Category: Book Writin'

This tale of trickery sent in by Rob Loughran:

My name is Rob. I'm a cheater.

Hi Rob!

No, I'll confess, but I don't want to rehabilitate. I'm proud of how and why I cheated. For nearly five years I tried to get my book High Steaks published. I read Writer's Digest magazine and attended seminars on marketing your novel and laid out thirty bucks a year for an updated copy of The Writer's Market. And I did what they told me: I wrote a cover letter outlining my publishing credits and bundled it up with the first four chapters of High Steaks; included a synopsis and an SASE for the editor's convenience. I marked down the date, the publisher, and the editor in a submissions journal.

The SASEs returned (anywhere from three months to a year; some are still out there in orbit) with a form rejection slip. I did, however get a bite, and sent in, along with High Hopes, High Steaks. The manuscript returned with a form rejection slip: Not For Us At This Time --The Editors. That's okay, I'd been writing professionally for over twenty years and I know that rejection is part of the game; it bothers me about as much as the speedbumps in the Safeway parking lot.

My wife, not so calm.

Inserted into a colorful torrent of obscenities (she works with truck drivers-"colorful" truck drivers) was the observation that the manuscript had red wine stains and crumbs all over it. "Not for *#!~ us at this #@!~*& time? It looks like the %$^^+ passed it around at their #`!#**&+ Christmas party!" She was right. It had made the rounds of some office affair. Other High Steaks manuscripts were requested and returned in better states of repair, but with the same rejection slip. High Steaks is 80,000 words, which is roughly 450 manuscript pages. The cost of paper, printer cartridges, mailers, postage and RETURN postage ain't cheap and I couldn't go ahead like this indefinitely for two reasons. First the cost, but more crucial: I ran out of publishers.

Not every (nowadays most) publisher accepts unagented submissions and there is a giant Catch-22: Publishers won't read a novel unless it's agented, but you can't get an agent unless you've had a book published.

Horse puckey!

continued...

Some of my favorite tidbits of advice and questions answered from the week of Miss Snark:

Dear Miss Snark: What on earth does an agent mean when she asks "for first refusal on representation for a month after receiving it." Is this just another way of asking for an exclusive reading?

Why agents don't write specific responses to each query.

Dear Miss Snark: I'm preparing my query letter. I have several non-fiction publications, but no fiction. I have written two novel length fanfiction pieces that received a large number of positive reviews. Would it be appropriate to include the web address and pen name in the letter?

Dear Miss Snark: would my using a pseudonym make it even harder for me to get an agent?

"WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!" If you were a studio audience and this blog were a sitcom, that's what you'd be saying after you finish reading this post. Excerpted here from the book Writing the Great American Romance Novel is Catherine Lanigan's advice on writing the love scene. So please be mature about this and don't squeal too much. If you want to read more of Catherine's advice, you can pick up her book here at Allworth Press. By the way, a few people have asked me about the photo here and I got it off a Google image search for "love scene." It is a still from the Marlon Brando/Rita Moreno flick The "Night of the Following Day".

In a romance novel, the love scenes are one of the most
critical pieces of writing you will do. Be assured that your audience not only wants these scenes in the book, but they are paying very good money to the authors who deliver them well.

Love Scenes and "Head Action"

The action, dialogue, and pacing in the love scenes are unbelievably important. Again, you will need to refer back to or keep in mind the sub-genre you are writing.

If this is a spiritual- or religious-based story, your love scene is not going to be graphic in detail. Your dialogue is not going to hint at anything racy or spicy. You will want to keep the Victoria's Secret underwear in the drawer, but that does not mean that your characters would be prudes, either. There is nothing more beautiful than the human body.

No matter what the genre of romance you have chosen, your hero and heroine should always have respect for each other in bed. Their dialogue will be loving at all times.

They can have fun and kid around, but loving respect is what makes a hero and a heroine.

Even in the raciest love scenes you can write, the best part of the scene is what is going on in the heads of the protagonists.

It is best to break the love scene down into four parts.

continued...

...So says Patricia Fry at Writers Weekly. Well, I think most of us know that book proposals are used for much more than How-To books. However Patricia gives some good insights on things to keep in mind when you do craft your proposal for your own book, How-To or otherwise.

Armed with an MFA from Ohio State and a partial manuscript for her first novel, this author describes to Carmen Sheidel how she landed an agent and scored a book deal:

You wrote parts of your book at writers' colonies. What was that experience like? When I first moved to New York, I had no money, at all, and I had gotten out of a grad program where I had been treated as a writer, then I was in the city and I was treated like a temp. I moved to New York in October and I went to Yaddo in early November, and it was just so nice to be among these other great writers and great artists -- and not even have it be a question that I was one of them. I was at Yaddo in the winter, which is very, very small, there were like 12 people, so it was me, and Susan Cheever and Oscar [Hijuelos], whose name I can't say, and Andrew Sean Greer, who was a writer who I had known and read for years. It was interesting to be there and have the experience and be treated as a writer. McDowell was very similar. That's where I finished the book. At McDowell they have little plaques in every studio and you sign your name, and so I was in the studio where Alice Walker hand been, and Jonathan Franzen and Michelle Herman who was this professor I had in grad school. It was really interesting, Leonard Bernstein had been in my studio. It was like, "Oh, wow!" And they trusted me with this place!

How did you support yourself when you came to New York from the Midwest?
I was doing a lot of freelance work for the National Enquirer. I was really fortunate in that I got nice grants to Yaddo and McDowell. Basically I did whatever I could find. I poured wine for Wine and Spirits and wrote women's magazine stories for the lesser known women's publications. I just scraped things together.

More here, for AG members.

"After spending two-plus decades creating strategic visions for companies like Citibank and AT&T - I thought my brand-shaping days were behind me after I sold my first novel. But, soon after I decided to leave advertising, my publisher sent me an author questionnaire that presented me with an ironic challenge: how to position the brand of me." James P. Othmer, Pop Quiz victim, discusses the new tricks he had to learn here at StrategyMag.

Here are some of the best tidbits of advice from my favorite anonymous literary agent:

Has your editor recommended you try another editor who will charge you to read your work? Dump 'em both.

Oh so many bits of advice on sending in the query.

"When a publisher retains 'all rights' and the option clause grants "first look" -- is this bad?"

"In a recent discussion on an online writing group, a number of women members felt adamant that if a man wrote a novel with a female protagonist, he needed to explain / justify / rationalize his reasons for doing so in the query letter. Is this really an issue?"

Robin Friedman at Absolute Write chats with Alexandra Cooper, Assistant Editor at Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers about what the publisher looks for from its authors, amongst other things:

What kinds of books do you like to work on?

Novels and pictures books represent different challenges. For novels, I love being in the trenches of writing-- figuring out how to solve problems on the sentence and paragraph level. I am a stickler for le mot juste! That's also essential in picture books, where the challenge is to find the right balance of text so that the illustrator can expand on the story. One of the most fun parts of the job is finding new illustrators! In both genres, I am interested in books with strong, spunky female protagonists with real voices that readers can relate to, even if the situations are foreign.

More here.

Are you impatient? A control freak? A legal risk? Congratulations! You might be a perfect candidate for publishing your own stuff, according to Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly. "I'm sure I don't need to convince most of you that self-publishing has been and is increasingly being recognized as a perfectly respectable way to get published. It can also be a very lucrative form of self-employment, if you treat marketing your book(s) like a full-time job," she says, although reading this two-part article might also convince you that even though you'll be in some good company, you'll be in some not-so-great company, too.

For my conservative readers out there (if there are any), this post is from the Daily Kos and is written in in honor of "finally starting to reclaim the best-seller lists from the likes of Ann Coulter." Regardless, it's a good practical series on book publishing, especially for bloggers.