrade. Go over my head and right to the publisher—that's an actual position at most, uh, publishers. :)

Anyway, usually if I don't think much of the synopsis itself, I still will read the chapters. Plenty of great book writers are bad synopsis writers. However, a bad synopsis could derail your proposal because the editor doesn't make it to your book. So don't assume that the editor or agent will set aside an incoherent synopsis and judge just on the chapters. Make the synopsis as good as you can, given the length requirements.

Oh, right, mistakes to avoid. Well, the mistake is thinking that the synopsis is a summary of the PLOT. It should in fact be a summary of the STORY. What's the difference? Well, what's the difference between this:

Sheet music for Ave Maria

and this:

Pavarotti singing Ave Maria

The story is more than what happens. It's the journey of the characters, the emotion they experience, the theme and voice. All that should show up in your synopsis in some way. If this is a funny story, the synopsis should have humor. If the characters go through psychological agony, the synopsis should explore a bit of that.

I am aware, having written many of these damned things, that a synopsis is hard to get right. But having read even more of these damned things, I can tell you this: You will NOT write a good synopsis if you start with plot. I can just about guarantee this. The simplest plot sounds convoluted and tedious when you tell event and then event and then event. And if you have a truly complex plot? Well, I am going to get lost once you decide your job here is to give me a detailed map of the labyrinth.

So you might be asking, what do you write about if not what happens? You write about the situation (the small southern town "invaded" by freedom-riders in 1963) and you write about the characters (the African-American girl who has to integrate the high school, the politely racist shopowner who finds himself throwing rocks at her the first day of school, the college student from the North who joined the freedom-ride because he wanted to impress a liberal girlfriend). You write about how things change, and yes, you'll probably talk some about the plot events because they show the changing. But if you start your writing with the plot events, you'll never get beyond that, and your synopsis will likely be as excruciating to read as it was to write. "This happened, then that happened"—that's the worst model for a synopsis, and yet most of them start there. Don't. Don't try to revise a bad synopsis. Start over, and this time, tell us about the characters and the situation and what is wrong and what changes and why.

4. And then in the opening of the first chapter, the most common big mistake is a lack of focus that results in confusion. I've read a lot of first pages where I'm exhausted just from trying to keep track of the names of nine characters and make sense of the situation, the people, the setting, the action, and the thoughts.

Look, the purpose of the first paragraph isn't to tell everything needed to understand the book. It's just to get us to read the second paragraph. :) But we probably won't read on if the first paragraph reads like this:

Aaron Cathcart ran his hand through his sweaty hair, gazed up at the Porter mansion on the hill, where it sat foreboding and grim against a dark sky, and began trudging up the gravel driveway towards the marble front steps. Along the way he passed a jasmine bush, and the pungent smell assaulted his nose. On either side of the door were footmen in the blue and purple Porter livery, and as he approached, they moved in unison to open the great oak doors so he could enter the hall.

Reading that, I've learned exactly one important thing—a character's name. Sure, I know there's a mansion, and it apparently belongs to the Porters, and they're rich enough to afford footmen. But I don't care, because I don't know if they matter to Aaron or if he just wants to use the phone to call the auto club.

Two things to remember about your opening: First, think of the opening as posing a question somehow that will tempt the reader into reading more. For example, the opening to Shirley Jackson's famous short story "The Lottery" poses the question, "What is this lottery they're gathering for?"

So the opening to Aaron's story could pose the question, "What's he afraid he'll find here?" or "Why is he entering the house of his enemy?" But the question has to be relevant to the story. Think about what question you want the reader to ask, and see if you can set that question up with the first few paragraphs.

Second, focus the opening. You simply can't get everything in there, the setting, the characters, the situation, the backstory, and you end up leaving out important stuff like the conflict. Don't even try to be comprehensive here, or you'll just confuse. Think about one thing you want to introduce. But make it important. Think about starting with the character in some conflict.

Aaron Cathcart stared up at the Porter mansion on the hill. That was the last place he wanted to go, and the Porters were the last people he wanted to ask for help. And if it wasn't for the lady unconscious in his stalled car, he'd walk the two miles to the next town. But he had no choice, if he was going to save her life.

Conflict!

Or maybe you want to start with character:

Aaron Cathcart never asked for help. Nope, not now, not ever. He could take care of himself. That's what he had in place of religion, a stony self-sufficiency. And this afternoon, if he had any choice in the matter, he'd walk away, down the hill and away from his stalled car. But he didn't have any choice, because he didn't have the right to let the lady die for his principles.

Or you could start with setting:

The Porter mansion stood grim on a barren hill, the ugliest site in this pretty county. It had a sort of grotesque pride up there, surrounded by a gravel drive and a flat expanse of lawn, the gray tiles of the roof blank against the dark sky. No one could want to be there, and yet the Porter family had lived there for decades, when they could surely afford something else.

But focus on something. Don't try to get everything into the first paragraph. After all, the whole point is to get the reader to read the second paragraph, where presumably will be other important stuff happening.

5. Limping to a conclusion. Usually in a proposal you send the first three chapters of the book. Agents especially are known to vary this—they might ask for the first chapter or the first fifty pages. At any rate, too many submitters are sending in proposals where the very last sentence or word don’t do anything to inspire the agent to ask for more. You don’t want your proposal to limp to a conclusion!

Again, think about your purpose in submitting this proposal—it’s to get the agent or editor to ask to see the whole book. So that last bit they read is your last chance to make them want more. They probably won’t want more if you:

· End in the middle of a line just because that’s the end of the fifty pages.

· End on a boring note, like “She took a shower and went to bed.”

· End on a resolution, like “He smiled, realizing that he’d finally won.”

First thing to recognize is—they might determine what "a proposal" is, but you’re the one who determines what that is FOR YOU. If she says she wants three chapters, you don’t actually have to stop exactly at the point before “Chapter Four.” You can manipulate a bit here. Let’s say that the first two chapters are long and action-packed, and the third is more clean-up and transition to the turning point in Chapter Four. Well, you can take those first two chapters and make them three! Just divide them differently. For most of us, chapter divisions are fairly arbitrary—a chapter might be three scenes, might be two—and you can divide them differently to make more or fewer chapters.

Second trick—if you’re given a page limit, you can make tiny changes to get more into that 50 pages (or fewer). If you generally use Courier 12, try Times New Roman 12, which is about 15% smaller but is still 12 point, don’t ask me why. So that will give you 3-4 more pages to work with. Yes, all the agents know this, but unless they specifically say “no TNR,” go for it.

Of course, that’s only useful if those 3-4 extra pages are going to be a nice come-on. That’s the third trick. Whatever you need to do to make this work, end the proposal on something intriguing, something that captures the reader’s attention. A cliffhanger works here for high-action books, but a quieter book might need a mere suggestion of conflict or irresolution, something that makes the editor look around for the next page, and, not finding it, send you a request for the complete manuscript. Often this requires another sentence or paragraph at the end of a seeming resolution. Like take that one above:

He smiled, realizing that he’d finally won.

But as he was leaving the room, he looked back at Mary. Wait a minute. If he’d been the one to win, why was she the one laughing triumphantly?

So don’t limp to a conclusion of your proposal. Make sure the end of the chapters is an invitation to read on. A hint of conflict, an irresolution, will help encourage the editor or agent to ask for the rest.

Alicia

Tales from the Slush Pile

I've spent the last two days in a massive slush dive, and not only that, but I've had some in-depth conversations with our entire editorial staff about their pending submissions. It's desk-clearing time in my corner of the earth.

So here are the trends I'm spotting:

1. Elves. We used to see an elf here or there, and we've even published one or two stories with elfin folk, but the preponderance of elves in the slush pile is a bit shocking. Every time I see an elf, I get a vision of Santa's workshop. Not sure that's the vision people want me to have when reading these subs.
   
2. Don't ask an editor to "represent" your book a/k/a know the difference between an agent and an editor.
   
3. Don't sum up your plot resolution with a generic cliche. For example, "The hero saves the day" doesn't tell me anything about how the conflicts are resolved. This is less snarky than inviting me to request the full to find out how it ends, but it's still not the mark of a professional.
   
4. Always, always, always put contact information in everything. Here's a sad story. For some reason, an email submission is coming through garbled. I can't read the routing information or the message itself, and when I press "reply," I get a blank message instead of an auto-filled address. There's no contact information on the partial, and now we can't contact the author.
   
5. If it says "we don't publish this" in the guidelines, and you send it anyway, we will reject it. Even if you apologize very prettily and make a passionate defense of why the story contains the element we don't publish. Sorry. Publisher's rules.
6. We're in that cycle in the submissions cycle where almost everything we get comes through personal contacts at conferences. Not as much is arriving through the generic inbox. Same thing happens every year. I think I've already read 30 or 40 subs from RT alone, and they're still arriving. These tend to be higher quality across the board.
   

That's not too earth-shaking, I know, and you've heard a lot of this before if you've been reading this blog for any amount of time. But there are reasons we have to keep saying these things. Check the guidelines. Actually, don't just check them: follow them.

Theresa

Insomnia

Up too early this morning, just one of those mornings when there's no reason for insomnia but it strikes anyway. So I finally gave up the attempt and crawled to my desk for a good old slush dive.

In an hour, I banged through about two dozen subs. That works out to roughly 2.5 minutes per sub, except that averaging them out in this way doesn't give a good representation of how the hour was actually spent. I opened the submission and scanned right away for three things:

1. Is it romance?
2. Is there erotic content?
3. What is the word count?

Today I was able to eliminate about half of the opened submissions within 30 seconds because they didn't pass that 1-2-3 test. So that means I spent maybe 6 minutes on a dozen subs, and nearly an hour on the remaining dozen.

That still works out to about 4.5 minutes per sub, and though that's almost double our earlier average, it probably still seems like I'm skimming or not giving enough attention to each manuscript.

But again, averages don't show the whole picture. Of that dozen subs that passed the 1-2-3 test, probably 10 were rejected quickly for problems in the technical aspects of the writing. In general, if the first page contains multiple verb tense errors, dangling modifiers, bad dialogue tags, punctuation errors, and so on, we know the rest of the manuscript will be in much the same shape. Those can be rejected in probably two minutes each, three if I get distracted and start editing in my head.

So let's estimate 6 minutes on the subs that are completely wrong for us, and another 20 minutes on the ones that are fast rejections for bad writing. This leaves us with two manuscripts and about half an hour left in the hour or so. If the writer followed our guidelines, this means we're looking at two one-page synopses and two ten-page partials.

For the first the writing is very good. Lots of energy in the prose. Clear characterizations. Good stuff. But from reading the synopsis, it's clear that there's a structural problem in the plot. I make a few notes to be included in the rejection letter -- this is a good writer, and the problems are fixable, so it's worth a few minutes to jot some notes of encouragement and explanation for her. Still, this one doesn't take more than ten minutes of my time, including my notes.

That means that the one good submission, the one that is appropriate for our house, well-written, and (based on the synopsis) well plotted, gets roughly 20 minutes of my time. This is ample to read enough of the submission to know that we want to see the full manuscript. I don't need to perform a detailed analysis at this point, after all.

Perhaps worth noting is that the two best submissions also had the best cover letters. One opened with a log line clearly encapsulating the characters and conflict. Then followed a paragraph with a conflict-focused plot summary and a paragraph with credentials and similar data. Based on the submission, I can tell that this story is very character-driven with lots of emotion and a prominent conflict. The query letter plays to these strengths.

The other opened with some discussion of her theme and premise, both of which are unusual enough to be eye-catching. She only gave a quick sketch of the plot, just enough to fill in some blanks left by the discussion of the premise. This works, though, for this particular book, and again, it plays to the submission's particular strengths.

In other words, both of these cover letters demonstrate a clear-eyed understanding of what makes these books stand out from the pack. Neither used "hooks" but they managed to hook me, just the same.

Theresa

A Few Thoughts on First Person

Last week in the comments to my post about the slush pile, several of you questioned our policy about first person manuscripts. This has come up before, and I thought maybe it would be worth front-page attention for two reasons. First, it touches on the way publishing houses operate. And second, we can talk about some of the pitfalls of first person.

In-House Debates

Editors are not all-powerful goddesses, even though we look the part. ;) We have bosses, just like any other person working a job. I'm the managing editor, and my boss is the publisher, and part of my job is enforcing the publisher's rules across the entire acquisitions and editing process.

Sometimes I get to make some rules, and sometimes I get to influence some rules, and sometimes I do what I'm told without having any influence on that mandated rule. Part of being an effective employee is knowing when to hold and when to fold. The first time, the very first time, I asked my boss about her rule banning first person narratives, the tone in her voice made it clear that this was not a hand I wanted to play. She has strong feelings on the subject, and I trust her editorial sense. If she says these don't fit our house style and mission, then they don't, and that's that.

I might ante up on other topics, and at different times, I've played my cards on a wide variety of subjects. Don't ask for details, though, because another part of my job is to be a good public representative of the company. This means that, win or lose, I don't air our debates in public. We present a unified front because we are, in fact, unified in our mission of making this company strong and positive and supportive and successful.

Some battles have been hard fought and hard won, but never in the sense that my boss and I are adversaries. We play on the same team. She's my leader, and I am her enforcer. We might disagree in the course of making decisions, but in the end, once the decision is made, I implement it without further debate. And to the best of my ability. Because that's my role, and it's one I embrace willingly.

So. We don't publish first-person narratives because our publisher said not to, and she means it. I've never tried to change her mind on this topic because I know how to pick my battles, and because, even though I enjoy reading first person stories, the slush pile has convinced me that the publisher is probably right about this.

First Person Pitfalls

It surprises me to say that because I enjoy first person narratives. I read plenty of them -- in fact, right now, I'm working my way with great pleasure through the Tasha Alexander books, which are first-person historical mysteries. Before I came to work at Red Sage, I handled plenty of first-person narratives as a freelance editor, writing instructor, agent, and so on. I have no bias against this form of pov.

But our books are erotic romances, which means there's a higher than average (and more explicit than average) amount of sexual content in them. Human sexual behavior tends to be highly personal (with some commonalities, of course), and pov might influence the way we read a sex scene more so than it influences the way we read other kinds of scenes. That is, it's one thing to read about someone else doing something that we might not do. It's entirely another to read about "I" doing it. And all it takes is one little detail, one thing that the reader might not personally relate to, and the reader bond is weakened. Maybe even broken.

Compare:

I kissed my way down his broad, strong back, admiring the planes of his muscles as I lingered here or there. When I reached his ass, I pulled apart the round globes of his cheeks and then I licked his asshole. (Reader: OMG, I would never do that.)

She kissed her way down his broad, strong back, admiring the planes of his muscles as she lingered here or there. When she reached his ass, she pulled apart the round globes of his cheeks and then she licked his asshole. (Reader: Euw, but okay, if you think it's fun, go for it and I'll watch and wait until you start doing things I like better.)

Yes, there is the third option, the one in which a reader thinks, Yay! Yummy! and eagerly reads for more asshole licking, regardless of the pov of the narrative. As a house, we can choose to cater to this reader, perhaps by including notes on the product page about particular fetishes. Or we can choose, as we have chosen, a more mainstream approach which focuses on character, premise, plot, conflict, etc., and references the sexual content as it relates to those elements. This better fits our house style and mission.

There are other common pitfalls to first person which are unrelated to sexual content. Just listing them off the top of my head --

1. Uneven voice. It frequently happens that the author can sustain the first-person narrator's voice during exposition ("telling") or interior monologue, but completely loses it during action and dialogue.
   
2. Too much exposition. An inexperienced author sometimes tries to compensate for this uneven voice by relying more on exposition than on scenes. This makes for a boring narrative, no matter how lively the character voice.
3. Drowning in I. Too many I pronouns can make for a claustrophobic and repetitive narrative.
4. Failure to leverage. This is one of my pet peeves. The main reason to choose first person pov is to provide a consistent filter through which the reader perceives the action. First person narrators are often unreliable because their perspectives color their interpretations of the narratives. It's that filter in action. Bridget Jones was wrong about Daniel Cleaver and wrong about Mark Darcy, but we initially saw these characters through her eyes, so we wandered down the wrong path with her. Would that story have been as entertaining if Bridget was always right?
   

In my early days with Red Sage, when I ran across a first person narrative I really liked (and that would work better in third person*), I would ask the author to revise it. I got some really great stories this way, but for every great story, I got ten or twenty authors who wanted to argue their way into getting the story published in first person. They can't win that argument with me any more than I can win it with my publisher. I don't mind that they tried, but I minded very much the few who continued to argue after I explained that their choice was to revise it or to pull it because of house style rules.

*I don't ask for changes that would weaken the story. Duh, right? There have been extremely rare instances (Alicia will remember one) when we've had first person narratives that were exactly right as first person narratives. The action was vivid and strong, the voice was consistent and interesting, the amount of exposition was appropriate, the narrative frame was relevant to the story, and the sexual content was both hot enough and mainstream enough to work within the context of erotic romance as we publish them. But these are extremely rare manuscripts, and we handle them with caution. More likely, as we ask for revisions to a first-person narrative, we're also discussing other changes we want to make, like a shift in narrative focus away from telling and into actual scenes.

This is in danger of turning into a ramble now. Instead of continuing to get deeper into detail, I'll turn it back over to the commenters who prompted this post. Does this answer your questions? Does it raise more questions?

Theresa

Tales from the Slush Pile

Recently found in the slush (identifying details obscured to protect the writers)--

1. An author who spends an entire paragraph explaining, in carefully worded but deceptively vague terms, why her submission fits our guidelines. In fact, it doesn't even come close, and even a cursory glance at our website should have proved that. It's a canned letter, which is fine, but these "spaghetti on the wall" submissions sometimes irritate me. This one sure does. Why make such a grand point about fitting our guidelines if you're just going to ignore them anyway?
   
2. Several manuscripts in first person pov. We don't publish these. It could be brilliant, and the publisher will still hold to her rule against this style. I used to sometimes ask for revisions on these, but not so much anymore. I just don't have time for that. I am tempted to start a drinking game, though. First person? Drink! Who drinks? "I" do! Alas, that would slow my response time even further. Better stick to coffee and tea.
   
3. A clutch of stories with wives cheating on their husbands. This is a trend now? Cheating spouses almost always going to come across as unheroic, unsympathetic characters. There are exceptions, which typically involve some sort of heroic self-sacrifice or permission from the non-cheating spouse. That is, the "he pissed me off, so I'm gonna get him back by doing his brother" motivation probably won't work. Plus, we say "no marital infidelity" in the guidelines.
   
4. Double bonus: A cheating wife story told in first person. Everyone drinks twice!
   
5. A half-dozen or so stories with jailbait characters. There's no way we'll publish stories like this. Not gonna happen. I'm not going to jail for anyone's youth fetish. With several of the particular stories under consideration, it would be so easy to age the characters by a year or two and avoid the problem. So why even go there in the first place?
   
6. Several very good stories in the 70-100k range. Word must be getting around that we're looking for these. Here's a submission tip -- anything over 55k is an editorial priority right now. There are reasons for that, but we're not ready to make any announcements yet. Details will follow when there are share-able details.
7. Two -- yes, two! yay! -- that were referred by in-house authors. Real referrals, too, not just the "I met your author once and am trying to make it sound like a referral" referral. I love the real ones. It's a sign that our authors are happy enough to recommend us. I route these submissions to editors with somewhat lighter loads right now, with notes pointing out the connections, and with high hopes that a fast response will be given.
   
8. Verb tenses matter. I can forgive an occasional error with the past perfect tense or the subjunctive mood (which can trip up anyone, really). But random uses of present, present progressive, etc., in place of the narrative simple past are probably going to undermine your credibility as an author. We're also seeing a rash of improperly conjugated conditional verbs. Verbs are too important to be treated so poorly.
9. Know what else matters? Two things-- EROTIC CONTENT and ROMANCE. (Sorry to get all shouty and capital, but sheesh.)
   

All told, I knocked out about 80-ish submissions. About a half dozen either were routed to editors for further review or triggered an automatic request for a full. I'm also pleased to note that, due to our new procedures and system, our response time on initial queries is improving. This is a good thing for everyone.

Theresa

Chapter breaks

Someone asked me, "Should I start a new page after a chapter break?" that is, start the new chapter on a new page, or just skip a few lines and start it at the end of the last chapter.

I think what matters is... do you need this ms to be longer or shorter? :)

Keep in mind that whatever you do, the editor will do it house style. But if you're over 400 pages, well, save the white space and start a few lines down.

Not that any editor is dumb enough to be fooled by page count. Well, I am, but generally we do pay much more attention to word count.

Can't hurt though. It looks like 399 pages? Good!

Remember when books were 550 pages?

Alicia

More on either/or (perfect mechanics or great story-- don't be either/or)

I'm asking this because this is a question that comes up a lot: "So someone submits a perfectly clean manuscript, every comma in the right place, but it's boring. And someone submits a manuscript with a lot of grammar mistakes, but it's a great story. Which would you take?"

Hmm. That's a toughie. It's especially tough because in my experience, good creativity and good mechanics are NOT mutually exclusive, far from it. Language is the way we present our stories, and the presentation is important for getting the story right. To tell you the truth, I seldom see a "great story with terrible mechanics". (I have seen a few perfect manuscripts with boring stories... mostly I see okay stories with okay mechanics, alas.)

First, I guess I'd like to say-- no editor is looking for a perfect manuscript. We assume that there will be a few typos, a few infelicitous phrasings, some small format problems. No editor starts hyperventilating at the prospect of working with a writer who is a little less than perfect on every page. Got to justify our existence, don't we? Perfect writers don't need editors!

So never worry that the editor is going to read 200 pages and on page 201 discover that misspelling and decide to reject. That won't happen. But what if there are four misspellings on the first page? What should the editor do then? (Lately if there are a lot of mechanical problems right away, I've been sending back the submission without reading further, and saying, politely I hope, that I know the submitter would like another chance to edit so that it's easier for me to consider. So far, the writers have all thanked me for the chance, though who knows what they're really thinking. :)

One thing I do have to point out is that there really isn't an either/or here. Creativity might be messy at the creation stage, but I know very well there is no need for a good story to be messy at the submission stage. Most good stories go along with at least adequate mechanics, because the writer cares enough about presentation and narration to work hard at things like sentences and paragraphing. Most good writers don't assume that "story" is just "idea," but understand that ideas are developed in scenes which are made up of causally linked passages which are made up of paragraphs and sentences.

A mechanically inept manuscript is, in my experience, more correlated to inept development of the central idea or plot. I might see, in a mess of a manuscript, a good plot idea, or a glimmer of brilliant characterization. But that's usually all there is-- an idea, a glimmer. The execution and development aren't done well, particularly at the scene level. Why, well, interestingly, I think, there is "story grammar" and "scene syntax." Just as in a sentence or paragraph, stories and scenes have relationships that are shown in the structure or design. If the writer doesn't get that this pair of sentences shows a causal relationship:
He lurched forward,his mouth open.
I got out of the way before he puked.
Then probably the same writer isn't going to design a scene developing the cause/effect relationship between bigger events, although those events might be terrific.

Have I ever seen a great story with lousy mechanics? Yes, but mostly with my college students. If they come from a storytelling family or culture, often they get the story grammar talent with mother's milk. They've been surrounded by great stories all their lives. But usually this is oral storytelling, and often their ability to write it down is limited. We see this a whole lot with non-native speakers, especially those who left their home culture before high school, so that they aren't "writingly fluent" in their native language either. We also see this in native speakers who didn't have adequate educational experiences (or who weren't paying attention... the class clown comes to mind-- usually he's a great storyteller). The issues are usually spelling and punctuation, not sentences-- that is, it's really the -writing- stuff, the letters and punctuation marks which aren't clear in spoken English that cause the problem. Sometimes word choice is lacking too, especially in non-native speakers-- they just don't yet have the vocabulary. But they do have the ability to describe setting and people, to design scenes for maximum drama, to select the telling detail.

I had two students like this in one semester. They both would have gotten an A if I taught speech. As it was, one got an A, the woman who wrote very affectingly about her grandmother being diagnosed with Alzheimers the same week the writer found out she was pregnant, and how that baby ended up helping the grandmother keep her speech long into the illness. She worked closely with me and a tutor to find the mechanical problems that got in the way of the story presentation. The other was a young man who wrote (this was a kind of emotionally wrenching semester) about getting to the hospital just a few moments after his mother died, so he couldn't say goodbye. The urgency of the journey across town -- wow. Beautifully structured with great suspense. But he didn't have the time to transform this great story into a great paper, and didn't get as good a grade (though I made sure he knew that he had all the right stuff and just needed to go this additional step, and I hope he did in the future).

So I know it's possible to have great story/bad mechanics-- but I have to point out that these were students in freshman composition, each coming out of an oral tradition that rewarded great story design and impressive vocal performance (which they had-- as I said, they both would have gotten As in a speech class). Transferring that to written language is a separate process.

But if you're submitting a written manuscript to a book publisher, well, it's expected that you are as adept at the tools of the craft. Those students might not know so much about punctuation and other elements of written language, but they did know how to use vocal expression and pauses and body language as they told their story. (They weren't so great at first at transferring that to writing, but they really did have the vocal tools for storytelling.) If you choose to write this story, it's kind of expected that you would use the written-language tools adequately.

Now, as I said, minor errors are not the issue here, and I think writers who get upset when I say I want a mechanically adept manuscript might think I mean no typos. But what I mean is-- well, truth is, most of you would be shocked to see a story with dialogue like this:

He said "Joni Im sorry about your cat's.
She said don't worry about it. There probably hiding in the garage"

That's not actually the sort of "messiness" that goes with creativity and great ideas. But that is what we see a lot. And that sort of leaden presentation means the voice is usually leaden too. Voice isn't just about word choice-- it's developed through sentencing and punctuating too.

So... let's say you are like my students, trained by tradition and upbringing and talent to be a great storyteller but not a great practitioner of the written discourse? You know what I'd suggest you do? I'd suggest you dictate your story into a recorder, and hire a good secretary to type it. Many secretaries have been, uh, quietly editing their bosses' prose for years, and know how to turn your dictation into an at least adequate manuscript. (When I worked at the late lamented Grammar Hotline, most of our callers were secretaries who were interested in getting the grammar right, or in proving to their boss they were right, and they usually were.:) If the problem is getting it from oral language to written language, it's probably easier and cheaper to hire someone than to make the transition yourself.

Now when I think of it, the corollary -- the perfect manuscript and boring story-- happens more often. That's because you can hire someone to turn oral language into written language -- same words, after all, and it will still be YOUR story, not the transcriber's. But if you hire someone to design your scenes, deepen the characterization, create a suspenseful tone, structure the events-- it's not really your story, is it? All those things ARE story. (And that is why people hire ghostwriters, I guess.)

Thinking back on perfectpunctators/lousystorytellers... I have seen that too. I used to write Regency novels, a subgenre that attracted a lot of English teachers and librarians (it's set in the time of Austen, see). And when I'd judge a Regency contest, I'd frequently get an entry that was well-written on the basic word level, but lacking in story grammar. They knew how to write a sentence, but couldn't flesh out a character. They knew how to punctuate dialogue, but not how to make it sound authentic. The story would never be insane (that's much more likely with the messy manuscript, and yeah, I've seen that a lot too), but it would be "by the numbers," often using conventional situations (ballroom scenes, mistaken identity) but with nothing fresh added.

(Okay, insane stories-- I've seen these, and they really usually are accompanied by wild and inaccurate punctuation, creative spelling, and labyrinthine sentences that lose all sense partway through. What's insane? Not just fun over-the-topness, but characterization so inconsistent as to come across as reflecting schizophrenia -- the author's, not the character's; sudden and unmotivated changes in story elements-- the villain suddenly isn't bad anymore; events in early scenes in later scenes just didn't happen. I don't mean the author is insane, but the story in this case makes no sense on any level. Fortunately, I haven't seen a lot of these stories, but I think every one featured some strange font or spacing choice. These are not, I hasten to add, your competition!)

In a contest, the meticulous but boring entry would often score sort of on the high end of mediocre, but never win. And really, I don't have a quick solution ("hire someone to type it") here. The problem is more global, more personal-- that is, the writer probably doesn't have a great imagination and/or an innate or learned sense of story grammar, and you just can't hire that. (But I do think these would be great typists for the oral storytellers out there! :)

So... which of the two (messy but good story, clean but boring story) would be more likely to be published? Hmm. Well, of course, when we pick up a published book, we're seeing an edited version, not the original submission. So there might be plenty of previously-messy books that have been wrestled into rightness by a pair of editors and a proofreader, and we'll never know unless we get the editor drunk. ("You know that writer of mine who made the NYTimes list last week. Oi, you should have seen the manuscript when it came to me. One long sentence, the whole first chapter. I kid you not. You're buying the next round, right?") Notice that this requires a lot of time and energy from the editors and money commitment from the publisher, so a damn good story is required, not just a good story, to elicit that much effort.

But we certainly all read boring but well-written books. They're well-written enough that we don't take them back to the bookstore and demand our money back, or post nasty reviews on Amazon. We don't feel passionate enough about them for that level of response. Meh... we sort of wonder why this book was chosen out of the many the editor must have read that month. (Probably the original book for that slot didn't come in on time, so they needed a book to fill the gap, a book that didn't require much work to make presentable, and this one landed very cleanly on the desk at just the right moment. See why it's a good idea always to send in a clean manuscript? "Doesn't need much editing" is maybe not the fulsome compliment you were hoping for, but there are times when that's exactly what the publisher wants in a book.)

Well, anyway, we should all strive for great story/great mechanics. Figure out our weakness and what to work on to overcome it, but maintain our strengths too.

I'm remembering a query I got from one of those meticulous types, the one that made me really WANT to buy-- "I always make deadlines. I always deliver a clean manuscript. I have worked as a proofreader for a decade"-- it was sort of sad. Imagine an epitaph: "She always made her deadlines, including this one."

Alicia

More on Steampunk

Alison and Theresa have already discussed the Steampunk genre, and I have only one thought-- question really.

Let's say you are going to submit a Steampunk novel. You might have noticed, and if not, Alison made a good case for it, that the current Sherlock Holmes movie has certain important Steampunk markers.

(It also has Jude Law, and you remember I said that if Jude Law planning to star in an adaptation of your book, that would get me to read it? Well, I am modifying that. Jude Law plus Robert Downey, Jr., making googly eyes at each other in your book? Sold!!!!)

Now Steampunk isn't a genre and doesn't have its own publishing lines, as far as I know. So you can't count on that YA editor or that s/f editor knowing as much as Alison knows (or Theresa knows now, having edited one). My question is:

You naturally want to provide some notion of how your book fits in with a trend and how it might be marketed. And so you might refer to the Sherlock Holmes film in your query letter. How would you do that without being annoying (I for one get annoyed with those breezy brain-teasers: "It's like Sleepless in Seattle meets Pulp Fiction!")?

The purpose would be, I presume, twofold-- one to give a quick way to understand what the approach is, and second to say it's really cool and trendy now. So give me a couple sentences or a paragraph where you might insert the mention of the film in a subtle and effective way, connecting it to your own Steampunk story.

Alicia

Last Revision Before Submission

I'm going to start a checklist for writers who are about to submit, just a checklist for the most common grammar and usage errors. So help! Any additions? I'm sort of concentrating on what I find most annoying, but you know me. I find it all very annoying. :) I do like a pristine manuscript. Make use of grammar sites (particularly university writing centers) on the web, or grammar textbooks (there are many, and often available cheap at used bookstores-- just choose one that explains things in ways you like). There is no excuse these days for mechanical mistakes in submissions.

1. Check for apostrophe problems. Apostrophes are used in possessive nouns and in contractions, and their proper use is a signal to the editor that you know what you're doing with words and sentences. You want to show that you understand what words mean-- that this noun is a possessive, or that this word has letters left out to make a contraction. Here's a good site to help with apostrophe use. Apostrophe mistakes are a real "mark of the amateur"(TM) for me, and I doubt I'm the only editor who cringes at "Shirleys mom really believes in marriage: She has had five husband's herself."

2. Check for commas after introductory elements. This comma isn't always needed, but in my experience, most house stylebooks call for it. So most editors will read a submission and make mental note of each intro element that needs a following comma, as they will have to fix this if you don't. You don't want the editor making mental notes of how much work your manuscript will require if bought. So:
If she had her way, Joey would have gone to college and become an engineer.
All things considered, he would have been happier then.
Unfortunately, there wasn't enough money to pay for school.

3. Check for misused words, including homophones ("sound-alikes") and misspellings that get past spell-check (that is, they are words, just not the right words). More than a couple uses of wrong words tells the editor that you aren't reading your own sentences for meaning, or you'd notice that you mention "the blogger form Indiana". And if you don't read your own work for meaning, real meaning is likely to be a haphazard process. Read ALOUD. You will hear the sentences as sentences, not as collections of words. And then you'll figure out if there are any wrong words, because the sentence won't mean what you want it to mean.
For more on homophones, see Commonly Misused Words.

4. Check for run-on sentences. You thought I was going to say fragments, didn't you? Well, check for them too. But fragments can be used occasionally to good effect, while run-on sentences are usually another sign that you're not reading carefully. (I've seen run-ons used to good effect in action scenes, and sometimes in highly emotional scenes and love scenes-- but that intensity is seldom created by accident, and most run-on sentences are... accidents.)

5. Check for sentence length and complexity. There's no actual right or wrong here, of course. Just check the sentences against the effect you're trying to achieve to make sure you're not undercutting (like a series of short sentences won't give that lush feeling you want as the heroine relaxes in the hammock).

6. Check for transitions in time and space. If the characters move or if time passes, show it in the narrative. It doesn't take much, maybe a few words at the start of the new sentence, but it makes all the difference. If you use these transitions (like now, across the room, a few days later, when she got into bed), the editor will get a sense of flow in your paragraphs, and also follow the action better.

7. Check for dangling modifiers. These tend to be invisible to the writer but jump right out at an editor. I'd start by checking every participial phrase, as those are the ones most likely to dangle. Then look at prepositional phrases. Almost any adjectival phrase can wind up dangling. Again, reading aloud is your best revision technique at this point. LISTEN to your narration.

What else? I mean just mechanical things. I'll add more when I am feeling more inspired, or exasperated. :)

Alicia

Questions about Agents

We have our winners. Emails have been sent this morning.

In my last post, I invited questions about agents. Here's one from Livia:

Since we're asking questions, what are good ways to research prospective agents? I know the general advice to look at the website, previous sales and deals, etc, but I know less about specific places/websites to go to for that information (hopefully websites that don't charge too much money for a subscription :-P). And is there anything more specific to look for besides what have they sold recently and in what genre?

Many of you have already flagged agentquery for Livia. It's a great site, packed with useful information, and certainly deserves the recognition it receives. There are other places, too, such as P&E, a comprehensive listing of agents, publishers, and much more, with recommendations.

But let me point out that, aside from public resources such as these, there's a much better way to get inside information. Build your network. Create bridges to writers in all corners of the publishing world, and nurture those contacts. Ask them for their war stories. Ask them what their best decision has been. After you've cobbled together a list of potential agents using the public reference material, ask your private network what they know about the people on your list.

You don't have to spend a lot of money on dues for formal organizations. There are countless public fora in which you can meet other writers. Even here on this little blog, some of the regular commenters have begun to form a community, and I'm sure information-sharing is part of their interaction. It should be.


Leona said,

I can't figure out why there's so much negativity on the side of writers against agents.

Agents play a complicated role in the publishing industry. They act as gatekeepers and, to some extent, tastemakers. They might not own the keys to the kingdom, but they certainly know where the keys are kept and how to persuade the keyholders to unlock the doors. In some part, their effectiveness is determined not by their authors but by their relationships with editors. This can make it seem as though they're playing both sides to their own middles, but they're not. They're both important business partners for authors and important business relationships for publishers.

That said, a bad agent can destroy an author's career. That's not hyperbole. Thankfully, it's also not that common. But ask around. That network you're going to build? Yeah, bet you'll hear some lively horror tales from them.


Rachelcapps asks,

Is it best to look for an agent in your own country first?

If it were me, I would want an agent in the country where I intend to market my manuscripts. A foreign agent won't be as "in the loop" as one who's in the thick of the native action. And contract law varies from country to country -- witness google's recent troubles in France over moral copyright violations -- so you might be best served by someone in your target market.

I would like to hear some opinions from our overseas authors, though. How many of you work with agents in your home nations? Is this also where you sell your manuscripts?

Theresa

Housekeeping and a Question

First, a reminder -- today is the last day to enter the contest to get the first ten pages of your manuscript reviewed. We've received a good number of entries so far, and I look forward to compiling our "best of" list based on your recommendations.

In the midst of reading and responding to the entries, I found this question in the mailbag.

I recently ran across a fairly controversial anti-agent blog post, where a writer argued that you should always submit to editors first and get an agent after you have a contract in hand. He argues that none of agents who take writers without a contract are good, and in the comments says that writers should submit to publishing houses directly even if they have a clearly stated "no unagented submissions" policy. Could I ask your take (and Alicia's) on this post, as editors?

I'm not going to link to the blog post mentioned in the question. Suffice it to say it was a mix of nonsense and insight, with more of the former than the latter.

What I will do, instead, is respond to what I think the real questions are.
1 - Should you submit to editors before agents?
2 - Do you need a contract to get an agent?
3 - Is it okay to ignore "agented only" guidelines?

The short answers are Maybe, No, and Almost Always No. I'm guessing you want more information than this, though, so let's look at the rationale behind the answers.

1 - Should you submit to editors before agents?

That depends on the project, your target market, and your own preferences. If you're targetting a line that's open to all submissions, and if you feel comfortable handling things like contract negotiations and money disputes, then you can probably skip the agent. But I can't advise anyone always to do it one way or the other, and neither can anyone else, because this is a case-sensitive situation. Figure out your target, study their guidelines, and see if you can get some behind-the-scenes information on things like their boilerplate contract and maybe a sample royalty statement. Then you can answer this question for yourself, based specifically on your needs and circumstances and abilities.

2 - Do you need a contract to get an agent?

No. It might help you land an agent if you have a deal on the table, but then again, it might not. What if your deal is with a house or editor this agent rarely works with? Maybe they'll want to branch out, and maybe not. What if your deal is subpar, and the agent knows it, but you've already agreed to some bad terms? Then they might know they can't help you much -- not only that, but the work involved in unraveling what you've already done might be more than they can take on. What if the agent already has a full load? Then your deal will have to be stellar to grab the agent's attention, and it's unlikely you'll get that kind of offer on your own.

On the other hand, it can't hurt. Approaching agents with an offer in hand might be enough to get you out of their slush and onto their desks, and that gives you a leg up on the competition. It's not a guarantee of representation, but it might get you an extra look. There are plenty of other ways to get that extra look, though, the best of which is to write an unforgettable book.

3 - Is it okay to ignore "agented only" guidelines?

I have to give this one an, "Almost always no," instead of an, "OMG, are you fucking kidding? NO!" because sometimes special circumstances will get you around the agented-only requirement. Maybe you met an editor at a conference. Or dinner party. Or your kid's dance recital. And the editor invited you to submit directly after asking you about your work. Or maybe your best friend has written 20 major bestsellers for them and gave you a personal recommendation. Or maybe there's some other weird planetary alignment that grants you a free pass in the form of direct, expressly stated permission from an editor to submit without an agent. In that case, go for it.

Otherwise? OMG, are you fucking kidding? NO! You don't get to ignore the rules just because you don't like them or they don't work to your particular advantage.

There was some other nonsense in the post referenced by the questioner -- my favorite being the blogger's contention that only new agents ask for rewrites before submitting. That's laughably wrong. There are agents, legends in this business who revise for *years* before letting an editor anywhere near the client's work. These people have reputations for delivering only the finest manuscripts in near-perfect condition, and they generally earn deals commensurate with that kind of work. (A friend of mine is working with one of these agents, a guy so well known that I'm sure all but the freshest beginners have heard of him. Someday, maybe we'll invite her to do a guest post on their collaborative process. But first she has to finish the revisions he asked for -- a year and a half in the making, and still going -- and then we'll have to let her come down from the stress-and-xanax high.)

There's probably a follow-up post to be made, something on the agent's role in publishing as a whole. But before I write it, maybe you should all have the opportunity to ask questions about agents. With so much bad information floating around, I'm sure there are plenty of questions lingering out there. If you want to remain anonymous and don't want to post in the comments, remember that you can email us directly at editorrent at gmail dot com.

Theresa

Vanity "Experience"

Here's a question that's been coming up pretty regularly lately. If you've had a book "released" through one of the vanity presses, how should you reference that in a query letter?

Let's start by distinguishing between vanity publishing and self-publishing. I'm sure some of you learned the difference as a result of a certain recent kerfuffle, but in case you didn't:


Vanity publishing: Sometimes also called subsidy publishing, though there are technical differences between the two. More or less, you pay for all aspects of the publication of the work. The vanity company offers a variety of options, which you select as from a menu. You get no services other than those you pay for. You get little or no meaningful distribution through the label, with little to no possibility of distributing it yourself through standard channels. The ISBN and bar codes are linked to the vanity label, not to you. You give up part or all of the rights, and you don't get the profits but are paid some form of royalty or split.

Self-publishing: You act as your own publisher. You hire a press, a designer, editors, artists, and so on, or you do the work yourself. You learn about things like bleeds and trims, and you spend many hours wondering just how necessary Adobe Distiller really is. You get an ISBN of your own, and maybe bar codes, too. (Though, if you're frugal, you might get these in other ways than by registering your company and paying the fees.) You keep all rights to the work (through your company, probably), and you keep all profits from sales. You figure out distribution options and, if you're lucky, sell to national accounts.


There are legitimate reasons for choosing either option. If you have little publishing experience and less time, and if you have a project of mostly personal value -- a family history, your dissertation, your child's drawings and notes -- vanity publishing might be a good option. If you have a nonfiction project and an established platform, and you're willing to learn and work, then self-publishing might be a good option.

Generally, neither is a good option for fiction. There are exceptions to that general principle, of course, and it may be that you had some legitimate reason for choosing one of these options, some of which I'll mention below.

Which brings us to your query letter.

If you have self-published a non-fiction book, it won't hurt you at all to mention that in your query. It might not be necessary as it might not fit your query, but that is rather case-specific. The point is, if you choose to include it, it probably won't hurt you. You can mention something about how you've built a platform for your nonfiction works, have experience with PR and marketing, that sort of thing. You might even mention how you could leverage your existing non-fiction platform and press contacts for your novel's publicity.

If you have self-published a novel or other fiction, you will probably want to keep that fact to yourself unless you can legitimately demonstrate a solid reason for self-publishing. Without such a reason, I will assume you self-published because you couldn't find someone else to publish it for you. And that won't score you any points.

Examples of legitimate reasons:

• You wanted to learn the publishing business from every angle.
• You ran your own press and published many authors, including yourself.
  
• You were mid-series when your publisher folded and you wanted to complete the series yourself.
• You have an extensive publication history and recognized that this was a pet, one-off project not worth troubling your publisher with.
  

What do these examples have in common? They don't undermine your credibility as a professional. In fact, they might even enhance it by demonstrating your understanding of the industry.


If you have vanity published a personal project, it probably won't hurt to mention it as long as it's clear that this was a highly personal project suitable for vanity publication. But is it relevant? Why would your decision to present your siblings with bound copies of grandpa's journal be relevant to our potential business relationship? I'm not saying it can never matter -- perhaps this was the project that whet your appetite for publishing and led you to try your hand at writing. But if there's no connection, there's probably no reason to mention it.

If you have vanity published a novel, you're probably better off keeping that information to yourself. Generally, we expect novels to be published through normal market channels *if* they're good enough. If they're not good enough, and they get rejected by everyone on the planet, that's not exactly a fact you would want to broadcast.

Now it may be that you have some legitimate reason for vanity publishing a project that isn't quite a personal project. I'm willing to believe it's possible, even though I'm not personally aware of any such reasons. In that case, tell me the reason in the query letter. Otherwise, I will assume the book just wasn't good enough and you vanity published as an act of desperation. Sorry if that sounds cold. Sometimes the truth, she is an icy bitch.

What's the bottom line? Have a good reason to justify it, or don't mention it at all.

Theresa

Fakery and Fuckery

Here's a handy submissions tip.

Don't pretend to be your own agent.

We've seen a rash of this lately, and there are frequent tells, including using the same email account or phone number for the "agent" and the author. Or creating a phony web url for the "agency." Or the "agent" who pitches the work and invites us to contact the author directly to close the deal.

(sigh)

Theresa

Query question

I'm in another airport... I should take and upload photos, but fortunately, I haven't the slightest idea how to do that. :) Anyway, had a thought.

Or a question.

Let's say you've written a great book that happens to have one of those "instant rejection" markers, but really, it's good! And you can't change whatever, because it's important, etc.

Okay, specifics. I had a book that started in Russia. Well, that is, apparently, one of those Kiss of Death things I got away with because it was a long time ago. Anyway, let's say your book starts Somewhere Books Aren't Supposed to Start, or has some important plot element that is sure to antagonize in summary (but works in the book).

And here you are, trying to write a query letter or a synopsis. What do you do? You know the editor or agent might instantly-R this, just seeing that word (Russia, psylocibin, child death). So how do you work around that?

Open discussion thread on that! (And this is why, as an editor, I always skim the query and read the pages-- I don't want to reject the next JK Rowling because she puts "wizard" in the query.)

What do you do then? If you want the editor/agent to ask for some chapters?
Alicia

Submission question re: amateur marks

Jami asked: This may be a topic for another post, but what about the actual formatting of things? There's so much conflicting information out there as far as Times New Roman vs. Courier New, underlining vs. italicizing, etc.

I think Courier is very ugly, but I'd never reject because of that font. And underlining is a holdover from typewriter days, when you couldn't italicize, so I prefer italics. But really, that's not important, and neither says much about the writer as a writer, the way, oh, headhopping does, or being boring. :)

So I'd just ignore probably. If I got the submission as an emailed document (not paper), I'd very likely change the font to TNR or something I like better-- I really, really hate Courier, especially the light version-- which will mess up the pagination, but none of this will matter much in my consideration.

The reason, I think, many writers choose Courier is because it's, geez, I forget the term. Proportional? And that's kind of irrelevant these days, at least with electronic submissions, as font can be changed in an instant, and anyway, the typesetter doesn't care-- the ms will be transformed into whatever is house-style. So don't use Courier just to be proportional-- unless the publisher specifically asks for that.
Alicia

Getting away with it--

I have noticed a sort of interesting attitude in some submitters. It's that the trick is "getting away with it". You know, say I point out that a four-page long prologue all in italics (because, I guess, it takes place in the villain's head) might be kind of annoying. (I'm making this particular issue up, as the attitude is the important thing.) And the submitter comes back with (rule #1-- don't argue when you're being rejected... it doesn't help), "But (insert bestselling author's name) got away with it!"

"Got away with it." It sounds sort of childish, doesn't it? "But you let Ryan stay up till nine last week, and that was a schoolnight! How come he can get away with it and I can't?"

Sure, I know it's infuriating to be told that you've done something wrong, when you know for a fact that publisher, maybe even that very editor, let someone else get away with exactly this. Maybe you left out quote marks, and you know Charles Frazier in Cold Mountain did just that and got away with it. Or maybe you start with a line of dialogue, and someone like, well, me, points that out as a particularly egregious obnoxiousness, and you go to your bookshelf and pull out FOUR books that start with a line of dialogue!

Or maybe the editor rejects with a comment that your opening situation is cliched, and "we're looking for fresh premises," yet (insert Old Dinosaur Author's name) is published by this house and no one can figure out WHY she's still getting published, since she is on her 50th book using the same characters (just changing the names). How come she can get away with being boring and repetitive, and you're just using a conventional opening scene and you get dinged?

Is that fair????

Possible Answers:
1) No. It's not fair. Neither is life. How old did you say you were?

2) (Big name author) did it right. You did it wrong. Maybe the editor says your use of all that Regency detail is didactic and dull, and you point out that (insert best-selling Regency author, if you can find one :) had all that info about tin mining in Cornwall in (book title), and all the reviews said that the detail made the world of the book come to life. So how come she got away with it, huh? Well, maybe she deftly inserted the detail through character-- hero is a mine owner, heroine's father died in a mine collapse, while you relied on page-long info dumps of research material, barely changing the Wikipedia wording. Doing something at all is not the same thing as doing it well.

3) She did it better than you did, or differently, and you're remembering the general (italicized prologue) and not the specific (villain's POV). Maybe that italicized opening worked for Big Name. Maybe she did amazing things with it. Maybe this villain's perspective is really fascinating, so fascinating that the editor agreed to leave in the italics, which would draw attention to the villain's careful controlled raving... but yours was not so good, and all the italics did was hurt the reader's eyes.

4) You're right-- you do it just as well or better. But the publisher has never made a dime off you, and he's made a lot of money from Big Name, and is willing to cut BN some slack, or rather, has to do that or BN will go elsewhere.

5) You're right-- BN's plots are totally redundant and it's embarrassing. (I agree, and say everytime that this is the LAST BN book I'll ever read!) But you know, BN has this readership that will read everything he writes. It's a guaranteed 75K sale-- in hardcover. Your story, on the other hand, might be done better, but "better" isn't actually what BN's readers are looking for. They like the comfort and familiarity of the themes and treatment.

6) Yep, redundant. But BN's agent had lunch last week with Matt Damon's agent, and Matt was stuck in the Boston airport and had nothing to read but the 10th in that series, which his agent had stuck in his carry-on, and he hadn't read the other nine in the series so wasn't struck as we are by the repetitiveness, and guess what-- by the time the flight arrived at LAX, he called and optioned the film rights. Does your agent lunch with Matt Damon's agent? No? Too bad, so sad.

7) You're right-- yours is better done. But that author was sitting next to the Managing Editor at a banquet and it turns out they both love dogs, and both had lost their pets recently, and they held hands and cried together about Fuzzy and Rover, and Author told Managing Editor about this great project where you can adopt a retired racing greyhound (who would otherwise be euthanized), and the brindled former champ "Diddy" came to live with Managing Editor, and Diddy is so loving, so great with the grandkids, and Managing Editor wants to bring Author as much happiness as Diddy has brought the family.... There might be a lot more involved here than you know, or could possibly replicate.

8) This agent has one, count 'em, one author who writes needlepoint mysteries, and she's not about to take on a competitor. Her loyalty goes to her current client, not a submitter, especially a better one.

9) Yes, back in the past, what you and BN author did with sentence fragments was just fine, great, in fact, post-modern and all that. And we all used to think leg-warmers were sexy. Jennifer Beals still looks pretty good in leg-warmers, and besides, Flashdance was so cool. Back then.

10) True, Editor doesn't like this thing you did that BN did too. Editor can't tell you this, but he went to the mat arguing with BN about this, and BN brought in her agent-- you know, the one who is BFF with Matt Damon's agent-- and there were veiled threats made, and Editor's company just laid off three editors, and this really wasn't a good time to alienate Big Name Author and Big Name Agent, so Editor backed down, and has thought ever since that he was a big coward, that he should have made a stand on that issue, and he's vowed never to let that Whatever into another book. Even if it means that he rejects the next Harry Potter.

11) You argue with Editor about this Whatever, and she was thinking of working with you, and now she thinks about what it be like, working with you when you argue like this, and life's too short.

12) You use those words, "But you let someone else get away with it," and it sounds real juvenile, and this isn't a children's literature publisher.

You know the bottom line here? What counts is not whether Cormac McCarthy "got away with it." What counts is whether the story works for the reader. And if you're submitting to an editor, any single element can make that story not work. Maybe it worked for Cormac, maybe it didn't. But whether it worked or not for him, the fact that he did it doesn't make yours right.

First go back to your story. Imagine you're the reader. Does this thing, whatever it is, contribute to the reader's experience-- in a way that the reader will appreciate? (I say this as someone who thinks that a reader will really be a lot better off for having read my mini-history of how West Virginia seceded from Virginia-- really! It's part of American history! You have a problem with learning more about history?) And maybe you're right-- the reader will LOVE it. But the reader will never see it if--

Well, you know the end of that sentence.

I remember Laura Kinsale (who does amazingly dangerous things in her plots and prose and "gets away with it" because she's BRILLIANT) wrote an article about "when you get the call" (from the editor), and she kept repeating, "How badly do you want to sell this book?" Well, how badly DO you want to sell this book? Badly enough that you'll change that prologue from italics to Roman font? Badly enough that you'll ditch the whole prologue? Yes? Well, it's time then to humbly thank the editor and go off and make the changes and resubmit and hope that is the ONLY problem she had. Your story is more than that one thing, or it better be. It might even be lesser without that-- but maybe it'll be better, and anyway, maybe it'll be more saleable.

But what if you don't want to sell it that badly? What if the issue isn't just the font, but something so integral to your vision that you simply can't change it? Well, okay, just don't go all sulky and pre-teen and pout about how someone else "got away with it." You really can write something brilliant that isn't going to sell to this publisher. Or maybe any publisher (now). Maybe it's really, really good. Maybe this thing you're doing (the thing Susan Howatch got away with :) isn't wrong, is terrific, but is just too experimental or innovative for traditional publishing... now what?

Well, know yourself. Know your work. Don't idealize here. It's time to evaluate as objectively as you can whether the story is as good as you think. (Put it away for a bit first.) If it is-- if you have your own certainty AND some objective evidence, like contest wins or editorial regret ("This was a very hard decision for me...") or an agent's support-- then start thinking about your options. (First, love yourself for having written something wonderful.) Traditional publishing is not the only option. (And even if it is, you have options-- waiting a couple years and resubmitting, getting another agent, submitting to hardcover houses rather than softcover or to smaller regional presses....) You can self-publish. You can go with a non-trad press. You can break new ground and try some interesting web-publication (a scene a week in a blog? Hey, why not?). You have a lot more options now than ever before. Don't sell yourself and your story short, so pay close attention to your rights and the reversions thereof. The traditional publishers might actually be MORE interested if you sold 10K copies in e-format, or if your "Twitter-novel" has a thousand followers. You need to have accessible print rights to take advantage of such an opportunity.

Keep looking for options. Recently an author sold an English-language novel to a Spanish publisher (it was translated and published there). Some novels have been turned into screenplays and sold that way (of course, you lose the italics then :).

Just don't whine. No "but so-and-so got away with it!" That sort of attitude doesn't just alienate editors and agents. It gets in the way of your understanding of your own story, because that attitude is All About You, and the story better be About More than You. This is about connecting the story and the reader together. If Whatever Thing works to help that, good. But it doesn't work because someone else got away with it. You have to pull away from the personalizing of this situation, thinking of the editor or agent as a parent and other authors as siblings or even rivals. Go back to your story. This isn't about you, and it's not about what you can "get away with."

I don't think it's delusional for you to think that a book can be wonderful and still widely rejected-- been there, endured that :)-- but I do think it's unproductive to think about this in terms of "getting away with something." If your story is really good, see if it's measurably harmed by losing whatever is identified as a problem. And if it is, then you have decisions to make... fortunately, you also have options. You have many options. But you can't reach those options or make good decisions unless you can be objective and thoughtful and analytical about your story.
Alicia

Newbie "Tells"

Alicia posted some of the things she considers "marks of an amateur," and she spent some time explaining why adverbs used as empty amplifiers can weaken prose.

I agree with her (of course), but would add that other kinds of empty amplifiers hurt the prose, too. Bling punctuation is a good example of this, and one we've blogged about in the past. Look on the sidebar for a link to posts about ellipses if you need a refresher. The bottom line? Strong conflicts don't need gimmicks and bling. They're strong enough without them. (And if they're not strong enough without them, you might want to look at strengthening them instead of adding a chain of exclamation marks.)

Other things that can make me doubt your readiness--
-- loads of present participial phrases
-- misplaced modifiers
-- dangling modifiers
-- errors in usage
-- too much exposition or "set-up"
-- comparing your work to Hemingway's*
-- telling me you're agented when you're not**
-- selling yourself short***
-- lack of respect for the genre****
-- lots of grammar or punctuation errors*****
-- query letters that read like bad ad campaigns******


More than all this, though, is that you can just tell when a writer is not in complete control of the narrative. Maybe there are so many vague, ten-dollar words that you lose track of the action. Or maybe the prose is so flat that the characters vanish into the page. They don't know how to focus on action and exploit conflicts, or they don't know how to write sentences that crackle with energy. There are long meanders through character histories and resumes. Characters die in chapter four, and then reappear without explanation in chapter nine. Characters change their hair color, occupation, and even gender mid-story. Characters dress in parkas and boots to go snorkeling in Jamaica.

The point is that each newbie manuscript is unique to some degree, and often manuscripts fail in unique ways. There are common faults, and these should be avoided at all costs, of course. But it takes work to control a narrative. It takes careful, deliberate thought. There's a long learning curve in fiction writing, and it can be hard to accurately assess where you are on that curve. That doesn't mean you stop trying. It means you have to understand what you're in for. There may be frustrating moments and hurt feelings and loads of self-doubt.

But there's also magic. Everything you do along the learning curve brings you closer to that magic when you suddenly understand that all story is character, and all narrative is story. When you understand that, you'll know that there is no failure in writing. There is only a learning curve and, eventually, magic.


* Don't do this. But especially don't do this if you're writing romance. Hemingway is the opposite of romance. (A shocking number of writers talk about Hemingway in their queries. Why?)

** You think we can't google this? Imaginary agents can only negotiate imaginary deals.

*** "I'm not very good at this, but I'm willing to learn more." Great. You do that, and after you've learned what you need to know, write something new to sub.

**** "I am writing the great American novel, but thought I would write romance to support myself along the way." Yeah, because it's so easy to make a living writing romance these days.

***** I'm not talking about optional usages. I know when an author has deliberately chosen to use or not use a particular comma convention. I also know when they they're just sprinkling commas like glitter because they suspect commas should go somewhere.

****** "Theresa, do you yearn to discover new talent? Crave the excitement of seeing a book climb the bestseller charts? Call today to learn more about this exciting manuscript!"


Theresa the Picky

DQ'd for Low Literacy

Yesterday I made the comment that we sometimes disqualify slush submissions for multiple spelling errors or egregiously bad grammar. I want to clarify that we're not talking about simple typos, which can happen to anyone. I don't ever expect to get a manuscript which is 100% typo-free. This is because I live in the real world and know how it operates. Fingers can be clumsy, and eyes can miss details.

Just to give you some idea of what I mean, here are some creative spellings I've encountered in recent memory.
queery
manuskript
manuscrip
novell
storey
storie
heero
heroe
erottic
aventure
sex seen

I could go on. You get the idea. One slip like this won't count against you. I'll just assume your fingers slipped and you missed it in the proofing stage. But imagine reading a letter something like this:

To whome it may concern:
Dear editer,
Hi my name is Susan and I'm 23 year old and I love books ever since I was a kid I've been reading allot. Please read my novell its about a heroe who goes up in a space, ship and then he crashes the planet is full of beautiful woman. One in particular. And so they don't know because woman rule this planet. But he's not like that. There are lots of great sex seens, as I'm sure you can geuss!!!!!!!
Please let me know soon k, thx.
Susann

This is not an actual query letter, but mimics problems we routinely see on the "egregious grammar" end of things. Run-on sentences, multiple spelling errors, incoherent statements, incorrect word usages, bad punctuation, text-style phonetic usages, and so on. They're not all this dreadful, of course, but maybe you begin to see what I mean about signs of low literacy levels.

And yes, I have absolutely seen people spell their own names two different ways. I hope this means they're still debating about pen name choices.

Theresa

Tales from the Slush Pile

I spent all day Saturday reading slush subs. I didn't keep count as I was going through them, but based on my best estimates:

• About 3% thought they were submitting to an agent.

• About 10% submitted work that is not even remotely close to what we publish -- memoirs, religious books, dissertations, cookbooks, etc. (Why is there always a cookbook?)
  

• About 20% submitted fiction, but not even remotely close to our type of fiction -- hardboiled detective novels, fictionalized childhood memoirs, YA witches and vampires, stories a la Tom Clancy and Louis L'Amour, etc.
  

If you're doing the math so far, that's about one-third of our submissions that are wildly inappropriate for us. It's a waste of my time and yours to send that sort of submission to our house.

(Side note -- Last week I asked for your input on our submission guidelines. I took many of your suggestions. New guidelines are here.)

So this leaves about two-thirds of the original pile. This somewhat-reduced group is all more or less romance and may or may not have enough erotic content for our needs. Of this remaining two-thirds:

• One out of three will be disqualified for multiple spelling errors, egregiously bad grammar, or other signs of a writer who is barely literate. These are the most mystifying submissions. You have the stamina to write a whole entire book, but can't take the time to run the spellchecker? Really?

• About half will be capable of writing a clear sentence in the English language, but won't understand basic fiction mechanics. These are the people who got As and Bs on all their high school papers and would probably make strong nonfiction writers. If they learn things like scene structure, pacing, characterization, and the like, they will probably eventually write publishable fiction. But they're not there yet.
  

If you're still doing the math, we've now culled almost nine in ten (roughly 88%, by my estimate) manuscripts from the slush pile. Most of these have been easy decisions. From opening the submission, scanning the contents, through sending out the form rejection, I should not spend more than five minutes on each of these submissions. However, if I spend a full five minutes on each, this amounts to about seven and a half hours of reading time per one hundred slush subs, and I would still have twelve to read to finish off that batch of a hundred.

Of those remaining ten or twelve subs:

• One-third (roughly three or four) will have great external romance plots, competent writing, and an interesting premise, but will leave me guessing as to what kind of erotic content is included. These are sometimes rejected, and sometimes get a request for a full with a reminder that we publish erotic content. I usually suggest that they make sure they have the right heat level before sending in the full. In about half of the cases, we don't ever see these fulls, which leads me to suspect the story wasn't hot enough to begin with. Of the ones that are submitted, they are usually not erotic enough to suit our needs, but if the author is willing, it's very easy to pump up the erotic content. (Usually.) For this reason, we tend to request the non-hotties more often than we reject them.
  

• Another three or four will be hot enough to melt my eyeballs, but will have weak characterizations, trite external plots, occasional awkward phrasing, and other glitches. Sometimes these are fixable, but much depends on the skill level and willingness to work of the author. These are the ones editors evaluate with one eye on the clock: "How much of my time will it take to get this into publishable shape?" The answer, almost always, is too much. For this reason, we tend to reject the hot-clunkies more often than we request them.
  

• Another three or so will be just right. Good plot, good heat, good writing -- or good enough, anyway, to be fixed in under a hundred editor-hours. With some sense of anticipation, we will request fulls on all three. Two will eventually show up.
  

What's the lesson in this? Read the guidelines, run the spellchecker, and respond to requests for fulls. Be willling to work and revise your stories. You can improve your odds a lot just by doing these basic things.

Theresa