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owlectomyAre You Your Own Biggest Roadblock?
With Jack McDevitt, Lori Devoti, Liz L. Gorinsky, Ann Leckie, Jordan Castillo Price.
Is it possible you are doing something to keep yourself from selling? Come discuss what we do that keeps us from writing, submitting, and ultimately selling -- or selling again.
LG: I'd like to start with the panel description, spending time on writing, submitting, and selling, and come up with a roadblock that kept you from writing, submitting, and selling.
JCP: When you're a beginner you write one thing and you polish it and you love it, and you're crushed when you get that rejection. If you're in a band -- if you write a LOT, then you're not too bothered if someone says one song sucks, but if it's just your ONE song, you're crushed. So you need to have a dozen stories rather than just one, so that it doesn't hurt quite so bad. When I started writing multiple stories and therefore not getting so crushed by rejection letters, I started selling.
AL: At the very beginning my biggest problem was the voice in the back of my head that says, "You're terrible, why do you think you can write? That's the stupidest idea. Hide in the closet for the rest of your life." The helpful thing for that was NaNoWriMo. You don't have to do that, but just the habit of saying you have to write 2000 words every day, and you can tell the voice, shut up, it's not supposed to be good. That's tremendously helpful. Rejections are devastating. I had to make a rule that no matter what the rejection said, the story could not spend the night at home -- it had to go out again. When it's out I feel much better about it. The editor's not going to call me up and say, I want to read what's on your hard drive.
LD: I sold my first book really easily and then had a sophomore slump. My biggest mistake was letting someone else tell me what to write. Not that it was a bad idea, but I made my next sale when I said I was going to do what I REALLY wanted to do. My agent, a very well-respected agent, was telling me what to write. It wasn't bad advice but it wasn't for me. I needed the confidence to believe in myself.
JM: When I was a freshman in college I wanted to write SF. They used to have a freshman short story contest, I won that, they published the story in the college literary mag and I thought, I'm on my way. Then I made the mistake of reading David Copperfield and thought, how am I ever going to compete with him? I decided I was out of my league and I didn't write another word for 25 years. Lori quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: You've gotta believe in yourself. We go through a lifetime of authority figures telling us, stay away from that, don't do that, you'll break it. If you can get past that point, you'd be amazed at what you can do. People are a lot smarter than they realize.
LG: When we're receiving people's writing, we reflect upon... comparing the submissions to our own favorite writings, to see if we're not missing something great. We never hold it against somebody for submitting something and not quite getting there.
LD: But if you try to imitate someone you admire... it's going to be crap.
LG: You need to ignore the trends, because it's going to show if it's not what you need to be writing, and you're going to be behind the trend anyway.
AL: I read slush. It's a fun job in a lot of ways but I see the things people are submitting. One thing I notice is partly when people are writing things, and write the trend but it's not really their story. One really important thing is, when you write the story, you don't say, well that's good enough. If you don't sit down and make it as good as YOU can make it, everything that's "good enough" is going to stick out. I feel better about sending things out when I make sure everything's as good as I can make it. When you get comments from friends and critiquers, you have to be the final judge of what you want your story to be about. Not the story other people think you should have told.
JCP: You can make a game out of submitting things. You might get the brief rejection -- I'm not even worth a full sentence? You might get the form rejection -- Great, you pressed a button, thanks. You might get the highly critical rejection. No matter how you get rejected it's going to hurt. If you've got a number of things on submission, throw them in a spreadsheet and make a list of places you submit to, make a column for each, and pencil it in as you get the rejections in the spreadsheet. You can make things different colors and change your fonts around. It's a way of coping with the feeling of inadequacy. You have to be in the right place at the right time.
LG: Are you still at the stage where you're submitting raw to anyone?
LD: I haven't had my agent not accept anything... we've discussed ideas. I was in a short story anthology, and the way I sold that was, my friend was in it, and I thought I wanted to be in it, so I called up the editor. Ann had some good advice. I would make sure to have things out in five places. The agent hunt is horribly painful but it helps if you know you have something else. You do it, you send it out, and focus on something else. That keeps you sane. And know who you're sending it to. Research the agents and know what they sell, otherwise it's a waste of your time and more rejections.
JM: The world may have changed. When I was getting my career running, if you got any kind of critique from one of the top magazines, it's an almost-sale, and you should take that as encouragement. I got one when I was fifteen, I thought, my God! This guy doesn't like my stuff. You get a personal note, that's encouragement. Send them more. One point that I want to make -- I hope that most people who are trying to write are doing it with short fiction. Breaking in with novels is the hard way to do it. Short fiction is easy on you, you don't have to spend a whole year on something. If you can sell a few of those, you get a name. Then they recognize the name, they're more inclined to take you seriously. The screener's job is to get rid of your manuscript, so you have to write something that reaches out and grabs that screener by the throat. Don't start with weather, do something in the first paragraph.
LG: I think there are a number of people who got lucky and got their start with a novel. I know writers who find short stories just as hard as novels. It's never a bad idea to concentrate on sending out short stories. What we're looking for is not usually the very beginning of a manuscript, but... we look for a positive signal, like publications in magazines, as signals that we might give something the benefit of the doubt if they've sold stories, or been through one of the genre workshops. But the work has to stand by itself.
LD: The short story market is dead everywhere except SF/F. I know writers who can write novels and can't write short stories, and I'm sure the reverse is true. They're very different things. But short stories can help you build a platform and make you more desireable.
LG: It's great to have an established fandom, but... the number of people who read short fiction is tiny compared to the people who need to buy your novel, so the marketing needs to be in place in other ways.
LD: After a while you start to judge the rejections... you need even a bit of validation to keep writing.
JM: I remember Harlan Ellison saying, when I saw my name in print, I knew that nothing was going to stop me. That's the value of this. It seems out of sight to see your name in print in a major magazine -- but if you can see your name in print, you know you can believe in yourself.
LG: From the editorial side... it's scary to give feedback to something you don't have an editorial relationship with. We know our boilerplate form rejections get evaluated. If someone thinks there's enough there to put in a sentence to say, this shows promise, or this could show promise if you change something, you don't have to pay attention to that, but it means a lot.
AL: No editor ever says "We want to see something else from you" casually. Believe it. A good rejection can be fantastic. It kept me going for weeks. I was so thrilled. A friend said, but it's a rejection! But look what they said! If your story is fantastic, it stands on its own, but when it comes in -- 99 times out of a hundred, a really strange or bad cover letter indicates something not great. That gives the screener or the editor certain expectations. When you see a good cover letter and well-formatted manuscript, it gives you the expectation that this writer is serious, competent, professional. If it's talking about their emotional reasons for writing the cover story -- you wince. You want to take every opportunity to bias the editor in your favor.
LG: We can be biased positively, we can be biased negatively. We only notice when the cover letter is crazy. It's possible, since we are a gigantic market, we may see a higher proportion of crazy. Don't do anything to make yourself stand out negatively. Some of you may have been on the verge of a sale -- a revision request, or someone who's interested but asking you where it's going. Can we talk about a situation like that?
JM: I do my books one at a time.
LD: I've had books go to committee. The editor liked it, but they take it to the publisher's committee. That's still a long way from a sale. The editor loves it? Oh well, marketing doesn't. I've had ones that have had revision requests. At that point you have to decide, do you want to make those revisions? That may sound kind of stupid, because you want to sell the book, but even at that level sometimes people write a book you're not writing. You write what you can write. Sometimes the book they want is not the book you're writing. I've said no to those, sometimes, because it's a waste of time and I'd feel bad about what I had in the end. You have to know yourself to be able to make that decision.
AL; In the end you're the judge of what you want the story to be. Take advice only from people who share your vision, including editors. If they say, "I'll buy this if you put in a werewolf bagpiper"... you have to think about if it's going to work with the story. If you're lucky you'll get a rejection that says, I really enjoyed this part... but I think the werewolf bagpiper should have opened an antiques shop instead of killing himself? It's easy to say, oh, well that's what I should do. If you say, that solves the problem, that makes so much sense, that's great. But don't let your story mutate into something it never was. This work doesn't pay a lot. If you can't be proud of it, it's not worth doing.
LD: That's not to say, don't respond to editorial suggestions. It's 100% a better book because of the suggestions that I took. But after a certain point, it wasn't the book I wanted to write.
AL: If it's going to make it better, do it in a heartbeat.
JCP: The last time I got a revision request it was... make the ending less of a downer, and make it a series. And it turned into a 10-novelette series. Sometimes a request for a change is a reason for a yay! Sometimes your gut reaction is no, no! But then it comes back to haunt you -- sometimes it's your ego saying no, when it would actually make it better. It's hard to tell the good gut reaction from the ego reaction.
AL: And that's where the mean little voice comes in handy -- accurately pointing out where your critics are right. When it's under your control, it's really helpful. If every word you write is absolute gold, and no one understands your perfect brilliance, you need to cultivate that mean voice.
LD: And sometimes you need to read between the lines. Like your editor says, this story needs a dog, and you say, what? But what they're really trying to say is, the character needs to be more accessible.
JM: I sent a SF chess story to Chess Life. They said, it's too long and our readers don't read fiction. But we'll buy it if you cut it to 3000 words. There's a glut of markets for SF chess stories... I got rid of everything that didn't move the action forward. They took the story and I grumbled the whole time. But it's six times better now. I've had the same experience with novels. My problem is getting rid of stuff. The single biggest beginner's mistake is overwriting.
AL: Especially at the beginning... two or three paragraphs of throat-clearing. Slice it off.
JCP: I had to lose two chapters from my latest novel because the climactic action doesn't happen soon enough. It was brutal. The cool thing was, I have cutting-floor snippets to put in my newsletter.
LG: Most writers have this negative reaction to editorial suggestions. You can be outraged at those suggestions for a little while, and then... come back to it after a week. Nobody's sitting around suggesting changes for their health. It's easier either to reject, or to let it go straight through to production. I know when I feel like something's wrong, and you need to respond to that in a way that doesn't compromise the work. There are certainly cases where agents or editors make offers conditional on certain changes -- it's hard for us to buy something that's fundamentally wrong, because we don't know how you'll respond to criticism. It's easier later in your career.
LD: In the agent hunt, agreeing to exlusives is a mistake. I would put a time limit, like two weeks. In this business, people try to get from you what they can get. That sounds horribly negative, but everything is a negotiation. You have to think about your own best interests. It can be a year sitting on someone's desk, seriously! If you don't hear back from them, nudge them. Don't be afraid of the agent. The other thing is, I've had friends with a couple books published and they can't sell again. It depends on whether your goal is to write a certain type of book, or to be constantly published. But you may have to get a pen name, you may have to write something different. I started out in romantic comedy when romcom was taking a nosedive, I'm in paranormal romance now. I was willing to change. I wouldn't be published again otherwise. If you have one type of book that's all you will write... it may not sell for ten years.
JM: The agent works for us. You don't work for him. If I were to ask what a writer is supposed to do, you might say, he's trying to tell a story. When it rains in your story, the reader should get wet. Give your reader an experience. Don't do anything to remind you that I'm home sitting in a chair reading. I should be hanging off a cliff with the love of my life! If you use a word I have to look up in a dictionary, the illusion's gone. If you make a technical mistake. Put the action on stage. The best friend a writer can have is someone who'll tell you what they really think. Take him to lunch and don't get mad. If you're smart you'll marry them.
AL: It's not just storytelling -- you're manipulating the reader's mind. When you hear don't use passive, etc. There aren't any rules. There are certain techniques and effects. Be as ambitious as possible. Experts don't practice what they already do well, they do the things they can't do. So be crazy ambitious, even if you fail.
JCP: Keep reading. Read outside your genre. Works within a genre start sounding like one another, and if you sound fresh, if you don't sound like everybody else, you've got an edge. Even if it's not your favorite genre you can learn a lot from it. Don't just get lost in the story, put on your analytical head.
AL: Sit down at the computer and type it out, if you don't know how it works. I typed out an entire novel. I learned a lot from typing it out and I didn't get carpal tunnel. Even just typing out opening chapters, opening paragraphs, the writer brain kicks in. Try it out.
LG: Read your work out loud. Read it in a different font. I've read books I'm editing out loud in their entirety. You need to hear the music of the prose. You process things a different way. The question of the negotiation during the selling process -- it's very scary for many people coming up, because they don't think of the people they're sending it to as real people. But they get genuinely excited when they find something they can publish. We're all human beings. If there's something promising there we'll let the writer have their own human direction with a process.
LD: Read a publisher contract and an agent contract very carefully. There are clauses that limit what you can send somewhere else. You have to make the decision for yourself, but know what's there. A bad agent is worse than no agent. It can kill your career.
LG: You have different amounts of power at different points in your career... but the process doesn't beat you down. We have a no-simultaneous-subs policy for a reason, but at the same time none of us wants to make a good writer six or eight months or a year for a response, which is how long it can take to read an entire submission. I can't publicly go against that policy, but most editors and agents will take some negotiations. Our goal is eventually to publish good work. Talk to pros about what's working for them and what kind of interactions you've had with certain markets.
LD: There are houses you can submit to without an agent. Most only accept agented submissions. The odds are like this. (Mimes a funnel). It's much better if you have an agent, you need an agent. I made my first sale at a conference, to a house that didn't require agented submission. There are ways around it. If you want to sell to New York you need an agent.
LG: We get about 2000 submissions a month. We still read them because it's the greatest thing in the world to discover a new writer. The first thing we ask is, do you want to get an agent? It's preferable because it keeps the negotiation and editorial process pure.
LD: Every agency has different boilerplate contracts with the various houses. They've gone through all those clauses, they've done the back-and-forth. So you start off with a contract that's more in your favor, with an agent.
(On the agent hunt:)
LG: You should get a subscription to Locus. Every month it has what's selling: what author, what agent, what house. You'll see names repeated over and over again, as an indication that they're selling pretty regularly.
LD: Publisher's Marketplace, also. You can see how many big deals an agent makes. You don't always want the more high-powered agent but it gives you that information. Agentquery.com lists agents that represent each genre, and it's free.
Lg: You can look up individual authors. They may publicly state who their agent is.
LD: Read book acknowledgements. On some publisher's websites you can look for information about foreign rights, etc.
LG: Sometimes those agents in locus already have a full house, but they might have a sub-agent. An agent who's just starting out is not a negative.
AL: Once an editor has rejected something, don't resubmit. Unless a new editor comes in. When a thing runs out of markets, they sit until a new market opens. My rule of thumb is, there are some markets that I'm not going to submit to. They need to pay or else have some critical cachet. You have to make that call yourself. There's a lot of churn in short fiction. There's little markets that might pay $50 or $100 for a story.
With Jack McDevitt, Lori Devoti, Liz L. Gorinsky, Ann Leckie, Jordan Castillo Price.
Is it possible you are doing something to keep yourself from selling? Come discuss what we do that keeps us from writing, submitting, and ultimately selling -- or selling again.
LG: I'd like to start with the panel description, spending time on writing, submitting, and selling, and come up with a roadblock that kept you from writing, submitting, and selling.
JCP: When you're a beginner you write one thing and you polish it and you love it, and you're crushed when you get that rejection. If you're in a band -- if you write a LOT, then you're not too bothered if someone says one song sucks, but if it's just your ONE song, you're crushed. So you need to have a dozen stories rather than just one, so that it doesn't hurt quite so bad. When I started writing multiple stories and therefore not getting so crushed by rejection letters, I started selling.
AL: At the very beginning my biggest problem was the voice in the back of my head that says, "You're terrible, why do you think you can write? That's the stupidest idea. Hide in the closet for the rest of your life." The helpful thing for that was NaNoWriMo. You don't have to do that, but just the habit of saying you have to write 2000 words every day, and you can tell the voice, shut up, it's not supposed to be good. That's tremendously helpful. Rejections are devastating. I had to make a rule that no matter what the rejection said, the story could not spend the night at home -- it had to go out again. When it's out I feel much better about it. The editor's not going to call me up and say, I want to read what's on your hard drive.
LD: I sold my first book really easily and then had a sophomore slump. My biggest mistake was letting someone else tell me what to write. Not that it was a bad idea, but I made my next sale when I said I was going to do what I REALLY wanted to do. My agent, a very well-respected agent, was telling me what to write. It wasn't bad advice but it wasn't for me. I needed the confidence to believe in myself.
JM: When I was a freshman in college I wanted to write SF. They used to have a freshman short story contest, I won that, they published the story in the college literary mag and I thought, I'm on my way. Then I made the mistake of reading David Copperfield and thought, how am I ever going to compete with him? I decided I was out of my league and I didn't write another word for 25 years. Lori quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: You've gotta believe in yourself. We go through a lifetime of authority figures telling us, stay away from that, don't do that, you'll break it. If you can get past that point, you'd be amazed at what you can do. People are a lot smarter than they realize.
LG: When we're receiving people's writing, we reflect upon... comparing the submissions to our own favorite writings, to see if we're not missing something great. We never hold it against somebody for submitting something and not quite getting there.
LD: But if you try to imitate someone you admire... it's going to be crap.
LG: You need to ignore the trends, because it's going to show if it's not what you need to be writing, and you're going to be behind the trend anyway.
AL: I read slush. It's a fun job in a lot of ways but I see the things people are submitting. One thing I notice is partly when people are writing things, and write the trend but it's not really their story. One really important thing is, when you write the story, you don't say, well that's good enough. If you don't sit down and make it as good as YOU can make it, everything that's "good enough" is going to stick out. I feel better about sending things out when I make sure everything's as good as I can make it. When you get comments from friends and critiquers, you have to be the final judge of what you want your story to be about. Not the story other people think you should have told.
JCP: You can make a game out of submitting things. You might get the brief rejection -- I'm not even worth a full sentence? You might get the form rejection -- Great, you pressed a button, thanks. You might get the highly critical rejection. No matter how you get rejected it's going to hurt. If you've got a number of things on submission, throw them in a spreadsheet and make a list of places you submit to, make a column for each, and pencil it in as you get the rejections in the spreadsheet. You can make things different colors and change your fonts around. It's a way of coping with the feeling of inadequacy. You have to be in the right place at the right time.
LG: Are you still at the stage where you're submitting raw to anyone?
LD: I haven't had my agent not accept anything... we've discussed ideas. I was in a short story anthology, and the way I sold that was, my friend was in it, and I thought I wanted to be in it, so I called up the editor. Ann had some good advice. I would make sure to have things out in five places. The agent hunt is horribly painful but it helps if you know you have something else. You do it, you send it out, and focus on something else. That keeps you sane. And know who you're sending it to. Research the agents and know what they sell, otherwise it's a waste of your time and more rejections.
JM: The world may have changed. When I was getting my career running, if you got any kind of critique from one of the top magazines, it's an almost-sale, and you should take that as encouragement. I got one when I was fifteen, I thought, my God! This guy doesn't like my stuff. You get a personal note, that's encouragement. Send them more. One point that I want to make -- I hope that most people who are trying to write are doing it with short fiction. Breaking in with novels is the hard way to do it. Short fiction is easy on you, you don't have to spend a whole year on something. If you can sell a few of those, you get a name. Then they recognize the name, they're more inclined to take you seriously. The screener's job is to get rid of your manuscript, so you have to write something that reaches out and grabs that screener by the throat. Don't start with weather, do something in the first paragraph.
LG: I think there are a number of people who got lucky and got their start with a novel. I know writers who find short stories just as hard as novels. It's never a bad idea to concentrate on sending out short stories. What we're looking for is not usually the very beginning of a manuscript, but... we look for a positive signal, like publications in magazines, as signals that we might give something the benefit of the doubt if they've sold stories, or been through one of the genre workshops. But the work has to stand by itself.
LD: The short story market is dead everywhere except SF/F. I know writers who can write novels and can't write short stories, and I'm sure the reverse is true. They're very different things. But short stories can help you build a platform and make you more desireable.
LG: It's great to have an established fandom, but... the number of people who read short fiction is tiny compared to the people who need to buy your novel, so the marketing needs to be in place in other ways.
LD: After a while you start to judge the rejections... you need even a bit of validation to keep writing.
JM: I remember Harlan Ellison saying, when I saw my name in print, I knew that nothing was going to stop me. That's the value of this. It seems out of sight to see your name in print in a major magazine -- but if you can see your name in print, you know you can believe in yourself.
LG: From the editorial side... it's scary to give feedback to something you don't have an editorial relationship with. We know our boilerplate form rejections get evaluated. If someone thinks there's enough there to put in a sentence to say, this shows promise, or this could show promise if you change something, you don't have to pay attention to that, but it means a lot.
AL: No editor ever says "We want to see something else from you" casually. Believe it. A good rejection can be fantastic. It kept me going for weeks. I was so thrilled. A friend said, but it's a rejection! But look what they said! If your story is fantastic, it stands on its own, but when it comes in -- 99 times out of a hundred, a really strange or bad cover letter indicates something not great. That gives the screener or the editor certain expectations. When you see a good cover letter and well-formatted manuscript, it gives you the expectation that this writer is serious, competent, professional. If it's talking about their emotional reasons for writing the cover story -- you wince. You want to take every opportunity to bias the editor in your favor.
LG: We can be biased positively, we can be biased negatively. We only notice when the cover letter is crazy. It's possible, since we are a gigantic market, we may see a higher proportion of crazy. Don't do anything to make yourself stand out negatively. Some of you may have been on the verge of a sale -- a revision request, or someone who's interested but asking you where it's going. Can we talk about a situation like that?
JM: I do my books one at a time.
LD: I've had books go to committee. The editor liked it, but they take it to the publisher's committee. That's still a long way from a sale. The editor loves it? Oh well, marketing doesn't. I've had ones that have had revision requests. At that point you have to decide, do you want to make those revisions? That may sound kind of stupid, because you want to sell the book, but even at that level sometimes people write a book you're not writing. You write what you can write. Sometimes the book they want is not the book you're writing. I've said no to those, sometimes, because it's a waste of time and I'd feel bad about what I had in the end. You have to know yourself to be able to make that decision.
AL; In the end you're the judge of what you want the story to be. Take advice only from people who share your vision, including editors. If they say, "I'll buy this if you put in a werewolf bagpiper"... you have to think about if it's going to work with the story. If you're lucky you'll get a rejection that says, I really enjoyed this part... but I think the werewolf bagpiper should have opened an antiques shop instead of killing himself? It's easy to say, oh, well that's what I should do. If you say, that solves the problem, that makes so much sense, that's great. But don't let your story mutate into something it never was. This work doesn't pay a lot. If you can't be proud of it, it's not worth doing.
LD: That's not to say, don't respond to editorial suggestions. It's 100% a better book because of the suggestions that I took. But after a certain point, it wasn't the book I wanted to write.
AL: If it's going to make it better, do it in a heartbeat.
JCP: The last time I got a revision request it was... make the ending less of a downer, and make it a series. And it turned into a 10-novelette series. Sometimes a request for a change is a reason for a yay! Sometimes your gut reaction is no, no! But then it comes back to haunt you -- sometimes it's your ego saying no, when it would actually make it better. It's hard to tell the good gut reaction from the ego reaction.
AL: And that's where the mean little voice comes in handy -- accurately pointing out where your critics are right. When it's under your control, it's really helpful. If every word you write is absolute gold, and no one understands your perfect brilliance, you need to cultivate that mean voice.
LD: And sometimes you need to read between the lines. Like your editor says, this story needs a dog, and you say, what? But what they're really trying to say is, the character needs to be more accessible.
JM: I sent a SF chess story to Chess Life. They said, it's too long and our readers don't read fiction. But we'll buy it if you cut it to 3000 words. There's a glut of markets for SF chess stories... I got rid of everything that didn't move the action forward. They took the story and I grumbled the whole time. But it's six times better now. I've had the same experience with novels. My problem is getting rid of stuff. The single biggest beginner's mistake is overwriting.
AL: Especially at the beginning... two or three paragraphs of throat-clearing. Slice it off.
JCP: I had to lose two chapters from my latest novel because the climactic action doesn't happen soon enough. It was brutal. The cool thing was, I have cutting-floor snippets to put in my newsletter.
LG: Most writers have this negative reaction to editorial suggestions. You can be outraged at those suggestions for a little while, and then... come back to it after a week. Nobody's sitting around suggesting changes for their health. It's easier either to reject, or to let it go straight through to production. I know when I feel like something's wrong, and you need to respond to that in a way that doesn't compromise the work. There are certainly cases where agents or editors make offers conditional on certain changes -- it's hard for us to buy something that's fundamentally wrong, because we don't know how you'll respond to criticism. It's easier later in your career.
LD: In the agent hunt, agreeing to exlusives is a mistake. I would put a time limit, like two weeks. In this business, people try to get from you what they can get. That sounds horribly negative, but everything is a negotiation. You have to think about your own best interests. It can be a year sitting on someone's desk, seriously! If you don't hear back from them, nudge them. Don't be afraid of the agent. The other thing is, I've had friends with a couple books published and they can't sell again. It depends on whether your goal is to write a certain type of book, or to be constantly published. But you may have to get a pen name, you may have to write something different. I started out in romantic comedy when romcom was taking a nosedive, I'm in paranormal romance now. I was willing to change. I wouldn't be published again otherwise. If you have one type of book that's all you will write... it may not sell for ten years.
JM: The agent works for us. You don't work for him. If I were to ask what a writer is supposed to do, you might say, he's trying to tell a story. When it rains in your story, the reader should get wet. Give your reader an experience. Don't do anything to remind you that I'm home sitting in a chair reading. I should be hanging off a cliff with the love of my life! If you use a word I have to look up in a dictionary, the illusion's gone. If you make a technical mistake. Put the action on stage. The best friend a writer can have is someone who'll tell you what they really think. Take him to lunch and don't get mad. If you're smart you'll marry them.
AL: It's not just storytelling -- you're manipulating the reader's mind. When you hear don't use passive, etc. There aren't any rules. There are certain techniques and effects. Be as ambitious as possible. Experts don't practice what they already do well, they do the things they can't do. So be crazy ambitious, even if you fail.
JCP: Keep reading. Read outside your genre. Works within a genre start sounding like one another, and if you sound fresh, if you don't sound like everybody else, you've got an edge. Even if it's not your favorite genre you can learn a lot from it. Don't just get lost in the story, put on your analytical head.
AL: Sit down at the computer and type it out, if you don't know how it works. I typed out an entire novel. I learned a lot from typing it out and I didn't get carpal tunnel. Even just typing out opening chapters, opening paragraphs, the writer brain kicks in. Try it out.
LG: Read your work out loud. Read it in a different font. I've read books I'm editing out loud in their entirety. You need to hear the music of the prose. You process things a different way. The question of the negotiation during the selling process -- it's very scary for many people coming up, because they don't think of the people they're sending it to as real people. But they get genuinely excited when they find something they can publish. We're all human beings. If there's something promising there we'll let the writer have their own human direction with a process.
LD: Read a publisher contract and an agent contract very carefully. There are clauses that limit what you can send somewhere else. You have to make the decision for yourself, but know what's there. A bad agent is worse than no agent. It can kill your career.
LG: You have different amounts of power at different points in your career... but the process doesn't beat you down. We have a no-simultaneous-subs policy for a reason, but at the same time none of us wants to make a good writer six or eight months or a year for a response, which is how long it can take to read an entire submission. I can't publicly go against that policy, but most editors and agents will take some negotiations. Our goal is eventually to publish good work. Talk to pros about what's working for them and what kind of interactions you've had with certain markets.
LD: There are houses you can submit to without an agent. Most only accept agented submissions. The odds are like this. (Mimes a funnel). It's much better if you have an agent, you need an agent. I made my first sale at a conference, to a house that didn't require agented submission. There are ways around it. If you want to sell to New York you need an agent.
LG: We get about 2000 submissions a month. We still read them because it's the greatest thing in the world to discover a new writer. The first thing we ask is, do you want to get an agent? It's preferable because it keeps the negotiation and editorial process pure.
LD: Every agency has different boilerplate contracts with the various houses. They've gone through all those clauses, they've done the back-and-forth. So you start off with a contract that's more in your favor, with an agent.
(On the agent hunt:)
LG: You should get a subscription to Locus. Every month it has what's selling: what author, what agent, what house. You'll see names repeated over and over again, as an indication that they're selling pretty regularly.
LD: Publisher's Marketplace, also. You can see how many big deals an agent makes. You don't always want the more high-powered agent but it gives you that information. Agentquery.com lists agents that represent each genre, and it's free.
Lg: You can look up individual authors. They may publicly state who their agent is.
LD: Read book acknowledgements. On some publisher's websites you can look for information about foreign rights, etc.
LG: Sometimes those agents in locus already have a full house, but they might have a sub-agent. An agent who's just starting out is not a negative.
AL: Once an editor has rejected something, don't resubmit. Unless a new editor comes in. When a thing runs out of markets, they sit until a new market opens. My rule of thumb is, there are some markets that I'm not going to submit to. They need to pay or else have some critical cachet. You have to make that call yourself. There's a lot of churn in short fiction. There's little markets that might pay $50 or $100 for a story.
(no subject)
25/5/09 18:02 (UTC)I think Jack McDevitt is absolutely wrong there. I think he's describing the older reality of the markets. I agree with the description of the science fiction short story world as a "club scene" -- you're doing it for other writers, you're doing it to play around with weird stuff, you're doing it to have a conversation within the genre with, let's face it, a really tiny number of people.
And, sure, it's heartbreaking to spend a year or two years on a novel that's never going to see the light of day. Is it less heartbreaking to spend that year writing a dozen stories and... maybe ONE of them gets picked up for a small-press zine, and nobody sees it, and you get a check that doesn't even cover the costs of printing and mailing.
Drabbles and flash fiction are seeing a renaissance with the internet, I think. In Japan, at least a couple of people have had success making stories available to people via cell phone. Me, I don't know where the market is going. If I have a good idea for a short, I'll write it. But there's no money in short stories and very little love.