If you've been to our website, you probably know that we have a list of Frequently Asked Questions. However, after taking a long, sobering look in the mirror, we've admitted that maybe we're not perfect, and perhaps there are questions every writer wants to know about an agency but hasn't had a chance to ask.To remedy this, we're offering writers a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be anonymously immortalized on our site. We're looking to add about five new questions to the FAQ that perhaps we overlooked, things you think all writers should know about an agency before sending in their work, or questions specifically about our how we work as an agency.An example may be:
So there you have it! Please post your suggestion for a question as a comment (remember, these will fit in with what's already on the FAQ; this isn't the time to ask a question about a specific submission or anything). If you'd like, pick questions above you that you particularly think are useful. We'll lock the comments around tomorrow at this time, pick our five favorites, and add the questions and our answers to the site.
One of my college professors once imparted this bit of wisdom to our workshop:“Look closely at what you’ve just written. Now go through and circle everything in it that you love, every gorgeous description, every turn of phrase—and delete it.”There are days when I think this is the best advice I’ve ever gotten (usually when my writing is not going well). And there are days when I think it’s the worst (usually when I’m particularly in love with myself).I urge you to give it a try and see what happens. It's a fun experiment, and if you're suffering from a case of wordiness, it can be very grounding and helpful. But if the professor’s approach is a little too harsh for you this Tuesday morning, then I’ll leave you with the very wise words of a former Editor-in-Chief of mine:“Every word should carry its own weight.”When you get right down to it, both statements are really about checking your ego at the door when you write. It’s about bringing a sense of honesty to your writing, about doing what’s best for the story.Write well!
So I am at last turning to queries. (Sorry to those who have been waiting; I haven't been idle, honest!) And, perhaps because I am reading tons of queries, my thoughts turned back to when I started in children's books, as an assistant at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.The slush at Harcourt was read by a sweet, gracious writer named Joan Bowden, who came in once a week, plowed through the hundreds of submissions, and returned them to the authors, 99% of the time with a form reject. When she found a particularly funny sentence in a query, she'd cut it out and tape it to a scroll at the entrance to her cubicle. I photocopied that scroll but have somehow lost the other pages in my many moves; I have only one sheet. I offer them here as ... I don't know, a cautionary tale? A bit of sweet comedy? Part of the historical record? These are all at least fifteen years old, and I can't imagine anyone will recognize their own work, but if that does happen, you have my sincere apologies. And my assurance that you have, inadvertently, given me much joy over the past decade and a half.These are all genuine. I have created the order, but all errors and formatting are the authors' own.
And, because this just made me laugh this morning: The Harper Collins UK Children's Books team has created a new world record. Yes!Have a happy Labor Day, everyone!
So I am at last turning to queries. (Sorry to those who have been waiting; I haven't been idle, honest!) And, perhaps because I am reading tons of queries, my thoughts turned back to when I started in children's books, as an assistant at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.The slush at Harcourt was read by a sweet, gracious writer named Joan Bowden, who came in once a week, plowed through the hundreds of submissions, and returned them to the authors, 99% of the time with a form reject. When she found a particularly funny sentence in a query, she'd cut it out and tape it to a scroll at the entrance to her cubicle. I photocopied that scroll but have somehow lost the other pages in my many moves; I have only one sheet. I offer them here as ... I don't know, a cautionary tale? A bit of sweet comedy? Part of the historical record? These are all at least fifteen years old, and I can't imagine anyone will recognize their own work, but if that does happen, you have my sincere apologies. And my assurance that you have, inadvertently, given me much joy over the past decade and a half.These are all genuine. I have created the order, but all errors and formatting are the authors' own.
And, because this just made me laugh this morning: The Harper Collins UK Children's Books team has created a new world record. Yes!Have a happy Labor Day, everyone!
Before I got into publishing, maintaining my social network pages was easy. I joined Facebook in 2005, a bygone era where the most I had to worry about was whether or not my profile picture made me look chubby.When I was lucky enough to land a job in publishing, I suddenly realized that my Facebook profile was filled with material I didn't exactly want every writer out there to see: three years worth of immature jokes shared with college friends, photos of me in silly costumes from various Halloween parties, and links to off-color material that made me laugh. I decided the day I became an agent that I was going to maintain Facebook only for my personal use. If I didn't know you or want every piece of information on my profile to be available to you, then we weren't going to be friends.Predictably, I started getting friend requests from writers. Those were easy enough to ignore at first. Then I started getting from requests from editors. Those were a little tougher. After much hand-wringing (seriously, my hands were wringed), I accepted that in today's digital world, it was hopeless to hold out.I'm sure many writers out there are struggling with the same issues. What should be on your Facebook page, your blog, your Twitter updates? Will you hurt your chances by posting something seemingly innocuous that could offend the wrong person?The answer, unfortunately, is a very big maybe. We've all heard tall tales about editors reading bits of information about a writer that has turned them off to a project. I've personally encountered information about writers or my publishing brethren that made me hesitant to want to work with them. I don't go seeking this information out for the most part, but sometimes it has a way of showing up.My main advice to you is to develop a strategy and stick with it. If you don't want all your information out there for the world to poke and prod, make sure that you're controlling what strangers can see. After all that hand-wringing I did, I've stuck to my guns and kept Facebook mostly personal by using different privacy settings (in case some of you out there were wondering why you can barely see any pictures of me or information but the basics, there's your answer). I decided that Twitter would be the tool I used more for communicating with writers and editors. For the most part, it's worked for me, aside from the *occasional query that references personal information about me and makes me squirm a bit (examples below).So how about you? How do you make sure the information about you is only what you want people knowing? How do you ensure your professional identity is separate from your personal one in this connected world of ours? Or does it not matter to you?*Nearly true examples of things culled from Twitter used in recent queries:
The view from the front window of my favorite local coffee house has changed from “lazy summer” to “school’s in.” Busy students rush down the street, clutching books in their arms, hunching under the weight of their backpacks.Reading this article in the New York Times has further increased my back-to-school spirit. Allowing students to choose (some) of the books they read for English class? What a fantastic concept!Which also got me to thinking about the books I read in junior high and high school—both the ones I had to read for class, like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird, and the ones I read on my own, like the then-scandalous Forever by Judy Blume (which had a library waiting list about a mile long).Ah, sweet nostalgia!So here’s a question to get your work week started: How about you? What books did you fall in love with when you were a student? How did they affect you or influence you?
Last week, after months of being pestered by different friends, I finally checked out the pilot to the A&E show Breaking Bad. If you haven't seen it, Breaking Bad stars Bryan Cranston (known mostly as Hal, the dad from Malcolm in the Middle) as Walter White, a down-and-out high school chemistry teacher who, after being diagnosed with stage-three terminal cancer and realizing he has no way to leave an inheritance for his wife and family, decides to try his hand at making crystal meth.The show probably isn't for everyone, but I was completely sucked in by the first episode. And do you want to know why? Because it's got a plot concept that drives the action like a souped-up Formula 1 racecar.This blog will feature many more discussions of plot, so I won't go too overboard in this post. I will say, however, that a setup for a story such as that of Breaking Bad is the perfect example of both the high concept plot and a premise that can really drive forward the action. When telling people what the show was about, I could see instant reactions. Some said, "That sounds awesome." Some said, "That sounds too depressing." But everyone agreed the show sounded unique, fascinating, and worth checking out.And in beginning with such a rich setup, the action that follows can almost write itself. The mind quickly wanders to what could happen next. There's instant sympathy for the main character and the tough decisions the audience knows he's going to have to face.Not every story will have a plot as instantly engaging as that of Breaking Bad. Not every story will have the roaring engine, either. But whether you write about a man desperate enough to put his life on the line or something as simple as a coming-of-age story of friendship, you should still have an engine in your story that will drive the tale forward and make people want to keep reading.Can you do it? I, for one, think you can, I think you can, I think you can...
The other day, the easygoing and brilliant editor Cheryl Klein made "a modest proposal" on her blog (here) that, unlike Jonathan Swift's, actually makes a lot of cynicism-free good sense. It's a long, complicated post that you should read, but the gist of it is that when agented manuscripts garner pre-empt offers and then hasty auctions, the book may not land at the best house. There are all sorts of considerations that should be made in matching manuscript to house and editor, and to give all of those a backseat to Speed is to ill serve the book. So Cheryl proposes that manuscripts be submitted with timelines attached to them—well, here's the proposal:
When you send out the manuscript, say in your cover letter that you will not make a decision about any offers until a certain date—at a minimum, a day three weeks from the date of the submission, and better still four to eight weeks out.
Well.Then super-agent and bran-muffin-afficionado Michael Bourret answered her here. And she responded to him here, and he replied again to her here. Both sides are winningly articulate, both make good points, and, I think, both are in the right to a good degree. Really, this kind of calm, impassioned debate is the whole reason I love to read blogs.So, I've now been on both sides of this divide, as agent and editor, and I sympathize with both sides. But while I think Cheryl's proposal has a certain utopian grace about it—really, that is how the world should be—I do not believe it is possible to get every agent in the industry to agree not to accept pre-empts, nor do I believe it is possible to get houses to stop trying to take books "off the table" with big piles of money and promises. This problem—if indeed it is a problem—is one that has come about due to the enthusiasm and cupidity of both agents and publishers.I think Michael's final response is entirely correct: Yes, it is difficult to quickly marshall the forces of a publishing house and gain support for an auction—but it is always difficult, isn't it? I mean, if an editor can't gather support now, what faith should we have that he or she will be able to stoke the fires of enthusiasm later in the process when it matters even more?And honestly, most agents will allow passionate editors more time to put together an offer, because of course, we want the best advocate for the book and the author, but letting a hot submission sit idly for two months while the editor gets around to it doesn't serve the manuscript so well, either. Michael is right that procrastination will rear its head (there is always another fire to put out), and it will be read quickly, at the last minute, and any offers assembled hastily. And we're back where we started at. I know from my years in the trenches that the interest from other editors flagged certain submissions as worth dropping everything to look at (which is to say easily commercial or of unarguable literary merit).It's a thorny issue, and one with no solutions that will please everyone. How would you feel if your agent were to not accept any offers or interest for two months? Is this a modest proposal that the industry should adopt?
So, I am on Goodreads. I kind of love it. I go through phases in which I drink down books like water, and because I am a long-winded, opinionated sumbitch, I blather about them. And I'm not alone: You will find a lot of us there, us publishing people. Editors, writers, agents, marketing people—our first love was reading, and we do like to talk about what we read.But not everyone posts reviews. In fact, many of my publishing cohort don't even bother to give books ratings. They log on just to see what others are saying. Or, if they do rate the books they read, they choose a tack like that of the utterly brilliant Rebecca Stead, who explains in her profile, "Many of the books on my list are, in my opinion, amazing. Some I didn't like. But I give them all five stars, because stars make people—including me—happy. Confused? Me too."That's fair, right? I mean, which author or editor wants to go onto a site and see someone bagging on the novel you've spent years bringing into the world? That's no fun. And if you work in the business, the last thing you want to do is piss off the editor or author of such novel by crowing about how the emperor...well, he's naked as a jaybird. So I've taken to not rating books I loathe, not having them part of my update feed, not writing the reviews. Instead, I put my notes in the "Private Notes" section.But I hate doing that. Feels monstrously cowardly to me. Part of what Goodreads is about—the part of it that I love—is that it is a dialogue about books and how well they work (or, if they don't work very well, why they don't). It is not a bleacher full of cheerleaders. It's a giant book club, and my friends and I, we're there to discuss what we read. I may not love your novel, but who cares? I am just one person. (And have you met me? I'm a tin-eared crank, "nothing but a young curmudgeon" according to one old lady who shook her cane at me after the Rutger's One-on-One a few years back. Who cares if I like your published novel?) But politeness suggests I need to play nice with others and never say a word against anything by anyone who may later be a position to help one of my clients. So I censor myself.Is this an imaginary problem on my part? How do you feel about this? When someone complains about your work in one of these forums, do your hackles rise? ("Well, no, Michael—we're not dogs.") Does this feel like part of a healthy dialogue? Or just mean-spirited snarkiness?
Because the shows I can attend are already sold out: I Can Has Cheezburger: the MusicLOL! It's part of Brooklyn's annual Fringe Festival, always a competition for which show can be most deliciously wacked-out. And this, my friends, looks like it will take the cake. (Or, you know, the cheezburger.)