Teresa:

Timing is all.

I have bumped into your blog just as I am reading (again) my daughter's amazing memoir of growing up hippie. She's been stuck for a couple of years, and I've offered to pick up the ball and try to find a publisher for her. My last publishing experience was back in the sixties, when I was the first publisher of Richard Brautigan's "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" and Willard Bain's "Informed Sources: Day East Received" (both The Communication Company, San Francisco, 1967), so I'm a little out of touch with that world. I have an intro to the agent of a friend of mine who's memoir of those times was published several years ago (Peter Coyote, "Sleeping Where I Fall"), which I have not yet acted upon. My question is: am I better off starting with the agent, or am I better off trying to interest a publisher's editor on my own? I'm starting to write an initial "query/cover letter", which is, I'm told, the crucial first step in the process. How do I determine if this agent is the right one to work with?

My own (highly subjective) opinion is that my daughter has written a fine book, but it would be good to have the opinion of a sophisticated reader who doesn't know her and could render a more objective opinion. What's a good way to get some second opinions without compromising any of our options? Thanks for any help you can give>

Posted February 20, 2004 10:22 AM by Claude Hayward

Refering to the easiest way to get an agent scenario: if your first and second choices for agents actually do pass you over, does that mean you did a bad job in picking agents, you've got bad luck/timing, or does it reflect in some strange way on the publisher who bought your book?

Just wondering.

Posted February 20, 2004 11:33 AM by Jon

Yes!
Finally somewhere one can send authors to read about agents. Between this and the slush thread, I think you might have the beginnings of a book I would recommend to up and coming authors and some of the older ones I know or maybe you can create an online (or off-line) short course on writing.

Posted February 20, 2004 11:48 AM by Kathleen David

Wunnerful, wunnerful.

Only one small caveat. There are some agents (mine for example) who will not share information about clients and are totally legitimate. There are, however, other ways to find out the client list. A happy client, for example. The SFWA membership list. Etc.

Jane

Posted February 20, 2004 12:14 PM by jane yolen

First: Who told you a query letter is essential, and what did they tell you about it? Give me some sense of where you're coming from.

Onward to the real advice. Start by using the connections you already have. Who you know? If you have friends who are published authors, ask them whether they'll take a look at the manuscript and/or recommend you to their agents. That's a much better starting point than a query letter. Agents get query letters like we get slush.

Posted February 20, 2004 12:28 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Claude Hayward, that last message of mine was addressed to you. Stuff intervened while I had it sitting there half-written on my screen.

Posted February 20, 2004 12:30 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

To Kathleen David: my suggestion is to point beginning writers to the PARTICLES section of Teresa's blog, and have then click on "Learn Writing with Uncle Jim."

Jim Macdonald, AKA Yog Sysop of SFF.NET, wrote this, and it's chock-full of excellent advice for the new writer wanting to become a professional.

Posted February 20, 2004 1:54 PM by Sherwood Smith

The 'life cycle of agents", described above, seems to be analagous to the life cycle of attorneys, physicians in private practice, insurance agents, and NY taxi/limo companies.

Posted February 20, 2004 2:26 PM by BSD

There's also this (sub division of the "not very helpful"): landing a very young agent at a large agency who is enthusiastic about your work--but not very good at basic things...like following up.

My first agent called to represent me at exactly the same time I heard from an editor at a NY house who wanted to see the rest of the novel a chunk of which I had sent her.

I called my new agent. She had me send her the entire ms. and she sent it to the editor. She also sent it out to other editors she said would be interested.

I assumed for professional reasons that I should not follow up with the first editor myself and just let my agent keep in touch with her to find out whether they wanted the book. My agent said that was the right way to go.

This was a HUGE mistake on my part and I have regretted it ever since. Months went by during which my agent told me she was not hearing back, blah blah blah.

Long story short--2 years after this agent tired of shopping the novel (as well as representing me) I found out that in fact the said first editor had not been followed up with properly. But by now it was too late, really.

File under: stories to make a writer want to become an alcoholic.

Posted February 20, 2004 2:53 PM by John Farrell

I like reading your blog regularly, so I was surprised to see my site mentioned here. Thanks for the confidence in P&E. We'll try to always deserve it.

Posted February 20, 2004 4:16 PM by Dave Kuzminski

Start by using the connections you already have.

Oh, cool. 'Cause I already know you and Kath, so if I ever decide to move from amateur to pro I'll be sure and whine in your direction. ;)

Are there really a lot of places that don't accept unagented submissions? It's weird, in corporate employment the trend seems to be going the other way, lots of prospective employers don't want to go through agencies at all any more because it's so easy to connect directly now.

Posted February 20, 2004 4:18 PM by Elayne Riggs

There are some agents (mine for example) who will not share information about clients and are totally legitimate.

There are some bars that tourists shouldn't walk into wearing a Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, with a camera slung around their neck and all their vacation money in their pocket. A big bearded guy with scarred knuckles, tattooed arms, and wearing scuffed leathers might be able to go into that same bar and have a perfectly lovely time. A hole-in-the-wall joint with no windows, with a row of Harleys parked out front, and a sign that reads "Girls! All nude!" over the door might be such a place.

In the same way, there are some agents who have some of the red-flag signs about them. If you're already a professional writer or well-connected in the publishing field you'll be able to tell who's a legitimate agent and who's going to steal your money.

As some of you know, I volunteer on my local ambulance squad. Tourists can get into trouble in one bar or another. I know that you aren't supposed to blame the victim, but sometimes I just want to ask people, "If you didn't want an unemployed lumberjack to punch your lights out, what the heck were you doing in there at two in the morning?"

Posted February 20, 2004 5:16 PM by James D. Macdonald

Are there really a lot of places that don't accept unagented submissions? It's weird, in corporate employment the trend seems to be going the other way, lots of prospective employers don't want to go through agencies at all any more because it's so easy to connect directly now.

There's a significant difference in the costs in the two cases. When a publisher gets a book through an agent, they don't pay any more for it - the agent's fee comes out of the author's advance and royalties (right?). When an employer gets an employee through a recruiter, they have to pay the recruiter a hefty fee on top of the new employee's salary and benefits.

Posted February 20, 2004 5:38 PM by Dan Blum

I have to admit to curiousity here: Why would an agent want to avoid sharing a list of clients?

(And I'm not even thinking of a whole shebang list here. I'm thinking of the sort of thing that crops up places like Writer's Market: a couple-few authors and maybe their most recent published book the agent handled.)

Posted February 20, 2004 6:12 PM by Tina

Why would an agent want to avoid sharing a list of clients?

1. Poachers from other agencies. 2. To cut down on the amount of mail that has to be forwarded to the writer from the fanboys. Let the publishers pay the extra postage...

Posted February 20, 2004 8:33 PM by Glenn Hauman

I have to admit to curiousity here: Why would an agent want to avoid sharing a list of clients?

And also, in some cases, the clients themselves have requested confidentiality. (Some of them are not in a position where they are comfortable being approached by writers who are seeking agents and happen to be aware of their affiliation. It can be potentially awkward, I understand.)

Posted February 20, 2004 10:16 PM by Jennifer Jackson

Teresa:

Onward to the real advice. Start by using the connections you already have. Who you know? If you have friends who are published authors, ask them whether they'll take a look at the manuscript and/or recommend you to their agents. That's a much better starting point than a query letter. Agents get query letters like we get slush.

What I hear you saying is that if I am so fortunate as to have an old friend, published, who has said: "Call my agent, here's his number, use my name.", then I should just do that and e-mail him the MS if he agrees to look at it. Sounds good to me. I'm just concerned that I put energy towards the best shot, and didn't realize that a contact like that IS the avenue to follow.

Thanks

Posted February 21, 2004 12:24 AM by Claude Hayward

"If you didn't want an unemployed lumberjack to punch your lights out, what the heck were you doing in there at two in the morning?"

I thought I was hard enough to do the punching out.

Posted February 21, 2004 2:09 AM by bryan

More great advice from TNH. I suggest one other way to meet agents (well, one other way that beats blind query letters): go to conferences/cons. Actually getting to meet someone goes a long way.

It's even a great way to meet living, breathing editors. I went to the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference in Denver last year, and met with an editor named Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

She seemed nice.

Posted February 21, 2004 9:54 AM by TL Hines

I'd rather try and get my short stories (or a novel, if I ever had time to write something that long) published than go through the review process for an academic journal again.

Oh wait, I'm applying to grad schools, and my boss wants me to finish this abstract for a conference this fall... and there are two more journal articles to read... and I just printed draft #2 of chapters 1-3 of The Thesis....

I'll never escape peer review. Arrgh.

( on a side note: I honestly can't remember the last time I saw an issue of Asimov's, Analog, or F&SF.... I've been a busy little student. I have, started a Pile Of Books to read after graduation: 84 days and counting.)

Posted February 21, 2004 10:31 AM by Bill Blum

What about young writers - young teens who are still in high school or middle school, who have manuscripts that are pretty good but don't know how to publish them? I mean, Andew Clements book about the sixth grader getting published seems pretty unrealistic. THeoretically, if the book's good enough, it gets published - but how do you even get it to the publisher?

Posted February 21, 2004 1:10 PM by Hope Richards

What about young writers - young teens who are still in high school or middle school, who have manuscripts that are pretty good but don't know how to publish them? I mean, Andew Clements book about the sixth grader getting published seems pretty unrealistic. THeoretically, if the book's good enough, it gets published - but how do you even get it to the publisher?

Posted February 21, 2004 1:11 PM by Hope Richards

Hope -
Lots of people would say the situation you described is unrealistic, but I've got the same problem. I'm only in seventh grade and I've written a novel. I have no idea how to get it published - who publishes stuff by a twelve-year-old? A couple of my friends have read my book, and they think it's pretty good, but I haven't shown it to any adults yet. What should I do?

Posted February 21, 2004 1:26 PM by Adriana Williams

I have no idea how to get it published - who publishes stuff by a twelve-year-old? A couple of my friends have read my book, and they think it's pretty good, but I haven't shown it to any adults yet. What should I do?

Print it out in standard manuscript format (black ink/white paper/double spaced/Courier 10 font/numbered pages/1-inch margins/running header top right with your name and the book's title) and submit it to a publisher who publishes books more or less like the one you've written. You aren't required to tell them that you're twelve years old, because if your book is good enough to get published, your age isn't going to matter.

Most likely, what will happen is that you won't hear anything about your book for about a year, and then you'll get it back with a note saying that it doesn't meet their needs at the present time. This happens to most people with their first submission; it isn't personal.

What do you do while you're waiting for that first book to come back to you?

Start working on the next one.

Posted February 21, 2004 1:50 PM by Debra Doyle

Hope, Adriana,
What Debra Doyle said, above. Your writing isn't 12, or 18, or 64 years old. Your writing will speak for itself.

I started submitting when I was in middle school...granted, it took until after I'd graduated from high school to make a sale. (Short stories only.) The amusing bit is that I was in South Korea at the time. So I sent out the story (sometime around graduation, I think; don't remember clearly), then figured it was a lost cause and went off to college in the U.S. The acceptance letter went all the way to Korea, of course, because that was where I'd addressed the SASE to, my younger sister phoned me in glee with the good news sometimes during the first or second week of classes, and then the poor letter had to travel all the way across the Pacific and most of the North American continent again so I could hold it in my hands.

Some of your early work will probably be dreck, and some of it will eventually be good, or is in fact good right now. The only way to tell is to get feedback and to submit. The only way to get better is to keep writing. (I speak as someone who inflicted a fair amount of dreck on slushreaders. Mea culpa.)

Also, if people are going to quibble about the age of the author independently of the writing's quality, they'll do so no matter what, so you might as well ignore them and get on with the writing. I got that when I wasn't yet 20, and I daresay that even when (if?) I became a curmudgeonly nonagerian (not that I'm not a curmudgeon right now), someone is going to grumble about that young whippersnapper's stories. :-) So hang in there, and best wishes!

Posted February 21, 2004 5:33 PM by Yoon Ha Lee

Mid-teenagers in recent memory who've had books published: Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, born in 1984 and published at 13. Her fourth book was published in 2002. The author of ERAGON, named Paolini, recently got published at (IIRC) 14. It can happen; it's uncommon, but not unheard of. Good luck!

Posted February 21, 2004 5:49 PM by Tom Whitmore

I believe Paolini was 16 when his parents published his book which was republished by a major publisher when he was 18. He sent it to me in mss. when he was 15.

Jane

Posted February 21, 2004 6:13 PM by jane yolen

Adriana: I'm pretty certain Gordon Korman's first book was published while he was in his teens. Gordon writes YA books and is probably best known for the YA book, Son of Interflux.

(Upon checking Google for "Gordon Korman first book" I found this page. Reportedly, his first book--also the book I first read, waaaay back in fourth grade--was written as a grade seven English project.)

Posted February 21, 2004 6:54 PM by PiscusFiche

I started to submit my writing (using proper manuscript format and cover letters) to magazines, and collecting rejections in jr. high. And I made my first pro sale to a DAW anthology when I was 17, a month after my high school graduation.

How did I do it? First and foremost, I did it myself. In other words, I did not rely on a grownup to investigate markets or proper manuscript format procedures for me. And back then, there was no Google and no internet for quick research. I had no money, so I would go to bookstores with a piece of paper, stand in the aisle and copy market info by hand from the Writer's Market and Writer's Digest and The Writer.

My advice for any young person who is passionate about being a writer and publishing their work professionally is to act like an adult. Be a sponge of industry information. Do your own homework in the field, read writer's magazines, hang out in online places such as here where professional writers and other industry professionals can be found. Submit your work and deal with the rejections. Act grown up and you will pick up the needed methods. If you have your parent look things up for you, then you will not learn as quickly as you might otherwise. I had to do it all, despite the handicap of English as a second language, and you can do it too.

Second, be intense and passionate about the act of learning all this, as much as you can. Asking questions about writing. No matter how old or young you are, look upon it as your true calling and your profession. Treat it as such even when you are still turning in school homework.

Posted February 21, 2004 7:25 PM by Vera Nazarian

For young writers who bring their parent/s, we give scholarships to our conference. I hope it's not inappropriate for me to mention this here.

Posted February 21, 2004 7:48 PM by Karen Junker

Back again. The thing I have to say first of all is that Jane Yolen's agent is entirely respectable, distinguished even, and yet she doesn't like giving out her client list. I don't know any other agents -- the unquestionably real sort, I mean -- who take that attitude, but she is and she does.

Jennifer, Glenn, Tina, I don't know why Jane's agent would want to keep her list private, but it's her call. However, an author/agent relationship can never be truly confidential, because by definition the agent is the author's public representative. If they're the agent of a pseudonymous author, they're the public representative of that pseudonym. And while Jane's agent may not make her list public, but if you're publishing Jane's books, you darned well know who her agent is.

When this question came up online some years ago, I came up with three examples for why it would be absurd to cleaim that relationship is entirely confidential:

"You want to make a movie from a novel we published? Great! Sorry, I can't tell you who that author's agent is, though; that information's confidential."

"Tell Sylvia down in Accounting that I'm sorry she's having trouble mailing out royalty checks, but I can't give her names or addresses for those agents -- it's confidential information."

"Hiya, I'm Stephen King's new agent. I know, I know -- you thought it was Ralph Vicinanza. That was then. Now it's me. No, I can't show you an agenting agreement -- that's confidential information. Now, about those checks I should start receiving ..."

When you read my mention of agents who sell their clients into vanity publishing operations, some of you may have wondered how the agent collects 15% of a negative cashflow. The answer is simple: they add a 15% surcharge to the amount the vanity publisher collects from the author, and keep that as their agenting fee.

John, I feel I've been a tad unfair to the not-very-helpful agents. At minimum I should have said that they're rare, and that they do have a third virtue, which is understanding the language and provisions of publishing contracts.

At the same time, I should have also put in that category the new writer's family lawyer, who's not a publishing specialist doesn't see why a publishing contract shouldn't be like any other kind of contract. We truly dread hearing from those. They have all the suspiciousness about being told that something is "standard industry practice" that baby writers ought to have; but alas, where baby writers believe such claims about horrid vanity-press contracts, the lawyers don't believe them about standard industry practices.

My all-time favorite response to a contract (for certain values of "favorite") was a long letter about the assignment of territorial rights clauses, in which a long list of countries are identified as being part of the British Commonwealth. The author explained in painstaking detail that, that, and the other country no longer belonged to the Commonwealth, or had altered their relationship to it, or had changed their name, etc. etc. etc. He was right on every count, but it didn't matter, because for purposes of selling books, all those countries are still part of the British Commonwealth. The ghost of the Empire lives on in bookselling territories.

About young authors: The book is all that matters, except when signing the contract, when the author's parent[s] or guardian[s] will probably have to sign as well. But that's all. At Tor, you're free to submit a book if you're twelve, or a four-armed green alien, or a sentient computer, or an elephant who's learned to hold a pen with your trunk; so if you're any of those things, you might as well say so. Depending on the entity and the book, it might turn out to be a good sales angle.

I'm just a little envious of kids these days. The internet gives you guys so many opportunities to talk about writing, find out about how to do it, and show your work to others, without ever having to admit how old you are.

Claude, that is indeed a good way to go about it. Of course, you could be sending out query letters too; no reason not to. Throw out enough hooks, and sooner or later the universe will catch on one of them.

BSD, would that be the set of all professions where you learn by doing, and clients become attached to individual practitioners?

Mr. Hines, it's good to hear from you again. I had good hunting at that conference, and met a lot of very interesting people.

Jim: Ah, that bar! You pointed it out to me when I was in Colebrook. I think I can tell you one reason tourists come to grief there: it would not have been obvious to me that it was an untowardly place to have a drink. I've been in establishments where the clientele included local cattlemen or fishermen, and while I could tell they were working-class joints, I couldn't tell whether they were dangerous. And recollect that in my city, the Hell's Angels' block is a relatively safe street to walk down, as long as you don't do something mega-stupid like touch the bikes.

You, on the other hand, have had extensive experience with bars, joints, dives, and places like that one in Valparaiso that had the late-night pay phone. Or that SEAL bar you were telling me about that had no windows, no furniture, and no drinks served in glass containers. Or the bar near the Brooklyn Navy Yards that employed the ballet dancer. Or ... I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but I think I've made my point.

Not that it has anything to do with agents.

Elayne, the last time Tor metered its annual flow of slush was some years back, and near as we can tell we handled close to three thousand submissions. Our estimate for this year is closer to five thousand. An editor can read slush from one year to the next without finding a manuscript that pans out. The vast majority of our books come from other sources. Is it any wonder that many houses stop accepting raw unagented slush?

Dang! That reminds me of something I should have said in my main post, which is that anyone, absolutely anyone, can set themselves up as an agent. The Association of Authors' Representatives (AAR) maintains certain criteria for membership, but to be an agent takes nothing at all.

Have I gotten letters from "agents" I was reasonably sure were the authors themselves? Many times. None of the books were all that good, but perhaps if they'd been better writers, I wouldn't have noticed that their agents weren't real.

In the wake of 9/11 and the anthrax scares, we were making fun of all the lists of suspicious characteristics that are supposed to alert you to the potential for danger in anonymous parcels that come in the mail. We get those every day of every week. During one especially low period in the months that followed the disaster, we kicked around the idea of dealing with the backed-up slush by phoning the FBI and telling them we'd received exactly the sort of thing they were looking for.

Dave Kuzminski, you guys are a major resource for beginning authors everywhere, and you do an incalculable amount of good.

Kathleen, I wish there were more material available on real agenting and what it's like -- ideally, written by real agents. I do what I can, but agents are the next universe over.

Jon, I hate to say this, but: it depends.

Karen, that info is both helpful and appropriate.

Posted February 21, 2004 8:19 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

How do you tell if something's good? How do you know when you're done revising? If you get rejected, does that mean its not good enough or you didn't revise enough or both?

Posted February 21, 2004 9:00 PM by Azadeh

It depends.

Posted February 21, 2004 9:04 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Vera: What good advice. Incidentally, I remember reading your stories in some of the Sword and Sorceress anthologies when I was in middle and high school, and finding them beautiful, and your example inspirational. I wish I knew where in storage those books were; I have a sudden hankering to reread--was it "The Starry King," or "The Starry Queen"? And the one about the executioner who was the queen's sister? (I apologize for a lousy memory and poor recordkeeping.)

I didn't have access to Writer's Market, but internet was around by the time I was really seriously submitting, although I think I got all my submissions guidelines by snail. I also scoured the introductions to the Datlow & Windling Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and the Dozois Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies when my high school library started acquiring those, O happy day. I hunted down books on writing--Ben Bova, Damon Knight, the one edited by J.N. Williamson (okay, there might be multiples, these are all books I don't have access to anymore but which helped immensely in getting started).

And having grownups look things up for you assumes that the grownups are supportive of the endeavor. :-p My parents, who think that sf/f is a waste of time (sigh), did the next best thing and never stood in my way.

Posted February 21, 2004 9:11 PM by Yoon Ha Lee

Okay, this is a really stupid thing that shouldn't matter, but it does - I don't have the Courier font on my computer.

Posted February 21, 2004 9:29 PM by Adriana

I approached my friends' agents first, because I thought a query letter to a successful agent who didn't have some personal connection with me would be ignored.

The friends' agents didn't work out. The query letter to an agent who didn't know me did. (After he offered to represent me, it turned out that we did have some mutual friends and acquaintances. But I didn't know that when I queried him.)

He told me that he gets about 200 queries a week. But mine was the one he liked.

So don't lose hope if the personal connections don't work or you don't have any. Just write a really good query letter, with the same mindset that you had when you wrote your really good book.

Posted February 21, 2004 9:47 PM by Rachel Brown

"Okay, this is a really stupid thing that shouldn't matter, but it does - I don't have the Courier font on my computer."

Courier is the monospace font (monospace means that each letter occupies the same amount of horizontal space) that looks like it came from an old typewriter. If you don't have a font that looks exactly like that, you can probably download a good version of the font off the web. Just google for "font courier."

Alex

Posted February 21, 2004 10:06 PM by Alex Roston

Yoon Ha:
Goodness, no apologies, and thank you for your kind words about my stories ("The Starry King" and the other one about the Executioner is "A Thing of Love"). It is always somewhat amazing to hear that anyone has even read or remembers them. Again, thank you!

Adriana:
Here is a link to download "Dark Courier," which is a better-looking print version of Courier. For some reason on most modern printers the regular "Courier" or "Courier New" font looks too wispy when printed and is therefore hard on the eyes. But the regular Courier looks better on the computer screen than the Dark Courier does, so when in doubt, download both and simply switch your final print document to the Dark Courier.

Download Dark Courier

Posted February 22, 2004 12:26 AM by Vera Nazarian

I've never understood the Courier fixation in mss submissions. It's not a very good-looking font, is it? Or is it just that it's a fixed-width that's easy on the eyes? I guess if editors hadn't decided to lay down the law, font-wise, they would be inundated with manuscripts in fourteen different varieties of fonts, including italics, dingbats and handwriting fonts. Still, why specifically Courier?

Posted February 22, 2004 1:30 AM by Abigail

Re: Abigail's question about why Courier?

Answer: that's how it's always been done. (Well,
for the last 70 years or so.)

Typewriters had one font-- Courier-- and there's no
compelling reason to change an existing standard.
A manuscript isn't supposed to be *pretty*, it's
supposed to be easy to work with-- and bookmakers
have been working with Courier for 3.5 generations.
(Side note: 12 point Courier, not 10 point.)

Posted February 22, 2004 2:06 AM by Stephan Zielinski

It's not really that it was "an existing standard." There were a lot of minor variations in the slab-serif faces typewriters used (the FBI has a master file of them); "Courier" was a common one for IBM Selectrics, which were enough of a de-facto standard for anybody who could afford one that they licensed Remington to make them to meet demand.

The point is that it is a distinctly readable face, in the specific terms of being able to distinguish letters from one another, and especially to spot wrong letters. In monospaced faces, skinny characters like "i" and "l" can be mistaken for each other.

(Hmm. Suddenly I want to write a short book called "Infamous Characters," about the personalities of the alphabet. But I digress, as usual.)

Monospaced faces also greatly simplify wordcount, to wit:

--Characters per line (generally 65, on a 10-pitch line with an inch margin to either side)
--times lines per page (around 25, as there are 66 12pt lines on a page, an inch margin top and bottom, and double-spacing)
--divided by six (a theoretical average 5-character word plus a space)
--times number of pages.

Yes, computers can count words, but what counts in printing is not the exact number of words, it's the amount of space the document is going to take up. And, for this reason, rounding to the nearest 50-100 words is fine. I can remember, in the days before WP, getting slush manuscripts with "8643 words" on the header, and feeling for the person who had gone to the effort. I even saw a couple of novels counted out.

As for size, yes, 12-point is right. Again before WP, the specification was "10-pitch" -- 10 characters per inch on the line -- which for Courier happens to be the same as 12pt.

At the risk of going into waytoomuch boring historical detail, a printer's point is 1/72 inch, and the rules for determining point size, because they take into account ascenders and descenders, mean that two "12-point" faces may be rather different in actual appearance. There are twelve points in a pica, another printer's term, and 12-point typewriters were also known as "Pica" machines, the smaller 10-point (12-pitch -- a curious symmetry) being called "Elite."

Now, where the heck are my composing stick and quoin keys?

Posted February 22, 2004 5:02 AM by John M. Ford

Vera:

Thanks for the link to the Dark Courier font... looks like it'll be useful.

John:

I hid your composing stick underneath my case of 10pt Cheltenham type. You can't have it back. Sorry.

Posted February 22, 2004 8:43 AM by Bill Blum

John M Ford wrote:
(Hmm. Suddenly I want to write a short book called "Infamous Characters," about the personalities of the alphabet. But I digress, as usual.)

Oh, yes, please do! That would be lovely to read, as a book, as a web page or as an article anywhere.

My brother, who's a font freak, used to tell me all about the evils of Helvetica. Since the standard font in the small print of official documents is Helvetica, and it's also used on road signs and in the subway, I've started to understand what he means. Above all, the lack of distinction between "a" and "o" is bothersome.

Posted February 22, 2004 8:56 AM by Therese

Do the characters of the characters change from font to font, Mr. Ford?

Posted February 22, 2004 11:22 AM by Tom Whitmore

Therese wrote:
My brother, who's a font freak...

Hmmm. If I right-click on C:\Fonts, it shows 2900 items. (of which, only 90-100 are installed at any one time.)

I'm clearly well on my way to being a font freak.

Helvetica isn't useful anymore, for me at least. I'm partial to Officina Sans, or ITC Conduit. Gill Sans is another favorite.

Posted February 22, 2004 1:25 PM by Bill Blum

Mid-teenagers in recent memory who've had books published

The company that Teresa used to work for was founded by a person who started writing professionally at the age of 13. And he kept on doing so for decades, producing numerous bestsellers and becoming quite well known in the industry-- he is, in fact, one of the few people I look up to.

Of course, that's because he's one of the few people in the world taller than me...

Posted February 22, 2004 1:53 PM by Glenn Hauman

Helvetica isn't very good for masses of text, but it's coming into a sort of retro vogue for signage. Trollback & Co. just re-did all of AMC's advertising in aggressively simple Helvetica-family typeface. If the only thing on the page are the letters AMC, legibility isn't such a big deal.

Myriad is another nice sans-serif font for block text, such as footnotes. So is Scala Sans.

Posted February 22, 2004 2:04 PM by Seth Ellis

I was talking to a colleague the other day about how we both went through love affairs with Comic Sans in the late 1990s. I used Comic Sans as the default font on EVERYTHING on my PC, most especially my web browser. Read the New York Times in Comic Sans!

Now, Comic Sans looks grotesque.

Comic Sans is the leisure suit of fonts.

Posted February 22, 2004 2:24 PM by Mitch Wagner

Yes, that's a good characterization -- also, where absolute trust is absolutely essential.

Posted February 22, 2004 2:34 PM by BSD

Mitch - That may be the best thing anybody's ever said about Comic Sans.

BSD - I suspect no one's ever said that about Comic Sans, and I suspect you didn't either, but I like it anyway. It's hard to have absolute trust in a document printed in Comic Sans.

Posted February 22, 2004 2:48 PM by Seth Ellis

On a somewhat unrelated note: I apparently just ate an entire box of girlscout cookies while working on my thesis.

I have to get up from the computer now, and go ride my bike some more. (30 miles already today).

Posted February 22, 2004 2:51 PM by Bill Blum

Sometimes it's impossible to find time to write. I make time, right before I go to bed, after I get back from swim practice... but the problem with being in seventh grade is all this HOMEWORK! And if I ever finish my book report Dad wants to go play some lacrosse (lacrosse in February - he's a fanatic) and my sister wants me to go on the trampoline with her... but I HATE book reports, especially on complicated books with fifty characters. I've written about ten pages today, but most of them were in the book report.

Posted February 22, 2004 2:58 PM by Adriana

Adriana: I remember reading all those writing-advice books on how you must make time to write, and thinking to myself: that's true to a point, but graduating was a higher priority. And college. So I could have a hope of getting a day-job to keep a roof over my head to facilitate future writing. College and/or grad school are not a necessary part of this equation, and high school might not be either, but I think of them as very good investments.

One thing I used to do, even in classes that bored me silly, was to doodle. I mined history, science, and math classes for story/worldbuilding ideas. Or, if all else failed, brainstormed in the margins of my notes. I was a very good student, but a good half of the time my teachers thought I was there in the front row taking mad reams of notes, I was either writing a story or brainstorming or sketching.

Some years later, when I student-taught math at the high school level, I made it a habit to walk around the classroom (I almost never sat down unless I was ill) and see what students were up to, what they were struggling with, what problem-solving techniques they were using (so we could share 'em with the rest of the class), what love notes they were writing...granted, with math, "off-topic" note-taking is perhaps more obvious, but I'm flabbergasted that not one of my high school teachers ever twigged on. Maybe it takes being peripatetic.

Other ways to milk writing out of your day: wake up a little earlier or stay up a little later (parents permitting). If you get lunch at the school cafeteria and it has long lines, you can get a notepad and write while in line. Write during lunch, even once a week. If you have a long school bus ride, or a subway ride, write on the bus/subway (assuming you don't need the sleep worse). If your school is set up such that you can get to your next class a few minutes early, squeeze in a couple sentences after you've gotten out your homework, looked at the day's agenda, and so on.

A paragraph here, a sentence there. It adds up.

I should add that I used to spend about 2 hours a night on calculus homework alone, and another 1-3 hours a night on the physics, and add an hour for English/history, which I was better at and which therefore took me less time except when big papers were due. So I know it's tough, but it can be done. Plus, you have vacations--squeeze in writing then, too. If your family travels, bring a notebook along. A change of scenery can be inspiring in itself!

Note that most of the above suggestions for squeezing in writing can also be used to squeeze in getting-homework-done. The key is to figure out when you write best, and when you do homework best, and arrange the time accordingly. I used to get a head start on my calculus during lunch, and would photocopy or hand-copy the assigments out of the books because taking home four textbooks every night with a mile's walk home from the bus stop was backbreaking. (Yeah, I know, back in the day, it would have been four miles uphill both ways, but...)

I should write a book on how to write while you're a student, except I don't think I'm qualified yet/anymore. :-)

Hang in there, keep writing, make time...you may not be able to devote as much time as you'd like, but that's true, I suspect, of a lot of us. And at least (I trust) you don't have to file taxes yet! Best wishes.

Posted February 22, 2004 3:28 PM by Yoon Ha Lee

Whatever happened to "Tekton" and its derivatives? It was very faddish back in the early-to-mid '90s. I remember seeing whole ads set in it (ads that were, to be sure, obviously put together by total amateurs at graphic design). I rather liked it for a while, but nowadays think it looks stupid; I suspect that a lot of people feel the same way, which is why we never see it anymore.

Posted February 22, 2004 5:44 PM by David Goldfarb

Tekton was treated for a while as a slightly more classy Comic Sans, I think. People in the early 90's with their first really powerful desktop computers got all excited about type that didn't look like, you know, type. Tekton is actually an architectural script, but it was seized on and made popular for a while, like a hard-working touring band that suddenly has an unexpected hit on the radio. Now the thrill is gone, and Tekton has gone back to its day job.

Posted February 22, 2004 7:29 PM by Seth Ellis

A neat thing about Tekton is that it is based on the handwriting of an individual person. That's a kind of immortality - like being a cancer patient whose cells, used for research, live on for decades after the rest of the body has died.

Around 1990, I discovered a program that you could run in DOS to change the default DOS font - there was a choice of, IIRC, four fonts, and one of them was called Tektite. It was a Tekton clone. I used that as my default DOS font thereafter, well into the Windows 95 era when I continued to use it in DOS programs run under Windows.

I'll hazard a guess that I stopped using the DOS font program on the day that Genie went out of business, and I stopped using DOS dial-up software to access the service.

Posted February 22, 2004 7:45 PM by Mitch Wagner

We seem perilously close to generating a daughter thread.

And she's a cute little thing, too.

A quick check of the Fonts directory shows 1058 of them, though many of those are isotopes (I've got something like eight language-specific Courier Newses).

For what it's worth, I've got Gill Sans as the standard Windows display face. I'd use Johnston (the London Underground face) but it gets a little grainy at small sizes.

Bit of language transformatics that nobody but me thinks is interesting: a "font" was originally a block of type -- that is, several hundred little bits of cast metal -- and the word referred to a typeface at a specific point size. 12pt and 18pt Bodoni were the same face, but different fonts. In the land of cold type, however, point size is infinitely variable; you buy the typeface and adjust it to whatever fits, whether that's 10 or 12 or 11.374. I've italicized faces that don't have an italic by using skew functions, and with some faces you can create Kludge Bold by thickening the outline. (Yeah, I'm a vector-graphics guy.)

Backing up a bit, the word "typeface" has now been almost universally replaced by "font." It saves four letters and a syllable, and I don't actually have a problem with it, but it's a curious bit of evolution.

Posted February 22, 2004 8:26 PM by John M. Ford

John M Ford: actually, I think that's interesting, even though I have been calling them "fonts" instead of "typefaces" for a long time now, and you're probably more of a typography geek than I am.

I think the simple answer to the question of "why did it change?" is that the Mac had a "Font" menu instead of a "Typeface" menu, and that did the trick. Jordin might know more, given his sister's involvement.

Fun font tricks: in Mac OS X, open TextEdit. Change the font to Zapfino, in a reasonably large point size (48 or higher). Then type the word "Zapfino" and watch what happens as you add each letter. (Then type your name, or my name, since your name turns out much less interesting in Zapfino.) Auto-ligatures can be fun!

Posted February 22, 2004 10:06 PM by Christopher Davis

You'd probably have guessed that I already knew that, Mike.... still, it's interesting.

Posted February 23, 2004 12:32 AM by Tom Whitmore

It's true that writers must take time to write. But no one said how much time or how often, both of which can and do vary per writer.

(Okay, not "no one"; I've seen people who say you must write x hours a day every day. But I don't believe they're correct.)

Write on the weekends if that's all school (or work) leaves you time for. Or 15 minutes at lunch, if that's all there's time for. Sooner or later it adds up. Better two hours on Saturday every Saturday than not at all.

And don't let not writing regularly for a while keep you from doing it again later.

Posted February 23, 2004 11:17 AM by Tina

Adriana, "the impact of homework on academic achievement is relatively limited", it's official!

The report also says
"Homework is bad for your family, [...] it causes arguments and upsets.
A study of the impact of homework in different countries says that the pressure of homework causes friction between children and parents.

This pressure is worst in families where parents are most keen for their children to succeed at school.

And the survey claims that homework causes "anxiety" and "emotional exhaustion".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3472467.stm

Posted February 23, 2004 11:54 AM by The Magician

Mike: when I used to edit an Events Guide, we used to produce it as camera-ready -- one print out -- and it was then printed for distribution by traditional old fashioned printers. The elderly owner of the firm remembered using literal lead for leading.

One day I bought fifty new fonts for Avagio, the charming DOS program I used to produce the thing. "I've bought fifty new fonts!" I said to him enthusiastically.

"Fifty *scalable* fonts?" he asked, with a little sigh and a longing gleam in his eye.

Somewhere in between the lead and then, he'd used Ventura, where you apparently bought fonts as character-set-at-size -- so you'd pay so much for it at 12 point, so much for it at 30 and so on.

Oh, and if you do the thing about the personalities of letters, bear in mind that "c" is very shy and doesn't like going alone at the end of words without "k" being prepared to beat up strangers on its behalf, and that "q" keeps its nose in the air and absolutely refuses to be seen in public without humble "u" to carry its train, oh and "e" is a frightful busybody, but I'm sure you knew that. Anthropomorphism. Gets me every time.

Posted February 23, 2004 2:34 PM by Jo Walton

Therese urges Mike to write Interesting Characters.

For a taste -- is his narration of a dingbat font (IIRC, first published in NYRSF many years ago) anywhere on the web?

Posted February 23, 2004 2:43 PM by CHip

But when "c" does break out of its shell, it makes quite a statement, as in antic or magic. It just hangs out there being a hard sound all on its own.

On these occasions "k" gets a bit jealous. Sometimes he tags along anyway, making a nuisance of himself, as in magick. "K" can be a little bit of a bully that way. They have a conflicted relationship.

Posted February 23, 2004 2:49 PM by Seth Ellis

'c' has multiple personalities, depending on whether it's at the end of a word ('electric') or followed by a vowel ('electricity'). It pretends to be 'k' or 's', respectively. In that way, I guess it's sort of the Lugh ("Yeah, but do you have anybody who can do ALL those things?") of the alphabet...

Posted February 23, 2004 3:05 PM by Xopher

Wow! Finally someone figured out that homework causes stress, takes WAY TOO MUCH TIME and is often pointless. I get tons of homework, especially because I'm in a math class that's two years above grade level, and I like school and I like to learn, but I hate having to come home and spend hours on homework. My parents don’t pressure me about school, because they know I’m a perfectionist myself, and I get all A’s anyway.

Posted February 23, 2004 4:13 PM by Adriana

Jo, have you read Language Visible? If you ignore the blecky graphics (someone didn't smooth the pixels in the examples. I was shocked, horrified, and appalled.) it's not a bad general-interest look at the alphabet, and does assign personalities to the letters. If we can manage to hook up the next time I'm up your way, I can loan my copy to you.

Adriana, you've received a lot of really sensible advice. Honest, if your writing is good, and it hits an acquiring editor right, then that editor won't care how old you are. If it hits them wrong, they also won't care how old you are---they'll just send you a rejection letter. Do follow the submission guidelines for wherever you send your writing to the letter. Do have someone---a sympathetic, linguistucally competent friend, a writing buddy, a mentor, anyone whose knowledge of English you can trust, read over your work before you send it in. If you can, do get involved in a writer's group with people whose writing you respect and learn how to give and take constructive criticism---stuff like "I liked your opening paragraph, but then it felt like your story just got bogged down with descriptions of your setting. I think you need to spread that stuff out a bit, and make it part of your narrative." (I'm just making this up, I have no idea what Adriana's writing is like beyond her posting to this comment thread.) Having sensitive, sensible, constructive criticism can be a really good way to learn how to look critically at your own work. Giving the same kind of criticism can also teach you how to look at writing carefully and find where it stops working for you. Do learn to accept this kind of criticism gracefully and use it to make your writing better. Do learn how to put stories away for a few days when you think they're finished, and revise them again when you can look at them with a fresher pair of eyes.

And, as everyone else has said, keep writing, keep submitting, read everything you can, don't take the rejections personally, and take every chance you can to learn from pros, editors, and other folks who want to write.

Posted February 23, 2004 5:27 PM by jennie

Thanks for the great advice, everybody!
p.s. I saw this ad for a six hundred dollar manual about how to write a book into two weeks - its supposed to turn you into a "wrting machine" and they say not to be creative. If you ask me, its a bunch of $#@&.

Posted February 23, 2004 9:40 PM by Adriana

Two weeks, huh? I suppose it IS possible - have you ever heard of NaNoWriMo? It's where you write a novel (50K+ words?) in a month. My husband participated in it last year. He made it with 5 days and several hundred words to spare.

I won't comment on quality - he won't let me read it until he's revised it a few times.

Posted February 23, 2004 9:45 PM by Alice Keezer

Didn't one of last year's NaNoWriMo folks sell her novel to an actual publisher? Now I have to spend days trying to find her name...

Posted February 24, 2004 1:04 AM by Karen Junker

From the NaNoWriMo FAQ:
Has anyone had their novel published?

Jon F. Merz was one of Team 2001's winners; his NaNo book The Destructor was published by Pinnacle Books in March 2003. So far, two NaNoWriMo 2002 participants have sold their works to publishers, including Lani Diane Rich, whose NaNo-penned manuscript will be coming out on Warner Books in Fall 2004.
---

I don't think any of the 2003 participants have sold a book yet, but I could be wrong.

Two weeks is a short time to do a draft in, but it's possible. There's a 3 Day novel marathon (40k word draft, which is short for a novel) over Labor Day weekend. And I did nearly half my NaNo 2003 in the last three days (about 23.5k words).

(I don't recommend this as a normal part of one's writing plans. I was just bound and determined to finish.)

But that's a draft. More importantly, that's a first draft, the draft in which I allow myself to make mistakes, leave plot holes, change world rules halfway through, etc. as necessary. I also write very short first drafts; I'm averaging just about 55k for the first three novels' first drafts.

So, eh. You can write a book in two weeks, but it'd probably need a lot of revision.

Posted February 24, 2004 2:00 AM by Tina

> Adriana, "the impact of homework on academic achievement is relatively limited", it's official!

> The report also says "Homework is bad for your family, [...] it causes arguments and upsets. A study of the impact of homework in different countries says that the pressure of homework causes friction between children and parents.

> This pressure is worst in families where parents are most keen for their children to succeed at school.

Teresa, thanks for this, which I am going to check out. My daughter's only in 2nd grade and homework has been a bugaboo for us from the first. Either it was make-work which she could toss off in 5 minutes and therefore didn't give a rat's ass about or it was some piece of idiocy where I felt you had to have a PhD to understand the instructions. Even in the "homework help" part of her afterschool program, actual teachers didn't always understand the instructions on the worksheets!

Anyway, homework is a bane of my existence. Not because I care that much about it, but because my child does. I don't mind the extra-credit reports--we generally have more time to do those and they are on topics that are actually interesting--but the day-to-day stuff is just killer, dull, boring, repetitive. My daughter learns better from things other than worksheets (god help me, those math flashcards I sword I'd never use when she was in K really made a difference this year).

But if the kid forgets her homework in school or gets something wrong, she flips out. It's a hard juggling act as a parent--you want your child to do well in school _and_ get a good education (those are not always the same thing) but at the same time you don't want to pressure them, especially the ones who are self-motivated.

Last night the local station showed the episode of the Simpsons where Lisa wigged out because of a teacher's strike--I told my daughter she was a little too much like that, and I hope she is getting the point . . .

Anyway, I'm going to look at that article and maybe take it the to Parent Coordinator at school.

Posted February 24, 2004 10:27 AM by Melissa Singer

When I was a kid, back in the late 60s and 70s, we got a half-hour to an hour of homework, a couple of times a week, but not every night.

I have read that now parents expect their children should have HOURS of homework, every single day.

I have no children myself, but I am concerned that children today -- children of the last 20 years, really -- don't get nearly enough unstructured play time. Time to sit around, get bored, and figure out something to do to alleviate that boredom ("Hey, let's BLOW THINGS UP!")

Posted February 24, 2004 2:30 PM by Mitch Wagner

Melissa -
My parents never pressure me in school because they know I'm a perfectionist and I get stressed out enough without them saying anything.

Mitch -
I know EXACTLY what you mean, I spend hours on homework every night, book reports, worksheets, math problems, projects, etc and then I have about six hours of swimming total every week and I write whenever I can and I have basically no time to play because of all this homework. Last year I never did my homework until my teacher forced me to at the end of the year, so it sort of came as a shock this year. I hate how there's never enough time.

Posted February 24, 2004 4:32 PM by Adriana

I can't find the font-related movie clip I wanted to post, so this'll have to do: Helvetica Bold Oblique Sweeps Fontys (from the Onion a few years back).

Posted February 25, 2004 3:16 AM by Jed Hartman

There is a flash movie about the Cooper Black font - rather fun, and more interesting than one might think (well, perhaps not given the company).

It can be found here

Posted February 25, 2004 7:37 AM by Kristjan Wager

Anyone see some striking similarities between this Making Light thread and this new piece in Media Bistro, which is called, coincidentally, "Making Book?"

Posted February 25, 2004 10:32 AM by adrienne

One final note on assessing agents: ask how your book will be presented to editors. There are agents who never seem to submit individual books; instead they send out their client lists, with a paragraph or two on each book, or a group presentation of half a dozen projects at a time (which includes some combination of a synopsis, sample text, and author bio). The editor is asked to respond by requesting works they are interested in seeing.

I don't think this gives each book a fair chance and generally such presentations are not well targeted to specific editors. If I were looking for an agent, I'd want one who could assure me that my book would be submitted on its own.

Posted February 27, 2004 11:17 AM by Melissa Singer

It was pointed out that the link I made to the Cooper Black flash movie didn't work, so I'll just repost it:

Cooper Black flash movie

Posted February 28, 2004 2:27 AM by Kristjan Wager

Question for Teresa and the other pros here: Do legitimate agents charge editing fees? Ever?

The reason I ask is this: As a couple of you know, I was recently shopping for a writing group here in San Diego. One of the people I talked to was a nice woman who was involved in a writing group in the area. I didn't join her group - one of the main reasons was that it was run on the teacher-student model, with a pro who was paid to critique manuscripts and dispense writing advice. When she was stating the credentials of the members of the group, she said several of them were in talks with publishers and agents.

I know enough about publishing scams to ask whether these agents and editors charged fees. The woman said, no, but several of them made referrals to editors who, of course, charged fees for editing the writer's ms.

By this time my scam alarm was setting off red alerts all over the place.

(You may now envision the canned film clip they used to use on the original Star Trek, with the klaxon going WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! and the shot of the red light flashing, cut to a shot of velour-clad crewmen hurrying this way and that while Capt. Kirk's voice comes over the loudspeaker: "This is not a drill. Repeat: this is NOT a drill.")

I still have this woman's e-mail address, and I'd like to do my good deed for the day by passing along some advice. So, here's my question for Teresa and the other pros here: is this woman and her colleages getting scammed, or is it possible they have found legitimate editors and agents who charge editing fees? Do legitimate editors and agents charge editing fees?

Please state your name and credentials - my plan is to pass this URL on to the woman, and she'll want to know, "Who are these people? And why should I listen to THEM?"

And if you can point me to any other URLs I can pass along, on how to tell legitimate agents and publishers from scams, I'll be grateful for that information as well.

Posted February 28, 2004 3:16 PM by Mitch Wagner

The Cooper Black movie is fantastic!! Thank you Kristjan! Now - can anyone identify the book of type that is photographed about 3/4 through the film? It looks absolutely delicious and I'd love to find a copy.....

Posted February 28, 2004 4:02 PM by Mark D.

Today's San Francisco Chronicle had an article on what sounds like the worst possible way to get an agent -- "agent dating". For the ugly details, see:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/02/29/LVGEI5850U1.DTL&type=printable

Posted February 29, 2004 10:04 AM by Faren Miller

I have recently been given the name of a former editor who is becoming an agent, but will be working from the west coast. I've been advised on several occasions to get a New York agent because of the time difference. In the e-mail age, is this still an issue?
Thanks.

Posted February 29, 2004 3:11 PM by Elaine Isaak

Faren- thanks for the link...I'm having the agents who organized the event at my con this summer. They plan to do a longer meeting with writers, go over the first page of a manuscript and talk with groups of 10. The speed-dating seems similar, if shorter, to agent appointments I've had at other writing cons.

It would be fun to know what the follow-up numbers turn out to be and if anyone gets a contract as a result of the SF event. I practically stalk my alumni to find out how their careers are going. It's not as if coming here is the turning point (well, in a few cases I know of, it was), but it all adds up.

I think speed pitches must prepare a writer to pitch a book succinctly, if nothing else. I like to watch the movie The Player for hints on how to get the meat and potatoes into a dazzling package.

Mitch - I'm curious about paying for editing help, too. The publisher I'm trying to write for has a paid manuscript critique service and they are the only publisher that puts out the sub-genre I'm writing. So, if it's okay for them to do it, where do we draw the line? PS a friend paid for the critique, submitted the corrected manuscript and was rejected. It seems opinions vary in-house.

Posted February 29, 2004 4:22 PM by Karen Junker

"Speed pitching" a book would prepare a writer for nothing except writing books that can be condensed into a couple of lines of shallow, context-free "big ideas."

Yes, this is done in the movie business. But it does not -work- for the movie business, either. It produces a continuous flow of derivative crap that's "like" something that sold tickets last year. I thought the point of the pitch scene in "The Player" was how meaningless and empty everything became after being first reduced to a slightly blackened fond and then modified on the fly to suit the offhand whim of the producer.

There's a reason a partial is chapters-and-outline, not slogan-and-outline.

Posted February 29, 2004 5:19 PM by John M. Ford

Thank you, John, I appreciate and respect your opinion. I'm not saying I'm an expert...I'm operating under the advice of published romance authors who teach in their workshops that a writer ought to condense their novel into a high-concept pitch. They say this is to provide a hook that will grab the agent/editor and provoke a conversation about the work. Also, I've been to dozens of workshops that advise (romance) writers to open a query letter the same way, one to three sentences. My question to you is - do you think this means writing anything else is not like writing romance? I'm not phrasing that very well, but...I've been repeating this advice to a lot of people, so if there's a better way, I want to change what I've been telling folks. Also, if you think this may apply to romance but not to other types of writing, I'd like to hear your views on that.

I guess the point is that they don't want the editor/agent's eyes to start to glaze over too soon. How would you advise a new writer to pitch to an agent?

Posted February 29, 2004 7:25 PM by Karen Junker

I personally deal with lots of non-NYC agents, for what that's worth.

Posted February 29, 2004 8:36 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

>>How do you advise a new writer to pitch to an agent?

"I have a book contract. Do you have a possible opening in your list, and would you like to see the novel?"

An agent isn't a movie producer, though it sounds like some of them are pretending to be. Her job (along with a great deal of bookkeeping and file-minding) is to present your work to potential publishers, to some degree using her reputation as a person capable of recognizing quality work to push the door open a little. An agent can't sell a book to an editor who doesn't want to buy it (for whatever reason), though a lot of people think so. An agent who constantly sends junk to editors (and there are some) falls into the "worse than nobody" category. An agent with a full client list may not have time to read a new author's work, but one who would simply rather not go to the trouble of reading a whole novel is in the wrong business -- as this thread has noted, possibly deliberately.

As for the "short pitch" idea, I think that this -may- (note that word) be applicable to highly formularized fiction. It -might- apply to romance if you're talking about Mills & Boonies; it doesn't if you mean Jane Austen or Cecelia Holland, or even Tom "Jennifer Wilde" Huff. The assumption of the short pitch is that all this book -has- to differentiate itself from the vast pile of generic romances, or police procedurals, or space-war sagas, is that the romance takes place on the Moon, or the cops are ancient Minoans, or the space war is being fought with vacuum-sealed cream pies.

This happens a lot in slushpile science fiction: the author points out how new and fantastic his idea is. First, he's usually wrong, but more importantly, it's not "the idea," it's how the idea is developed, what difference it makes to the characters, how they respond to it. One is presumbably writing a book, and not a bumper sticker, because the characters and the context matter.

And a query letter is not a cover blurb, though again, lots of folks think so. You cannot convince anybody that your book is "new" or "different" or even "good" in two sentences, any more than "New and Improved!" on a cereal box is evidence of novelty or improvement. Somebody's gotta read it, and that person is not caused to read it because the query letter was so wonderful; they're reading it because that's their job. The overwhelming effect of "Let me describe my book in a few choice words" queries is to make the book sound lame and unoriginal. Doubled and vulnerable if it's a comparison to something else.

Do I think writing "anything else" is not like writing romance? I think that writing one kind of formula fiction is a lot like writing any other kind, and that no genre (romance included) is forced into formula. There are succesful publishing lines, and successful authors, who do well by producing highly generic work, and I'm not sneering at them; that's a voluntary choice to serve a real market.

But I don't think that novels aspire to the condition of movies, though sometimes authors do.

Posted February 29, 2004 9:39 PM by John M. Ford

Karen --

Please understand that I am not by any means angry or upset with you; I -am- often exasperated with the current state of the business (particularly the infusion of concepts from the movie and music industries, like "the people who actually do the creative work are disposable day labor"). Apologies if you feel caught in the blast radius.

Posted February 29, 2004 9:45 PM by John M. Ford

Many thanks, Mr. Ford!

Posted February 29, 2004 9:53 PM by Karen Junker

While I think that 3 minutes is too short for a pitch, it's pretty routine for pitches given at conventions, during formal "pitch sessions," to run 5-7 minutes. That's enough time (sometimes more than enough time) for me to figure out if I really want to see a submission.

And from a human interaction point of view, I do feel that authors should be able to talk about the main points of their plots and their main characters without seeming to have to summon that information from the deepest recesses of their memory. I know that authors are nervous/scared, and I've been told more than once that I'm intimidating (which I don't understand), and I try to be warm and welcoming to the prospective writer, but sometimes I feel like I'm dragging info out of people one detail at a time. I'm only human, and situations like that can be exhausting, especially when you have to do it half a dozen times in a row.

RWA-trained people give the most together pitches I've ever seen, whether it's for romance or mystery or something else entirely. I don't take more submissions from these writers, but we do get to the point of the submission more quickly and then have time to discuss nuance or for me to ask questions of more depth than "are there any women in your book?"

Posted March 1, 2004 10:20 AM by Melissa Singer

It should be clarified for readers not familiar with the various genre-fiction industries that the "conventions" Melissa refers to above are somewhat different from the science-fiction "conventions" that Teresa and I go to intermittently.

The events Melissa is referring to are gatherings of aspiring writers, generally over a weekend, full of panels and workshops and often featuring the opportunity for each attendee to deliver a brief "pitch" to a working editor or agent. Teresa and I have each been the Real Editor at an event like this a time or two, and it's exhausting, although not without its rewards.

Science fiction conventions, on the other hand, while they may feature events geared to the aspiring writer, are primarily run by and for avid readers of the stuff; their central orientation isn't necessarily toward "breaking in." Exceptions, as in all things, abound.

Mike Ford is also right that different genres are more or less amenable to the "brief pitch."

Posted March 1, 2004 10:33 AM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Now I want to read about a space war fought with vacuum-sealed cream pies.

---L.

Posted March 1, 2004 10:53 AM by LNHammer

It happened once before
We fought the Solar War
With cream pies...

Posted March 1, 2004 11:39 AM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Regarding verbally pitching books... I don't know if I could do this unless I came prepared with something I'd written out and then memorized, not so much out of nervousness (although there's no doubt that'd figure in) but out of a much simpler thing: writing, I can do. Speaking is rather different.

I have a much harder time explaining things to people verbally than writing out instructions; I'm quite good at the latter, because I have time to revise and reword, whereas the people who get verbal tutoring from me are stuck with listening to me search for the right way to explain and going back and saying "Oh, yeah, I left out a step". Okay, not always, but...

Likewise, I have yet to be able to answer the question "so what's the book about?" without either sounding like a moron, leaving out half the things I'd put in a one-paragraph written answer to that, or taking 10 minutes to explain. Trying to condense it on the spot just doesn't work for me. (Though I can babble at length about it!)

I mention this because I doubt it's just me.

Of course, the obvious solution would be to come prepared -- set it down on paper first, read it until it stuck, and hope I didn't leave something out when presenting it verbally. But that would be where the nervousness would come in...

Posted March 1, 2004 12:30 PM by Tina

Patrick speaketh sooth wrt to "my" conventions; I have been off the SF&F convention circuit for many years now, with the occasional exception of World Horror, World Fantasy, or Necon.

Instead, I spend most of my limited travel time at conventions that are equal part dedicated-to-analysing-and-appreciating-a-genre and equal part I-want-to-be-a-writer-how-do-I-do-it? and at writers conferences, which are totally oriented toward breaking in. Said conventions/conferences are often of a genre like mystery or romance. However, I've done some more general ones as well, where writers of virtually any type of fiction (or even nonfiction) may find help and encouragement.

Posted March 1, 2004 2:32 PM by Melissa Singer

Karen--practically? There's no practically. :)

I would think that many basic courtesies of writing would bleed over no matter what the genre. Boring is boring.

And FWIW, my agent isn't in NY and I have no complaints. I think our society has advanced sufficiently.

Posted March 1, 2004 2:56 PM by Julie Mensch

My answer to "What's the book about?" is "About 320 pages."

My answer to "What happens in the book?" is "The good guys win."

Posted March 1, 2004 4:29 PM by James D. Macdonald

Heh. I can see I am going to have to steal those answers. They sound so much better than mine.

"Oh, well, see, first there's this... well, actually, no, first you find out... And there's this woman... well, and this guy, too... and they're...

"You know what? How about you wait until I write a synopsis. I'll hand them out."

Posted March 1, 2004 4:48 PM by Tina

Re, the short pitch.
I think that Tina has articulated an important use for the one-sentence summary of your book, which is marketing yourself and your work to whomever might take an interest--even if that means a stranger in an elevator. Obviously, the novel is more complex than that sentence, but if you can attract the attention of a reader, agent, editor with something brief that can't be a bad thing. My dad, the marketing man, pointed out that a key issue in being self-employed is selling yourself. One way to do that is to know your message (i.e. your short pitch) and be ready to use it at any time.
I think it is also useful from the writing perspective because crafting that sentence should clarify for you what the important issue or question of the work is. You can use the sentence as somewhat of a yardstick to be sure that your digressions don't get out of hand.

Posted March 1, 2004 5:21 PM by Elaine Isaak

Tina, when I talk about my nearly-finished novel project, I don't even try to say what it's Really About. I give a brief list. "What's it about? Oh, Finnish mythology, the Cold War, and vacuum-tube computing." When in fact it's only sort-of about any of those things and largely about, well, see, there's this guy, and also these two women....

I have no idea how well this works, as I haven't tried it with Real Live Editors yet. But it makes me feel much more "put together" than the flustered versions I've used in the past.

Posted March 1, 2004 6:29 PM by Mris

Karen: Also, I've been to dozens of workshops that advise (romance) writers to open a query letter the same way, one to three sentences. My question to you is - do you think this means writing anything else is not like writing romance?

Looking at this purely as a longtime reader (rarely of more than a few paragraphs of anything labeled solely as "romance") -- it seems that romance writing in this country is much more oriented towards formula, particularly formula that reads as "different but the same"; from what I've seen there are (inter alia) several labeled grades of (e.g.) how close the characters come to intercourse before marriage (and if they do how much detail is provided). The labels are of course nothing as clear as PG-13 -- but they do represent, from what I've heard, very specific maximum (and minimum) levels of activity.

Many years ago I was told by a sometimes-reliable source that Laser (the SF line that came from the same source as Harlequin romances) lasted only 18 months because the management was utterly unused to the books selling according to quality (in themselves or as perceived from the author's name); they expected every title in their line to sell a similar number of copies. They might move a writer who showed some usable individuality or skill to a different line, or even a solo line (e.g. Barbara Cartland) but expected all of the titles under the same label