Tag Archives: literary agent

Perfect Pitch

January 15, 2015

As promised, here is a piece on crafting that query (or blurb) to get agents, editors, reviewers and (most importantly!) book buyers excited about your book.

Writing the Badass Query

stack of papers

By Niklas Bildhauer (who also is User gerolsteiner91. (originally posted to Flickr as folder) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Congratulations.

Your book is done. You’ve written it, rewritten it, had it critiqued and maybe even edited professionally.

You’ve printed it out and read the whole thing aloud: to your mother, your cat, and your toughest crit buddies–not to mention the Philodendron. You’re at the point where you’re just pushing commas around.

You know what that means?

You’re ready.

The Hook

hook

By Parrot of Doom (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Do you remember the last book you bought at the bookstore? I’m not talking about the one you thought you wanted to buy.  I’m talking the one you had to buy. You wanted something fresh. You were sauntering along the aisle, picking up books one by one, studying the covers, running your finger along the spines. And then you turned one over to read: the book jacket.

How long did it take you to decide?

It started with a sentence, a handful of words. Maybe it was enough to make you catch your breath. It was at least enough to make you read the next line. And the next, and the next, until before you know it, you were standing at the checkout holding out your debit card.

Now that, my friends, is a proper hook.

Pitch Perfect

As writers, we all know you’ve got to show and not tell. But a pitch is different, right? After all, you’ve only got a page. If there was ever a case for telling, now is the time, right? Wrong.

Now is when you absolutely must show. Don’t tell them your protagonist struggles with loneliness and can’t find the right guy. Show her in the checkout line, juggling four pints of Ben & Jerry’s while eyeing the douchebag with the $200 haircut. Meanwhile the cinnamon-sweet cashier can’t catch her eye.

That’s all there is to it. Build a collage: a sketch of character, a shadow of scene. Arrange a few powerful verbs around one glistening metaphor. Sculpt the shape of your story like that—the first third of it at least—and leave the reader with a breath of hint of what’s to come.

Now, finally. Make it sound like you and make it match the tone of the book. Funny book? Funny pitch. Scary book? Scary pitch. You’d be surprised how many people miss this.

All right, got all that? Great. Now do it in 300 words. Easy-peasy, right?

The Shameless(?) Self-Promotion

If you’re doing a query letter as opposed to crafting a pitch for Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Contest, you’ll also need to talk about you, the writer. The same rules apply—don’t tell them about your immense talent, your sparkling prose or that your characters are thoughtfully crafted. You should have shown them that in the preceding 300 words or so.

Awards and writing credits, if you have them, are a fair brag. But don’t tell them your story is impossible to put down; make your query impossible to put down.

The Final Dos and Don’ts

Did you ever wonder why literary agents hate rhetorical questions? Don’t.

Do you think your novel is so ground-breaking it merits a two-page query? Don’t.

The Dos?

Proofread your query 1,001 times. Once you’re convinced it’s perfect, have it proofread by someone else. Lots of someone elses.

You only get one chance. One single chance. C’mon, you busted your behind to write that book, it deserves the best pitch you can give it. Write one so good it blows their hair back.

I’m counting on you.

2015. It’s more than just the square root of 4,060,225.

December 31, 2014
Magic 8 ball says: My sources say no

Well how else do you make decisions? Magic 8 Ball says: My sources say no.

So I was reflecting on the year to come and contemplating how to fit it all in. I had paralyzing fear penciled in for the first few months, followed by a six-week self-pity retreat, and I was keeping the summer open for raging self-doubt.

And then I thought: No.

Oh my dearies.

It’s not just that I’ve been keeping secrets from you. Turns out I spend most of my time tharn in the middle of life’s headlights. But enough of that sorry behavior.

Galley copy of HitList

View from the desktop with a galley copy of HitList

This year, I’m going to tell all: about my dream-date query experience with HitList, what Random House said about my book and about those next two novels in the queue.

Look for juicy tell-all posts, good advice on badass queries and how to make agents fight over you. Plus, tips on how to blow it all because you’re going through an ugly divorce.

What’s after that? Who knows. Maybe I’ll even update my Facebook status.

Here’s hoping you are in the midst of your own brave plans for 2015.

Literary Agents are People Too

May 17, 2014

No, really.

Way back before I found Agent Sara, while I was still submitting my first novel, I talked about rejection from a writer’s point of view. But there’s another side to the rejection story…

Let me introduce you to Brynn. She’ll get through a stack of submissions by lunch: rejecting one for one too many ellipses, another for having two POV in five pages. She has to. It’s not that she’s cruel or indifferent—she just needs to make a living. She’s buried in a pile of submissions and she wants to help you both—but she can only represent what she can sell.

Yes, it’s Sunday, but she spent the week mired in edits with a writer out of St. Louis—well she had such hopes. But again, it seems a case of them not getting it. Perhaps in this stack lies the next JK Rowling, the next Hemingway even.

She plucks out a query letter: “Dear Mr. Brine:”

Probably no Hemingway today.

She used to have dreams. Her own debut novel won two prestigious awards, but had the thinnest of sales. She was never able to sell the second. Hell, she’s seen the best novel of the century—represented it herself and pitched it to every publishing house she could find. It never sold. That writer works at Cyber Town, stocking shelves. He emailed last week: he hoping for full-time so he can qualify for health insurance.

And then there are the hundreds of submissions that send their perfect, polished query packages, but the stories go flat on fulls. The piles of disappointments, the volumes of misrepresentations. She’s learned to recognize the signs and each word is a clue that might veer her off the page.

It’s a high wire act, step-stop-balance. Gauge the wind. Each move requires certainty. The competition is fierce and reputations have been ruined on allegiance to the wrong manuscript. It takes experience, luck and timing.

Do people read anymore? Sometimes she wonders. Like a shape-shifting beast, the publishing industry seems to morph into something new every ninety days or so. One must be agile, quick and wise.

But even on working-Sundays, there’s hope. She pulls one from the stack. Another post-apocalyptic zombie-mermaid novel; the fifteenth today.

Aw crap.

I’ve Been Hearing the Voices Again or Thank You Chuck Palahniuk‏

November 15, 2012

I’ve been MIA. I was somewhere between writer’s block, HitList revisions and [The Next Thing], which up until Sunday was nothing but white noise. I wanted, I needed, I swore to finish HitList but instead I found myself shuffling words around the pages of my manuscript, composing imaginary emails to my editor and having mental arguments with the literary agent who gave me a lengthy, encouraging, kind-but-firm rejection letter.

LITERARY AGENT: In your book, I didn’t find the voices of your three narrators sufficiently distinct.

ME: But they are. I can prove it to you. I Write Like says so. Ahem. Well at least two-thirds of the time it does.

YOU: Okay… Well. Whatever. But what does this have to do with Chuck Palahniuk?

The website—I Write Like. They have an online form that matches your word choice and writing style with famous authors. I clicked-dragged-copied-dropped each and every chapter from HitList into it, to see which author each character sounded like. And for whatever reason, one protagonist continually came up as Chuck Palahniuk.

I’d never read his books and if you’re a fan, I apologize for this shortcoming. Here’s why: I haven’t been reading much lately. Not since I started writing. Well, since I had kids. Okay, okay, I haven’t been reading at all—but it makes me feel terminally insecure and what can I say, I’ve been occupied watching my daughter’s Pocahontas DVD for the past three years.

But Sunday I went out and bought Damned, just to hear Mr. Palahniuk’s voice. And let me say that while I don’t possess the man’s biting wit, delicious timing, full-throttle-rhythm or a fraction of his talent–if you put that aside for a second–I can write exactly like him. Well… we both write in English.

What I didn’t expect to happen was that reading his book would be mental Drano, creative WD-40, effectively pulling a thumb from the dike of my imagination. They started talking again—my narrators. They had a lot to say and there were more voices, and more stories too, so much so that I can’t possibly keep up. But despite the chaos of all that chatter, I now have the clarity I need: I know what I must do to put the final tweaks and polish on HitList.

I can’t say what it was about the book that did it for me. Damned has little in common with HitList, aside from a rainbow spectrum of messed-up teenagers. Maybe it was the book, or his protagonist, or perhaps it was only the unapologetic sound of Chuck Palahniuk’s voice. So, if you’re face-down in a stagnant pool of creativity, or hopelessly bogged in a mire of revision, there may be other ways to unstick your stuck. Or, you could always try Chuck.