I've targeted certain agents, mainly from information on agentquery.com, and checked out all I can find about their tastes before I approach them. Some of the sample query letters they display are puzzling - some want "personal", some want "professionally objective" and some don't tell you! Many of them, however, seem to have a fairly long response time, e.g. 3-6 weeks for responding to an e-mail query of maximum 250 words (and it was difficult to be informative in such a short query, believe me!). Is it considered reasonable to query multiple agents at the same time, or perhaps send to two, wait a couple of weeks, try a couple more etc.? I know my chances of attracting interest are slim, so I don't want inadvertently to annoy anyone. Also, if I have been rejected by a certain agent, can I query someone else in the same office? AND (sorry to be so profuse!) for the ones who say they will only respond if interested, how long should I wait generally before assuming that they were indeed not interested?
My current other question concerns a publisher whose advertised response time is 9-12 months (and yes, they have been around a long time and are no doubt very popular). If I haven't heard from them at all (apart from receipt of submission) and 12 months have passed, how long should I wait before asking politely what the current status of the submission is? (In the past, I've assumed about a month more, but this could be bad form, for all I know.) And is it generally true that silence indicates they haven't yet chucked it, or should I read no meaning into this at all?
On the question of multiple submissions, please see this post. Also, since you're querying in the US, multiple submissions are completely acceptable there.
If an agent in one office has said no, take it as a 'no' for the whole office. Multiple-agent offices are a rarity in Australia so we don't tend to face this issue too often, however in an agency with several agents an individual agent may well pass on queries to other agents in the office if they think it's a better fit for them. If you've had a 'no', you can presume that either hasn't happened or happened and it was a no there too.
If you haven't heard from them within eight weeks - if it's only a 250-word query (geee, wonder if I can get away with asking for that ...) - then move on.
As to the publishing company: you're right, give them a month over the time limit and then make contact. Do not read anything into the silence other than the fact that they haven't responded to you yet. I go silent on submissions for weeks - months - at a time and it's because I haven't read it yet. Everyone gets a lot of submissions. We all make promises about time frames but can only keep them if we have minions to help us. Agencies and publishers aren't that flush with cash, ergo, no minions and no timely response.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Agents and editing
Once a writer has feedback from the Editorial Department of a publishing house, to what extent do literary agents involve themselves, or make themselves available during the editing/rewriting process?
Presently, I’m an unsigned writer, with a dozen pages of detailed chapter by chapter comments and an invitation to rewrite and return, from a Senior Editor at one of the big houses. I’ve started the rewrite, but wonder whether I ought to seek out an agent to oversee the process of getting the best book possible out of this pile of pages before resubmitting (and hopefully, negotiating a contract). I realise that there are plenty of reasons for working with an agent, but I’d particularly like to know how the editing stage is managed. Many thanks.
I can't speak for all agents on this issue, as I don't know what they all do. So I'll just speak for myself, and I have as little or as much editorial involvement as the author wants me to have. Sometimes I'll read part of a first draft and give feedback on that; sometimes I'll read the full first draft; other authors don't want to show me until draft three or six or whatever number it is when they feel ready.
Once the authors have received editorial notes from their editor/publisher, again, it depends how much they want me to be involved, but usually they'll send me the notes and ask me for my opinion, especially on contentious points. And it's just that: an opinion. As is everything with editing. One thing I never want to do is come between them and their editor - that is a very intense relationship that should not have a third party inserted into it, unless there is a fundamental problem with communciation between author and editor. Happily, that doesn't happen very often.
Presently, I’m an unsigned writer, with a dozen pages of detailed chapter by chapter comments and an invitation to rewrite and return, from a Senior Editor at one of the big houses. I’ve started the rewrite, but wonder whether I ought to seek out an agent to oversee the process of getting the best book possible out of this pile of pages before resubmitting (and hopefully, negotiating a contract). I realise that there are plenty of reasons for working with an agent, but I’d particularly like to know how the editing stage is managed. Many thanks.
I can't speak for all agents on this issue, as I don't know what they all do. So I'll just speak for myself, and I have as little or as much editorial involvement as the author wants me to have. Sometimes I'll read part of a first draft and give feedback on that; sometimes I'll read the full first draft; other authors don't want to show me until draft three or six or whatever number it is when they feel ready.
Once the authors have received editorial notes from their editor/publisher, again, it depends how much they want me to be involved, but usually they'll send me the notes and ask me for my opinion, especially on contentious points. And it's just that: an opinion. As is everything with editing. One thing I never want to do is come between them and their editor - that is a very intense relationship that should not have a third party inserted into it, unless there is a fundamental problem with communciation between author and editor. Happily, that doesn't happen very often.
Foreign etiquette
I've discovered that once I've had a story published in an Australian magazine I can try to sell it to overseas publishers. I know I need to specify what rights I'm selling (eg. First British serial rights), but is it necessary to mention it has been published here in Australia?
First you need to check which rights you've sold in Australia - if you gave them world rights, then you have nothing to sell. I'm presuming you've done that, so if you're submitting overseas you should mention that it's been published in Australia, because it's a good thing - someone else thought the story worthy of publication. But, given that we're a former colony partly populated by former Britons - a fact they conveniently forget, damn overlords, just because the aforementioned former Britons were criminals - don't expect anyone in the UK to actually care. I could spend two hours ranting about British publishers and their cavalier behaviour in respect of Australian rights, but I'm already en couleur and I should really calm down before trying to eat my lunch.
First you need to check which rights you've sold in Australia - if you gave them world rights, then you have nothing to sell. I'm presuming you've done that, so if you're submitting overseas you should mention that it's been published in Australia, because it's a good thing - someone else thought the story worthy of publication. But, given that we're a former colony partly populated by former Britons - a fact they conveniently forget, damn overlords, just because the aforementioned former Britons were criminals - don't expect anyone in the UK to actually care. I could spend two hours ranting about British publishers and their cavalier behaviour in respect of Australian rights, but I'm already en couleur and I should really calm down before trying to eat my lunch.
In an existential black hole
I was wondering if you might be able to offer some advice. I have recently completed my first work - a short work of fiction of about 80 000 words. I took the step of approaching someone who is the director of a small publishing house. This is what I received by way of feedback:
'I've had a quick look at the ms and, while it's very fluent and has some very interesting things to say, its fictional form would, I think, make sales too difficult to find for someone with as few marketing resources as I have. It would need the muscle of a better-resourced publisher.'
As I am new to 'the game', and understanding that without a personal contact with an appropriate (well-resourced) publisher, the ms is likely to sit on a 'slush pile' for years, my question is: where to from here?
Are you sure you realised what sort of blog this is? That an agent writes it? The question where to from here? suggests that you didn't, so now I'm in some kind of post-structuralist existential black hole - do I exist? Does my job exist? Arrrrghhhh. This is why I'm so slow at answering questions - I can't take the angst.
So I'll make it simple:
1. Personal contacts only get you so far, and most published writers don't have them. If the manuscript isn't any good, the contacts certainly won't help you get published and, in fact, may be wishing they didn't know you.
2. Agents help you avoid the slush pile - try submitting your manuscript to a few of them. (Of course, if I don't really exist - if agents aren't real - then my head just exploded while writing that.) And just so you know, agents don't count as 'personal contacts'.
3. If you don't want to try agents, there are several novel competitions around - your local writers centre would be able to advise you.
FYI: 80 000 words is not a short work of fiction. That's a slightly-longer-than-average work of fiction.
'I've had a quick look at the ms and, while it's very fluent and has some very interesting things to say, its fictional form would, I think, make sales too difficult to find for someone with as few marketing resources as I have. It would need the muscle of a better-resourced publisher.'
As I am new to 'the game', and understanding that without a personal contact with an appropriate (well-resourced) publisher, the ms is likely to sit on a 'slush pile' for years, my question is: where to from here?
Are you sure you realised what sort of blog this is? That an agent writes it? The question where to from here? suggests that you didn't, so now I'm in some kind of post-structuralist existential black hole - do I exist? Does my job exist? Arrrrghhhh. This is why I'm so slow at answering questions - I can't take the angst.
So I'll make it simple:
1. Personal contacts only get you so far, and most published writers don't have them. If the manuscript isn't any good, the contacts certainly won't help you get published and, in fact, may be wishing they didn't know you.
2. Agents help you avoid the slush pile - try submitting your manuscript to a few of them. (Of course, if I don't really exist - if agents aren't real - then my head just exploded while writing that.) And just so you know, agents don't count as 'personal contacts'.
3. If you don't want to try agents, there are several novel competitions around - your local writers centre would be able to advise you.
FYI: 80 000 words is not a short work of fiction. That's a slightly-longer-than-average work of fiction.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
The dead end
I’m an author and I’ve written what I think is a really good book. I’ve passed it around to colleagues and friends, and friends of friends who tell me (hopefully with honesty) that it’s full of all of the good things a great book should be full of.
Yet, I’m having terrible trouble finding a literary agent, and I think that it’s because my book (as great as it may be) is hard to market. I’m 29 and unpublished, and my book takes the form of a prose-y, personal memoir-ish, travelogue in which I challenge the conventions of modern marital restrictions, and question my own relationship and existence.
I’m getting decline letters left and right despite the fact that I know I have a good book! What on earth do I do?
Honey, every writer thinks they've written a good book, otherwise they would never submit their manuscript to agents and publishers. I've not yet come across an author who says 'I think my manuscript is crap, but I'm sending it to you anyway'. Funnily enough, though, a lot of my published authors - wonderful, talented people - are convinced that everything they write is crap. I find this simultaneously hilarious - It's brilliant! How could they doubt it! - and disturbing - If they think it's awful, how can I convince them otherwise? Why can't they see it's good? (AL, I'm talking to you). Maybe there's some kind of logarithm for that ... Author self-belief (X) is in inverse proportion to literary merit of novel (Y) where Z is variable. I'll leave you to work out what Z is.
Anyway, back to you. Here are a few tips:
1. Friends and friends of friends are not good judges of literary quality. They are always going to tell you what you want to hear, especially if they tell you that that's exactly what they're not doing. Unless all those friends work in the publishing industry, their opinions won't matter. And please don't put them in your query letter.
2. Saying that you think your manuscript hasn't been picked up because it's hard to market is equivalent to blaming the formatting of the ms ('I should never have used Courier New!!!'). If something's good enough, being hard to market doesn't matter.
3. ' I challenge the conventions of modern marital restrictions, and question my own relationship and existence' - at this point I thought your email may have been a joke, but I proceeded in good faith. Don't you think this subject matter has been done before? What makes your manuscript different? How are you going to do it differently to, say, Jay McInerney in The Good Life, even if that was a novel and you have written a memoir? Or Julie Benz in Perfection? [Ed note: after writing this I realised I was confusing Julie Benz - 'Darla' in Angel - with Julie Metz, the real author of this book. D'oh! So it's Perfection by Julie Metz.]
4. If you're convinced you have written a brilliant, if misunderstood, manuscript, publish it online. You'll find out soon enough.
I'm probably sounding snarky. I know I should be encouraging you to hang in there et cetera. But I'm reluctant to, for these reasons: first, because I don't understand why everyone who writes thinks publication is the sine qua non of their endeavour, when there are plenty of musicians who never want to put out a record or dancers who never want to appear on So You Think You Can Dance; second, there is a lot of complaining about why agents and publishers close submissions, and the reason is that we get far too many manuscripts that are simply not up to scratch, and we then make a decision to miss the potentially brilliant one because we're not up to wading through the other stuff.
It's possible you have written a brilliant manuscript, and that it's just not the time for it to find a publisher. Or it's possible that it's just not ready yet. Or that it will never be ready. So I'll go back to a common piece of advice: put it aside for six months and then read it again. If you find absolutely nothing to change, put it aside for another few weeks or months. Repeat. Good writers - great writers - will always be drafting, realising that the story is continually in motion. If you think your manuscript cannot be improved, well ...
Yet, I’m having terrible trouble finding a literary agent, and I think that it’s because my book (as great as it may be) is hard to market. I’m 29 and unpublished, and my book takes the form of a prose-y, personal memoir-ish, travelogue in which I challenge the conventions of modern marital restrictions, and question my own relationship and existence.
I’m getting decline letters left and right despite the fact that I know I have a good book! What on earth do I do?
Honey, every writer thinks they've written a good book, otherwise they would never submit their manuscript to agents and publishers. I've not yet come across an author who says 'I think my manuscript is crap, but I'm sending it to you anyway'. Funnily enough, though, a lot of my published authors - wonderful, talented people - are convinced that everything they write is crap. I find this simultaneously hilarious - It's brilliant! How could they doubt it! - and disturbing - If they think it's awful, how can I convince them otherwise? Why can't they see it's good? (AL, I'm talking to you). Maybe there's some kind of logarithm for that ... Author self-belief (X) is in inverse proportion to literary merit of novel (Y) where Z is variable. I'll leave you to work out what Z is.
Anyway, back to you. Here are a few tips:
1. Friends and friends of friends are not good judges of literary quality. They are always going to tell you what you want to hear, especially if they tell you that that's exactly what they're not doing. Unless all those friends work in the publishing industry, their opinions won't matter. And please don't put them in your query letter.
2. Saying that you think your manuscript hasn't been picked up because it's hard to market is equivalent to blaming the formatting of the ms ('I should never have used Courier New!!!'). If something's good enough, being hard to market doesn't matter.
3. ' I challenge the conventions of modern marital restrictions, and question my own relationship and existence' - at this point I thought your email may have been a joke, but I proceeded in good faith. Don't you think this subject matter has been done before? What makes your manuscript different? How are you going to do it differently to, say, Jay McInerney in The Good Life, even if that was a novel and you have written a memoir? Or Julie Benz in Perfection? [Ed note: after writing this I realised I was confusing Julie Benz - 'Darla' in Angel - with Julie Metz, the real author of this book. D'oh! So it's Perfection by Julie Metz.]
4. If you're convinced you have written a brilliant, if misunderstood, manuscript, publish it online. You'll find out soon enough.
I'm probably sounding snarky. I know I should be encouraging you to hang in there et cetera. But I'm reluctant to, for these reasons: first, because I don't understand why everyone who writes thinks publication is the sine qua non of their endeavour, when there are plenty of musicians who never want to put out a record or dancers who never want to appear on So You Think You Can Dance; second, there is a lot of complaining about why agents and publishers close submissions, and the reason is that we get far too many manuscripts that are simply not up to scratch, and we then make a decision to miss the potentially brilliant one because we're not up to wading through the other stuff.
It's possible you have written a brilliant manuscript, and that it's just not the time for it to find a publisher. Or it's possible that it's just not ready yet. Or that it will never be ready. So I'll go back to a common piece of advice: put it aside for six months and then read it again. If you find absolutely nothing to change, put it aside for another few weeks or months. Repeat. Good writers - great writers - will always be drafting, realising that the story is continually in motion. If you think your manuscript cannot be improved, well ...
Competitions and world rights
A writing competition (for novels) that I'm thinking of entering offers a cash prize plus publication. I notice in the small print however that the publishers reserve all world-wide publishing rights to the winning manuscript and all shortlisted manuscripts. Is this good or bad? Would the winner still get royalties on such things as foreign, movie or electronic rights?
There's a growing number of competitions in our island's publishing industry, so your question is timely and important.
It is customary for publishers to take worldwide rights for competition winners - okay, yeah, they have the writers over a barrel, so what can you do? But I have real problems with shortlisted writers (a) being told they can't submit elsewhere until the publishing company has decided whether they want to publish the novel or not and (b) being made to give up these rights while their status is in limbo, and even if it's not.
Foreign rights is a specialised area of the industry. I don't always advise my authors to hold onto their foreign rights so I can do something with them - sometimes the publisher will have a much better chance of placing the book overseas, and I'll tell the author that. It all depends on who we know and who publishes what, and it's important to do what's best for the book. So I'm not saying that publishers who take world rights in these competitions are inherently bad, because it may be good for the author if the publisher handles those rights. For example, if the author doesn't have an agent who can manage those rights for them, how are they going to exploit them otherwise? And for the winning manuscript, I can see why the publisher wants them: they've invested time in the competition, they've chosen a winner and now they're going to invest time and money in them. Thus, they want to have the opportunity to make back some of that money by selling foreign rights.
However, for the shortlisted writers this is not the case. The competition has served to bring their manuscripts to the publisher's attention, nothing more. They have not won; they will not automatically get an advance. The publisher is using the competition to find new talent, and that's fair enough, but the shortlisted writers should not then be subject to the same conditions as the winning manuscript. They should also be free to submit elsewhere. The Vogel Award, for example, is not an award for One Really Good Novel and Four Close Calls. It's an award for one novel alone. Once the winner is announced, the others should either be set free immediately or given a (short) time frame within which the publisher has exclusivity.
As for the royalties you mention, the author gets those - well, any money earned on sales of foreign rights or movie rights etc go against the advance, so you see royalties if you've earned out your advance. Any publishing contract that tells you that you're not entitled to a royalty on subsidiary rights (translation, movie and so on) is a contract you shouldn't sign.
There's a growing number of competitions in our island's publishing industry, so your question is timely and important.
It is customary for publishers to take worldwide rights for competition winners - okay, yeah, they have the writers over a barrel, so what can you do? But I have real problems with shortlisted writers (a) being told they can't submit elsewhere until the publishing company has decided whether they want to publish the novel or not and (b) being made to give up these rights while their status is in limbo, and even if it's not.
Foreign rights is a specialised area of the industry. I don't always advise my authors to hold onto their foreign rights so I can do something with them - sometimes the publisher will have a much better chance of placing the book overseas, and I'll tell the author that. It all depends on who we know and who publishes what, and it's important to do what's best for the book. So I'm not saying that publishers who take world rights in these competitions are inherently bad, because it may be good for the author if the publisher handles those rights. For example, if the author doesn't have an agent who can manage those rights for them, how are they going to exploit them otherwise? And for the winning manuscript, I can see why the publisher wants them: they've invested time in the competition, they've chosen a winner and now they're going to invest time and money in them. Thus, they want to have the opportunity to make back some of that money by selling foreign rights.
However, for the shortlisted writers this is not the case. The competition has served to bring their manuscripts to the publisher's attention, nothing more. They have not won; they will not automatically get an advance. The publisher is using the competition to find new talent, and that's fair enough, but the shortlisted writers should not then be subject to the same conditions as the winning manuscript. They should also be free to submit elsewhere. The Vogel Award, for example, is not an award for One Really Good Novel and Four Close Calls. It's an award for one novel alone. Once the winner is announced, the others should either be set free immediately or given a (short) time frame within which the publisher has exclusivity.
As for the royalties you mention, the author gets those - well, any money earned on sales of foreign rights or movie rights etc go against the advance, so you see royalties if you've earned out your advance. Any publishing contract that tells you that you're not entitled to a royalty on subsidiary rights (translation, movie and so on) is a contract you shouldn't sign.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Formats, fonts and attachments
I write young adult medical science fiction. Two of my stories have been published in Analog. I have dreams of having novels published, but realise that YA SF does not sell books right now. I am, however, looking at agents for the three books I have in various stages of polished, from basically-finished-and-re-edited several times to still-a-mess. Maybe I can set a new trend or pull up the one established by James White.
To my delight, I found three agents who like young adult science fiction. But one of the Guidelines confused me. One wanted snail mail. Easy. I submitted there first -- yesterday. The second wanted email and would accept attachments. Good. I can do that if the first comes back. The third wanted email, no attachments. Now I'm totally confused. Won't my five-to-ten pages, of beautifully formatted novel, arrive in the agent's office in a mess?
I've asked tech people and got some really strange responses but no answers. I really do not want to send junk.
I'll answer your questions in a second but for now I can't get past the sentence 'I can do that if the first comes back.' Why are you waiting to submit elsewhere? Have the agents you're submitting to told you that they want exclusivity? If they haven't, don't give it to them. That's a waste of your time. If they have, what are they going to do in exchange for the exclusivity? Are they going to get back to you in a fortnight? They should.
Okay, now I'm over that. Let's look at what you actually asked about: submission guidelines. Many, many authors get hung up on formatting, and I don't know why, unless they're trying to hide behind the formatting as a reason for why they get rejected - 'It wasn't that my novel was awful, I just didn't use the Helvetica font they wanted'. But I have heard enough talk about it to realise that some authors spend a lot of time and use up vast amounts of creative energy formatting their text. I find it curious, and occasionally disturbing.
I may be an island on this issue, but I don't care about formatting. My clients and the authors who submit to me can use whatever font and font size they like, because I'm probably going to change it all to Garamond with 1.5 line spacing. I can do that, you see - that's the beauty of Microsoft Word: I get to have the font I want. So when people submit in a body of an email, I can either read it as is or I can copy and paste it into a Word document and change the font. The only thing that drives me crazy is when they've used a soft return (using Shift + Enter instead of Enter) because then paragraphs disappear when you paste the text.
I wouldn't mind betting that the agent who's asked for the text to go into the body of the email feels the same as I do - they wouldn't ask for a submission like that if they were worried about an author getting formatting right, because email always does wacky things to text. So just make sure there are no soft returns and you'll be right.
To my delight, I found three agents who like young adult science fiction. But one of the Guidelines confused me. One wanted snail mail. Easy. I submitted there first -- yesterday. The second wanted email and would accept attachments. Good. I can do that if the first comes back. The third wanted email, no attachments. Now I'm totally confused. Won't my five-to-ten pages, of beautifully formatted novel, arrive in the agent's office in a mess?
I've asked tech people and got some really strange responses but no answers. I really do not want to send junk.
I'll answer your questions in a second but for now I can't get past the sentence 'I can do that if the first comes back.' Why are you waiting to submit elsewhere? Have the agents you're submitting to told you that they want exclusivity? If they haven't, don't give it to them. That's a waste of your time. If they have, what are they going to do in exchange for the exclusivity? Are they going to get back to you in a fortnight? They should.
Okay, now I'm over that. Let's look at what you actually asked about: submission guidelines. Many, many authors get hung up on formatting, and I don't know why, unless they're trying to hide behind the formatting as a reason for why they get rejected - 'It wasn't that my novel was awful, I just didn't use the Helvetica font they wanted'. But I have heard enough talk about it to realise that some authors spend a lot of time and use up vast amounts of creative energy formatting their text. I find it curious, and occasionally disturbing.
I may be an island on this issue, but I don't care about formatting. My clients and the authors who submit to me can use whatever font and font size they like, because I'm probably going to change it all to Garamond with 1.5 line spacing. I can do that, you see - that's the beauty of Microsoft Word: I get to have the font I want. So when people submit in a body of an email, I can either read it as is or I can copy and paste it into a Word document and change the font. The only thing that drives me crazy is when they've used a soft return (using Shift + Enter instead of Enter) because then paragraphs disappear when you paste the text.
I wouldn't mind betting that the agent who's asked for the text to go into the body of the email feels the same as I do - they wouldn't ask for a submission like that if they were worried about an author getting formatting right, because email always does wacky things to text. So just make sure there are no soft returns and you'll be right.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)