C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m

See all my books at AllThatChazz.com.

07/20/2010 • 4:58 PM 0

Vampires, What’s Hot & What Editors Want

Last year the word was, “We’re burnt out on vampires and werewolves! No more! No more!” New York editors say that every second year. Some even go so far as to pronounce the genre dead (despite Salem’s Lot, Anne Rice, Buffy, Team Edward etc.,…) You shouldn’t have believed those pleas from treacherous agents and editors.

Get this: Vampires do not die. Get it? They just don’t.

I just ran across a blog by author/agent Mandy Hubbard that confirms your worst fears about the immortality of the undead. She also drops some science on you about the art that’s coming out and what editors want. Great blog! The magic key to the kingdom right now has the initials MG.*

*BONUS:

I don’t believe in trying to time the market (that goes for the stock market as well as the book market.) However, if you’ve got a manuscript that fits into these trends, you need to send it out again. Keep in mind, what was last year’s laughable proposal might be a hot prospect this year. Keep submitting!

Filed under: agents, blogs & blogging, Editors, publishing, web reviews, Mandy Hubbard, publishing trends, what editors want

07/13/2010 • 9:00 AM 0

Five Tips on Finding an Agent or Editor (and get published.)

1. Go to the bookstore.

2. Find books like your book.

3. Check the acknowledgements and the author’s website to identify their house, editors and agent.

4. Now you have some idea where to submit and a nice opening to your query letter. “I’m submitting to you because your association with of X’s excellent book…”

5. Check the agent’s website and make sure you confine yourself to their requested parameters for submissions.

BONUS:

Try to get a sense from their voice on their site. Does this person sound like someone you could marry? Yes. It’s that serious.

Filed under: agents, agents, editors, get published

07/12/2010 • 9:10 AM 0

Writing Rules Apply to You

Best story of my recent publishing conference? It’s someone else’s story so I’ll skim over the details. Long story short: Agents rejected a Margaret Atwood story. They didn’t know it was Margaret Atwood. We say it over and over:

PUBLISHING IS A SUBJECTIVE BUSINESS.

However, if you don’t follow submission guidelines, you hurt your chances. If you’re submitting to an agent, ignore the Writer’s Market books and go straight to the agent’s website. Follow their instructions as best you can. The rules apply to new writers. They apply to you. No exceptions. You’re trying to enter a business relationship with publishers and agents. Do not try gimmicks. White paper (or non-wallpapered email) and business forms. No pestering. No sense of entitlement.

Just submit, submit, submit.

Next post: HOW TO FIGURE OUT TO WHOM YOU SHOULD SUBMIT YOUR MANUSCRIPT.

Filed under: agents, writing tips, query letters, submissions to editors, submitting to agents

06/30/2010 • 4:22 PM 0

Slush Pile Hell

Here’s the key to the door to a long winding staircase down to the hot iron gates of Slush Pile Hell. All ye who enter here, send better queries.

Filed under: agents, manuscript evaluation, agents, queries, slush pile hell

05/28/2010 • 8:21 PM 0

Guide to Literary Agents

Here’s a great blog on those agent people:

www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog

Getting an agent is tough and if you’re a pessimist, you’re probably not writing for publication.

Accept that writers are generally screwed.

Now get back to writing.

Good news:

No matter how bad it is, there will still be new books published next year.

Bad news:

They’re all gonna be diet books by Tom Arnold and YA by Jay Leno.

Filed under: agents, publishing, agents, guide to literary agents

05/21/2010 • 3:14 PM 0

The Subject is Subjectivity

Editor and agent submission guidelines can sometimes be silly and hyperbolic. “Blow me away! I want to be transported!” Then you actually read their lit journal or the books they published and you think, “Really? That blew you away? I’d rather read a cereal box.”

Agents will tell you what they don’t want, which is reasonable. If editors who handle fantasy aren’t in their network, that’s fine, they don’t handle that. That’s a business decision that says nothing about your work.

Editors and agents want something that appeals to them and they’ll call whatever appeals to them “good.” Bookstores and libraries have lots of books that don’t appeal to me. I don’t assume that means they’re bad books, however. I just think, somebody must love that stuff and I don’t. I have no interest in birdwatching or golf. Still lots of people are into that.

The best rejection slips simply say, “Not for us.” That’s most accurate. Everything else is just an opinion. Don’t take your rejection slips personally.

Now go mail your manuscript again.

Want to commiserate with somebody about rejection? Meet Writer Rejected at Literary Rejections on Display.

Filed under: agents, queries, Rejection, getting published, queries. agent requirements, rejections

05/18/2010 • 12:09 PM 0

What works, works.

If it plays, it plays.

Recently I read yet another agent banging on about how offensive writers were when they made the wrong word choices. Eh, well…her black and white thinking struck me as too narrow.

Often what brings writing alive is an unexpected word choice that may challenge its general use. For instance, today I wrote about a “tangent of sopranos taking off from the wider chorus.”It sounds like she’d reject my work based on my choice to use “tangent.” It’s not the right word. I know it’s not the right word. But I think it’s the perfect word.

Fitzgerald often threw in clichés. Then he would slip in a phrase like “deprecating palms” (the trees bending, not hands bending.) It worked.

Filed under: agents, rules of writing, good writing, queries, rules of writing

05/17/2010 • 11:43 PM 0

Research before you query an agent

I ran across an agent’s site proclaiming what they wanted and what they didn’t. They emphatically did not want any more novels about middle-aged white man angst.* Really? Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like all those declarations that the world can’t possibly stand one more book on vampires (declared variously in 1975, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2009)?

No more male midlife crisis novels, huh? Goodbye to the next Updike! Hey, Roth! Apparently, you SUCK!

Uh-huh.

I know. The response would be that it’s not Updike or Roth writing this flood of manuscripts that they want to damn and dam up.

My answer? Updike and Roth weren’t always Updike and Roth. Once upon a time, they languished in slush piles, too.

At least when you do your research you can figure out which agents have silly prejudices and avoid them.

*No, you guessed wrong. My novel is about a sixteen-year-old (with angst.)

Filed under: agents, publishing, Rant, agents, publishing, queries

05/14/2010 • 10:32 PM 0

More on self-publishing (courtesy of the NY Times)

Through agent Nathan Bransford’s weekly wrap-up (recommended reading every Friday) I was tipped to The New York Times story on self-publishing. The author kind of glosses over problems with distribution. Also missed: the general lack of editing self-published books suffer and their snake-belly low chance of being a hit. However, due to economic changes across the publishing industry, many books suffer from too light editing and proofreading–I’m looking at you Writer’s Digest Books (among others.)

Also, nobody really knows what will be a hit. JK Rowling was famously rejected twelve times before the thirteenth publisher said yes. The editors who rejected Harry Potter and The Most Profitable Franchise of All Time now work in animal husbandry. In the Sudan. Beaten by Oompa-Loompas. In heat. Uphill. Both ways. (Rim shot!)

As the most underrated novelist of our time, William Goldman, said of Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.”

Filed under: agents, publishing, self-publishing

05/13/2010 • 10:52 PM 0

Querying Agents, Blagents and Checking Out Their Blogs

Email has made querying is easier than it used to be (and the same with rejection.) There are still a few ancient agents still murdering trees but generally we’re firing off our missives in pixels and saving stamps. Presumably the agents and editors who insist on snail mail ride to work on horseback. As for the rest, there are numerous agent blogs so you can take their temperatures and read between the snarkiness to divine where they fall on the bonehead/human being/transcendent genius maven index.

They all have two things in common: they complain about getting lousy manuscripts to evaluate (as if we all don’t have aspects of our jobs that suck) and they are all looking for a book to fall in love with. (Maybe yours! Well, not yours, but somebody’s!)

I’m working on an agent query now. It’s a mammoth exercise in second-guessing that goes beyond editing. It’s more like looking for the tiniest excuse for the query letter to be laughed at, denigrated or misconstrued. And then blogged about. (I’m also naked in the paranoid fantasy that ensues and it’s really, really cold.)

We were all happier before the Internet and the wave of agent blogs. We did much the same submission for everybody back then and didn’t see the sausage getting rejected and thrown on the slaughterhouse floor. Now the agent blogs are there for us all to see the sausage not getting made in ugly detail.

BONUS:

Don’t believe me. Go to their blogs and form your own opinions. Best thing? They all have their individual quirks and guidelines laid out somewhere in their blogs. Look it up before submitting. They’re looking for any excuse to say no. Don’t give it to them.

*About the term blagent. It means a blogging agent and no, I cannot recall who coined the term first.