Conventioneers! O Conventioneers!

We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson...

I'll be attending a couple writer's conventions in April and May.  So while this is fresh in my mind, I thought I might delight you dear readers with a few tips about writer's conventions.

Conventions can be fun and provide you with some useful insights and exposure to the publishing world.  Whether the convention you're attending is large or small, there are a few things you should probably know about what to expect (and to not expect) at a convention.

What you should expect

Writer's conventions are often held by writer's groups, but sometimes by magazines and other professional groups. For writer's groups they work simultaneously as a benefit for the members, a fundraiser for the group, and a membership drive.  Writer's groups can be helpful for all sorts of reasons, the primary one being Community.  Being with other like-minded individuals and sharing your struggles and information can be a blessing.  Writing is a rather solipsistic activity, and encouragement can be difficult to find.  If you do not belong to a writer's group, then consider joining one, and consider going to their convention first to find out if it's your scene.

Usually these conventions have a few familiar components.  The first are classes or presentations.  Guest lecturers from inside the community and from without will hold forth on a range of topics, usually having to do with books (how they ought to be written, how best to sell rights to them once they are).  The second is some sort of keynote speaker (or draw) usually a notable author, agent, editor.  Then, there are the agents and editors.

There are typically a few panels dedicated to agents and editors where writers are given an opportunity to pick our brains, ask about submissions practices, and what our likes/dislikes are.  That is usually followed (though not necessarily) by a pitch session, where authors can pitch their projects to agents and editors in person.

It seems to me that there is an undue amount of attention put on the pitch sessions, which, in my not so humble opinion, are only about as important as the other stuff on the agenda.  Certainly a lot of authors will skip a lot of the other conference stuff, and go right into their tete-a-tete with the hungry agent, eyes gleaming with false hope.

What you should expect from these sessions is for an agent to listen patiently to your attempt at pitching the concept behind your work and, if you're lucky, to request a sample of your work for further study back at their respective lairs.  That is the best-case-scenario.

You can't reasonably expect a professional, whose job it is to evaluate book properties for their potential marketability to learn everything they need to know about your property from a brief spiel, and a few minutes of chatting.  There is the small matter of having to read the work, and decide whether or not you're actually as good on the page as you may have been in person.  Since what end-users (see: readers) will be reading is the book (see: your book), the pitch (see: your pitch) doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.  So don't build it up to be something bigger than it is.  If you blow it, you haven't really lost anything.  You may have embarrassed yourself a little, but so what?  What matters is what's on the page, and as long as you nail that, you should be fine.

While you should certainly prepare for your pitch session (more on that below) what you should focus on during your convention experience is building a community and opening yourself up to new information. If you obsess about the pitch session at the exclusion of everything else, then you're not really getting your money's worth.

The pitch session isn't a make-or-break moment for anyone's career, it's just an exercise.  At best, it can be the beginning of a business relationship, but in order for that to transpire it first has to be an interaction between two human beings.


What you should not expect

You should not expect to win publishing.  It's not a prize, it can't be won, and if it were it certainly couldn't be won in the convention hall of a hotel. This is a scenario that will never play out:

Author pitches book to agent. Agent immediately stops author mid-     sentence and declares: "that's the most brilliant thing I've ever heard! I needn't even read this book, it will be a best-seller, I am certain! I wish to sign you up as a client right now!"

"In fact," the agent continues "let me call every editor I know right now and let them know you've won publishing. You're absolutely correct unicorn slash fiction is the new Harry Potter." Agent immediately takes out cellphone, conferences every editor agent knows while drawing up your contract. End scene.

The best-case scenario, as mentioned above, is that the agent/editor thinks your idea is neat, and pending a review of your material may make a determination at a later date.  That's nice, but not really cause for a ticker-tape parade.  The same could have happened if you had sent a blind-query.

The added benefit to you is that you actually got to discuss the book in a real conversation with a real live human being.  In a conversation you get to provide the agent/editor with some information in response to their direct questions.  That information is, hopefully, more pertinent to them than information you may have volunteered in a query.

So now that you have your expectations set, what can you do to make the most of your pitch session?

Dos

1. Do take the opportunity to hang out with other authors.  Before you even consider signing up for a pitch session you should make friends, talk shop, compare notes, give and receive advice.  The purpose of the conference should be more than preparing for your big debut with the agents and editors. In the long run it's your fellow authors who are going to be the biggest help to you.

2. Do prepare for your pitch session.  Your pitch session will last anywhere from three to ten minutes, but you needn't spend the entire time on the "pitch" part of pitching.  The pitch should be only a few sentences long, and it should give the agent/editor a good idea of what the book is about and who the book is for. As with a query, you should do research about where your book likely fits in genre-wise, and you should already have a brief summary of your book on hand.  For the pitch you're going to want to condense that summary down to a few sentences, and write those sentences down.  You needn't practice them verbatim, but you should be able answer, in a few brief sentences, the direct question that seems to beleaguer even professional authors: "So, uh, what's your book about?"  The tendency when faced with this question is to think to oneself "what isn't this book about?" and that is the highway to the danger zone (see: Don'ts #2).  What you should do instead is take your written pitch and read it aloud several times (again, not memorizing it, just reading it aloud) and get a feel for summarizing your book in the most natural way possible.  Once you feel like you've nailed it, then practice it on some test subjects (a willing spouse perhaps, or an honest friend) to see if you make any sense.  If you pass that test then you should be ready to go.

3. Do try to be professional. You don't have to dress like it's a job interview, or a black-tie event, but do try to appear professional.  Do conduct yourself with a bit of decorum. Do be polite, and gracious, and kind. In short, do try to behave like the sort of person an agent/editor might like to be in protracted business relationship with.  Personality is a factor in evaluating potential clients and authors.

4.That being said, do relax. Agents and editors are just people.  They aren't smarter than you, or better than you, they probably aren't even as good looking as you.  All they have is a bit more experience working the levers of publishing, and a bit more time spent reading unpublished manuscripts. Their evaluation of your concept as a marketable concept is not an evaluation of you as a person or an artist. Also, they aren't there to judge you, they're there to help you.  If you're on the verge of success they have both a personal and a financial interest in helping you get there.  If you're struggling, they have an interest in seeing that you have the tools to succeed.  They want more and better authors, and they know that authors aren't born, they're built.  To the extent that they can help you, they will.  If they can't help you, no biggie, the convention should be full of people who can.


Don'ts

1.Don't be a pitch robot.  I don't need your help reading your query letter.  I would be in a lot of hot water if I was an illiterate literary agent.  So you needn't waste your time reading your letter to me.  Even less helpful is having you memorize and recite it.

2. Don't ramble.  While you don't want to be a robot, you also don't want to give me the long version of your pitch.  Keep it brief, so that we have some time to talk. Also, so I can keep the story straight.  There is such a thing as information overload.  Stories are full of information (character building, world building, back story) all of which may be necessary in the novel, but not in the pitch. You start describing every minor character and sub-plot and you're going to lose me, and lose me quick.

3. Don't omit necessary info. While you are trying to not be a robot, and also trying to keep it brief, try to give me a good idea of what we're talking about.  If your pitch omits important information it's just going to complicate matters as we start to talk, and I try to parse out exactly what your story is supposed to be about. Your summary should include all the relevant info: genre, length, main characters (name them, tell me who they are and why they are important), central conflict, how that conflict is resolved (spoilers welcome).  I once had an author pitch to me, and I wasn't clear on what the central conflict of the author's book was or how it was supposed to be resolved.  I kept asking questions, and the author kept responding "you'll just have to read it".  After a while I got fed up and finally said, "actually, I don't have to read it, that's the point of this conversation."  When you have limited time, and the other party has limited patience, it's best not to be coy. If I didn't want to know who the secret murderer was in your mystery novel, I wouldn't have asked.

4. Don't forget to have fun. This should be fun. Learning is fun.  Meeting new people is fun. Remember to have fun.  If you don't plan on having fun, don't bother coming.  You'll just harsh everyone else's cool.  If you know you're prone to nervousness and panic, and your strengths lie primarily in written communication, then maybe querying is the best path for you.  If you still feel like you'd like some face-time with an agent, but you don't think you can pitch your book without breaking into a cold sweat, you can sign up for a pitch-session and use it to ask the agent questions. They won't be disappointed (in fact they may welcome the break), and you don't have to feel like you have to perform for them.
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In Defense of the Royalty-Only Model for Digital Publication

John Scalzi, author, blogger, lame-duck (but by no means lame) President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, defender of working writers everywhere, and client of the agency I happen to work for, has been commenting this past week about a shift toward advanceless book deals and the gradual erosion of authors compensation in the digital marketplace (summary can be found here).

While John is mostly right (especially about Random House's new Hydra/Alibi/Loveswept/Flirt "profit share" endeavor being exploitative) I thought he was perhaps a bit unfair to the royalty-only model, and I thought I might supply a counterpoint to his criticism, and also a bit of context about how the royalty-only model rose to prominence in the digital book sphere.

The royalty-only model is, as mentioned by John, not a new model, but its rise in the digital book world is not surprising, nor should its adoption by the larger publishers for the purposes of creating their own low-overhead imprints be necessarily surprising either. The model was born out of desperation by upstart e-publishers who didn't have the initial capital to pay out advances.  Even before the rise in popularity of self-publishing, they needed an arrow in their quiver to convince authors to write for them, rather than focus their efforts elsewhere.  That arrow was a higher than average royalty, and in some circumstances flexibility on the rights retained by the author.  

The benefits to the publisher of such a model are fairly obvious: by not having to pay advances, they had more money to invest in expanding their business, and greater discretion to acquire works.  By not having to worry about recouping an advance and by having limited production costs, not only could these small upstarts publish with greater frequency, but they could also experiment with more niche works and sub-genres, and find readerships that were previously not serviced by the larger publishers.

If you need an example of one such publisher, consider our agency's other client Ellora's Cave Publishing.  They began in early 2000 as an upstart by a romance and erotica author named Tina Engler (you may know her by her pseudonym Jaid Black) who found that her steamier material was too hot for mainstream publication and decided to begin offering her and her friends' erotic tales online.  The transactions used to be handled over PayPal, and the books delivered via email as PDF files. Now they are a multi-million dollar operation with over 800 authors, a backlist of over 4,000 titles, and they have launched the careers of several best-selling authors including Lora Leigh, Shiloh Walker, and Sylvia Day.

Now that's all well and good for Ellora's Cave, and other such royalty-only e-book publishers, but what about the authors?  Well the redounding benefits to the authors are that now there is a market for erotic romance, where none used to exist.  In 2000, good erotica was hard to find, now its ubiquity has spawned several competitors to Ellora's Cave, as well as paved the way for mainstream successes such as 50 Shades of Grey.

In 2000 there was no one willing to publish an author's male-male paranormal romance novel, now an author can choose between several different publishers, including an imprint of the largest romance publisher in the world.  Next year Ellora's Cave authors will pioneer several new sub-genres (ever wonder what a vampire steampunk menage-a-trois might be like?) and a handful of their authors will grace the New York Times e-book best-seller list while doing so. 

It's hard to say that Ellora's Cave's authors are exploited by their royalty only agreements because they receive no advances. Authors receive a substantial share of their book's take, and the back-end compensation is not as big a burden because the lead time between delivery of the manuscript and publication is short, and royalties are paid monthly or quarterly. Certainly there have been a few authors whose experience with Ellora's Cave didn't live up to their expectations of what publication should be, but when considering the alternative (no publication at all) it hardly seems fair to begrudge Ellora's Cave their business model.  

Arguably, it was the rise of Ellora's Cave (and other notables like Samhain Publishing) that caused publishers like Harlequin to experiment with their Carina Press imprint (headed by former Samhain and Quartet editor Angela James), and Carina Press that started the domino effect at the other publishers to capture the same lighting in a bottle. Overall I don't believe this trend is harmful.  In fact the opposite is probably true. Publishers throwing their weight behind royalty-only digital-only imprints means gaining additional opportunities for authors to reach readers with partners that offer a bit more stability than a fly-by-night digital startup can offer.

While I'm not running to go get all my clients digital-only royalty-only deals (I would prefer an advance against royalties and a print component as, I'm sure, would most of my clients) a royalty-only ebook deal is better than no deal at all, and it presents a viable alternative to self-publishing for authors who don't have the knack for it.

Not every book is mainstream enough to warrant a substantial investment by a publisher (just like erotica was thought to be unpublishable in 2000) but that doesn't mean there's no readership for that book. A publisher's knowledge of the market (or potential markets) is not absolute, and because they can't afford to take as many risks when it comes to offering an advance they often don't. That's not to say publishers don't take risks, they do, but the business of publishing is more art than science.  Whole sub-genres can get written-off because a publisher's first trial with that particular sub-genre was a flop.  Taking a flyer on some weird book by a new author is hard to justify when you've got to put up tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege. 

Royalty-only e-book publication offers a viable alternative for success in the instance that a mainstream publisher deems a book too big a risk to publish through traditional means.  I am happy to see that the big publishers are each sporting new digital-first/digital-only imprints (some of which, like Berkley's Intermix and S&S's Pocket Star, do pay nominal advances, though smaller royalties) and I think creating more opportunities for up-and-coming authors to get published should be encouraged, even if that means giving up an advance in lieu of back-end compensation.

That being said, John is right to be wary of the big publisher's foray into this realm. In the absence of advances, royalties should be higher than average, and authors should never be on the hook for expenses related to publication. Nor should authors tacitly accept less than favorable terms, just because their book is being sold digitally.  There is always room to negotiate, and authors, agents, and writer's groups have a responsibility to insist on fair compensation. (update: it turns out such insistence works)

The point of these digital-only/digital-first imprints should not be to lure noobs into exploitative arrangements but to use the flexibility afforded by the low overhead to explore new vistas of genre and style and to discover and cultivate readerships that can blossom into new enterprises that will benefit authors, publishers, and readers alike.  

Turns out writing is like...hard

Which is to say, I apologize for my long absence.  I've had no shortage of things to blog about, but little time to actually spend blogging.  I have decided, however, to rededicate myself to the noble effort of shouting into the internet void.  More content to come...

Take a Chance with a Weird Book

I have a pretty awesome job for a book nerd.  I get to read books only a handful of people will ever read.  Sometimes I read great books with fascinating characters and engrossing plots.  The trade-off for this privilege is that I also have to read a lot of really awful books as well.  I also get to sit by and grumble as decent, but mediocre, books climb the best-seller lists while the books I like collect dust on an editor's desk.

The only thing more painful than having a book one champions continually rejected is the practice of self-censorship one must engage in from time to time just as a matter of expediency.  Some books that I find fascinating, I know from experience, most editors won't touch.

It pains me to think of all the average, but marketable, books that get published every year, and all the weird, but deliciously good, ones that don't.  If you're curious about how this fascinating selection process works, I'd recommend taking a look at my colleague Denise Little's blog post about the way books are acquired and published entitled Two or More Years Before Publication: The Publisher at Work.  

To summarize: the acquisitions process is a group process involving the editorial staff, as well as marketing, sales, and the art departments.  Books are chosen by popular vote and evaluated not just for their artistic merits, but for their saleability.  Lots of funny things can happen in these meetings that can prevent a book from making it to publication.  Often times editors are crestfallen that their pet project didn't survive the scrutiny of their co-workers.  I've been on the receiving end of many a regretful rejection letter from an editor who, as much as they loved the book, failed to get it picked up at their acquisitions meeting.  Separate from the acquisitions process, some imprints also have editorial meetings, wherein they winnow down selections before even presenting them for acquisition.

There are many ways that this process is effective from a practical standpoint.  Group decisions help build coalitions and foster a sense of group responsibility that will guide a book through each stage in the process of production and sales.  The hope is that these group decisions will more closely mirror the current zeitgeist, and that the books chosen will therefore reach the maximum number of readers.  This is sometimes the case, but  the downside of these group decisions, in my opinion, is that they create a culture of self-censorship which then trickles down to agents like me.  Editors don't want to bring oddball projects to their editorial or acquisitions meetings if they know they're going to get shot down, and so they avoid them altogether. 

I don't believe that there's any special talent editors or agents possess that make them any better in their role as taste-makers than your average reader.  The decisions they make about which books to keep and which books to toss, are similar to the type of decisions shoppers make at bookstores every day.  No one likes to be bored, and editors and agents are no exception.  The one thing that differentiates them from other readers is the surrounding cultural influences of the industry itself, and the narratives constructed around the successes or failures of the books they publish.  While publisher's like to think they're giving their customers what they want, in truth it is a publishing professional's preconceived notions about what a commercial book should look like that most influences what readers end up with.

The lessons a publisher extrapolates from the data compiled on a book can be rather unscientific.  One poor showing can mean writing off an entire sub-genre and some successes are falsely attributed to the popularity of a theme when they're really based on the popularity of an author (or visa versa).  In leaner times, like the ones we're experiencing now, this sort of problem only gets exacerbated. On the one hand publishers are being very cautious about trying different sorts of books, and on the other they are looking to throw their weight behind previous successes that are rapidly approaching their expiration date.  People tend to respond to scarcity by being more conservative, and that can be a recipe for stagnation. Is it possible that in our efforts to better serve existing readerships that we're limiting the opportunities to connect with new readers, and to open the door to new styles and genres? 

What are we so afraid of?  There are several admirable books that pass muster with the acquisitions team, but which flop anyway.  No one has a complete lock on the marketplace, and bubbles are bursting all around us.  What would be the harm in taking a crazy risk once a season, rather than once in a career?  If your bubbles are bursting, why try to prevent the others from bursting when you can just blow more bubbles? 

I propose that imprints seriously consider publishing one hare-brained book a season, and market it as such.  Restaurants have specials every day as a way of experimenting with which dishes to add to the menu, why can't imprints create a slot each season for that one experimental book that editorial can agree is so crazy it just might work?  The rest of the list can be meat and potatoes, but once a season a book should make it to publication that will either blaze a trail to the stars or end up as a beautiful pillar of smoke at the end of the runway. Otherwise, why bother?

Likewise, readers should get their sense of adventure back.  Read something freaky once a year, why don't you?  You could read something that you don't connect with at all, or you could wind up having a revelation.  Either way, at least you won't be bored, and you'll be saving the publishing industry from itself.

404 Error: Blog Post Missing

I've got a new idea for a post, but no time to post it.  I was just reminded of the idea by this Tweet from @bradfordlit: 

I totally want to reminsce about this fab scene from a ms I was never able to sell & it makes me sad that so few ppl have read it.

I know many agents can sympathize with this.  Not every book is a great success.  Sometimes we have to pass on books that we really quite enjoyed.  Sometimes agents just have to face facts: just because you like it, doesn't mean everyone else would.  

I will ruminate more on the subjective nature of the publishing business, and how agents try (sometimes unsuccessfully) to navigate the mine-field, as soon as I don't have a quadrillion things to do.  

Thanks for reading.

Plan B: What's to be expected after getting rejected

As I'm sure you may already know, a lot of things in life don't work out the way you would like them to.  A lot of prospective authors throw their hat in the ring with high expectations, only to end up with a file full of rejection notices rather than a book deal.  It happens.  Frequently.

Some may think that as an agent I don't think about the books I reject daily, or the plight of their authors.  While it's true I don't have much sympathy for poorly written books, I'm not unsympathetic to authors (even the bad ones) who have put it all on the line only to come up with bupkis.  It is with this in mind that I'm blogging today for those who need a Plan B.

I like to joke sometimes that I'm a professional rejectionist.  I have a lot of experience rejecting things. I do it every day.  In addition to rejecting things, I'm also pretty expert at being rejected.  Getting rejected by editors is just part of the grind.  As someone who is constantly rejecting books, and having clients' books rejected by editors, there is a lot I can tell you about rejection, what it means, and what you should know.

The Dreaded Letter

Rejection letters can often be just plain unhelpful. Agents/editors don't often have a lot of time to compose these letters, and they don't have a lot of incentive to give you an exhaustive inventory of all the reasons why your book is not suitable for representation/publication.  To compound this problem, they often try to choose words carefully so as not to offend, rather than give you the straight dope on why your book doesn't work for them.  For these reasons, it is always good to look at rejection letters with a fair bit of suspicion.  Because they are incapable of telling the whole story, and the part they tell isn't always completely accurate, trying to discern your next course of action from them is often a fool's errand.  There are a few things, however, which you can reasonable assume.

If the letter is short that usually means that the agent/editor didn't consider your book for very long.  They either made a summary judgment, or something was immediately unappealing to them about your book.  Usually the shorter the rejection letter, the more is probably wrong with your book.  It could be spelling, grammar, failure to suspend disbelief, cliches, annoying characters, or just a simple matter of taste.  You will never be able to discern what you've done wrong from a rejection letter with only a few sentences or paragraphs, so I wouldn't recommend reading too much into any single rejection letter. I certainly wouldn't rewrite your book according to criticisms in any individual short rejection letter.  There simply isn't enough information to go on.

Now, taken cumulatively, several short rejection letters can give you an idea of where you may have gone awry.  If several agents/editors have the same or similar criticism of your book then you should probably consider revising according to that criticism, but only if that criticism is very specific (i.e. the dialog wasn't as good as it could have been, the ending was a bit predictable).  Editors/agents can often employ similar vague and unhelpful statements such as "I didn't connect with the main character/characters".  There's no way you can fix the fact that an agent/editor just didn't find the fundamental structural components of your book appealing.  If you get a lot of vague rejections like that, then there's probably several serious things wrong with your book, and you need to evaluate whether you should try to find what those things are and fix them, or move on to a better project.

If an editor/agent takes the time to write you a long rejection letter (more than two or three paragraphs with several long sentences each) and lets you know specifically what the dealbreakers were for them, take those criticisms to heart.  You may not realize it, because you were preoccupied with all the nasty and dismissive things they were saying about the work of art you painstakingly created, but that agent/editor just did you a huge favor.  They told you what it would take for them to like your book.  If you really want them to be your agent/editor, they've given you some guidelines on what can be done to fix your book.  Be aware, however, that those criticisms might not carry over to another agent/editor.  Some things they request, might be dealbreakers for someone else.  Also be aware that you take a risk by revising the book, because there's always the chance that they simply won't like your revisions.



No Response/Form Rejection

Eli Wiesel says that the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.  People think rejection is bad, but getting no response, or a form response, is in many ways worse.  Don't mistake months of silence to mean careful consideration.  I would take any prolonged silence to mean that you've been rejected.  There are caveats to this, of course, which I will explain later.

A form rejection is only slightly better than not hearing anything.  A form rejection is a standard "no thanks" either on a postcard or an automatically generated response.  There's no way to tell, based on a form rejection, just how carefully your submission was considered.  The agent/editor may not have made it past the first paragraph of your query letter before giving up, they may have read your entire submission including sample chapters.  The form reject provides about as much insight into the decision to reject your submission as not receiving any notice at all.

If you have a box full of form rejections, or you get no response at all (after a matter of weeks or months) then I would seriously consider revising your query letter.  It may be that your bad query letter is selling your book short, and making a bad first impression.  If that doesn't help, then I would recommend scrapping your current project, and moving on to something different.  There's no use plugging away at a project which has been continually rejected.


Caveats

Sometimes agents have a policy (as our agency does regarding email submissions) of not responding to queries/submissions unless they are interested.  Typically there's a time frame attached to this (ours is 2 weeks).  Emails come into the box, we read them (usually the day of) and if we don't like what we see, we delete them.  The volume of emails (hundreds a day) means that we hardly have time to read all the emails we get, much less respond to every one we're not interested in.  Two weeks is our best estimate of the maximum amount of time it would take us to mull whether to request a full manuscript for any email we save.  If you don't hear from us in two weeks, consider that a rejection. Paper submissions with an SASE we give a form rejection as a courtesy.

Sometimes, though, we get really busy.  Things can languish.  Things can be forgotten, only to be unearthed weeks later.  I have, in the past, requested manuscripts based on queries I received a month or two previously.  This, however, rarely happens.  It's not wise to hold out hope that you're the person whose submission was simply misplaced.  Likewise, if you're querying several agents at once, and you don't hear back from any of them, the chances that your query was simply misplaced by all of them is improbable.

In any case, waiting around several months for an agent to finally get back to you is a sucker's game.  You should be making productive use of that time to research new agents, make new submissions, or to revise, re-write, or write something new.

Now, if you're the impatient type, I want to be clear, don't abandon hope immediately.  For paper submissions the response time is usually slower.  Things are usually slower when the Post Office is involved.  Don't expect to hear back on a paper submission in under a month.  I would say give it two months.  Email submissions, give it two weeks (three if you're patient) if you don't hear back then move on.  If you receive no response to an unsolicited submission, don't bother to follow up.  You don't owe an agent who hasn't responded to your initial query any of your time.  If they miss out on the opportunity to represent you because they're disorganized, or slow to respond, that's their problem, not yours. If you have run out of options, and the only agent who hasn't rejected you is one that hasn't responded to your query in six months, don't bother following up. They probably won't respond, and even if they did, would you really want them to be your agent anyway?


Back to Square One


Okay, so you've been universally rejected by every agent/editor.  Are you a bad writer, or just unlucky?  It could be one, the other, or a mixture of both.  Some people just aren't cut out to be writers, some people just need practice, and some people are just plum unlucky.  I'll try to address each scenario.

Bad writers

It's time to pack it in.  You thought your book was equal parts J.K. Rowling and Dostoevsky, but it turns out your spelling is hit or miss, your grammar is atrocious, your plot is a bit hackneyed, and your characters are two dimensional.  Don't sweat it.  You're not the first person (and you certainly won't be the last) to have written a truly awful book.  You  may have pumped this jewel out during NaNoWriMo and done zero revising, or you may have painstakingly written, re-written and work-shopped your baby over the course of decades.  One thing is certain, however, you were probably the recipient of some bad advice.  I'm here to set the record straight.  Your book stinks.  It just stinks.  It's irredeemably bad.  There's no way to fix it, and there's little hope that you can ever write a better book.   No one in the publishing industry will tell you this outright, because they are afraid you'll get angry with them.  They are doing you a great disservice.  You need to seek out someone who can give you an honest assessment of your talent (or lack thereof).  Someone that you can be certain will unabashedly tell you that you suck and, in detail, why you suck.  You will know you have found this person when you receive your manuscript back covered in red ink, and full of criticisms that will make you want to curl up into the fetal position and cry for weeks.  If, after this assessment, you can find the strength to continue writing, you are either a true artist or you're delusional (at a certain point there's little distinction).

Bad books

Maybe you're not a bad writer, you've just produced a lemon, and now you need to fix it or let it go.  You had a great concept, but you flubbed the execution, or maybe you're decent craftsmen that built something nobody needs.  In either case, you're just slightly off the mark.  It's time to adjust your aim.

If you're brimming with great story ideas, but you're not so great at bringing them to fruition, then maybe you just need more practice, or a bit of education.  Writers workshops can be a good resource, but they can also be bastions of bad advice.  I'd recommend a three pronged approach.  1. Read more of the type of book you'd like to write, and think critically about how your favorite writers  make their books work. 2. Read a few books on writing and see if you can learn anything  3. Write more, and have that writing evaluated (as in a workshop).  Practice makes perfect, and the more you write the better you'll get.  Workshops can be helpful, if only to get a different perspective on your writing, and to get yourself thinking differently about your work.

If you're a decent writer but you find yourself the recipient of several complimentary rejects, maybe it's not your writing, but the subject matter you choose to write about.  If you choose topics most people find boring, or topics so far outside the zeitgeist that no one can sympathize with the characters, then maybe you're heading in the wrong direction.  While it's true that a really excellent writer could make a book about a family of head lice a compelling read, maybe you don't have that level of genius.  You should probably learn to recognize your own limitations, and realize that your book about the secret life of dung beetles, while comprised of all the necessary components, probably isn't going to net you a book deal.  You need to think about who your readers would be and try to find a story you both can appreciate, rather than explore your own more esoteric interests.


Bad Luck

I feel for you unlucky folks.  I really do.  You've written a great book, but alas the the universe conspires against you.  You've got everything that agents and editors say they want, but for some reason your rejects are piling up.  Agents and editors are all very complimentary, but none of them want to take you on.  WTF?!  There's a real simple answer to this: market conditions.  You may have just missed the tail end of a trend, you may have written a book for a smaller market and the publishers rosters are already full, you may have written a book that's too close in style and content to other major books that were acquired ahead of yours.  It's not your fault.  You did your job, and you did it well, but no one wants to take the risk that your book won't sell.  My suggestion is to just shake it off.  You've got independent verification that you can write well, now you just need to do some more writing.  Don't try to chase trends, because that can put you in the same sort of trouble you are in already.  Just write the best book you can possibly write.  You may end up in the same place again because--let's face it--you're unlucky, but the only way to beat bad luck is by working extra hard to keep ahead of it.  If you write consistently better books eventually you'll catch your break, luck be damned.

Utopia/Dystopia

The Amanda Hocking phenomena has provided a bright ray of hope for authors who have felt stymied by their attempts at commercial publication. While I am pleased by her success, and hopeful for the future it hints at, I am concerned about the debate that's risen in light of her story's popularity. Many megabytes of tweets, blog comments, and facebook prognostications about the imminent demise of the publishing industry have followed this otherwise welcome news.

What I think is missing from this debate is a serious appraisal of just where we're at as authors, as readers, and as publishing professionals.  Publishing has been around for a long long time, and it has survived many pardigmatic shifts in the way the written word is delivered and consumed by readers.  It will survive this shift as well.  In fact, it might just come out the other end in better shape than it has been in a long time.  That is, if we can come together an prevent it from becoming a nightmare.

What has plagued publishing recently is not competition from self-publishers, or piracy, or the internet in general, but the increasing consolidation of publishers, distributors, and booksellers in the physical world.  Even before e-books were doubling their market share every year, print sales were down, independent bookstores were shuttering, and the publishing conglomerates were gobbling up imprints by the dozen. 

The problem that is created by consolidating interests, is that they produced one-size-fits-all products.  Independent bookstores used to cater the specialized needs of their customers, or they'd go out of business.  Big box stores were able to ignore this relationship because their real-estate afforded them the opportunity to draw in more customers, and they could float themselves on a handful of mega best-sellers while using that revenue to carry smaller stocks of a broader variety of other titles.  In the heyday of the nineties consumers had money to burn on entertainment, and books were a good value compared to music and movies. The success of big box stores drove many smaller bookstores out of business.

The dominance of the big box stores warped the priorities of the publishers, who prized better sellers for a general readership over better books for a smaller, more diverse, and more enduring readership. That paradigm couldn't have survived for long, as the readers willing to shell out money for a hardcover of the same sort of thriller they read last week (or more likely last year) become fewer and fewer, and as fewer people were being led to mid-list authors whose books just sat on the shelf in the back of a big box store.

That landscape has shifted through the oughts.  Consumer spending is still recovering and big box bookstores now compete with cheaper and more plentiful entertainment options (Netflix costs less than a trade paperback, and gives you unlimited movies for an entire month).  Some like Barnes and Noble have managed to do okay in adapting to these challenges, others like Borders have run aground.  The publishers that once benefited tremendously  from their relationships with the big box stores, now find themselves having to scale back on number of titles they publish.  Whole imprints have gone away, and further consolidation is only going to lead to a narrowing of potential opportunities for publishers to connect with readers.

No one doubts that the publishing industry is now at a crossroads. Where it goes from here will determine whether it becomes a utopia or dystopia.  In either scenario, the publishing industry is going to survive, because despite the claims of some e-book futurists, the market for print products isn't on the verge of disappearing any time soon.  What it looks like, however, depends not solely on the publishers, but on authors and readers as well.

Because I'm a big Pollyanna, I'm going to address the dystopic vision of publishing first.

In this version of publishing, the industry has become a veritable Pottersville.  It's a fully synergized vampiric horror that seeks to squeeze the last drops of life out of the author's already meager royalties while throwing its publicity weight behind a series of forgettable thrillers, and ghostwritten celebrity books that will molder the second they leave the bookstore.  Mid list authors are more or less ignored, while editors chase best-sellers whose diminishing returns set the bar lower and lower for what a best-seller means.  In the digital world, the publishing giants will simply dump backlists on their e-tailer partners and leave the responsibility for creative marketing in the hands of third-parties.

Meanwhile, the multitude of authors whose books were deemed not commercial enough for "mainstream" publishing will take their raw materials to the readers directly and build small, but loyal, followings selling e-books at pennies on the dollar.  This will work well for some, but for most it will prove disastrous to their careers, their nerves, and their writing. After all, it's hard to run an online media enterprise, while continuing to crank out a book every nine months.  Just ask Amanda Hocking.

The people who will suffer the most, however, will be the readers.  On the one hand they will have a overwhelming abundance of self-published e-books whose quality will range from lunatic ravings to fine literature with no way to differentiate between the two, on the other they will have a "mainstream" publisher who is trying to oversell an overpriced and overproduced version of a warmed-over concept from a decade ago.  In both instances the number of books available per year will shrink, as publishers cut back on the number of titles, and as authors become self-publishers that are too overwhelmed with doing all the other work of publicity and distribution to actually do the job of writing books.   

For those who still love brick-and-mortar bookstores, they will find that the independent bookstores are gone and that their big box store has become a magazine stand full of more knick-knacks, toys, and tie-in products, than books.  

All this version of the future requires is that we continue along the same path we're already on.  Publishers need only consolidate until they are a homogeneous paste, and readers and authors need only isolate themselves in their own fantasy of a digital marketplace that requires no guidance or organization.  The rest will work itself out on its own.

I think I have a better vision of how this whole thing plays out. It's a win win win situation for all parties involved, but it's going to take some work.

In this scenario, publishers realize the golden opportunity that the electronic market provides, and they make it work for them.  They curate lists of mid-list authors and keep backlists alive through creative packaging of online materials to serve more diverse niches in their readership.  They are able to better cross-promote using online media, and draw attention to their mid-list from their front-list and visa-versa.  They will effectively harness the energy of the web to build books in print, and will establish a long-tail model for backlist titles that will help raise revenues.  Those revenues will then be reinvested in finding and building new imprints, and creating a more diverse catalogue that serves the varied interests of many smaller readerships, rather than a singular focus on finding the next mega best-seller.  This growth will only beget more growth.

Parallel to their efforts, a community of online publishers and self-publishers springs up which is able to explore new and exciting frontiers. Without the burden of having their e-editions tied to a print product, these e-publishers will be able to start and establish trends in real time, and create viral successes online.  When a niche becomes popularized there will be a precedent for partnering with publishers to produce print products, which will enable them to build on their success offline as well.  In this way the self-publishing/e-only market will become the trying grounds for larger mainstream success, and will help keep the industry as a whole moving forward.

Bookstores will become the center of communities rather than cold book warehouses.  They will sell not just books, but culture in general, and will be home to events featuring local, national, and international authors, artists, and musicians.

This utopia requires everyone's participation, and a few sacrifices.

Publishers are going to have to step up their investment in online presence and marketing.  Sites like Suvudu, Tor.com and eHarlequin are steps in the right direction, but publishers need to do better.  They need to market smarter, and they need to better utilize their e-tailer partners.

Publishers also need to be more fair with e-book royalties, or they'll risk losing the enormous revenues they can generate by making use of a long-tail model in backlist sales.  It's hardly worth taking a hard line on e-book royalties if the publisher's share is going to be zero as authors refuse to hand over e-rights for older titles, and revert rights to books that are out-of-print.  

Then there's the issue of pricing, which will require concessions both from publishers and readers.  

Readers will have to pay a premium, whether online or in hardcover, for early adoption.  That's just the way it is.  If you want the newest Apple gadget, you're willing to pay a premium, it's the same thing for books.  If you're buying it the second it's released, expect to pay the hardcover cost whether you're getting a download or the real deal at the bookstore.  Paying the premium price for early adoption will help publishers gain the revenue to build newer and better products, and to invest in the infrastructure that will allow them to offer consumers deals on backlist books.

On that note, publishers need to make concessions about price on the backlist side.  There comes a point when the digital product is no longer undercutting any potential print sale, and the only engine that will drive sales is a lower price.  Selling backlist e-books at $3.99 or lower will help drive backlist sales, and it will delight readers looking for a bargain.  Authors whose books have finished their life cycle in print, can be given new life online at a price point that encourages readers who are looking to explore different styles and genres.

Bookstores are going to have to invest in events planning, and creative marketing, to drive readers into the stores.  You can't just rely on foot-traffic, and a coffee bar.  You need people to find a reason to be there, and you need to connect with your local community in ways that are not simply commercial. 

Authors you're going to have to recognize that publishing is a team effort.  In print it requires the work of agents, editors, publicity departments, reviewers, distributors, bookstore buyers, and even bookstore clerks.  Online it is comprised of e-tailers, bloggers, and social networking sites. Just like Flaubert, you have to realize that books are not like children.  Sure it may take nine months to create one, but once it's written it's not yet a whole entity unto itself, magically imbued with a life of its own.  A finished manuscript is merely the plan for a monument, and it requires not just your effort, but the effort of thousands to erect.  You have to ditch the attitude that you can do this all yourself, and start building partnerships that will help get your book in the hands of readers.

As for me, what I will need to do in this new world?  As an agent, I will have a lot more work to do as the liaison between the parallel enterprises of self-publishers, e-publishers and "legacy" publishers.  It's going to be the agent's responsibility to hammer out the framework for turning an online only product into a print product in a way that doesn't upset the balance between the needs of the print publisher and the e-author/e-publisher.  In many ways the agency I work for has already taken the first steps in this process.  My agency has made reprint and anthology deals with Pocket on behalf of our client the online romance and erotica publisher Ellora's Cave, and helped John Scalzi take the Old Man's War series from his blog to the best-seller list.   My own client Coscom Entertainment has gone from selling thousands of print-on-demand products exclusively through e-tailers to having tens of thousands of books in bookstores through deals with Gallery and Sourcebooks. The results haven't always been great--some reprint deals haven't been the best vehicles for a e-book/print partnership--but we're making strides every day in creating the contractual basis for this utopia, and creating precedents that will help build better relationships between the print and digital worlds in the future.  I'm committed to making this utopia work for authors, publishers, and readers alike.  It's my sincere hope that we will continue to build a better publishing paradigm together.