Friday Round-Up

First of all, due to the popularity of Monday’s blog post, I’ve decided to give away two books! The winner of the Sophia Nash giveaways are: Vicki and Terri W.

(Only one copy is signed, so whoever emails me with their address first gets the signed copy.)

Speaking of emails, a little bit of annoyance. I regularly get spammed by a certain book publicity company. I call it spam because they have sent me the same (form) email about half a dozen times. Wait, did I say email? I meant, they have filled in the comment form on my website about half a dozen times with the same pat information. If they can’t find my email address, which is listed in black and blue, at right, what am I to think about their ability to contact actual media outlets? If all they can do is send me multiple copies of the same form letter, then what am I to think about their ability to devise a personal publicity strategy tailored to the strength of my book?

I haven’t even heard about their work with any clients yet (oh yeah, this is NOT information they provide in their form letter, and it is of course, the only information I’m really interested in), and already, I’m skeptical of their ability to handle the basic requirements of a publicity person: having contacts, and personalized pitching. Confidential to said spamming book publicity company: your strategy is backfiring. If I’d found your website myself, I’d be more impressed with you than I am now.

Moving on to another semi-rant: Two agents are discussing their efforts at on-the-spot critiques at writer’s conferences. Both feel very frustrated with the endeavor. Kristin Nelson, in her usual polite, Midwestern way, wants to know if people expect her to be honest with them and reveal that she wouldn’t read the submission after the first paragraph. Jessica Faust of Bookends, who freely admits to not being “soft and cuddly” reports that she was shocked by the openly hostile nature of the writers she critiqued.

Raise your hand if you’re surprised. I’m not. I’m pretty sure by now that this whole “on the spot critique” is rarely more than an exercise in public humiliation. I’ve been at workshops like this where the agents seem to take great joy in making fun of the submissions, going as far as to read paragraphs aloud in ridiculous voices to the cruel delight of the audience. (Neither of the agents mentioned above, by the way.) You couldn’t get me to submit to one of those things for less than the price of enough martinis to get me drunk before and passed out afterwards.

I’ve no doubt that there are people (such as the commenters on each agent’s blog) who do want an honest review by an industry pro, but I doubt that’s the position of most folks in that audience. A lot of the people just want the editor to say, “My God, this is brilliant. Please, let me give you a contract right away!” Anything else to them is an unacceptable outcome, a “waste of their time.”

They don’t want feedback, because they’ve convinced themselves of a great myth of publishing: that the only thing keeping them from getting published is that they can’t get their book read by an editor. These are the folks who call agents the “gatekeepers” and say that they are keeping their work from reaching people who would truly enjoy it. The same folks who are so insistent that their book get read that they bring it with them to conferences and force it upon editors on sight, slipping it into their bags or under bathroom stall doors. They’ll throw hissy fits over pitch appointment sign up sheets or pay hundreds of dollars for charity critiques the quality of which they’ll loudly lambast on their blogs (though their only true complaint seems to be that the person didn’t fawn over their brilliance and offer them a contract on the spot). “If they just read it…”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way. Most of the time, they read it, and they still don’t like it. Does it mean that it’s not publishable? Sometimes. Sometimes not. We’ve all heard the stories of the books that got rejected everywhere, until one plucky editor took and chance and the rest was history. Whole publishing houses have been founded on the idea that the established NYC joints weren’t publishing something that the public wanted to read. Even books that sell get rejections. I’ve gotten plenty on the books I’ve sold. That’s why most rejection letters include that magic disclaimer: “This business is subjective.” The writers who get these critiques should keep this in mind.

But more than that, the agents who offer them should remember that there’s a percentage of attendees out there don’t ACTUALLY want a critique. They want an offer of representation. It’s the same logic that leads to agents only writing form rejection letters: any kind of constructive criticism is going to come with a backlash.

Which is too bad for the writers who actually are hoping for feedback. Still, I’m a bit skeptical of the whole process. I think it’s another myth: that all you need is someone in the industry to tell you the magic words and you’ll get it right. In the majority of cases, is feedback in a rejection letter really going to be valuable to the writer?

I got a rejection once that said, basically, that the editor would have bought the book if the heroine who didn’t have a military background had a military background, if instead of being unhappy and an orphan she was happy and had a full family life with none of the baggage that formed the main plotline of the book, if it was set in South America instead of Europe, if it was about a different topic than the topic it was about, if the hero, who worked for the heroine, was actually the heroine’s boss instead, and if the villain didn’t exist, and if the ending was different.

Which, fine, good to know, but how helpful is that? Clearly, she just wanted a completely different book than the one I’d written. Good to know. Good luck with that. I didn’t come away with any more information from all that than I would have from a “not right for me.” It didn’t teach me anything about what I’d done wrong in my book, just that I hadn’t pulled it off well enough for her to like it. In other words, Europe was not the problem. The fact that she was thinking about South America while I was writing about Europe was the problem.

There seems to be a rising body of opinion that editors and agents are somehow responsible for teaching writers what they are doing wrong, that they OWE writers an explanation. I often hear writers say, “if they would just tell me, I could fix it.” Do you think this is true? Is the problem not knowing, or not doing? I’m inclined to think it’s the latter. When I was a beginner, I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong, but I learned to see what I was doing wrong AND do it right as part of a slow and ongoing process. It wasn’t like “your dialogue sucks –>lightning bolt —>magically good dialogue.” I’m pretty sure that if I had rewritten that book about South America, she would have started to have visions of Africa in her head. Nothing she could tell me would make a difference. I had to figure out how to write Europe so that no one would think of South America.

Anyone here gotten feedback that was an instant turnaround? I’d really like to hear about it.