I've started sending out my pitch to get my second book published.
Here is my standard query letter, and below that, the parts of the formal proposal that spell out in more detail what the book is about.
Query Letter:
"When you're a fish out of water you look for the nearest ocean" — Anthony T. Hincks
THAT GUY IN OUR WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASS is a nonfiction memoir about a genderqueer sissy male, Derek, who decided that women's studies in college would be a good place to engage people in discussions about gender.
This narrative tale follows Derek down Oklahoma highways and into heroin dens in Harlem and then into the homeless shelters of 1980s New York City, as the determined but not always practical Derek pursues his dream.
Along the way, the story delves into the complexities of privilege and social identity in ways that challenge assumptions about power and marginalization—not in primary-color simplicity but by exploring privilege and deprivation along a number of different dimensions and showing it in all of its native complexity, all while still respecting a concern for empowering the voice of those left out.
"Hunter's prose explores the delicate tapestry of privilege and power... this is a deployment of 'show, not tell' I've rarely seen done... narrative social theory" — An early reader
Length: 95,962 words
From the Formal Proposal:
Elevator Statement —
In 1980, I came out as a sissy. I was reclaiming the term the same way that proud lesbians referred to themselves as "dykes" or the way that gay folks were reclaiming "queer". "Sissy" comes from the word "sister" and so it seemed like the right word: a sisterlike, i.e., feminine or girlish, male person.
We had gay rights activists back then. We even had trans activists. A lot of people didn't understand why I was using a new and different term. But I wasn't gay or trans. It was something else.
Trans women, both back then and today, tend to say "Don't see me as a trans woman. See me as a woman". That wasn't me. I didn't consider myself female. I considered myself femme. I didn't identify with the gay rights movement: my sexuality wasn't same-sex attraction and I saw a need to untangle gender from either physical sex OR sexual orientation.
The activists I identified with the most were feminists. They were the ones who said having a different behavioral standard and polarized social roles for the sexes was sexist.
So I headed off to the university to major in women's studies.
That Guy in our Women's Studies Class is a rare thing in the world of memoirs: a sequel. In March 2020, my book GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, was published by Sunstone Press (Santa Fe NM).
GenderQueer told the coming-of-age and coming-out story of realizing I had a different gender identity and of giving it a name. At the end of it, I vow to confront the world about how sissy males are treated. In That Guy in our Women's Studies Class, I set out to do exactly that, choosing the world of academic women's studies as my platform.
Elaborating on the Concept —
"When you're a fish out of water you look for the nearest ocean" — Anthony T. Hincks
As a male person very focused on the unfairness of gender expectations, I headed for the largest metropolitan center I could easily get to—New York City—figuring that even if my identity made me an exception to the exception to the rule, I'd be able to find people who were like me. And I pinned my hopes and dreams to women's studies, because the material I wanted to discuss with people would overlap with the material we'd be focusing on in the classroom.
That Guy in our Women's Studies Class illustrates the complexities of intersectionality, the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender and so forth. The main character is male, the privileged sex in the patriarchal context. Within the first few pages of the book, he has reason to worry that he's invading women's space by attending women's studies classes. At the same time, he's a minority within that space, and, as a gender-nonconforming sissy in the 1980s, a person with a gender identity that wasn't acknowledged and recognized yet, he's been somewhat marginalized by gender himself.
That's the presenting surface of a larger and even more intricate situation. To get to New York and attempt to get into college, he hitchhikes across the country and becomes a homeless person on the New York streets, eventually trading in on a history of psychiatric incarceration (he'd been placed on a locked ward shortly after coming out) to get into the better-funded assistance programs, which were earmarked for the "homeless mentally ill". A person with a psychiatric diagnosis was thus both privileged among the homeless and at the same time often stripped of basic rights because of that same status. And we follow along as the main character commutes every day from the grounds of Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital to SUNY college campus, where most of the other students are middle class suburban commuters with the advantages and privileges of that existence.
There is also the dynamic of race: although the SUNY campus is not as disproportionately black as an historically black college such as Grambling, there is a high proportion of inner city black students living in the dorms as residential students, and there's a tension between the mostly-white commuters and the majority-black resident students. The book's main character is commuting from a different majority-minority environment, the world of formerly homeless halfway-house residents. In his second year he moves into the dormitories to live among the resident students and get away from the oppressive environment of the psychiatric facility. Over and over again, he finds his attention diverted from matters of gender identity to questions of race and racial oppression.
Meanwhile, in his academic studies, he gets increasingly immersed in studying the complex tapestry of power itself, and the larger question of its desirability, which feminist theory examines as part of the patriarchal value structure.
That Guy in our Women's Studies Class is a narrative story, with characters and conversations and a compelling storyline. While real life doesn't often resemble the trajectory of a fictional novel's plot, this particular slice of life tells that kind of tale. It's an entertaining book, one that does not read like an educational treatise. It's the story of a young out-of-town person from a small village making a go of it in the big city, of a survivor coping with life on the streets while seeking employment and a place to stay, and of a fervent activist looking for his 'people', finding a place in the world, and finding a political voice.
The people and events described in this memoir were all quite real, but to streamline and optimize the narrative flow, I sometimes combined several characters into one composite character, so as to not have to develop so many characters; and on occasions I also condensed multiple similar events and described them as single events.
The names have all been changed—including my own, for consistency. As I did in GenderQueer, I refer to myself as Derek Turner throughout.
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You're secluded in quarantine, and all the performances and events have been cancelled, so it's a good time to read a book!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
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Showing posts with label query. Show all posts
Showing posts with label query. Show all posts
Friday, August 7, 2020
Saturday, October 5, 2019
Genre Variant
Originality has its limits; to make sense to people, we have to begin in familiar territory; to say something new, we must connect it with something people already know.
But the worlds of publishing and producing constrain originality far beyond that, in their expectation that books and other creative works fit into an existing genre, and that books within a genre fit narrow specifications and tick off the requisite number of anticipated elements.
The popular mystery/detective genre has its well-established requirement of Clues, Character-Suspects (among whom the perpetrator must exist), the Escalation of further perpetrations of subsequent crimes (and further clues), and the False Suspect thrown in our path to throw us off the scent, and so on. I've never written one, although like most of us I've read many over the years.
The romance genre should have the protagonists Meet Cute but initially behave more like antagonists, give us some Steam but establish reasons to defer pleasure for awhile, and insert a Setback just as things are lighting up (a misunderstanding or an unreconcilable difference) before it resolves as HEA (happily ever after) or at least HFN (happily for now). Nothing I've written qualifies as a romance novel, although I've read my share of these as well.
If an author writes within a popular genre, and writes well with an interesting twist that makes their book ever so slightly different while still mostly fitting the template, they stand a chance of finding a literary agent and landing a publishing contract as a debut author. The publishing industry knows they have a built-in audience.
There are some genres that have fallen by the wayside, styles of writing that were once written and sold in large quantities. Would you like to be a brand new author today and find yourself pitching a book set in the 1800s in the west, featuring an upright male citizen who is a bit of a loner, who rides into a town where the establishment institutions of social order aren't working, so he makes a stand, bravely facing death and being outnumbered, but with his skill with a pistol he and his sidekick, with whom he has his conversations, prevail, only to find it necessary to ride off into the sunset because the little town is ambivalent about him?
Or perhaps you'd like to be fishing for a lit agent for your debut book that features a vivacious gal who finds herself in surrounded by deceptive creeping danger, and is fraught with self-doubt and doubt about the attractive but flawed male of wealth and power who lives in near-isolation in a crumbling old mansion; he starts off hateful but she forces his reluctant admiration and shows him her mettle, then she gradually finds that beneath his compromised and ethically questionable exterior and all his characterological flaws, he's actually shiny and principled -- ?
If you're an established author with a proven track record, it might please you to put forth a book that's a clever twist on the old classic western or gothic genre, but I suspect it would be a far more difficult sell for a first-timer.
One of my favorite examples of a creative work that doesn't shoehorn nicely into existing genres is actually a film (originally a screenplay), Miracle Mile. It kicks off as a conventional romance / romantic comedy, invoking the trope of a main character reaching a misunderstanding about something that makes him believe there's a crisis afoot, resulting in him behaving in amusingly silly ways and luring others into doing likewise. Except this time it turns out that the crisis isn't the result of a miscommunication and the story becomes an apocalyptic end-of-world tragedy.
That it ever got made (without being revamped to make it fit into genre packaging better) is a testimony to screenwriter Steve De Jarnatt and his durable stubbornness. He was a graduate of American Film Institute and had credentials for prior work on Hollywood films, but even after the Miracle Mile screenplay won awards there were misgivings about proceeding with the project as written:
-- from Radiator Heaven
I hadn't anticipated as much difficulty fencing my manuscript as I encountered. Like most newbie authors probably do, I thought the writing was the primary challenge. Thousands of people crank up their word processors for NaNoWriMo every year thinking maybe they've got a novel in them, probably assuming that if they do indeed write one, and it's good, they can get it published.
I thought of my book as fitting into a genre: the LGBTQ coming-out story. I figured it would fit on the same shelf as Conundrum: From James to Jan and Rubyfruit Jungle and The Best Little Boy in the World and Stone Butch Blues and Emergence and so forth.
Unfortunately, as with the western and the gothic romance, the LTBTQ coming-out tale is treated as an "old genre". As I wrote in my various query-letter incarnations, there have been such stories for lesbian coming-out, gay male coming-of-age, and transgender (in both of the conventional transitional directions) stories *, but nothing addressing that "Q" that sits there at the end of the acronym; nothing that explains genderqueer -- or gender variance by any other name -- that doesn't overlap with the previous four letters. Well, that may have been part of the problem: the people I was trying to sell on the story's concept didn't see any unaddressed need there, because they, too, didn't have a notion of any remaining category for which we didn't already know the story.
Aside from that, "need" isn't the operative word by which the publishing industry makes its assessment. They think in terms of "market", not "need". They consider manuscripts in terms of their potential audience, the people already poised to go out and buy such a book. Genre, in other words.
Instead of being conceptualized as a part of an LGBTQ coming-out genre, my book was typically seen as either an LGBT book or as a memoir. The LGBT genre is mostly fiction, and mostly erotica-romance at that, with an occasional literary fiction piece from an established author. The memoir genre is occupied by the personal narrative by someone we've already heard of, a celebrity or a person who made the news and attracted our attention, and hence has a "platform".
Submission Stats as of October 2019:
Total Queries to Lit Agents: 1453
Rejections: 1441
Still Outstanding: 12
Total Queries Directly to Small Publishers: 117
Rejections: 58
Still Outstanding: 43
Pub Contract Signed (then went out of business): 1
Pub Contract Signed (rights reverted, creative diffs): 1
Pub Contract Signed (publication pending): 1
* to be fair, there aren't many bisexual coming-of-age / coming-out stories either. As with so many things pertaining to bisexual people, I think there's an attitude that if we have lesbian and gay equivalents covered, the story / concerns / situation of bisexual people won't be meaningfully different so we dont need to bother.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
But the worlds of publishing and producing constrain originality far beyond that, in their expectation that books and other creative works fit into an existing genre, and that books within a genre fit narrow specifications and tick off the requisite number of anticipated elements.
The popular mystery/detective genre has its well-established requirement of Clues, Character-Suspects (among whom the perpetrator must exist), the Escalation of further perpetrations of subsequent crimes (and further clues), and the False Suspect thrown in our path to throw us off the scent, and so on. I've never written one, although like most of us I've read many over the years.
The romance genre should have the protagonists Meet Cute but initially behave more like antagonists, give us some Steam but establish reasons to defer pleasure for awhile, and insert a Setback just as things are lighting up (a misunderstanding or an unreconcilable difference) before it resolves as HEA (happily ever after) or at least HFN (happily for now). Nothing I've written qualifies as a romance novel, although I've read my share of these as well.
If an author writes within a popular genre, and writes well with an interesting twist that makes their book ever so slightly different while still mostly fitting the template, they stand a chance of finding a literary agent and landing a publishing contract as a debut author. The publishing industry knows they have a built-in audience.
There are some genres that have fallen by the wayside, styles of writing that were once written and sold in large quantities. Would you like to be a brand new author today and find yourself pitching a book set in the 1800s in the west, featuring an upright male citizen who is a bit of a loner, who rides into a town where the establishment institutions of social order aren't working, so he makes a stand, bravely facing death and being outnumbered, but with his skill with a pistol he and his sidekick, with whom he has his conversations, prevail, only to find it necessary to ride off into the sunset because the little town is ambivalent about him?
Or perhaps you'd like to be fishing for a lit agent for your debut book that features a vivacious gal who finds herself in surrounded by deceptive creeping danger, and is fraught with self-doubt and doubt about the attractive but flawed male of wealth and power who lives in near-isolation in a crumbling old mansion; he starts off hateful but she forces his reluctant admiration and shows him her mettle, then she gradually finds that beneath his compromised and ethically questionable exterior and all his characterological flaws, he's actually shiny and principled -- ?
If you're an established author with a proven track record, it might please you to put forth a book that's a clever twist on the old classic western or gothic genre, but I suspect it would be a far more difficult sell for a first-timer.
One of my favorite examples of a creative work that doesn't shoehorn nicely into existing genres is actually a film (originally a screenplay), Miracle Mile. It kicks off as a conventional romance / romantic comedy, invoking the trope of a main character reaching a misunderstanding about something that makes him believe there's a crisis afoot, resulting in him behaving in amusingly silly ways and luring others into doing likewise. Except this time it turns out that the crisis isn't the result of a miscommunication and the story becomes an apocalyptic end-of-world tragedy.
That it ever got made (without being revamped to make it fit into genre packaging better) is a testimony to screenwriter Steve De Jarnatt and his durable stubbornness. He was a graduate of American Film Institute and had credentials for prior work on Hollywood films, but even after the Miracle Mile screenplay won awards there were misgivings about proceeding with the project as written:
De Jarnatt decided to shop the script around to various Hollywood studios and was turned down several times by executives that didn’t like the downbeat ending. The filmmaker said, “I certainly could have made it a few years ago if (the hero) woke up and it was all a dream, or they saved the day.” In fact, at one point, he was approached to shoehorn Miracle Mile into Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) only with a happy ending, but he turned that offer down as well.
-- from Radiator Heaven
I hadn't anticipated as much difficulty fencing my manuscript as I encountered. Like most newbie authors probably do, I thought the writing was the primary challenge. Thousands of people crank up their word processors for NaNoWriMo every year thinking maybe they've got a novel in them, probably assuming that if they do indeed write one, and it's good, they can get it published.
I thought of my book as fitting into a genre: the LGBTQ coming-out story. I figured it would fit on the same shelf as Conundrum: From James to Jan and Rubyfruit Jungle and The Best Little Boy in the World and Stone Butch Blues and Emergence and so forth.
Unfortunately, as with the western and the gothic romance, the LTBTQ coming-out tale is treated as an "old genre". As I wrote in my various query-letter incarnations, there have been such stories for lesbian coming-out, gay male coming-of-age, and transgender (in both of the conventional transitional directions) stories *, but nothing addressing that "Q" that sits there at the end of the acronym; nothing that explains genderqueer -- or gender variance by any other name -- that doesn't overlap with the previous four letters. Well, that may have been part of the problem: the people I was trying to sell on the story's concept didn't see any unaddressed need there, because they, too, didn't have a notion of any remaining category for which we didn't already know the story.
Aside from that, "need" isn't the operative word by which the publishing industry makes its assessment. They think in terms of "market", not "need". They consider manuscripts in terms of their potential audience, the people already poised to go out and buy such a book. Genre, in other words.
Instead of being conceptualized as a part of an LGBTQ coming-out genre, my book was typically seen as either an LGBT book or as a memoir. The LGBT genre is mostly fiction, and mostly erotica-romance at that, with an occasional literary fiction piece from an established author. The memoir genre is occupied by the personal narrative by someone we've already heard of, a celebrity or a person who made the news and attracted our attention, and hence has a "platform".
Submission Stats as of October 2019:
Total Queries to Lit Agents: 1453
Rejections: 1441
Still Outstanding: 12
Total Queries Directly to Small Publishers: 117
Rejections: 58
Still Outstanding: 43
Pub Contract Signed (then went out of business): 1
Pub Contract Signed (rights reverted, creative diffs): 1
Pub Contract Signed (publication pending): 1
* to be fair, there aren't many bisexual coming-of-age / coming-out stories either. As with so many things pertaining to bisexual people, I think there's an attitude that if we have lesbian and gay equivalents covered, the story / concerns / situation of bisexual people won't be meaningfully different so we dont need to bother.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Sunday, February 10, 2019
Querying
I was going to send out some query letters but Optimum Online was having an outage, so I thought I'd compose a blog post about the querying process instead.
The core piece of the process is the pitch or query letter, which is going to be the leadoff part of nearly every query that gets sent out. Authors interested in getting their books published are encouraged to work long and hard on their query letters, honing them and perfecting them in order to hook the interest of the literary agents or publishers who will be reading them. They're supposed to be short, they need to grab the reader from the first sentence, they should make the reader want to hear more. On the more mechanical and utilitarian level, the query letter is supposed to provide the title of the book, the genre it fits into, its length in words, and a sense of what the core conflicts or plot trajectory or story line is about.
Obviously, given those requirements, the crafting of a query letter requires a skill, it's an art. I often wonder why having the ability to write what amounts to effective ad copy should be used as a measure of one's ability to write good-quality novel-length tomes. I mean, it's not the same process and doesn't necessarily involve the same skills, although it's reasonable to suppose there'd be some overlap. It's a bit like requiring that composers of symphonies submit a 90 second commercial jingle if they want to have the orchestra consider performing their work, and deciding on the basis of the jingle whether to look at the symphony itself. But that's how the game is played.
Some lit agents don't want anything except the query letter--just send that and if we're interested in seeing more, we'll ask. But more often, they want auxiliary accompanying documents.
The writing sample, an excerpt from the book that's being pitched, is commonly requested. The length of the excerpt varies all over the map, with some people wanting to see your first three pages and others asking you to provide your first four chapters. The most common specific requests that I've encountered are the first three pages, first five pages, first ten pages, first fifteen pages, first twenty pages, first twenty five, and first fifty; first chapter, first two chapters, first three, and first four. Given the possible variations of what constitutes chapter length, these requests are often expressed in hybrid form: "Paste the first three chapters or fifty pages", or "Send me 25 pages or first two chapters", or "Please provide your first three chapters (not to exceed 35 pages)".
You'll notice a word recurrently repeated in all of those variations. However much of it they wish to see, they nearly always want that much of the start of your book. That puts a pressure on authors to frontload their book so that things are happening rapidly on the first pages. It works against an author who prefers to set the stage and develop the characters before springing the book's primary situation on the reader, and perhaps explains Dan Brown. I suppose I do see the point to this: if a person picks up a book and it doesn't hold their attention in the early portions, they won't keep reading long enough to get to whatever may be in the book farther in. I do have my doubts about what anyone can tell about a book from reading the first five pages though, aside from "yes this writer can string sentences together in a tolerably pleasant style".
The synopsis is another thing that people often ask for. A synopsis is more or less what we used to think of as a "book report" back when we were in fourth grade. It's a summary of what happens in the book, in the order that it occurs in the book, often chapter by chapter. For fiction and memoirs and other narrative forms that have storylines, the synopsis is a description of the plot. A synopsis is usually a single page's worth, and unlike the query letter is not supposed to be a teaser but instead should reveal what's in the story, to the extent that that can be summarized in a page's worth of description.
It is also common for the description for how to submit to include a blurb about the author, providing a list of any prior books or other publications that the author has to their name, giving the author's credentials or otherwise explaining why this author is a good person to have written this tale, and giving any additional background. A request for some information about the author is particular prevalent for nonfiction titles, and often specifically includes questions about the authors platform, the existing audience of people who are already paying attention to what this authors says and writes, the folks who already follow this author on Twitter or subscribe to the author's YouTube channel and so forth.
A memoir is nonfiction and unfortunately that means authors of memoirs are expected to have a platform in a way that authors of novels are not. I wish more lit agents and publishers were inclined to recognize that memoirs have more in common with fiction than they do with How To Make Your Fortune By Investing Shrewdly in the Stock Market or The Making of the Governor: Gubernatorial Politics in the Instagram Era or Authentic Spectacular Creole Recipes For a Limited Budget.
Speaking of nonfiction, a lot of times the instructions on "how to submit" specify that people who are pitching nonfiction manuscripts should include a proposal. A proposal is a complex multi-part document designed to make the case for why this nonfiction book should be published; it typically kicks off with an extended argument for the need for such a book, then delves into the qualifications of the author to write it (this part being more or less interchangeable with the about the author piece described above), a description of the market for the book (who will be likely to consider reading it if they're made aware of it, and why), a list of comparable titles and how this book is different from what's already out there, a chapter by chapter breakdown of the material that the book will cover (this part, for a memoir, is loosely identical to a synopsis; for The Making of the Governor and other more conventional nonfiction books, it would be more like an outline of topics and subtopics that the book will address and how those topics are organized), and, finally, a marketing plan, a proposed course of action for publicizing the book and bringing it to the attention of people likely to purchase it.
Oh, and proposals will typically contain sample chapters. For once, though, the tendency is not to concentrate on the material most direct adjacent to the front cover. In a proposal, a sample chapter may be from any part of the book. Some proposals may contain two or three sample chapters, and in keeping with that, the instructions for submitting material may specify that one should send a proposal with a specified number of sample chapters.
Less commonly, lit agents and publishers may request a list and/or discussion of comparable titles as a standalone alternative to a formal proposal, or may request a discussion of the likely market for the book.
In the United States (although not so much in the UK), literary agents typically do not want to mess with file attachments, at least at the initial-query stage, and so all of the above components are to be pasted into the body of the email. More often than not, submission procedures will specifically say that no file attachments will be opened or even that no emails containing file attachments will be read.
Email has limited capacities for text formatting; despite the occasional instruction from a literary agent to include everything in the body of the email and yet to "be sure to indent every paragraph, use one inch margins on all sides, and set the text to double spaced throughout", email doesn't handle indentation of a paragraph's first lines, doesn't do double spacing, and can't be relied upon to format the text in a specific font or point size. Even italics and boldface are pretty iffy. I've found it useful to maintain separate text copies of all of these query components, one with an extra line of white space to offset divisions between paragraphs so that it works reliably as part of an email body.
I have a querying engine that lets me quickly assemble an outbound email:
As you can see from the dropdown menu, I can append a synopsis, a full fledged proposal, writing samples of various sizes, an about-the-author blurb, and other components of a query to the current email body and then send it in that format. (I can also send any one of those pieces as a file attachment for the occasional agent or publisher who wants to receive the proposal or sample chapters as a Word or PDF document instead).
You may be thinking that this doesn't seem very personalized, and indeed some lit agents' instructions say we should "please tell me why you selected me as the agent that you want on this project" and indicate that they prefer to receive letters that don't make them feel like they're receiving spam that has gone out to all the other lit agents out there. I do sometimes customize my query letters, editing them with an additional note to say "I thought this would be of particular appeal to you because of what you said in your 2017 interview with Writer's World about wanting more LGBTQ material written in our own voices" or whatever. But writers' workshops on crafting and perfecting the ideal query letter abound, as do online forums such as "Query Letter Hell" on Absolute Write, all of which are oriented around the notion that one hones and polishes a query letter and then sends it out to the various people that one wishes to query, not that one starts from scratch writing a query letter with one individual recipient in mind. And in my situation in particular, there are seldom a lot of legitimately good reasons to query this lit agent instead of that lit agent. It's not like any of them have a track record of representing genderqueer coming-out and coming-of-age stories and therefore would be a good choice for representing mine as well. There are those who have indicated an interest in handling "lesbian/gay" material and there are those who say that they represent memoirs or narrative nonfiction, but very few who have any kind of track record with coming-out stories or anything else that readily compares to what I wrote. So the honest answer in most cases to "why did you decide to query me on this project?" is along the lines of "you are in the business and open to queries and you are alive and breathe air".
As of today, I have sent 1,424 queries out to literary agents and an additional 64 to small publishers that allow authors to query them directly. From the lit agents I have received 1,292 rejections; 132 queries are currently outstanding. On five or six occasions, lit agents have requested more material before ultimately saying they were not interested in representing my book, but none have ever offered me a business arrangement. From the publishers, I twice had signed contracts to have my book published, once with a publisher that went bankrupt and once with a publisher who assigned an editor to me who wanted to discard the first 33% of the book, which I was unwilling to do; I've had 62 rejections and none are currently outstanding because I was complying with a publisher's policy of exclusivity, and only got the rejection letter the other day.
———————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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Index of all Blog Posts
The core piece of the process is the pitch or query letter, which is going to be the leadoff part of nearly every query that gets sent out. Authors interested in getting their books published are encouraged to work long and hard on their query letters, honing them and perfecting them in order to hook the interest of the literary agents or publishers who will be reading them. They're supposed to be short, they need to grab the reader from the first sentence, they should make the reader want to hear more. On the more mechanical and utilitarian level, the query letter is supposed to provide the title of the book, the genre it fits into, its length in words, and a sense of what the core conflicts or plot trajectory or story line is about.
Obviously, given those requirements, the crafting of a query letter requires a skill, it's an art. I often wonder why having the ability to write what amounts to effective ad copy should be used as a measure of one's ability to write good-quality novel-length tomes. I mean, it's not the same process and doesn't necessarily involve the same skills, although it's reasonable to suppose there'd be some overlap. It's a bit like requiring that composers of symphonies submit a 90 second commercial jingle if they want to have the orchestra consider performing their work, and deciding on the basis of the jingle whether to look at the symphony itself. But that's how the game is played.
Some lit agents don't want anything except the query letter--just send that and if we're interested in seeing more, we'll ask. But more often, they want auxiliary accompanying documents.
The writing sample, an excerpt from the book that's being pitched, is commonly requested. The length of the excerpt varies all over the map, with some people wanting to see your first three pages and others asking you to provide your first four chapters. The most common specific requests that I've encountered are the first three pages, first five pages, first ten pages, first fifteen pages, first twenty pages, first twenty five, and first fifty; first chapter, first two chapters, first three, and first four. Given the possible variations of what constitutes chapter length, these requests are often expressed in hybrid form: "Paste the first three chapters or fifty pages", or "Send me 25 pages or first two chapters", or "Please provide your first three chapters (not to exceed 35 pages)".
You'll notice a word recurrently repeated in all of those variations. However much of it they wish to see, they nearly always want that much of the start of your book. That puts a pressure on authors to frontload their book so that things are happening rapidly on the first pages. It works against an author who prefers to set the stage and develop the characters before springing the book's primary situation on the reader, and perhaps explains Dan Brown. I suppose I do see the point to this: if a person picks up a book and it doesn't hold their attention in the early portions, they won't keep reading long enough to get to whatever may be in the book farther in. I do have my doubts about what anyone can tell about a book from reading the first five pages though, aside from "yes this writer can string sentences together in a tolerably pleasant style".
The synopsis is another thing that people often ask for. A synopsis is more or less what we used to think of as a "book report" back when we were in fourth grade. It's a summary of what happens in the book, in the order that it occurs in the book, often chapter by chapter. For fiction and memoirs and other narrative forms that have storylines, the synopsis is a description of the plot. A synopsis is usually a single page's worth, and unlike the query letter is not supposed to be a teaser but instead should reveal what's in the story, to the extent that that can be summarized in a page's worth of description.
It is also common for the description for how to submit to include a blurb about the author, providing a list of any prior books or other publications that the author has to their name, giving the author's credentials or otherwise explaining why this author is a good person to have written this tale, and giving any additional background. A request for some information about the author is particular prevalent for nonfiction titles, and often specifically includes questions about the authors platform, the existing audience of people who are already paying attention to what this authors says and writes, the folks who already follow this author on Twitter or subscribe to the author's YouTube channel and so forth.
A memoir is nonfiction and unfortunately that means authors of memoirs are expected to have a platform in a way that authors of novels are not. I wish more lit agents and publishers were inclined to recognize that memoirs have more in common with fiction than they do with How To Make Your Fortune By Investing Shrewdly in the Stock Market or The Making of the Governor: Gubernatorial Politics in the Instagram Era or Authentic Spectacular Creole Recipes For a Limited Budget.
Speaking of nonfiction, a lot of times the instructions on "how to submit" specify that people who are pitching nonfiction manuscripts should include a proposal. A proposal is a complex multi-part document designed to make the case for why this nonfiction book should be published; it typically kicks off with an extended argument for the need for such a book, then delves into the qualifications of the author to write it (this part being more or less interchangeable with the about the author piece described above), a description of the market for the book (who will be likely to consider reading it if they're made aware of it, and why), a list of comparable titles and how this book is different from what's already out there, a chapter by chapter breakdown of the material that the book will cover (this part, for a memoir, is loosely identical to a synopsis; for The Making of the Governor and other more conventional nonfiction books, it would be more like an outline of topics and subtopics that the book will address and how those topics are organized), and, finally, a marketing plan, a proposed course of action for publicizing the book and bringing it to the attention of people likely to purchase it.
Oh, and proposals will typically contain sample chapters. For once, though, the tendency is not to concentrate on the material most direct adjacent to the front cover. In a proposal, a sample chapter may be from any part of the book. Some proposals may contain two or three sample chapters, and in keeping with that, the instructions for submitting material may specify that one should send a proposal with a specified number of sample chapters.
Less commonly, lit agents and publishers may request a list and/or discussion of comparable titles as a standalone alternative to a formal proposal, or may request a discussion of the likely market for the book.
In the United States (although not so much in the UK), literary agents typically do not want to mess with file attachments, at least at the initial-query stage, and so all of the above components are to be pasted into the body of the email. More often than not, submission procedures will specifically say that no file attachments will be opened or even that no emails containing file attachments will be read.
Email has limited capacities for text formatting; despite the occasional instruction from a literary agent to include everything in the body of the email and yet to "be sure to indent every paragraph, use one inch margins on all sides, and set the text to double spaced throughout", email doesn't handle indentation of a paragraph's first lines, doesn't do double spacing, and can't be relied upon to format the text in a specific font or point size. Even italics and boldface are pretty iffy. I've found it useful to maintain separate text copies of all of these query components, one with an extra line of white space to offset divisions between paragraphs so that it works reliably as part of an email body.
I have a querying engine that lets me quickly assemble an outbound email:
As you can see from the dropdown menu, I can append a synopsis, a full fledged proposal, writing samples of various sizes, an about-the-author blurb, and other components of a query to the current email body and then send it in that format. (I can also send any one of those pieces as a file attachment for the occasional agent or publisher who wants to receive the proposal or sample chapters as a Word or PDF document instead).
You may be thinking that this doesn't seem very personalized, and indeed some lit agents' instructions say we should "please tell me why you selected me as the agent that you want on this project" and indicate that they prefer to receive letters that don't make them feel like they're receiving spam that has gone out to all the other lit agents out there. I do sometimes customize my query letters, editing them with an additional note to say "I thought this would be of particular appeal to you because of what you said in your 2017 interview with Writer's World about wanting more LGBTQ material written in our own voices" or whatever. But writers' workshops on crafting and perfecting the ideal query letter abound, as do online forums such as "Query Letter Hell" on Absolute Write, all of which are oriented around the notion that one hones and polishes a query letter and then sends it out to the various people that one wishes to query, not that one starts from scratch writing a query letter with one individual recipient in mind. And in my situation in particular, there are seldom a lot of legitimately good reasons to query this lit agent instead of that lit agent. It's not like any of them have a track record of representing genderqueer coming-out and coming-of-age stories and therefore would be a good choice for representing mine as well. There are those who have indicated an interest in handling "lesbian/gay" material and there are those who say that they represent memoirs or narrative nonfiction, but very few who have any kind of track record with coming-out stories or anything else that readily compares to what I wrote. So the honest answer in most cases to "why did you decide to query me on this project?" is along the lines of "you are in the business and open to queries and you are alive and breathe air".
As of today, I have sent 1,424 queries out to literary agents and an additional 64 to small publishers that allow authors to query them directly. From the lit agents I have received 1,292 rejections; 132 queries are currently outstanding. On five or six occasions, lit agents have requested more material before ultimately saying they were not interested in representing my book, but none have ever offered me a business arrangement. From the publishers, I twice had signed contracts to have my book published, once with a publisher that went bankrupt and once with a publisher who assigned an editor to me who wanted to discard the first 33% of the book, which I was unwilling to do; I've had 62 rejections and none are currently outstanding because I was complying with a publisher's policy of exclusivity, and only got the rejection letter the other day.
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Index of all Blog Posts
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Critical Mass: Chicken or Egg Questions
In order to get published, promoted, distributed, represented, featured, etc, you first need to have a critical mass of people paying attention to what you're saying. People begin taking you seriously enough to pay attention to you once they realize that other people, not just themselves, are encountering what you've written or said, which in turn is largely dependent on being published, promoted, distributed, etc.
This is the "platform" conundrum I am up against. Publishers (and literary agents too) want to know if the authors who query them already have a built-in audience of people. People who read their blogs, who watch their YouTube videos, who read and follow their tweets and retweet them, who come to hear them lecture.
I have had some of them informing me that getting a book published is no longer a mechanism for reaching people with your ideas. It is something that you do when you are already successfully reaching people with your ideas.
I have a prepared "about the author" statement that I include in my queries when the instructions for submitting to them say to give some background information about yourself, your prior publications (if any), your education (if relevant), position of employment or expertise (ditto), and, yes, your platform. At the end of it, after describing my academic background and history of being a gender activist and so forth, I have this:
The whole situation is frustrating, but I believe it makes it difficult, not impossible, to get traction. I keep reminding myself that I have twice had a publishing contract for this book, and if it had indeed gone into print I would have reached many people and more people would pay attention to the things that I say and write because I was a published author on the subject.
It's also useful to remind myself that only some people will not pay serious attention to a person's thoughts and ideas until and unless they believe that a lot of other people are also being exposed to what that person thinks. There are, fortunately, people who will get quite excited about or supportive of a line of thought that "clicks" for them, no matter where it comes from or who else is likely to be exposed to it.
Getting to critical mass is to some extent a random thing, a matter of chance. The longer I keep doing this, the more likely it is that my writings will affect someone who has something of a platform of their own, either in the sense of having the ears and eyes of a lot of people or in the sense of knowing some specific key personnel whose attention to this project could help propel it forward. That would, of course, include literary agents and publishers, who certainly possess the power to make my book a success.
Meanwhile, none of the other modalities of communicating with people make more sense to pursue instead of focusing on trying to get my book published. I already have a blog; a small handful of people read it and I don't know how I would increase that. I already post links to my new blog posts all over Facebook, and that's one reason I have the handful of readers that I do have, but again I don't know any magic tricks for drawing more attention to them. I have a Twitter account and I tweet about my blog posts, but I'm a clumsy and clueless twitterer and I'm not likely to suddenly become adept at expressing myself usefully in postage-stamp sized textmorsels. I've addressed some groups, giving presentations and leading discussions, but it's not easy getting booked when one has no authoritative position or official role and does not have a book published. I've even made a few YouTube videos, but they don't tend to pull in people any more rapidly than my blog posts do. And meanwhile, I've got a book, already written, so it kind of makes sense to continue to try to get it into print.
(Be all that as it may, if you have suggestions for how to get more people to tune into my thoughts and words, or for more useful ways in which for me to render them and make them available, by all means give them)
I probably should hire someone to make a home page for me, perhaps with the table of contents (i.e., "Index of all Blog Posts", see below) embedded in it. Or at least find out if I could afford it, etc. I could do something along those lines myself, but graphic design is not my strong suit and my HTML skills are pre-CSS, HTML 1.1 edition stuff at best.
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This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
This is the "platform" conundrum I am up against. Publishers (and literary agents too) want to know if the authors who query them already have a built-in audience of people. People who read their blogs, who watch their YouTube videos, who read and follow their tweets and retweet them, who come to hear them lecture.
I have had some of them informing me that getting a book published is no longer a mechanism for reaching people with your ideas. It is something that you do when you are already successfully reaching people with your ideas.
I have a prepared "about the author" statement that I include in my queries when the instructions for submitting to them say to give some background information about yourself, your prior publications (if any), your education (if relevant), position of employment or expertise (ditto), and, yes, your platform. At the end of it, after describing my academic background and history of being a gender activist and so forth, I have this:
About the Author's "Platform" — Many literary agencies and publishers, when they request the nonfiction author's bio, are primarily interested in knowing who will buy the book based on the author's reputation and stature in the field. This isn't that kind of memoir. No one (except maybe my Mommy) will read it simply because I'm the author; the book is interesting (and marketable) as a "representative" or "illustrative" memoir, the story of what it is like to be a particular TYPE of person (genderqueer, in this case).
Yes, I'm aware that that's probably not what you meant by "platform", that you're less interested in whether I'm a household name than in whether or not I have a following of potential readers and purchasers of my book. Well, I blog weekly; in this day and age, no one leaves comments directly on blog pages, but I post links to my new blog entries in a couple dozen gender-centric Facebook groups and I have a modest but supportive audience who follow me there.
The whole situation is frustrating, but I believe it makes it difficult, not impossible, to get traction. I keep reminding myself that I have twice had a publishing contract for this book, and if it had indeed gone into print I would have reached many people and more people would pay attention to the things that I say and write because I was a published author on the subject.
It's also useful to remind myself that only some people will not pay serious attention to a person's thoughts and ideas until and unless they believe that a lot of other people are also being exposed to what that person thinks. There are, fortunately, people who will get quite excited about or supportive of a line of thought that "clicks" for them, no matter where it comes from or who else is likely to be exposed to it.
Getting to critical mass is to some extent a random thing, a matter of chance. The longer I keep doing this, the more likely it is that my writings will affect someone who has something of a platform of their own, either in the sense of having the ears and eyes of a lot of people or in the sense of knowing some specific key personnel whose attention to this project could help propel it forward. That would, of course, include literary agents and publishers, who certainly possess the power to make my book a success.
Meanwhile, none of the other modalities of communicating with people make more sense to pursue instead of focusing on trying to get my book published. I already have a blog; a small handful of people read it and I don't know how I would increase that. I already post links to my new blog posts all over Facebook, and that's one reason I have the handful of readers that I do have, but again I don't know any magic tricks for drawing more attention to them. I have a Twitter account and I tweet about my blog posts, but I'm a clumsy and clueless twitterer and I'm not likely to suddenly become adept at expressing myself usefully in postage-stamp sized textmorsels. I've addressed some groups, giving presentations and leading discussions, but it's not easy getting booked when one has no authoritative position or official role and does not have a book published. I've even made a few YouTube videos, but they don't tend to pull in people any more rapidly than my blog posts do. And meanwhile, I've got a book, already written, so it kind of makes sense to continue to try to get it into print.
(Be all that as it may, if you have suggestions for how to get more people to tune into my thoughts and words, or for more useful ways in which for me to render them and make them available, by all means give them)
I probably should hire someone to make a home page for me, perhaps with the table of contents (i.e., "Index of all Blog Posts", see below) embedded in it. Or at least find out if I could afford it, etc. I could do something along those lines myself, but graphic design is not my strong suit and my HTML skills are pre-CSS, HTML 1.1 edition stuff at best.
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This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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Index of all Blog Posts
Sunday, August 19, 2018
Sexually Predatory Males, Gender Inversion, and the #MeToo Movement
The #MeToo movement has revealed a cognitive disconnect in our society between people who think sexually predatory behavior is inherently and inexcusably wrong and people who think it is only wrong when it crosses certain thresholds or boundaries.
In the latter camp are people who say that if we aren't careful, we're going to make it illegal and reprehensible and socially unacceptable to be a sexual male.
Why male? Because saying predatory male sexual aggression is mostly about as necessary and useful as specifying female menstrual supplies when discussing tampons. Because sexually aggressive predatory behavior is generally assumed to be as naturally a part of maleness and male sexuality as having periods is inherently a part of being female.
Feminist theorists have pretty much always said that this isn't so. That the connection of males to this behavior is a part of institutionalized heterosexuality, that it's not biologically built-in that way. This simultaneously means that it can't be excused on the grounds that it is inevitable and inherent in males and also that it is sexist to project this behavior onto males as if it were automatically a component of their character.
But if it isn't biologically built-in, if it is indeed a social construct, what happens when someone who thinks of himself as one of the girls ends up being attracted to them as well?
Me. On the most fundamental level, I'm what happens. It's the core of my story. Certainly there are other aspects of the tale, other areas of tension between the gendered expectations that people assumed about me and who I actually was--from interest in an ongoing connected relationship as differentiated from interest only in casual sex opportunities on down to things like how I move and sit, and so on. But if there's a central axis around which the greatest tension lies, it's around the behaviors that get called things like "sexual initiative", "sexually aggressive behavior", "putting the moves on", "making your play", "seducing" and, yes, "being sexually predatory".
Basically I'm not. It's not behavior that comes to me automatically, and since it is perceived as selfish and pushy and exploitative of women (and certainly not feminine), well, as someone who always thought of himself as one of the girls, I wasn't at all happy to be perceived this way and recoiled away from it. So that's what happens.
But that's not the only thing that happens. People like me get seen as examples of what happens when a male is not taking the initiative to put the moves on sexually attractive female people. And what doesn't happen is any kind of simple fluid coming together and connection, any discernable heterosexual success rate that makes our behavior look like a good strategy. People see that, observe that, and incorporate that into how they understand the world, that's what happens.
And there is social hostility and marginalization of feminine males, girlish males, as we all know, but more specifically to the point there is condescension and a disparaging attitude towards the prospect of us as heterosexual participants. We are pitied. The female people who might become involved with us, however briefly, are also pitied. Our sexuality is perceived as pathetic.
#MeToo voices seldom speak at any great length about males whose sexual behavior is not invasive and geared towards making sex happen, initiating sex. Their focus is on the problematic ones who do. When a different set of voices are expressing uncomplimentary opinions about nonvirile effeminate men who are unsexy for failure to grab and take, they seldom go on to discuss sexual assault and sexual harassment and rape and such things. It's almost as if no one can see both sides of the coin at the same time, or remember what's on the side opposite of what they're currently facing.
Not all male people who consider themselves atypical of the male gender or consider themselves femme or otherwise not part of the masculine construct, are opposed to taking sexual initiative. Some are quite emphatic about saying that being feminine does not mean they are sexually passive or strictly reactive to someone else's overtures. Indeed, I suppose the grab-bag of supposedly feminine traits contains enough material for someone to claim several aspects without selecting that specific one. I have to admit that I'd be interested in sitting down with other femmy males who are sexually aggressive and trying to get a better understanding of how and why this is compatible with thinking of themselves as feminine, how they handle the perception of this, how it all fits together for them. But yeah, I haven't been nominated to speak for all the sissy femme guys, and I don't. But for some of us it is not only a part of the picture but rather central to it, the behavior and the nuances of feeling and attitude towards sexuality and towards other people, the economics of sexual supply and demand and questions of self-worth and dignity, the role of tenderness and responsiveness in sexuality and the concomitant avoidance of the belligerent and the offensive crude.
Recently I have had the opportunity to pitch my book to feminist publishers who wanted a shorter and more concise query letter than what I usually use, and in the process of honing a new tighter letter that gets to the point quickly, I found myself pitching my book as a what-if: what happens when someone who thought of himself during childhood as one of the girls grows up and ends up being attracted to them as well?
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————————
Index of all Blog Posts
In the latter camp are people who say that if we aren't careful, we're going to make it illegal and reprehensible and socially unacceptable to be a sexual male.
Why male? Because saying predatory male sexual aggression is mostly about as necessary and useful as specifying female menstrual supplies when discussing tampons. Because sexually aggressive predatory behavior is generally assumed to be as naturally a part of maleness and male sexuality as having periods is inherently a part of being female.
Feminist theorists have pretty much always said that this isn't so. That the connection of males to this behavior is a part of institutionalized heterosexuality, that it's not biologically built-in that way. This simultaneously means that it can't be excused on the grounds that it is inevitable and inherent in males and also that it is sexist to project this behavior onto males as if it were automatically a component of their character.
But if it isn't biologically built-in, if it is indeed a social construct, what happens when someone who thinks of himself as one of the girls ends up being attracted to them as well?
Me. On the most fundamental level, I'm what happens. It's the core of my story. Certainly there are other aspects of the tale, other areas of tension between the gendered expectations that people assumed about me and who I actually was--from interest in an ongoing connected relationship as differentiated from interest only in casual sex opportunities on down to things like how I move and sit, and so on. But if there's a central axis around which the greatest tension lies, it's around the behaviors that get called things like "sexual initiative", "sexually aggressive behavior", "putting the moves on", "making your play", "seducing" and, yes, "being sexually predatory".
Basically I'm not. It's not behavior that comes to me automatically, and since it is perceived as selfish and pushy and exploitative of women (and certainly not feminine), well, as someone who always thought of himself as one of the girls, I wasn't at all happy to be perceived this way and recoiled away from it. So that's what happens.
But that's not the only thing that happens. People like me get seen as examples of what happens when a male is not taking the initiative to put the moves on sexually attractive female people. And what doesn't happen is any kind of simple fluid coming together and connection, any discernable heterosexual success rate that makes our behavior look like a good strategy. People see that, observe that, and incorporate that into how they understand the world, that's what happens.
And there is social hostility and marginalization of feminine males, girlish males, as we all know, but more specifically to the point there is condescension and a disparaging attitude towards the prospect of us as heterosexual participants. We are pitied. The female people who might become involved with us, however briefly, are also pitied. Our sexuality is perceived as pathetic.
#MeToo voices seldom speak at any great length about males whose sexual behavior is not invasive and geared towards making sex happen, initiating sex. Their focus is on the problematic ones who do. When a different set of voices are expressing uncomplimentary opinions about nonvirile effeminate men who are unsexy for failure to grab and take, they seldom go on to discuss sexual assault and sexual harassment and rape and such things. It's almost as if no one can see both sides of the coin at the same time, or remember what's on the side opposite of what they're currently facing.
Not all male people who consider themselves atypical of the male gender or consider themselves femme or otherwise not part of the masculine construct, are opposed to taking sexual initiative. Some are quite emphatic about saying that being feminine does not mean they are sexually passive or strictly reactive to someone else's overtures. Indeed, I suppose the grab-bag of supposedly feminine traits contains enough material for someone to claim several aspects without selecting that specific one. I have to admit that I'd be interested in sitting down with other femmy males who are sexually aggressive and trying to get a better understanding of how and why this is compatible with thinking of themselves as feminine, how they handle the perception of this, how it all fits together for them. But yeah, I haven't been nominated to speak for all the sissy femme guys, and I don't. But for some of us it is not only a part of the picture but rather central to it, the behavior and the nuances of feeling and attitude towards sexuality and towards other people, the economics of sexual supply and demand and questions of self-worth and dignity, the role of tenderness and responsiveness in sexuality and the concomitant avoidance of the belligerent and the offensive crude.
Recently I have had the opportunity to pitch my book to feminist publishers who wanted a shorter and more concise query letter than what I usually use, and in the process of honing a new tighter letter that gets to the point quickly, I found myself pitching my book as a what-if: what happens when someone who thought of himself during childhood as one of the girls grows up and ends up being attracted to them as well?
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Index of all Blog Posts
Sunday, August 12, 2018
A Lit Agent Considers My Book — LIVE!
The literary agency Redhammer is one I ran across awhile back; until recently, their page on submissions said they didn't accept unsolicited queries and then went on to say that if you're looking for a lit agency that does ... and then they supplied a rather long list of UK literary agencies.
It was a useful resource for me: the agencies that Redhammer listed on this page were agencies that I had not come across in AgentQuery or QueryTracker or the other sources I've relied on, for the most part.
Anyway, just recently the Redhammer folks changed tack and started accepting what they call "pop-up submissions": stating that most lit agents don't read much more than this much before making a decision anyhow, they ask for just 500 character's worth of query letter and the first 600 (now upped to 700) words as writing sample.
But they make their decisions live so you can listen to their evaluation and decision process.
So I opted to participate.
The whole August 5 program
Where they start reviewing my query and 1st 600 words
In general they said nice things about my writing — that it flowed easily with a natural looseness rarely found in unsolicited submissions; a couple of the participants complained that the main character wasn't as frightened (in particular) or otherwise reacting emotionally to what was happening as people began beating him up; and Pete, the primary honcho at Redhammer, said the main reason he could not represent my book is that it's not a type of book he has any experience representing and wouldn't know where to begin in trying to get a publisher for it.
I like the reassuring feedback about my writing, that's very nice to hear.
Derek's (i.e., my) reaction in the fight is a bit more complicated. The near absence of affect is realistic and intentional; years of unexpected out-of-nowhere hostility and violence is numbing, and early in the book I have Derek trying to turn to authorities for help and basically being told to just be a good sport and weather it. This is one of the tales within a tale in this book, that victims of this kind of alienating treatment learn to shut down. Obviously I can't explain that in the three pages' worth of intro, let alone in the 600 word sample that Redhammer permitted me, but I'm choosing to regard it as a feature, not a bug — that readers will see it (as one of the Redhammer reviewers suggested) as an aspect of the character, or will notice it and be curious about who this person is who experiences being beaten up in such a matter-of-fact manner. In the book as a whole, I don't explicitly say that Derek is shutting down emotionally or becoming stoic about other people being hostile, but in the best tradition of "show don't tell" I hope the sequence of events paints that for the observant reader.
And the notion that one main barrier to obtaining lit agents to represent my book is that this isn't the kind of book they're equipped to market to publishers is what I've been suspecting for quite some time now. I will continue to query lit agents but my main hopes lie with my queries to small publishers.
Incidentally, a couple people have suggested that I make YouTube videos of myself reading my blog posts. I'm seriously considering it. I could go back and do all the serious ones about gender and being a gender invert, and maybe some about writing and trying to market the book. I dont know if I'd get any more traffic on YouTube than I get here, but possibly I would.
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This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
It was a useful resource for me: the agencies that Redhammer listed on this page were agencies that I had not come across in AgentQuery or QueryTracker or the other sources I've relied on, for the most part.
Anyway, just recently the Redhammer folks changed tack and started accepting what they call "pop-up submissions": stating that most lit agents don't read much more than this much before making a decision anyhow, they ask for just 500 character's worth of query letter and the first 600 (now upped to 700) words as writing sample.
But they make their decisions live so you can listen to their evaluation and decision process.
So I opted to participate.
The whole August 5 program
Where they start reviewing my query and 1st 600 words
In general they said nice things about my writing — that it flowed easily with a natural looseness rarely found in unsolicited submissions; a couple of the participants complained that the main character wasn't as frightened (in particular) or otherwise reacting emotionally to what was happening as people began beating him up; and Pete, the primary honcho at Redhammer, said the main reason he could not represent my book is that it's not a type of book he has any experience representing and wouldn't know where to begin in trying to get a publisher for it.
I like the reassuring feedback about my writing, that's very nice to hear.
Derek's (i.e., my) reaction in the fight is a bit more complicated. The near absence of affect is realistic and intentional; years of unexpected out-of-nowhere hostility and violence is numbing, and early in the book I have Derek trying to turn to authorities for help and basically being told to just be a good sport and weather it. This is one of the tales within a tale in this book, that victims of this kind of alienating treatment learn to shut down. Obviously I can't explain that in the three pages' worth of intro, let alone in the 600 word sample that Redhammer permitted me, but I'm choosing to regard it as a feature, not a bug — that readers will see it (as one of the Redhammer reviewers suggested) as an aspect of the character, or will notice it and be curious about who this person is who experiences being beaten up in such a matter-of-fact manner. In the book as a whole, I don't explicitly say that Derek is shutting down emotionally or becoming stoic about other people being hostile, but in the best tradition of "show don't tell" I hope the sequence of events paints that for the observant reader.
And the notion that one main barrier to obtaining lit agents to represent my book is that this isn't the kind of book they're equipped to market to publishers is what I've been suspecting for quite some time now. I will continue to query lit agents but my main hopes lie with my queries to small publishers.
Incidentally, a couple people have suggested that I make YouTube videos of myself reading my blog posts. I'm seriously considering it. I could go back and do all the serious ones about gender and being a gender invert, and maybe some about writing and trying to market the book. I dont know if I'd get any more traffic on YouTube than I get here, but possibly I would.
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This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Update on My Get-Book-Published Endeavors
I wrote a book about being genderqueer and I'm trying to get it published.
Those of you who've been reading my blog for awhile now are well aware of that, but I have recently joined several Facebook groups where I may not have mentioned that, and I'm now echoing my blog in more places in hopes of reaching a wider audience... and it's been awhile since I blogged about the book itself. Most of my recent posts have been about some aspect of gender or genderqueer experience.
Anyway, yeah, it's a memoir (nonfiction, my own story), a coming-of-age and coming-out story, about 97,000 words long (probably about 325 pages, give or take). And I've been querying literary agents since 2013 and small publishers (the sort that you can query directly) since 2015.
Here's where things are at at the moment:
THE REQUEST FOR A FULL
Every rare once in a while my queries to literary agents have resulted in a request to see and evaluate the full manuscript, an event known in the world of authors and author-aspirants as a "request for a full". It's akin to when sending in your resume results in an actual job interview. I've had six of those so far.
The most recent was from Lucinda Karter of Jennifer Lyons Lit Agency (or, more precisely, from her assistant Jadie Stillwell), on November 17 of last year. I sent in the full manuscript and didn't hear a peep, so on December 8 I sent a follow-up inquiry, just asking for confirmation that they actually received it. They had; Stillwell apologized for being behind and said they hadn't had a chance to look at it but would get to it in due course.
At some point in the spring, I went back to querying lit agents, if only to distract myself from the waiting.
Eventually, the 8th of March rolled around, and it had now been three months since I'd heard anything from them and four months since I'd queried them, so I sent a follow-up email, inquiring if I had perhaps missed a critical piece of correspondence. On March 20th, still not hearing anything, I repeated that inquiry, and on March 30th I got a somewhat formletterish "thanks for the opportunity to read but unable to fully connect with the characters and will have to pass" rejection letter.
THE DOLDRUMS
One of the literary agents that I subsequently queried wrote back to say my proposal looks interesting but that they have a policy of only considering material submitted to them exclusively — so did anyone else have it? Of course they did. So in a back-and-forth exchange of emails we established that they'd be happy if I waited until any still-outstanding queries were rejected or else timed out with at least six weeks elapsing from the time I queried them, and then subsequently didn't send any other queries out until they'd had a chance to make their evaluation. That point will be on April the 12th, two days from now. I'll let them know on the 12th that they now have exlusivity and then an additional six weeks will tick by before their exclusivity-window expires.
It's a long shot but all inquiries to lit agents are long shots. I decided to go for it. But it's meant not doing anything as far as lit agents are concerned from week to week and (at this point) month to month.
It's hard to feel fired-up and like you're doing something towards getting a book published when you're just sitting around waiting for a calendar date to crawl by.
Meanwhile, with the publishers, I'm in the same damn situation: there was a publisher I wanted to query, one that was highly recommended on the queer / nonbinary / minority orientation and sexual orientation and intersex FaceBook groups as a good solid publisher for LGBTQIA titles. They, too, have a policy of exclusivity. So I had to wait until the previous publisher submission (to Kensington Books) expired from lack of activity and then sent them my query, which they've now had since January 23. They want 90 days to evaluate manuscripts, so they've got exclusivity until April 23, another thirteen days from now.
So I've been sitting on my thumb, metaphorically speaking, not sending anything to anyone and watching the damn calendar.
BROAD OVERVIEW / REVIEW OF THE SITUATION
I have twice had a publisher sign a contract with me to publish this book. Generally what happens when a publisher signs a contract with an author is that the book goes into print. In the first instance, the publisher, Ellora's Cave, went out of business and revoked all pending books. In the second instance, with NineStar Press, the editor wanted to cut the first third of the book entirely, and we were unable to establish a working relationship. (I experienced the editor as heavy-handed and insulting, and I gather that he found me arrogant and impossible to work with). So I asked them revert my rights back to me.
This is extremely frustrating, as you can probably imagine. The relief and excitement and joy of having a publisher pick up your book, the anticipation of seeing it listed on Amazon and perhaps on a book stand in a book store, the enthusiastic planning of promotional talks and book-signings and lecture tours and all that... ripped out from beneath me.
I was going to write that this isnt fun any more. That's misleading: it was never any fun, this process of trying to sell agents and publishers on the idea of publishing my book. I detest this entire process, just as I hate doing job searches. I have said in the past that trying to sell myself like this ranks right up there with cleaning all the toilets in Grand Central Station with my tongue. So "isn't fun any more" isn't the applicable phrase here. What's changed, I think, is that I won't be able to feel any of that relief, excitement, anticipation or joy when I finally do once again have a publishing contract. At this point I don't think it will seem real until the damn thing's actually in print and I am holding a copy in my hands. Maybe not even then.
"Well", you may be thinking, "why don't you just self-publish?"
It's an easy enough process to create a print run of my book. I even have a routine that allows me to print the whole book onto 5.5 x 8.5 format, two pages to a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, double-sided, so it can be whacked neatly in two with an industrial sheet cutter and bound. I could get bids and go with the cheapest bid, and that's before I even look into companies specifically geared to help authors self-publish.
Electronic printing is even more effortless, and free. I can generate a PDF at will, and Amazon (among others) will readily help me convert it to other standard eBook formats for paid download.
None of that is at all difficult. Most of that is not relevant.
The difficult, and relevant, part of what makes publishing different than mere printing is distribution and publicity. Running off five thousand copies of my book (and/or generating an eBook for electronic distribution) doesn't get it into people's hands. It doesn't get it reviewed. There are human activites that successfully overcome those barriers, promotional activities. I'm not good at them. If I were good at them, this would be a very popular blog with hundreds or thousands of weekly readers. It isn't. I'm not.
I'll still have to gear up to plan and execute a promotional campaign even with a traditional-model publisher, unless I get a large publisher on-board (unlikely); but even a small publisher makes the book "authentic" to the world of reviewers and opens up opportunities for distribution and consideration. I'm particularly interested in seeing it picked up as reading material for gender studies, LGBTQ studies, feminist theory, and other related academic course work, and hopefully also to find shelf space in LGBT community centers and support group meeting spaces and whatnot.
READINGS
One thing I have been doing more of lately is attending authors' groups where people bring samples of their work-in-progress and read from them and get feedback from the others there. I've been attending the Long Island Writers' Guild and the Amateur Writers of Long Island in recent weeks. Of the two, I like the format used by the latter somewhat better, as they allow up to 1800 word samples to be read and spend more time discussing each selection before moving on to the next. I've enjoyed them both, though.
The feedback I've received is encouraging. The people say my writing in general is vivid and effective, the characters and their behaviors and dialog strongly drawn, the paragraphs and phrases well-constructed. That's not to say I haven't received useful criticism, of the sort "you could do more of this up here before he says that" and "I found it a bit confusing when it jumped to this next scene, is that supposed to be later the same week or what?" and so on. But the overall takeaway is very good: my writing does what I want it to do, it works. At least in 1800-word chunks. (I still yearn for more feedback on the entire book as a satisfying or less-than-satisfying whole).
STATS
total queries to Lit Agents (counting requeries): 1171
As Nonfiction, total: 944
As Fiction, total: 227
total queries to Publishers: 30
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Index of all Blog Posts
Those of you who've been reading my blog for awhile now are well aware of that, but I have recently joined several Facebook groups where I may not have mentioned that, and I'm now echoing my blog in more places in hopes of reaching a wider audience... and it's been awhile since I blogged about the book itself. Most of my recent posts have been about some aspect of gender or genderqueer experience.
Anyway, yeah, it's a memoir (nonfiction, my own story), a coming-of-age and coming-out story, about 97,000 words long (probably about 325 pages, give or take). And I've been querying literary agents since 2013 and small publishers (the sort that you can query directly) since 2015.
Here's where things are at at the moment:
THE REQUEST FOR A FULL
Every rare once in a while my queries to literary agents have resulted in a request to see and evaluate the full manuscript, an event known in the world of authors and author-aspirants as a "request for a full". It's akin to when sending in your resume results in an actual job interview. I've had six of those so far.
The most recent was from Lucinda Karter of Jennifer Lyons Lit Agency (or, more precisely, from her assistant Jadie Stillwell), on November 17 of last year. I sent in the full manuscript and didn't hear a peep, so on December 8 I sent a follow-up inquiry, just asking for confirmation that they actually received it. They had; Stillwell apologized for being behind and said they hadn't had a chance to look at it but would get to it in due course.
At some point in the spring, I went back to querying lit agents, if only to distract myself from the waiting.
Eventually, the 8th of March rolled around, and it had now been three months since I'd heard anything from them and four months since I'd queried them, so I sent a follow-up email, inquiring if I had perhaps missed a critical piece of correspondence. On March 20th, still not hearing anything, I repeated that inquiry, and on March 30th I got a somewhat formletterish "thanks for the opportunity to read but unable to fully connect with the characters and will have to pass" rejection letter.
THE DOLDRUMS
One of the literary agents that I subsequently queried wrote back to say my proposal looks interesting but that they have a policy of only considering material submitted to them exclusively — so did anyone else have it? Of course they did. So in a back-and-forth exchange of emails we established that they'd be happy if I waited until any still-outstanding queries were rejected or else timed out with at least six weeks elapsing from the time I queried them, and then subsequently didn't send any other queries out until they'd had a chance to make their evaluation. That point will be on April the 12th, two days from now. I'll let them know on the 12th that they now have exlusivity and then an additional six weeks will tick by before their exclusivity-window expires.
It's a long shot but all inquiries to lit agents are long shots. I decided to go for it. But it's meant not doing anything as far as lit agents are concerned from week to week and (at this point) month to month.
It's hard to feel fired-up and like you're doing something towards getting a book published when you're just sitting around waiting for a calendar date to crawl by.
Meanwhile, with the publishers, I'm in the same damn situation: there was a publisher I wanted to query, one that was highly recommended on the queer / nonbinary / minority orientation and sexual orientation and intersex FaceBook groups as a good solid publisher for LGBTQIA titles. They, too, have a policy of exclusivity. So I had to wait until the previous publisher submission (to Kensington Books) expired from lack of activity and then sent them my query, which they've now had since January 23. They want 90 days to evaluate manuscripts, so they've got exclusivity until April 23, another thirteen days from now.
So I've been sitting on my thumb, metaphorically speaking, not sending anything to anyone and watching the damn calendar.
BROAD OVERVIEW / REVIEW OF THE SITUATION
I have twice had a publisher sign a contract with me to publish this book. Generally what happens when a publisher signs a contract with an author is that the book goes into print. In the first instance, the publisher, Ellora's Cave, went out of business and revoked all pending books. In the second instance, with NineStar Press, the editor wanted to cut the first third of the book entirely, and we were unable to establish a working relationship. (I experienced the editor as heavy-handed and insulting, and I gather that he found me arrogant and impossible to work with). So I asked them revert my rights back to me.
This is extremely frustrating, as you can probably imagine. The relief and excitement and joy of having a publisher pick up your book, the anticipation of seeing it listed on Amazon and perhaps on a book stand in a book store, the enthusiastic planning of promotional talks and book-signings and lecture tours and all that... ripped out from beneath me.
I was going to write that this isnt fun any more. That's misleading: it was never any fun, this process of trying to sell agents and publishers on the idea of publishing my book. I detest this entire process, just as I hate doing job searches. I have said in the past that trying to sell myself like this ranks right up there with cleaning all the toilets in Grand Central Station with my tongue. So "isn't fun any more" isn't the applicable phrase here. What's changed, I think, is that I won't be able to feel any of that relief, excitement, anticipation or joy when I finally do once again have a publishing contract. At this point I don't think it will seem real until the damn thing's actually in print and I am holding a copy in my hands. Maybe not even then.
"Well", you may be thinking, "why don't you just self-publish?"
It's an easy enough process to create a print run of my book. I even have a routine that allows me to print the whole book onto 5.5 x 8.5 format, two pages to a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, double-sided, so it can be whacked neatly in two with an industrial sheet cutter and bound. I could get bids and go with the cheapest bid, and that's before I even look into companies specifically geared to help authors self-publish.
Electronic printing is even more effortless, and free. I can generate a PDF at will, and Amazon (among others) will readily help me convert it to other standard eBook formats for paid download.
None of that is at all difficult. Most of that is not relevant.
The difficult, and relevant, part of what makes publishing different than mere printing is distribution and publicity. Running off five thousand copies of my book (and/or generating an eBook for electronic distribution) doesn't get it into people's hands. It doesn't get it reviewed. There are human activites that successfully overcome those barriers, promotional activities. I'm not good at them. If I were good at them, this would be a very popular blog with hundreds or thousands of weekly readers. It isn't. I'm not.
I'll still have to gear up to plan and execute a promotional campaign even with a traditional-model publisher, unless I get a large publisher on-board (unlikely); but even a small publisher makes the book "authentic" to the world of reviewers and opens up opportunities for distribution and consideration. I'm particularly interested in seeing it picked up as reading material for gender studies, LGBTQ studies, feminist theory, and other related academic course work, and hopefully also to find shelf space in LGBT community centers and support group meeting spaces and whatnot.
READINGS
One thing I have been doing more of lately is attending authors' groups where people bring samples of their work-in-progress and read from them and get feedback from the others there. I've been attending the Long Island Writers' Guild and the Amateur Writers of Long Island in recent weeks. Of the two, I like the format used by the latter somewhat better, as they allow up to 1800 word samples to be read and spend more time discussing each selection before moving on to the next. I've enjoyed them both, though.
The feedback I've received is encouraging. The people say my writing in general is vivid and effective, the characters and their behaviors and dialog strongly drawn, the paragraphs and phrases well-constructed. That's not to say I haven't received useful criticism, of the sort "you could do more of this up here before he says that" and "I found it a bit confusing when it jumped to this next scene, is that supposed to be later the same week or what?" and so on. But the overall takeaway is very good: my writing does what I want it to do, it works. At least in 1800-word chunks. (I still yearn for more feedback on the entire book as a satisfying or less-than-satisfying whole).
STATS
total queries to Lit Agents (counting requeries): 1171
Rejections: 1092
Outstanding: 79
As Nonfiction, total: 944
Rejections: 866
Outstanding: 78
As Fiction, total: 227
Rejections: 226
Outstanding: 1
total queries to Publishers: 30
Rejections: 22
Outstanding: 1
No Reply 3+ Months: 6
Pub Contract Signed, went out of business: 1
Pub Contract Signed, rights reverted: 1
————————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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