I am Nemo

Note: I’m not sure if the poster meant this as rhetorical, but I did want to respond, and my comment seemed to be getting quite long so I decided to bring it up here and make it a full post. No attack is meant towards the anonymous poster.

From the comments trail of my Monday post:

What I’d like to hear is a story of someone who did it the traditional way while being a complete nobody and knowing no one. Meaning: (1) no mutual friends with any agents, (2) never worked as an editor, (3) not married to a publisher, (4) an agent, (5) not a cover model, (6) not a celebrity, (7) not a big magazine editor, (8) not a great friend of a NY Times bestselling author, (9) no high concept book Hollywood would die to get, (10) has no mentor respected in the industry… (11) someone who is no one from the boonies, just sent a query on a good book, and voila…:)

I’m not quite sure whether or not this set up is meant to be viewed as a more noble or pure way of getting your book into print, but I am mildly amused by the supposition that most of 1-10 on that list above make it at all “easy.” Let’s take this hypothesis step by step, shall we?

(1, 8, 10) So basically not involved in the industry at all? Come on, now. No man is an island, and no one exists in a vacuum, and all of those other freindly cliches. In the process of learning about the industry, almost every single person out there manages to communicate with a published writer. I would never recommend anyone isolate themselves from discovering as much as they could about the industry — and one of the best ways to do that is to talk to people IN the industry. Join RWA and become at all involved in your local chapter and you’ll be fast friends with at least four or five published and/or agented authors within a few months. Hang out on an author blog or two and the same thing will happen. Go to a conference and you’ll drown in writers that would like you to play in their sandbox. And then you’re stuck. 😉 I can see it now:

“Sorry, I would not like to have a drink/go gambling/let our kids have play dates/start a book club with you, because, you see, you’re a published writer and I need to keep my street cred of not having any ‘connections.’ You seem like a fun, funny, with it kind of gal, but I gotta protect my rep.”

“Dear Sailor Boy, I will never forget the time we shared together. These five years have been a cornucopia of good times and good lovin’, but you see, I recently discovered that your mother is acquainted with a literary agent and thinks I should query her. Can’t have that.”

Quite frankly, friendship with anyone in the industry means exactly nothing. A) You have a friend, she gives you advice, she introduces you to her editor or agent, the editor or agent says to send her something, you do, and she rejects it (raise your hand if this happened to you — because it happened to me at least twice). Meanwhile, she gets something else in over the transom from a complete strange, loves it and signs it. B) You send to someone else over the transom, a complete stranger, they love it and offer (this has also happened to me). C) The friend of the friend of the friend you send to loves it, and offers (has also happened). D) You send to a ocmplete stranger, and get a rejection (yup, me again). Based on my experience, each of those four possibbilities have just as much chance of happening as the other. Because it’s the book that matters.

(The poster didn’t mention “has an MFA” but I suppose that would also be a black mark. We can call it 10.5.)

I think the person who goes in with zero knowledge of the industry, the hermit who lives in the cabin with the large stack of paper and a pen and has never heard of Writer’s Market, I think that person is probably the one who sends their tome to their favorite author instead of to a publishing house, who sends it into a contest (having coordinated a contest, I know this happens more often than you think). I don’t know if I can give you an example of someone who doesn’t know anyone else in the industry right now, nor would that person be commenting on the blog, because, hey, if they are plugged in enough to visit my blog, or if I know them at all, then that negates everything, right? It’s a catch 22.

A good worker in any industry is one who learns as much about the industry as possible. They take classes, if they need to, they buy books on the subject, they Google it and join a professional organization and try to talk to people in the industry to see how they work and what they need to do to succeed in this industry. You do that if you want to become a chef or a lawyer or a doctor or an accountant or a vulcanologist.

(2, 3, 4) I don’t think anyone in the comment trail below fits these descriptions. In fact, of the dozens of published authors I know well enought o have exchanged a personal email or two with them, I can only think of a handful that fit those descriptions: Lynda Curnyn, Sarah Mlynowski, Melissa Senate (gee, all Harlequin authors/editors) Erica Orloff, and my own agent, Deidre Knight. Is it so unusual for former editors to become writers? I don’t think so; back in college, everyone talked abotu becoming an editor in New York so that you could learn about the industry, much as people who hope to work in the government put in time on Capitol Hill. Yet I never hear anyone saying, “Oh, well, she got elected Congresswoman because she was a senatorial staffer.”

(5, 6, 7) I only know one person who wrote a book because he was a cover model, and I think Fabio’s romance was ghostwritten. He was a huge celebrity model, who not only made his living modeling, but got a host of other modeling and acting gigs (remember the margarine commercials?) because of his career as a romance cover model. He was like the Tyra Banks of paperbacks. Regarding my own “cover modeling,” I think the idea that any publisher would care that I have appeared on one Harlequin category and three small press covers is beyond ludicrous. It’s hardly a platform. It’s a funny footnote in my author bio. Likewise, I’ve heard of magazine editors and celebrities that write novels, but I also know that such celebrity novels are a tiny, tiny, tiny little portion of the publishing business. It’s bright, flashy, and gets a lot of press and maybe a bunch of sales, but then it disappears. And again, no one in the comments trail fits those descriptions, either.

(9) Okay, now this is just silly. So if it’s high concept, then it’s not just “a good book?” Or only if Hollywood is “dying to get their hands on it?” does it fall off the wagon of “good book” and become some sort of grandstanding hack job? Sorry for the snark, but I’m fresh off a writing workshop where high concept was bandied about as the “dirty word” that was ruining the publishing industry. The speaker said that high concept had no place in a book. She said other stuff too but I started daydreaming about my next high concept story and how I was going to write an absafuckinglutely fabulous story using that concept and stopped listening to her. . Wherefore the bitterness, people? It’s a tool, just like any other. Use it or don’t, but drop the whingeing.

My friends write both high concept and low concept stories all the time, and there’s no rhyme or reason to what gets interest from the publishing industry or from Hollywood. A marketable concept may get you a read, but it’s not necessarily going to get you a sale, and I’ve seen that happen more than enough times that I’m no longer baffled by it. “Great concept, doesn’t carry through.” You need that follow through on a book. If all you’ve got is the concept, well, we’ve all seen those Amazon reviews.

Quite frankly, I don’t have the slightest clue what Hollywood is dying to get their hands on. For example, let’s take Scott Westerfeld’s YA novels. He’s got a large variety of concepts going on with these books: a town where children born at midnight are given access to a secret world, a story of vampirism treated as an STD and the organization that stems the spread of the pandemic (or, as he puts it, “zombie apocalypse”), and a future dystopia where everyone gets plastic surgery to turn them beautiful at 16. What story got optioned? the one-off he wrote about professional cool hunters who race around Manhattan looking for the perfect sneaker. Okay.

(11) Well, I don’t know why the many, many people who shared their stories in the comments trail didn’t exemplify this (perhaps the assumption that by posting on a litblog they are automatically acquainted with a published author?) but off the top of my head (and a really splashy example at that), Stephenie Meyer, the author of Twilight. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t speak to its quality, but I can speak to its success. New York Times Bestseller List, sold as a high six figure deal that is reportedly the largest amount of money Little, Brown Children’s ever offered a debut author. She’s from Utah, she admittedly didn’t know a thing about how to submit books, she subscribed to Writer’s Marketplace, made a list of 15 agents, queried them, got one and sold her book. Period. (Oh, you say, but what about her high-concept vampire story, and the buzz and the movie deal? Yeah, fine. But I know half a dozen girls who sold their vampire stories this year, and another few dozen who DIDN’T sell theirs, so there’s no easy answer there.) And again, with the comments trail, as well as almost every single person I know that has sold a book. The thing is, these stories of people sending in queries, getting requests, sending in requests, getting offers, and publishing books? They are so commonplace, so normal, so utterly workaday that they are boring. No drama. But it happens. I’ve got a small circle of writing friends (the ones that do the “pens” thing) and of the five of us, four have sold our books, and this is how we did it:

1. Sent a query to an editor, who responded that she didn’t think it was right for her line, but try another line. Sent proposal to editor of other line, mentioning that first editor thought it might be a good fit. Second editor agreed, and bought the book six weeks later. No agent involved. Writer is married mother of four from British Columbia.
2. Me. I’ve bored y’all enough with my story.
3. Writer is Louisiana born, Texas accountant. She queries a bunch of agents, one takes her on; she shops her work, and sells it.
4. Writer works from home and is married mother in Michigan. Finals in contest, pitches to agent at conference. Agent reads work, takes her on. Several years and even more manuscritps later, agent sells two book deal for her.
5. When she sells, which will be sometime after actually finishing a project, five will be a young woman from Oklahoma who has taken writing classes under popular genre fiction writers. Dollars to donuts she will sell by querying agents, getting interest, sending in her work, getting offers, and selling it.

Slight variations, but the general theme is the same. Normal people with a good book and a query letter. It’s not about connections, or who you know, or what have you. It’s about having the right project, in front of the right people, and at the right time. That’s it, that’s all, it doesn’t matter how you do it. If you’re a nobodoy from nowhere who has never heard of the internet or a writer’s organiztion, just has a good story and a 39 cent stamp, or if you’re the networkingest networker celebrity ex editor cover model sister in law of Nora Roberts, it’s still right project, right people, right time.