I just read an agent blog (blagent) where the agent critiqued a query for our common education. Very brave of the person who put it out there to be publicly torn apart by an agent, but you know what? Totally discouraging.
Query letters are tough and we do have to have a thick skin. However, sometimes it sure looks like the bar is set too high. When a query goes under the microscope, sometimes it seems all perspective is lost. It’s a pitch. It’s a quick, enticing summary. Do nitpicking queries improve it? Mostly.
But if they are going to be that critical of a single page, no wonder we often have a hard time letting our writing go out into the world. If they are going to shred one page with their druthers (which really wasn’t that bad) then how easily displeased will they be with a whole manuscript?
I’ve slogged a publisher’s slush pile. I know it’s rare to find something good, but I also know I wasn’t doing a line edit as I read the submitted draft. It didn’t have to be perfect. There is no perfect. The odd weird sentence construction wasn’t a cause for exasperation and sneering. We took the time to read slowly enough that we would understand the occasional awkward sentence without getting prissy about it.
Of course, there are even fewer editors now and they are even more pressed. They’re using agents as the first line of defense (many more people submitted directly to publishers 20 years ago.) More egregious, now there’s all this bullshit about hiring a freelance editor so the author pays for what all publishers used to do in-house. (We’ll see even more of this now that the virus is out of the bottle.) I do freelance editing. I never saw Outhouse Book Doctor as my role.
Editors and agents tell you they want “to be delighted.” Okay. Does it have to deliver orgasms, too? And how is it that the stuff that does get through that editorial sieve comes out to so much bookstore shelf space that is not delivering me any orgasms? (…you know…unless I’m actually in the animal husbandry erotica section of the bookstore.)
Conclusions? I look at a pretty clean query and think, that sounds like an intriguing story. I want to know more. Send a partial. The agents look for any excuse, no matter how flimsy, to say no. Maybe they’re so overworked they’re cynical. Maybe this is why so many books that eventually become bestsellers get rejected by too many nosepicking nitpicking crankypants agents and editors.
What I learned from working in publishing is people know what they like. (I remember when the evaluation was, twofold: Can we develop this author and whether I like it or not, can I sell it? That’s actually easier than demanding I fall in love with everything I represent. Nobody can do that.
For instance, as a sales rep for a whack of publishers, I sold everything. I didn’t love everything. And some things I sold were so beyond hope your eyes went googly. I repped Margaret Atwood, Bret Easton Ellis and a book about female Saskatchewan artists that didn’t have a single picture in it. (That last one we called The Credibility Book. When we mercifully steered the unwitting bookseller away from that disaster, they believed us when we told them they needed to order a bigger stack of the unknown but promising midlist author.)
Also, nobody knows what’s going to be a hit, no matter how much they make their subjective opinions sound objective. Too much microscopy. Too many reasons for anyone to say no, no, no, no, no. But if one agent is interested, suddenly they are all interested and you’re suddenly not some boob who dared to send them that same fucking manuscript they sniffed at last week! I think I need to meditate more. And no more reading agent blogs for a week!
Filed under: publishing, publishing
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