Agents

About a Book (Panicking and Pitches)

April 4, 2019 By Bryn Greenwood 36 Comments

This happens more often than I’d like to admit: I’m sitting around with friends or acquaintances or random strangers, and the fact that I’m a writer comes up. (I never noticed before just how often people say, “What do you do for living?” until I started answering that question with “I’m a writer.”) From there the conversation usually moves to what genre I write, what I’ve published, when my next book is coming out, and then like a hand grenade tossed into my lap: “What’s your book about?”

I freeze. My brain sets off alarms that sound all over my body. Panic sets in. I try to buy time by saying, “Wellllll,” and “Uuuuummm,” and “Okay, sooooo.” My first book was published seven years ago, my fourth novel is coming in August, and this still happens every time someone asks me what my book is about. When I received a PR Q&A from my publisher with the question “what is your book about?” I may have yelled out loud, “Don’t you people have a whole sales department to tell me what my book is about?”

Part of this difficulty is related to many writers’ struggles with query letters and elevator pitches. After you’ve spent months or years crafting a complex and nuanced story, now you’re supposed to boil it down to a few sentences? I’m terrible at this in part for the same reason I write novels instead of flash fiction.

The other part of why this question is so hard for me is about the panic and how my brain responds to it. More than one person has suggested that I should just memorize my official pitch word for word. Sadly most of the time the panic wipes my brain clean, and all I can find in my Things I’ve Memorized file is a few random Bible verses and the Pledge of Allegiance. Even on the occasions when I successfully regurgitate what I’ve memorized, I just sound like a malfunctioning robot. If I’m supposed to be selling my book to potential readers, that is not the way to do it.

I wish I could tell you that I have found the solution to this problem, and that you can read about it after the jump, but the truth is I choked on my one and only attempt to pitch a novel to an agent in person twenty years ago, and I choked again this last week.

I was at a gathering of booksellers and inevitably I was asked the question about my forthcoming novel. Cue panic, followed by me opening my mouth and having a few hundred words fall out in no particular order. I’m here to tell you that this is not ideal, but it’s also not a complete catastrophe. After all The Princess Bride has been successfully selling itself with a pile of random words for many years: “Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escape. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.”

All this to say that my wisdom is much more philosophical than practical. Over the years of being asked what my books are about, I have learned to accept two things: [Read more…]

30 Things I’ve Learned About the Writing Life

November 27, 2018 By Barbara O'Neal 22 Comments

On Thanksgiving, I celebrated 30 years since the sale of my first book. It’s a crazy milestone and made me consider this writing and publishing life with a sense of bemusement. To celebrate, I have collected 30 things I’ve learned in those three decades.

1. Persistence is more important than talent.

2. Be nice to everyone. It’s a very small world. The meek editorial assistant of today will one day be running the prestigious imprint you most want to break into.

3. No one actually knows what talent means.

4. Don’t compare yourself to others.

4. Don’t buy into your own press. There’s nothing more obnoxious than a writer who swans around in a perfume of her own self-importance.

5. Learning never stops—which is one of the best things about the writing game. No one can possibly understand all of it.

6. A great agent will be your best ally—and the relationship can last as long as a marriage. I’ve been with my agent Meg Ruley for 20 years.

7. A bad agent is worse than no agent at all—by far.

8. ALL writers need good editors. I plan to write an entire blog on this very subject in the near future—editors are enormously important to creating your best work, and creating those relationships can make you a much better writer. No book should enter the world without editorial eyes. Period.

9. Some books will do better than others for absolutely no reason you can fathom. [Read more…]

19+

Bucket List for Writers

October 9, 2018 By Keith Cronin 33 Comments

sometimes you just gotta say bucket — Um, I don’t think this is the kind of bucket they’re talking about…

I believe it’s healthy to have goals. After all, having something to aim for can give us a sense of purpose, and can help us keep our efforts focused. We often hear of “the writer’s journey,” and I think it’s an apt metaphor, because this can turn into a VERY long trip. For those who manage to stay on the path, there are many milestones along the way – along with many hurdles.

While a writer might start out with a single goal (e.g., write the damn book), if that writer is serious about getting published, she might soon find herself adding multiple items to her to-do list. Armed with this list, off she goes on her journey!

And then, reality sets in.

For most – if not all – of us, it soon becomes apparent that this whole writing-and-publishing-a-book thing can take a while. Sometimes quite a while. Given how long it can take to get a writing career off the ground, a writer’s to-do list can start to resemble another list that has become popular in recent years: the “bucket list.”

Note: For those not familiar with the idiom, this is a list of things you want to accomplish before you kick the bucket. (And for those of you not familiar with what “kick the bucket” means, it’s a reference to an ancient – and anatomically challenging – romantic ritual involving a large bucket, three pairs of oversized steel-toed boots, 12 gallons of tapioca pudding, and 23 well-trained riverdancers, preferably double-jointed. Honest.)

For today’s post, I’ve attempted to assemble a typical bucket list for an aspiring writer, based on a combination of my own initial plans, accomplishments to date, and ongoing goals. As my journey has progressed, the items on this list have tended to shift and evolve – if you ask me next week, my list might look quite different. But for today at least, here’s my first stab at a bucket list for writers:

1. Finishing your manuscript

This is huge. Seriously, this could be the only item on your list, and it would still be a MAJOR accomplishment. By completing a manuscript, you’ve done something 99.999999% of the population hasn’t done.

Even more impressive, you’ve done something that probably 98% of the people who ever said “I should write a book” have never gotten around to actually doing. So if you have done it, you should congratulate yourself on a significant accomplishment, and celebrate it in whatever way you see fit. (Caveat: you might want to avoid celebratory activities that require a large bucket, three pairs of oversized steel-toed boots, 12 gallons of tapioca pudding, and 23 well-trained riverdancers – even if they’re double-jointed. I’m just looking out for your safety here.)

2. Signing with an agent

Okay, if you’re self-publishing, this won’t be on your list. But since I started my journey back when stone tablets were still more common than e-books, this represented a well-established rite of passage that I was eager and determined to complete. [Read more…]

When Zero Is Greater Than One

September 24, 2018 By Susan Spann 5 Comments

During the early days—correction, decade—of my writing career, before I had either an agent or a publishing deal, I often felt a kind of desperation. When would it finally be my turn? When would I see my work in print?

Would my day ever come?

I wrote, I researched agents and publishers, I pitched and queried, and—like everyone—I received rejections. Rejections upon rejections, until I almost dreaded opening my email for fear of finding another missive that began, “Although I enjoyed your work, I’m afraid I just didn’t love it quite enough to take a chance in this difficult market . . .”

At times I felt tempted to stop researching “fits” and simply adopt a shotgun approach in the hopes of finding any agent or publisher willing to take a chance on my stories.

Fortunately, twenty years of experience as a publishing lawyer stayed my hand. Because, despite the temptation, I knew that having no agent and no publishing deal is better than having a deal I would later regret.

The same is true for you.

Before signing a contract with an agent or publishing house, you must take off the emotional artist hat and evaluate the offer with a non-emotional, business manager’s eye. Consider every aspect of the deal. Does it make business sense? Does it fit your plans and desires for your overall career? For where you are now, and where you hope to go?

Beyond that, take the time to consider these important factors: [Read more…]

If I Knew Then What I Know Now

July 10, 2018 By Keith Cronin 28 Comments

past meets present — The author before and after learning how to use a semicolon

I get approached from time to time by aspiring new writers, asking for advice on how to get started. The longer I’ve been doing this, the harder it gets to answer them. At this point I’ve been in the game nearly 20 years, so how do I condense what I’ve learned into a quick conversation or a brief email? And what if they are interested in a completely different type of writing than the kind that has made me as rich and famous as I currently am? (Hmmm – now that I think about it, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. But I digress…)

So how to advise them? Do I lecture them on the ever-changing industry? Warn them of the dangers of reading the works of Clive Cussler? Or simply hand them a dog-eared copy of The Elements of Style and turn around and run? Depending on who asks, it’s hard to determine which advice would be the most useful.

When in doubt, fire up the time machine!

I’ve been binge-watching the old Stargate SG-1 TV series recently, and several of the stories focus on time travel, a concept that has always fascinated me. In a couple of episodes, the main characters manage to pass messages to versions of themselves who are living in a different time.

This got me to thinking: what kind of messages would Current-Day Keith send to Past Keith?

After considering obvious nuggets like “buy stock in Amazon” and “don’t enroll in Trump University,” I started thinking about what I would tell Keith The Writer From The Past (or, KTWFTP). Since SG-1 episodes usually incorporate a ticking clock or some other increasingly urgent complications, I decided to ramp up the pressure, and limit myself to five pieces of advice. Here’s what I came up with to share with the younger (and yes, hairier) Keith.

1. Know your genre – and its conventions.
Probably the biggest – and hardest – lesson I’ve learned as a writer is that genre matters. Historically the genre of a book just wasn’t something I thought or cared about – as a reader or as a writer. But after writing one hard-to-categorize manuscript after another, the first message I would pass on to KTWFTP is to pick a damn genre already. It will make things SO much simpler.

Why? Genre simplifies things by setting expectations. It helps an agent sell your book. It helps a publisher market your book. It helps a reader choose your book.

And if you’re self-publishing, it helps YOU market your book, which is utterly crucial. In an era when anybody can publish anything, you need a way to make your book stand out to your potential readers. [Read more…]