Comparison Shopping

First off, I have officially hit the halfway mark of my NaNoWrimo Novel. Feel free to celebrate, congratulate, jeer, or even cast dire predictions that I’ll crash and burn for the next twenty days.

Meanwhile:

NaNoWrimo
25005 / 50000 (50.0%)

Those of you who saw Tuesday’s post may note that this is only 2k more words. However, I have my reasons. I have been simultaneously working on line edits for Under the Rose, and I have been working on revisions of the stuff I’ve written on this proposal so far. I think that may be against NaNo rules, but what the hey. Researchign probably is, too, and I don’t think I can ever stop doing that. I did a particularly wonderful bit of it today, in fact. Woo hoo, research!

Onto other topics. I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend of late in industry blogs and email loops that I frequent. I’m not quite sure what to call it. Sometimes, it takes the form of universalization (e.g., “This one agent says to do this, so I’m going to do it just as she says, despite the different directions from other agents”). Other times, it’s accusation, (“Miss Snark says such-and-such but you say you don’t do that. What’s wrong with you!”) And finally, in its most amusing form, it’s two questions asked of two different industry bloggers. Unhappy with one answer? Try it again elsewhere. Above all, make sure you berate people for giving you “conflicting” advice.

Ugh. Stop the advice comparison shopping. Seriously. Stop trying to stir up pointless debates about whether or not equeries or snail mail queries are better. Stop expecting legitimate agents outside of New York to tell you exactly how their businesses work because some New York agent decides to get uppity on her blog somewhere and say she’s better than everyone outside the 212. (The only thing you need to know is a list of who she’s sold recently and where to, and if the six figure Hyperion and Disney deals aren’t enough to prove to you that legitmate agents do indeed work in Denver, CO, then I don’t know how a post explaining how she flies to NY every few months will make it any better.) Stop berating some nice agent who visits your email loop because his advice differs somewhat from the opinionated anonymous mouth of Miss Snark (who, God bless).

Accept the fact that different agents do things differently. Not EVERY Mexican restaurant in the world uses the exact same spices in their fajita, do they? No. And that’s what these comparison shoppers are really getting at here. With all the actual scam agencies out there in the world, the equivalents of Mexican restaurants serving rotten meat or taking your money and not giving you fajitas at all, you’re really going to quibble over a restaurant’s right to choose ultimately meaningless minutiae as the difference between habanero over jalapeno? Yes, by all means find out if it’s a habanero place, and if you never much cared for that and like your esophagus just fine the way it is, then by all means skip over querying –er, eating — there. But stop asking why they don’t serve jalapeno. Habanero is working just fine for them.

Step back for a minute and picture literary agencies as being like any other small business. One takes Visa. One only takes cash. One is closed on Sundays. One stays opens. One accepts equeries. One doesn’t, but wants five pages included with every query letter. Why is this so hard to grasp, or worse, to obey? I’ve been to cash-only nail salons and been forced to run across the street, my pedicured toes still separated by cotton balls, to hit an ATM. I would never dream of forcing my credit card into the poor attendant’s face and insisting she accept it. Yet that’s what this feels like to me. Have we been so overrun by the corporation, McDonalds culture of this country that we can’t accept minor variations between businesses of the same type?

It’s pointless. It’s wasteful. It’s a prime example of getting totally focused on the wrong thing. Reading the comment trails of these posts, I invariably come across some writer who gets all in a huff about the “conflicting” advice and/or promises never to query the agent in question because they won’t “get with the program” and do it the way that the writer wants. In truth, all the writer really wants is to be represented. If a writer was guaranteed a “yes” for sending a snail mail query rather than an email query, that stamp would be licked so fast! If an agent can land you a great deal, I doubt you care how many lunches she did or did not have in order to do it, or whether she hand-delivered the manuscript or sent it by way of carrier pigeon.

(I can’t even remember where I read the one that asked if, given an agency that accepts
both e and snail queries, one was “more likely” to get noticed. But any question that bears the slightest resemblance to “what are my chances?” gets an automatic eye roll at the screen. Poor Pantalaimon. Save him from all the eyerolling!)

It’s not the medium; it’s the message. Remember the immortal words of Theresa Nielsen Hayden:

Aspiring writers are forever asking what the odds are that they’ll [sell their books]. That’s the wrong question. If you’ve written a book that surprises, amuses, and delights the readers, and gives them a strong incentive to read all the pages in order, your chances are very good indeed. If not, your chances are poor.

It’s sad, really, that the remarkable boon to this industry that is the proliferation of the industry blog is being dragged down by this kind of pettiness. I love to pick up exciting new bits of industry information, to hear about scam agents being brought down, to learn insider tips and have publishing myths busted. But lately it seems I’ve been spending too much time watching the same questioners make their circuit, repeating the same questions over and over in an attempt to get their “secret handshake” answer, or trying their best to prove how “corrupt” and “ridiculous” the whole system is by showing how differently the so-called “gatekeepers” respond.

Update: Jana DeLeon has an easy-peasy “twelve step” program for writers looking to find that secret handshake. It’s a real winner.