After many years of writing bits and pieces for my own amusement I can no longer silence the voices in my head, their stories simply must be told. At this stage I have a handful of stories sketched out in very rough form and no idea how to get from point A to published author. So my questions are:
1) Where the hell do I start? Should I quit my job and devote the next year of my life to writing my first novel or do I need to start smaller i.e. writing short stories, entering local competitions, taking courses etc. before I attempt to write a full-length manuscript?
2) Is there any point in trying? Based on your previous blog entries it seems that getting a first novel published is next to impossible so what hope does an unpublished, 26 year old, public servant with a young family and no experience have? Am I just setting myself up for an epic failure?
3) Can an author publish works in different genres? Most of my work would be best describe as ‘chick-lit’ ranging anywhere from romantic fantasy which some might call bodice-ripping trash (although there’s nothing wrong with a bit of trash now and then) to more serious, dramatic, occasionally darker stuff based loosely on personal experience including the odd bit of poetry. Should I be concentrating my efforts on writing in one particular style or is it possible to get work published in more the one style/ genre? And if so should use a pseudonym? I’m torn between wanting to be the next Jodi Picoult and my secret desire to write for Mills & Boon.
And finally 4) If by some miracle I actually manage to produce something worthy of sending to an agent/ publisher should I focus my energies on getting it published here in Oz or is it worth having a crack at submitting it to an overseas publisher/ agent i.e. UK or US? Is it even possible?
I broke up the last lot of multiple questions into three posts but I think I'll keep these together ... just because I feel like it.
1) Under no circumstances quit your job unless you are independently wealthy. But all those other things you suggest are okay. You don't need to enter competitions and whatnot before you write a full-length manuscript - you can do them in tandem. Basically, if the stories are pressing on the inside of your skull then you have to write them the way they come to you, whether they're novel length or not. And as to 'where you start': you start where you are. You sit down, turn on the computer or whatever you're using, and write. No amount of thinking about it or trying to plan it is going to make a difference. Just start.
2) Is there any point in trying? I really can't answer that for you. I wouldn't - couldn't - write a novel if my life depended on it; that's why I'm not a writer. So I don't feel that same urge to tell stories that you have described. And if that urge is as strong as you say, of course there's a point in trying. (Okay, I think I did answer that for you.) If you're terrified of failure, that's fair enough, but - at the risk of sounding like Ol' Horsey Teeth, Anthony Robbins - it's really not a good reason to not try. Sorry.
3) An author can publish in different genres - and with different names - but I'd recommend you just pick one novel to submit at a time. You'll exhaust yourself if you submit a lot of things at once, and agents/publishers will usually only read one submission per author.
4) If you live in Australia, it makes sense to submit it here. I am always bemused by authors who constantly hanker after the US and UK - it seems like residual cultural cringe: 'Australia isn't good enough - to be a real writer I need to be published overseas.' There are many Australian authors who get published overseas - being published here first won't hinder that. And it's really nice to be able to talk to your agent, publisher, editor or publicist in the same time zone.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
How many drafts?
I am sure you must get plenty of questions about editing - I am wondering how many suggested drafts before approaching an agent might be? Three seems to be a popular number. Do you think there is much benefit to get a manuscript appraised or professionally edited? I am concerned about that as a professional edit might change the sound of my book.
Saying 'three drafts is popular' suggests that publishing runs on the same mathematical principles as the rest of the universe, but the truth is that the industry exists in a temporal fold somewhere between Jupiter and Chiron. If we could reduce everything to equations it would make life so much easier, but we can't. So, no, three is not the right number. The right number of drafts is the right number of drafts - it could be two or ten.
The only thing that I believe is close to a hard-and-fast rule about drafts is that you should give the manuscript time to marinate between each draft - as long as possible, in fact. Weeks and weeks, if not months. You need to come back to it with new eyes each time, and once you think it's cooked, hand it to someone you trust to read it. And by 'someone you trust' I mean someone who's not going to tell you it's wonderful when it's not. The auditions for Australian Idol are littered with people whose friends and family told them that they were wonderful singers when they plainly weren't. As in Idol, so in publishing: you don't want to end up in the gag reel - you want to be in the final twelve.
As for manuscript appraisals: if you can get a recommendation for an appraiser who will give you good editorial feedback, use them. If not, an editor can be useful but it's a considerable investment. It would be good to enter competitions - the writers' centres in each state know what's on - and you may get some feedback from judges.
The whole process of preparing your manuscript will take time; that is all I can guarantee. But the things you learn during that process only need to be learnt once, if you're paying attention, so it's a worthwhile process. Especially if the time you take helps you get published.
Saying 'three drafts is popular' suggests that publishing runs on the same mathematical principles as the rest of the universe, but the truth is that the industry exists in a temporal fold somewhere between Jupiter and Chiron. If we could reduce everything to equations it would make life so much easier, but we can't. So, no, three is not the right number. The right number of drafts is the right number of drafts - it could be two or ten.
The only thing that I believe is close to a hard-and-fast rule about drafts is that you should give the manuscript time to marinate between each draft - as long as possible, in fact. Weeks and weeks, if not months. You need to come back to it with new eyes each time, and once you think it's cooked, hand it to someone you trust to read it. And by 'someone you trust' I mean someone who's not going to tell you it's wonderful when it's not. The auditions for Australian Idol are littered with people whose friends and family told them that they were wonderful singers when they plainly weren't. As in Idol, so in publishing: you don't want to end up in the gag reel - you want to be in the final twelve.
As for manuscript appraisals: if you can get a recommendation for an appraiser who will give you good editorial feedback, use them. If not, an editor can be useful but it's a considerable investment. It would be good to enter competitions - the writers' centres in each state know what's on - and you may get some feedback from judges.
The whole process of preparing your manuscript will take time; that is all I can guarantee. But the things you learn during that process only need to be learnt once, if you're paying attention, so it's a worthwhile process. Especially if the time you take helps you get published.
Monday, February 9, 2009
YA fantasy and Australian agents
My next question might seem a little stupid … I have tried researching the answer to no luck. I am writing a young adult fantasy novel that will be around 120 000 words. I am certain I want an agent and wondering if perhaps I should be looking overseas? I understand from little information I could find that the publishing markets vary hugely in different countries and I am wondering if perhaps I am better off looking in USA or the UK? Like any person I would like to be able to give my book the best chance of survival and I am not positive where my novel would best be situated.
I'm going to be blunt about YA fantasy: LOTS of people are writing it, LOTS of people are putting boy wizards in it (sometimes with glasses! But, sorrowfully, not all resembling the delicious Dan Radcliffe), and you'd have to be very, very, VERY talented to try to beat Jo Rowling at her own game.
I'm also going to be blunt about fantasy in general: those manuscripts are huge. If someone wants to send me something that's 120 000 words long they would have to be very, very, VERY talented to get me to donate that much of my time to reading their manuscript. Especially when there aren't a lot of YA fantasy books being published here.
So your query about the US and UK is valid. The markets are much bigger there, and there's more likelihood of finding the right agent. But those markets are crowded with YA fantasy, and as vampires are so hot right now, it's hard for other stories to get a look-in. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't try. But just be prepared to try hard, and for a while.
I'm going to be blunt about YA fantasy: LOTS of people are writing it, LOTS of people are putting boy wizards in it (sometimes with glasses! But, sorrowfully, not all resembling the delicious Dan Radcliffe), and you'd have to be very, very, VERY talented to try to beat Jo Rowling at her own game.
I'm also going to be blunt about fantasy in general: those manuscripts are huge. If someone wants to send me something that's 120 000 words long they would have to be very, very, VERY talented to get me to donate that much of my time to reading their manuscript. Especially when there aren't a lot of YA fantasy books being published here.
So your query about the US and UK is valid. The markets are much bigger there, and there's more likelihood of finding the right agent. But those markets are crowded with YA fantasy, and as vampires are so hot right now, it's hard for other stories to get a look-in. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't try. But just be prepared to try hard, and for a while.
Is youth wasted on the young?
I have a couple of questions I am hopeful you might be able to answer. The first is age: is age really a factor in publishing or is it just a myth? I am 23, have had articles published, plays performed and written a book that I can say will never be published … so I am working on a new manuscript with publishing on my mind. I am not an inexperienced writer, having spent the last eight years of my life writing. Will this factor in when approaching agents? I am slightly concerned that I will have to lie or be elusive about questions regarding my age as I have seen some young writers have done and I was hopeful to find out if that’s as pointless as it looks?
(Sharp-eyed readers will note that this questioner said she had more than one question and there's only one in this post. That's because she actually had three which all deserved separate answers. So keep reading ...)
I've never had a bias towards any particular decade when it comes to taking on writers. If your manuscript is good, it's good - it doesn't matter how young or old you are. Of course, it's great if an author has an interesting personal story (for publicity purposes). Sometimes that story is that they're young - so I'd never say that youth is a disadvantage per se. Where it can trip you up, though, if if you're writing a novel that purports to reveal the secrets of life - no one is going to buy that from an eighteen-year-old. Your narrative voice always needs to be convincing, and if you're a young'un who has never left their bedroom writing about a grandfather hiking in the Andes, that may not ring true either.
It's possible that the authors you know who lied about their age were doing it because their writing simply wasn't up to scratch and they were desperately trying every trick they could think of. I don't know a single publisher who would refuse to consider something just because the author was young. In fact, there's a whole award for you guys: the Vogel.
(Sharp-eyed readers will note that this questioner said she had more than one question and there's only one in this post. That's because she actually had three which all deserved separate answers. So keep reading ...)
I've never had a bias towards any particular decade when it comes to taking on writers. If your manuscript is good, it's good - it doesn't matter how young or old you are. Of course, it's great if an author has an interesting personal story (for publicity purposes). Sometimes that story is that they're young - so I'd never say that youth is a disadvantage per se. Where it can trip you up, though, if if you're writing a novel that purports to reveal the secrets of life - no one is going to buy that from an eighteen-year-old. Your narrative voice always needs to be convincing, and if you're a young'un who has never left their bedroom writing about a grandfather hiking in the Andes, that may not ring true either.
It's possible that the authors you know who lied about their age were doing it because their writing simply wasn't up to scratch and they were desperately trying every trick they could think of. I don't know a single publisher who would refuse to consider something just because the author was young. In fact, there's a whole award for you guys: the Vogel.
Monday, February 2, 2009
To market, to market
I understand that books need to have a market or they wouldn’t be published. What I don’t understand is exactly how I’m supposed to gauge that market? I think I’ve finished my first novel. An earlier draft was assessed 'critically and favourably'. I fixed the problems they pointed out, I think, and I would have it assessed again but I don’t see the value in it unless I can find out more information on the potential market.
I’ve checked publishing trade magazines and checked bestseller lists but none of the numbers look unless it is genre fiction. So amongst this thinking-onscreen my question is: Is there a more accurate way to check marketability other than finding the novels closest to yours that made it on a bestseller list or through professional assessments?
I assume publishers do market research, so why can’t I find it? Sorry if my question is less than romantic. I’ve pretty much accepted that this novel won’t be published because apart from Ben Elton I can’t find much that resembles it.
'The market' is an enormously tricky and often frustrating issue for writers. And for agents. And publishers. If we could all guess 'the market' we could all just look for exactly the right books for it and spend the rest of the year in Bora Bora. Which is my way of saying that 'the market' is still elusive and mutable and highly subjective.
The main question to ask yourself is whether your novel has a potential readership of more than one or one hundred or even one thousand. Do you think ten thousand people would read it? If so, why? If you can answer these last two questions, you'll know not only whether you have a marketable book on your hands but also how to convince an agent and publisher that you do.
Publishers don't do a lot of market research other than looking at their sales figures every week. They can't pick the market with any certainty (see: Bora Bora above) so you can't be expected to either. And every single 'rule' about genre is abandoned when a novel is simply fantastic. So go back to those points: who is your readership and why are they your readership?
Hopefully that's answered your question. But it's late in the day and Mercury has just come out of retrograde so there's a chance I've stuffed it up - ask me again if so!
I’ve checked publishing trade magazines and checked bestseller lists but none of the numbers look unless it is genre fiction. So amongst this thinking-onscreen my question is: Is there a more accurate way to check marketability other than finding the novels closest to yours that made it on a bestseller list or through professional assessments?
I assume publishers do market research, so why can’t I find it? Sorry if my question is less than romantic. I’ve pretty much accepted that this novel won’t be published because apart from Ben Elton I can’t find much that resembles it.
'The market' is an enormously tricky and often frustrating issue for writers. And for agents. And publishers. If we could all guess 'the market' we could all just look for exactly the right books for it and spend the rest of the year in Bora Bora. Which is my way of saying that 'the market' is still elusive and mutable and highly subjective.
The main question to ask yourself is whether your novel has a potential readership of more than one or one hundred or even one thousand. Do you think ten thousand people would read it? If so, why? If you can answer these last two questions, you'll know not only whether you have a marketable book on your hands but also how to convince an agent and publisher that you do.
Publishers don't do a lot of market research other than looking at their sales figures every week. They can't pick the market with any certainty (see: Bora Bora above) so you can't be expected to either. And every single 'rule' about genre is abandoned when a novel is simply fantastic. So go back to those points: who is your readership and why are they your readership?
Hopefully that's answered your question. But it's late in the day and Mercury has just come out of retrograde so there's a chance I've stuffed it up - ask me again if so!
Territorial copyrights/parallel imports
You have commented briefly and provided a link on the topic of Parallel Imports and why they worry the Australian publishing and associated industries. I was wondering whether you could provide any further information about it, and contextualise Bob Carr’s recent essay in the Weekend Australian Review? From my very vague recollection, he was supporting the idea because it would provide Australians with access to cheaper books which is important for literacy in society, and also, because New Zealand was doing well with parallel importation. At the time, I didn’t take much notice of the article because I didn’t know anything about the issue’s significance and frankly, I don’t have a lot of time for Bob Carr.
As an adult fiction writer with something just about ready to start sending out, the thought of narrowing the chances for new and existing Australian authors worries me, but also because it would be dreadful if Australians weren’t able to read about Australians (written by Australians) again. The film industry has been devastated by the sheer volume of overseas content permitted on our television services and movies. What can we, as individuals, do to protest/object/resist before it’s too late? Or is it already too late? (I already support Australian writing by buying it).
I'm sorry I didn't answer this question in a more timely fashion - the dread Reading Pile again - because I could have pointed you to the submission guidelines for the Productivity Commission. Encouragingly, though, many people - including me - wrote submissions setting out the case against changes to the legislation and you can read those here: http://www.pc.gov.au/projects/study/books/submissions. I could attempt my own explanation of the issues, but then you'd probably be able to pick which submission is mine and there goes the whole Secret Agent thing.
Unleashing the inner editor
Over the past year or so I have undertaken a number of writing courses in what I thought was an attempt to fulfil a life-long dream to write … well, something (I hadn't quite worked out what my genre / product would be!). However it is becoming increasing clear, as I procrastinate over writing, that my love of writing is more about my love of reading (and words, I guess). I simply 'inhale' books, reading between 5 - 7 each week, depending what I can get my hands on.
I currently work in government and spend my days editing bureaucratic correspondence, briefing materials etc. I have no formal qualifications in this area (I have a BA (Psychology) and a MBA, hard-earned but completely useless in my current areas of interest!). I would appreciate any advice you may have about careers in editing /publishing, in the event I am able to garner some guts (!!) to pursue this.
I belong to the Writers’ Centre in my state but it doesn’t seem to have any relevant courses and I am loath to undertake formal study in this area. Are formal qualifications necessary? Is it about being /getting known or networking?
Well, this is a bit of a fix: you would like to change careers but don't want to undertake any kind of training ... Which is understandable, considering you have already been to university quite a bit. I spent a few years there myself and wouldn't hurry back to tertiary education.
Not all editors have formal training, but most of those sorts of editors were trained in-house and they started at the very bottom rung in order to get that training - that is, they were editorial assistants. Editorial assistants are on below-poverty salaries so I wouldn't recommend you do that. However, if you're not going to travel that road, you do need to make your contacts in the industry. It wouldn't be enough just to send a CV to a publisher and hope to make it onto their freelance roster - they don't know you and they don't know your work, so they're not going to rush to pay you money to edit something for them. Of course, the question then is how you make the right contacts.
It's no surprise that your local writers' centre doesn't offer courses on editing, as that's not their focus - they're probably flat out trying to accommodate the requests for writing courses and workshops. But they may be able to point you in the right direction - have you made an enquiry? You should also contact the Society of Editors in your state and ask them for help. As a rule editors are shy, retiring types - my own pet collective noun for them is an 'introvert' of editors. So they may not effusively welcome your enquiry, but I'm sure they'll be helpful. That tends to come with the shy retiringness.
I currently work in government and spend my days editing bureaucratic correspondence, briefing materials etc. I have no formal qualifications in this area (I have a BA (Psychology) and a MBA, hard-earned but completely useless in my current areas of interest!). I would appreciate any advice you may have about careers in editing /publishing, in the event I am able to garner some guts (!!) to pursue this.
I belong to the Writers’ Centre in my state but it doesn’t seem to have any relevant courses and I am loath to undertake formal study in this area. Are formal qualifications necessary? Is it about being /getting known or networking?
Well, this is a bit of a fix: you would like to change careers but don't want to undertake any kind of training ... Which is understandable, considering you have already been to university quite a bit. I spent a few years there myself and wouldn't hurry back to tertiary education.
Not all editors have formal training, but most of those sorts of editors were trained in-house and they started at the very bottom rung in order to get that training - that is, they were editorial assistants. Editorial assistants are on below-poverty salaries so I wouldn't recommend you do that. However, if you're not going to travel that road, you do need to make your contacts in the industry. It wouldn't be enough just to send a CV to a publisher and hope to make it onto their freelance roster - they don't know you and they don't know your work, so they're not going to rush to pay you money to edit something for them. Of course, the question then is how you make the right contacts.
It's no surprise that your local writers' centre doesn't offer courses on editing, as that's not their focus - they're probably flat out trying to accommodate the requests for writing courses and workshops. But they may be able to point you in the right direction - have you made an enquiry? You should also contact the Society of Editors in your state and ask them for help. As a rule editors are shy, retiring types - my own pet collective noun for them is an 'introvert' of editors. So they may not effusively welcome your enquiry, but I'm sure they'll be helpful. That tends to come with the shy retiringness.
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