The ghost who walks

I have put together a synopsis and the first chapter of an autobiography for a friend - essentially, I would act as a ghost writer. My question is: if the subject matter is good enough, would an agent see past my poor writing skills and come back with 'Great idea, but you suck at writing, friend, we will use our own ghost writer', or would they just reject on the basis of my writing not being up to standard? Obviously, I wouldn't want to jeopardise my friend's chance at getting her story published.

If the story is really strong and we don't like the writing, we may indeed express interest in the story and want to talk about how the writing could be improved. But the story would need to be very strong, and different to what's already out there.

However, I'm more intrigued by the fact that you think you may jeopardise your friend's chances: I suspect your friend has either asked you to help or has agreed to accept your help knowing full well what your skills are. But if you don't believe in your writing, it's unlikely anyone else will. So put those shoulders back, then put one of them to the wheel and keep writing.

Many authors, one query letter

I ran across your blog today and was wondering if you knew the correct way to send a query letter with multiple authors, or do you think that we should use only one name in our query letter?

The correct way is to list all the names of the authors involved. Unless none of you wants your names known, in which case you should construct a pseudonym.

I'm not sure why having multiple authors would even be a cause of concern - lots of books have more than one author!

There is no agent for you

I'm looking to get a book published. I have one problem, though, and it's that I'm not sure which agents can/will represent my work. I thought that, since you run the "Call My Agent!" blog, you might have some good advice to help set me in the right direction. So here's my problem:

I've designed a pen-and-paper game and the book is the set of rules for that game. So my problem is, essentially, that I don't really know which agencies to send my work to or how to word a query letter about my game. Almost all the advice I can find on the internet regarding queries is directed specifically towards fiction writers, and when I rang the Australian Society of Authors, the advice I got was 'just send out a query letter to as many agencies as you can'. Because my book is more like a manual for a computer or board game than a fiction novel, it's

difficult to know where to send it or how to advertise it.

I'll overlook your egregious use of 'fiction novel' and focus on your conundrum ... and it is a conundrum.

First, as the panel at right ----> says, I can't give advice about individual agents.

Second, your project is nothing that any agent I can think of would be able to place for you, unless that agent has specialised knowledge of games. And, generally speaking, we're book nerds, not game nerds. The ASA should probably have told you that. Agents tend to deal mainly with trade publishers, and that's not really the sort of book a lot of Australian trade publishers will look at.

Academic publishers may be interested, but because I'm not a game nerd I don't know enough to tell you that definitively. The best thing to would be to try to find some books similar to yours, see who published them and then make some enquiries accordingly. Good luck!

Submitting biography

I'm working on a biography of a major female Australian historical figure. [I have removed the information the writer sent me lest he give away his good idea. - AS]

It's my first biography and my publication track record only includes corporate and policy tomes published by the Australian Government.

Here are my questions.

• Is it best to finish the biography before submitting it to a publisher or agent?

• If the answer to the above is no, are three or four chapters enough to have complete (and polished beyond the first draft)?

• And is a proposed completion date of 2013 reasonable or laughable?

I'd also be grateful for any information you may care to share, on the blog, about publishing historical biographies in Australia.

I'll answer the first two questions together: it used to be okay to submit non-fiction on a partial manuscript - it was expected, even - but now it's getting harder to do that. I think publishers make a rod for their own backs if they expect a lot of journalists and academics to write full manuscripts before submitting anything, because usually their day jobs are all-consuming. But, in the current uncertain climate, they're looking for more certainty. However, as I'm privy to knowledge about your subject matter, I think you could get away with a partial submission - just don't be surprised if you're asked to come back later with a full manuscript.

As to your third question: your subject has been dead a long time. Why would it matter if you're not finished until 2013? (Unless there's a competing work being written by someone else.) Just as long as you're upfront about how long you'll need. What you shouldn't do is tell a publisher you'll be ready by January 2012 and in January 2012 say, 'Oops - I lied.'

General information about historical biographies: it's entirely dependent on the subject. If you're writing about your dear Aunt Vera and her twelve children growing up in Wallabadah, don't expect to have much success. If you're offering a new spin on Lachlan Macquarie, though, let's have it! [Note to readers: Lachlan Macquarie - certainly not female - is not the subject of this writer's biography.] Personally I'd love someone to do something on Inigo Jones, but perhaps it's an audience of one ...

Size matters

Is it true that literary agents reject writers because their novel is too short? If so, what would the general word count be for a young adult novel?

Yes, it's true. But it's not because we're inherently anti-short novels. It's because publishers like books to be of a certain length - and that's entirely to do with how much they want to be able to charge for a book and how much paper they will have to buy in order to print the book and make the costing work at the RRP ...

Young adult novels, however, can be shorter than adult novels. And that's because the price points are lower: generally under $20. I don't know that you'd want to attempt to place anything under 30 000 words and Harry Potter et al have shown us that the upper limits for a word count can be nudged a little. So anywhere between 30 000 and Hogwarts. But I'm also a fan of not writing to the word count: write the story and see where it takes you before you count the words.

Why Your Novel Won't Get Published (Ten Reasons)

That is the title of a post by Chuck Wendig at his blog Terrible Minds. The post is very funny as well as being very useful. Please read it, if only for entertainment:

http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2011/01/10/why-your-novel-wont-get-published/

The Shatzkin Files

'All publishers are global now. All book retailers are global now. The publishers and retailers who embrace that reality soonest will have the best chance to be around the longest.'

So says Mike Shatzkin in his latest edition of 'The Shatzkin Files'. If you are interested in what's changing in the publishing industry and you do not yet know of his blog/e-newsletter, click immediately on this link and sign up (there's a 'subscribe' box on the left-hand nav):

http://www.idealog.com/blog/