rj_anderson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rj_anderson) wrote2007-06-29 06:12 pm
rj_anderson) wrote2007-06-29 06:12 pm
Putting Your Best Book Forward: Stephen Barbara, Part I
Last weekend I attended the SCBWI Canada East conference, a one-day event featuring agent Stephen Barbara of the Donald Maass Literary Agency and authors Alma Fullerton and Jo Ellen Bogart. Unfortunately my pen died early in the afternoon, so Jo Ellen's talk has been lost to posterity. But I took detailed notes in the morning sessions, and got the speakers' permission to post them.
Stephen was up first, so here's a recap in my own words of what he had to say:
Getting an agent can certainly be helpful, but it's not the first step in becoming a successful writer. Nobody buys books because they're a fan of the author's agent. The #1 reason people buy new authors is Word of Mouth -- because the author has told a great story and people are excited about it. Your first priority, therefore, should be to become a great storyteller. Don't make agent-hunting your obsession at the expense of your craft.
Here, according to Stephen, are four habits of highly successful writers:
In Part Two, which I hope to post soon, Stephen discusses what a good agent can do for an author. Part Three will cover the Q&A session that followed his talk.
Stephen was up first, so here's a recap in my own words of what he had to say:
Getting an agent can certainly be helpful, but it's not the first step in becoming a successful writer. Nobody buys books because they're a fan of the author's agent. The #1 reason people buy new authors is Word of Mouth -- because the author has told a great story and people are excited about it. Your first priority, therefore, should be to become a great storyteller. Don't make agent-hunting your obsession at the expense of your craft.
Here, according to Stephen, are four habits of highly successful writers:
- Be a reader -- read constantly and widely. Figure out what makes some books succeed and other books flop. Learn even from books you hate; swallow your resentment and study them to see what they've done right. For instance, Dan Brown may be a terrible prose stylist and his characters may be flat, but he knows how to come up with an attention-grabbing premise and give the reader a sense of high stakes.
- Have a substantial writing life. You should always be thinking of new stories to tell. Try to publish wherever possible, and make contact with published writers who can become your mentors and advocates. Learn to take criticism graciously and learn from it without being crushed by it. Welcome all opportunities to make your book better, and get used to the discipline of revision.
- Become knowledgeable about the publishing industry. Read Publishers' Weekly, Publishers' Marketplace, editor and agent blogs. Look at bookstores to find out who publishes books in your genre, and try to figure out each publisher's unique tastes and specialties. Do the same for agents -- look in the Acknowledgements section of books you admire to find out who represents the author, and then Google them to see what other authors and genres they represent.
- Learn to market yourself intelligently. Don't spend two years writing a novel and ten minutes on the query letter. That letter is your introduction to the editor or agent you're seeking -- craft it carefully and get it critiqued, just as you would a manuscript. Remember that the purpose of a query letter is to interest an editor or agent, not to inform them -- so don't bore them with a blow-by-blow description of your book's contents. Instead your book's description should have a hook, a sense of your authorial voice, suspense, conflict, compelling characters -- all the same things that make a novel great. But at the same time, treat your query as a business letter, not a narrative. It should be clear, professionally formatted, specific to the agent or editor concerned, and succinct -- that means just one page.
In Part Two, which I hope to post soon, Stephen discusses what a good agent can do for an author. Part Three will cover the Q&A session that followed his talk.
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Sorry, that’s just asking the impossible. The legendary Miss Snark, who has made a second career out of publicly dissecting query letters and showing ways to improve them, has said that she cannot imagine how any agent can make an intelligent decision about a writer based on a query alone. Her submission guidelines require a (short) synopsis and sample, separate from the letter. That allows her to actually get a useful taste of the author’s voice, suspense, conflict, characters, etc.
If you can show your quality as a fiction writer in the roughly 300 words of pure nonfiction that can be fitted into a one-page business letter in standard format, there can’t be very much quality to show. As the old saw has it, if it can be put in a nutshell, it probably belongs there.
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I don't think his statement about what a query letter should contain is unreasonable. Agreed that there's no way to get a complete sense of an author's true narrative voice from 300 words; but I believe his point was that the tone of those 300 words should be similar to the tone of the novel, and contain at least a hint of the author's approach to storytelling. For instance, writing a sarcastically funny query full of rapid-fire sentences for a serious epic novel told in a lyrical style (or vice versa) would be a mistake.
And although it's true that the agent must look at the writing sample to know whether an author can really write, they'll need the query letter to give them a sense of the book's overall plot, who the main players are, and so on -- that will help them to judge whether the opening chapters of the story do a good job of pointing the reader toward that essential information, and thus help them judge whether the author is a good storyteller overall or merely competent at writing grammatical prose.
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In effect, the purpose of this policy can only be to make the agent appear open to unsolicited submissions, without the risk of giving him any actual slush to read. It affords the maximum number of rejections for the minimum amount of work — at the cost of making acceptances virtually impossible.
It’s like dealing with a bureaucracy. The bottom layer of bureaucrats have the sole function of saying no to people, cutting down the workload of the people higher up with the authority to say yes.
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Agreed, that's very short-sighted. I'm also not impressed with agents who maintain the policy of only responding to queries that interest them.
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And while it is of course true that no one sells a book based on a query letter alone--especially since the agent isn't, you know, actually the one buying your book anyway--agents can and do make decisions about whether they want to see more based on a query letter alone all the time, and then may go on to sell your book. (Not very often, it's true, but I can think of a fair number of cases where I know for a fact that people have sold books their agents initially found by reading a query letter in the slushpile.)
Whatever, I'm not saying the slush/accepting unsolicited submissions system is ideal, but in my opinion the rejection to acceptance ratio really isn't substantially different with a query letter alone as opposed to a query letter plus sample and synopsis. (Also, if the query is awful or clearly not what the agent is looking for, there's a reasonable chance they're not even going to bother to read the enclosed sample/synopsis anyway... while I think most agents do at least try to read every piece of paper that comes in, sometimes triage is necessary in the interest of ever having time to do anything else!)
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