Category: Writing

My synopsis has reached the point where I find it at least tolerable, and I’m anxious to get on with the business of starting to send out queries. So I’m going to pull up plain old notepad and start a file called submissions.txt which will contain a list of agents and publishers, their contact information, submission guidelines, how long they say they’ll take to get back on queries, etc. Each entry will look something like this:

Mr. Joe Bookseller
The Bookseller Extreme Agency
12345 Blahdee Blah
NY, NY 00000
www.extremebs.com
joe@extremebs.com
Prefers e-queries
Usually 2 weeks to respond

Each week I’ll query a handful from the top of the list, noting when the query was sent, and add a few to the bottom of the list.

Add them from where, you might ask?

Well, one good place I’ve found is The Association of Author’s Representatives‘ website. AAR is one of the several organizations that require their members to adhere to a farily strict set of guidelines for representation fees and activities, so it’s another helpful resource in finding a good agent. I went to their database and searched by keyword “fantasy”, since that’s the genre I’m writing in. Keep in mind that the results of this search are by no means all-inclusive within AAR’s membership – just because an agent’s entry in the database doesn’t directly spell out that they’re interested in representing fantasy novels doesn’t mean they aren’t. Over time, I’ll have to go through more of the database to find member agencies’ web sites to look at their specific guidelines, but for now, the 14 results of the search are enough to get started.

Make that 13 – the first one came up on the search for fantasy because one description line says “We are not interested in fantasy.” A few more will be placed down lower on the list because their own web sites downplay or fail to mention fantasy at all. Of what remains, several are promising – listing fantasy as one of their foci.

So I’ll visit each agent’s web site where possible, make a note of their submission guidelines, check them out on P&E, and add them to my list. By this weekend, the first round of e-mails and/or letters will be on their way!

So you’ve got the perfect manuscript, the perfect query, and the perfect synopsis all ready to go. Your next question of course, is where to send it.

Wrong question.

Before you send anything out, you should first spend some time becoming informed on where not to send it.

I’ve already expressed my general disdain for the self/vanity/whatever publishers who try to convince you that a book printed by them will be taken seriously anywhere but on your own website, so I won’t touch on that further here.

There are a surprising number of folks out there seeking publication for their writing. Enough to support a thriving industry of scam artists who will happily collect cash from would-be novelists without providing any legitimate service in return. The most common tactic employed by these types is the “reading fee”, as in “send me your manuscript and some cash, and I’ll read it.” No agent should ever charge you any fees whatsoever before a contract is signed naming them as your representative. The only fees a legitimate agent will charge between that point and the sale of the book are for duplication and mailing expenses if the agency sends it to the publishers for you via snail mail, and for these you have every right to ask for an itemized expense list.

One of the better articles on bad agents (and more) is the Writer Beware! section at the Science Fiction Writers of America site. Read it and take it seriously.

There are a number of information sources you can use to find lists of agents or publishers who will accept your submission. I’ll touch on a few of the primary ones in the next article. For now what you need to keep in mind is that while you’re compiling your who-to-query list, you should keep the following site open and use it to check out every agent name you come across:

Predators and Editors

It’s not the best presented or best organized of sites (entries sorted alphabetically by first name?), but nonetheless it is by far your best tool for separating the wheat from the donkey-droppings, agent-wise.

The synopsis is, for me, the toughest part of the preparation process during the search for an agent or publisher. It’s difficult enough to summarize 100,000+ words in a few pages, capturing the major events, noting character development points, and giving away all the surprises and twists along the way; but what adds to the challenge is that fact that there seems to be very little agreement as to the actual format of the thing, both in terms of size and of layout.

Web site A says to double-space it. Web Site B says single spacing. One person says “no more than one page or about 500 words”, another says “3 to 5 pages”, and a third mentions synopses of up to about 10 pages (are those single- or double-spaced pages?), etc. Many recommendations are to write one that is “as long as it needs to be”, but it seems to me that this will vary widely depending on the specific audience. Some agents might want a short summary and will throw away anything too long; others will likely have the opposite reaction.

My online searches for synopsis examples have resulted almost entirely in samples of romance novel synopses. Since I don’t want to post my synopsis (what there is of it so far) and give away my book’s whole story, here are some links to others’ successful attempts.

(Note: These being “romance” novel synopses, some of them might be offensive to people who think sexual situations are icky and several of them are ones that I, for one, wouldn’t read out loud to the kids. Unless by “kids” we’re talking “goats”, who I wouldn’t hesitate to read to but who probably find human sexual situations icky.)

A Few Winning Synopses
More Examples
Still More, with Penguins

Lots of Links to Synopsis Info

I’m struggling to strike the right balance between detail and generalization in my synopsis. It’s currently at about three single-spaced pages, which may be an acceptable size, but to get it there I’ve had to sacrifice descriptions of a lot of secondary characters and subplots which I feel add depth to the story and help to define and grow the main characters. By leaving those out, will the main characters and primary plot come across as too simplistic? There are a number of such items I had to leave in, though, because they effect the main characters’ actions in ways that have to be explained in sufficient detail to keep the reader from presuming a plot hole where there really isn’t one.

Well, back to the synopsofyin’.

Ah, the query letter. The single page whose perfection or lack thereof can make or break your chances of even having an agent or publisher look at your work; in fact, it’s all many agents will even ask to see at first. Their rationale, and it’s a reasonable one, is that if you can’t put together an attention-grabbing one-page letter, you’re probably not going to be able to structure a readable novel either.

Query letters are the subject of whole books and hundreds of web sites worth of information, opinions, and examples; just try Googling them! Their format is fairly straightforward and the good news is that they only need to be a page long. The bad news is, of course, that they need to be only a page long. With that one page, you need to make an agent or publisher interested in your specific current work and in you as a writer.

As far as general layout, any standard business letter format is acceptable. As mentioned above, confine your letter to a single printed page. Make it single spaced with 1”-ish margins, and use pretty much any font that’s easy to read and not too wide, narrow, tall, fancy, or weird. Courier, times, arial, etc., are fine; cursive fonts, futuristic type, etc., will get your letter filed under “My eyes! My eeeeyyyyyeees!”, and blinding an agent is not a good way to start a relationship with him or her.

What follows is a disassembly of my first cut at a query letter for my current book.

Donald Lloyd
6969 My Road
Someplace, DE 99999
Home Phone: (555)-555-5555
E-mail: me@wherethehellever.com

Standard stuff here. Tell them who you are and how to contact you in the event they’re smitten by your work.

Agent McPublisher
1313 Bestseller Ave
Most Likely New York, NY 00000

Again, fairly normal letter formatting, but I should touch on the importance of who you address your letter to. Rather than listing the name of the agency or publishing house you’re querying, check out their web site or listings in Writers Guide to try to find out who specifically within that organization handles queries in the genre in which you’ve written. Address it to “Agent McPublisher” rather than “Book Hawkers, Inc” when at all possible.

Dear Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss McPublisher,

This seemingly straightforward line is more important than you’d think. If you send a query to a “Mr. McPublisher”, but “mister” McP’s first name is Elizabeth, not only have you potentially offered insult, but you’ve shown that your attention to detail is not sufficient to have researched who you’re writing to. On almost every blog or site I’ve seen where an agent has posted an example of a winning query letter, that agent has expressed gratitude to the author for getting the salutation correct.

I am seeking representation for my fantasy novel, Spirit’s End, complete at 132,000 words. Enclosed are (whatever your submission guidelines ask for).

(Yes, I’ve decided to combine the 2 books into a single volume, and Spirit’s End is the working title.)

We’re still in the pure informational part of the letter. Start with a simple paragraph stating your book’s name, genre, and length. Agents’ and publishers’ submission guidelines vary and are usually listed on their web sites. Find them and follow them, and unless it’s a query letter only, indicate the contents of your submission here to confirm that you can follow simple instructions.

Many agents will ask for only a query letter at first contact; others will want a letter and a few pages or a few chapters, and still others will add a synopsis into the mix somewhere. Give them what they ask for.

On what should be his proudest day, a young man finds himself banished from his home for the role he might play in fulfilling an ancient prophecy of doom; his life is shattered by a few lines of bad poetry on a dusty old scroll. Half a world away, a young woman and a surly monk board ship to flee from persecution in the land of their birth. Their searches for purpose, aid, and redemption bring them together in a land on the cusp of war. As events beyond their control seemingly drive them toward the fate predicted for their world by the Star Gods of antiquity, they must ask themselves how to avert this foretold destiny and, more importantly… whether or not they should.

This is where the sales pitch begins. Picture the blurbs on the back covers of books you’ve read. This section is your blurb: your chance, in 1-3 short paragraphs, to convince a potential reader (in this case, the agent or publisher) that your book is worth reading.

I am the author of “The Sillymarillion: An Unauthorized Parody of J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Silmarillion’”, from Cold Spring Press. “Beyond Bree”, the newsletter for Tolkien fans within the MENSA organization, called my book “a highly warped, yet extremely funny alternate Middle-earth”, saying “D.R. Lloyd brilliantly captures the structure of Tolkien’s original, not only paying homage to it but render[ing] a heart-wrenching good laugh at the same time.”

This is another blurb, but here you need to sell yourself rather than your book. If your writing has been published in the past, indicate it here if it’s at all relevant. If you have some career or life experience that makes you uniquely qualified to write about your topic of choice, that goes here too. (“My 30 years as an amateur plumber and my history as a stoned hippie in the ‘60s make me well suited to write the science fiction vampire novel, ‘The Groovy Pipewrench Massacre, Man!”)

There are times when this paragraph should simply be left out. “I’m qualified to write fantasy because I’ve read a lot of it”, or the equivalent, will probably not be helpful. Listing self- or vanity-published books with your name on the cover will probably count against you, so just try to pretend they never happened.

I look forward to hearing from you, and I hope to establish a mutually beneficial relationship which will carry forward to future works of both traditional and humorous fantasy I intend to produce.

Sincerely,
Donald R. Lloyd, II

The closing is straightforward as well. Thank the person for his or her time and sign off. The line about future relationship is a little non-standard, but I figure it can’t hurt to mention that I’m a potential source of long-term profit for them.

(Please note: The blog software and template is undergoing some updating and tinkering – it may periodically be unreachable, and may periodically have gibberish and/or useless items in the sidebar.)

Before you begin to submit your work to publishers and agents, you’ll need to spend a little time tailoring it for submittal.

The bad news is that there are a number of variations on how much of your manuscript a given recipient will ask for; some will want just a query letter, some will want a page or two, some will want the first few chapters, and once in a while someone will ask for the whole thing. Be sure to understand the submission guidelines of each individual agent or publisher (usually available on their web sites) and conform to them.

The good news is that the overall formatting of your manuscript is very straightforward, and you generally won’t need to specially tailor it for one agent/publisher or another.

Pull up your manuscript in your word processor and choose “Select All” from wherever it is on your menus. With all your text selected, do the following:

• Set font to Courier or Courier New size 12. Some slight variations on this are acceptable, but a clean, easily readable monospaced, serif font at about 12 points is the standard.
• Set the line spacing to double spaced throughout the document.
• If you haven’t done this already, left justify everything – the left side of your text should be straight down, the right side jagged. If you apply this globally you’ll need to go back through and make sure titles and chapter headings are centered.
• As the above suggests, titles and chapter headings should be centered. Chapters should start about halfway down the page – I hit the enter key 10 times from the top of the page on a double-spaced page to approximate this.
• Set your page margins to 1” top and bottom, and 1” to 1.25” left and right throughout the document.

Now, a few more items to deal with:

• I’ve read advice in a number of places that some editors prefer that all bold or italicized text be changed to underlined to indicate emphasis, titles, etc, but this seems to be a rare and disappearing requirement. You can do this if you want. I’m not gonna… not until I get a rejection letter that says, “We loved your work but are unable to represent you at this time due to bolded chapter names in your manuscript.”
• Create a title page that has the book’s title (duh!) centered horizontally and vertically on the page. Skip a line or two, then enter your name and contact information on subsequent lines. It’s probably a good idea skip another line or two after this and enter the word count of your document (most word processors have a word count function that will provide this information).
• Use the header/footer features of your word processor to create a header that displays all but the first page. This header should contain your last name, the name of your book (abbreviated or shortened if the title is long), and the current page number.

Congratulations! You’re done the easy part of the prepare-for-submission phase.

Now that your book is written and ready to unleashed on the unsuspecting marketplace, you’ll need to make a few decisions and prepare a few necessary tools.

There are a couple of ways to get your work published.

The first, and easiest if you have some cash lying around, is to simply pay somebody to publish it for you. There are plenty of services around that will do this; some of them will even try to convince you that self-published works might somehow earn you some reasonable profits or attach some sort of legitimacy to your name, but don’t buy into it. There are a very, very few specific instances where self-publishing, vanity publishing, etc. makes sense, and if you’re at all serious about becoming a writer with any sort of mass-market appeal, steer clear of these. If you’ve already gone the self-publishing route and are trying to break into “real” publication, please, please, please, whatever else you do, don’t brag on your query letter that your previous work is available via PublishAmerica (aka PunishAmerica, one of the best known of these outfits).

The second way is direct-to-publisher submission. Some publishers – typically very small ones, but a few larger companies as well – accept direct queries from authors rather than requiring submissions to come from agents only. I went this route with The Sillymarillion by taking a chance with a well-timed informal e-mail to a publisher who had recently released several other Tolkien-related works. This is a worthwhile avenue to pursue, but there are some caveats to keep in mind. For one thing, publishers who accept unagented submissions often have a large backlog and can take a long time to respond to queries, and very likely give many of them a more cursory examination than they deserve, simply because of time constraints. Smaller publishers may not suffer as much from this effect, but they have their own inherent dangers. I’ve read a number of accounts of people who made a sale to a publisher only to have that company declare bankruptcy, going under and taking the author’s rights with it before a single book was even printed.

The biggest potential advantage to un-agented publication is, of course, the fact that there’s no entity waiting between you and the publisher to siphon away a percentage of your advance and royalties.

The third and most common first step down the path to getting your book into readers’ hands is submittal of your manuscript through an agent. An agent will skim off a percentage of your profit on the book, but a good agent (more on how to identify them in a future installment) should be well worth the cost.

First of all, unless you have a relative who works there, most big publishers simply won’t accept a book proposal that hasn’t been vetted by a literary agent. If a work hasn’t passed through the first stage of the weeding-out process, they assume, and most of the time rightly so, that said work isn’t worth taking the time to read.

Your agent should have connections in the industry and know specifically who needs to see your work and how best to present it. Furthermore, it is in your agent’s interest to find the best deal for you; to recognize what offers have the best potential for profit in both the short and long term, what will best preserve your rights as author of the work, etc.

In short, my recommendation is to try both options #2 and #3, while avoiding option #1 like the avian flu.

Before I can do that, there three tools I need to prepare:

• My manuscript, formatted properly
• A query letter
• A short synopsis and/or outline

Next time: Manuscript formatting.

Or Part I, part 2…

Part Ia?

Whatever. Parts is parts.

Your homework assignment from last night was to write your book. Done? Good.

Now fix it.

Edit. Revise. Rewrite where necessary. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Keep this up until it reaches a state that’s as close to polished and perfect as it’s going to get. Especially when you’re a first-time writer trying to make a sale, you are your own editor, your own proofreader, and, if you really want to critique your work honestly with the goal of making it better, your own worst nightmare. Spelling and grammar checkers are useful tools, but don’t rely too heavily on them. For my first round of serious editing, and sometimes one or two subsequent ones, I find it helpful to print out the whole manuscript and read through it, pen in hand, to scribble in corrections and modifications. I’ve found that having the text in hand in a different medium helps me to view it with more detachment than if I were to go through it on-screen.

Sometimes I’ll scribble out a sentence and fill the margin with a paragraph of replacement text to be added later; sometimes I’ll cross out a whole page and just leave myself a note that says “Fix this.” Occasionally I’ll yank out a whole chapter, or move it someplace else, or even write something like “Need new chapter here with more details on event XYZ”.

I generally share my work with my wife, who usually makes a few suggestions and finds a few problems that need to be fixed, but thus far I haven’t taken the step of showing it to anyone else at this stage in the process. Friends and family can be helpful, as can writers’ groups, etc., but the key phrase here is can be, which is quite different from one of its alternatives, are. Constructive criticism is good if it’s truly constructive, but bad advice is about the 4th most common substance in the universe, and the dangers of design by committee can be seen in the monstrosity that is the Pontiac Aztek. There is also, of course, the danger that once you’ve put a copy of your work into someone else’s hands, it will end up on the internet somewhere.

So by now your book should be written, edited, honed, polished, tweaked, and sprayed with a few layers of glossy clearcoat. You’ve spent weeks, months, or years in isolation, devoting heart and soul to a work of art that could very well be your masterpiece, its completion a moment of joy and pride whose memory you’ll treasure till your dieing day.

Congratulations – you’re off to a decent start.

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How to Become a Published Writer, Step 1:

Write.

Yeah, I know, it’s an obvious step. But it’s a fairly important one, at least in my humble opinion. Except, of course, if you (yes, YOU; I am speaking to YOU specifically, so pay attention!) plan to write non-fiction, where it is in fact acceptable to merely propose a book rather than writing it before trying to sell it – but you’d better at least have some credentials behind you if you go that route. “Hi, I’m Bob the Janitor, and I want to write a book about quantum thermodynamics” is just not gonna be taken seriously as a proposal. So let’s assume you’re trying to publish either a fictional work or a non-fiction book that you plan to actually write ahead of time.

Pick out a word processor. Just about anything more feature-rich than the Wordpad that comes free with Windows will do, and there’s no need for any fancy writing software (with the possible exception of specialized play- and screenplay-writing applications, and for advice on that you’ll need to look elsewhere). I bounce back and forth between Microsoft Word when I’m writing at work and OpenOffice Writer at home. I’m a big fan of the OpenOffice suite; it’s free, does everything I need it to do and more, runs on multiple platforms, it’s free, it’s not Microsoft, and it’s free. OpenOffice does, of course, lack animated talking paper clips, so if you find you can’t be productive without those, you should probably quit now and go play with one of those virtual pet toys.

Other resources you may need for research, inspiration, etc. tend to be specific to your project and/or personality, so I won’t touch on those much except to say this: Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com are your friends. Nay, not friends; rather, they are your humble servants; slaves, if you will, ready to instantly sate your deepest needs at a moment’s notice. (Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and you should be ashamed of yourself! Besides, there are better sites for that sort of thing, I’m sure.)

Well, you’re all set. Go write that novel.

I’ll wait.

As mentioned in a previous entry, I’m in the process of trying to find a publisher for my second book. (Yes, I’ve decided to market it as one 130,000-word volume instead of two 65,000-word books; the fantasy market these days is heavily slanted toward the thick side.) I’ve decided to chronicle my efforts here, at least in part because it’s something more than a half-dozen people might be interested in reading, as opposed to my normal rantings which apparently actually drive traffic away even from other sites.

There are plenty of resources online for information and advice on how to get published, but not too many that keep a running log of a close-enough-to-unknown-as-makes-no-difference author and his attempts to navigate the publishing industry maze. I was lucky enough to bypass several parts of the standard process with The Sillymarillion (it was a right place, right time kind of lucky break), so this will be a learning experience for me, and hopefully for anyone who happens by this little corner of the Web to read it.

As it turns out, that poetic obstacle I mentioned a while back was less a roadblock than a speedbump. After a brief period spent staring blankly at the screen, I put a couple of words together that managed to capture exactly the feel and rhythm I wanted to achieve, and the whole damned song just flowed into the keyboard from there, words and structure and all. It’s not Shakespeare and it’s not perfect, but overall I’m very happy with the way it worked out and how it fits into the story.

In weeks since then, I’ve managed to finish the manuscript for what I initially intended to be book 2 of a 2-part series, and even got through an initial round of editing and rewrites. Now, even as I rewrite and refine the text of both books, I have some decisions to make. Each volume is just slightly on the short side for what is considered appropriate for a novel these days – at 66-68,000 words, they’re just a tad below the oft-quoted “70,000-100,000” mark. Of course, fantasy books these days tend to run 500+ pages, even some I’ve seen from first-time authors.

So my choices, as I see it, are as follows:

• Market the books as is, and just hope it’s true that size doesn’t matter.
• Add more material to the story, running the risk of disturbing the pacing, introducing redundancies or continuity problems late in the game
• Tack on a couple of appendices containing information about the history, languages, etc of the world I’ve created, running the risk of inducing excruciating boredom in most readers.
• Combine them into a single volume. This probably makes the most sense and is likely the direction I’ll go, but it means a bit of rethinking over the title and structure of the work.

Now, as to “doing this the hard way”:

I contacted the publisher of my previous book to tell him that the project I had mentioned to him something like two years ago – which he had expressed interest in seeing – was finally ready for someone to take a look at it. His reply was that, for reasons I won’t go into here, his company was dropping its fantasy line altogether, at least for the present.

So much for the easy route! What that means is that I now have to go the route of writing query letters and synopses to send to long lists of agents to find one to represent me to publishers, following each separate agency’s submission guidelines and then, assuming one of them decides to represent me, following the same procedure with the publishers themselves.

First, though, I need to polish that manuscript. There’s a difference between sending a book to someone you’ve already worked with and saying, “Hey, here’s the draft – see what you think,” vs. the “Here’s an example of my best work – please send money!” objective I’ll be dealing with.

I hope to chronicle my efforts here, up to and including publishing any interesting rejection letters I accumulate. So if any of you search engine bots who read this have ever been curious about the process of trying to sell a book once it’s been written, you might want to watch this space in the coming weeks.