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Yew type Richard Yates and it don't say Richard Ford - nowhere. Yew type Richard Ford and it don't say Richard Yates neither. This thing got a few bugs to work out.

What crap.

This thingie only tells that readers of Author X are likely to read these other authors -- kind of like Amazon's "People who ordered this book also..." deal. It doesn't tell you whether the other authors are comparable in stature, quality or even type of book.

Who knows where they got their data -- obviously a limited sample -- but even so, I thought it was interesting, and kind of nifty.

Kathy

But Diana Wynne Jones (world's greatest living fantasy writer for children, YA, and adults, I kid you not) was placed closer to Marguerite Henry (classic horse books) than to E. Nesbit (founding mother of modern children's fantasy).

And Rowling, who regardless of her faults has placed children's fantasy in the public consciousness and been the entry drug for many readers, is always way out on the fringes.

There's something profoundly wrong with the engine, or the data sample. The obvious solution is to ask for input from browsers, but I didn't see any place for that.

I don't think this claims to be anything it's not. It's not saying that writers are similar, but that people who read A are likely to read B. You read both Pynchon and Sedaris, so you can't exactly claim that the site is incorrect to put them on the same page. I think it's more interesting to see these unexpected connections than to link writers of the same genre or school. That is, it's not at all surprising that Kerouac readers also read Burroughs, but I wonder why Bill Bryson would be so popular with them.

Anyone else notice multiples of the same author? There are three Anne Lamotts on one map--the correctly spelled one near Rainer Maria Rilke (!), "Annie" Lamott near Lorrie Moore, and Anne Lammott halfway between two different Flannery O'Connors....

This can only be called "artificial intelligence" in the most inclusive possible definition of that term. Nobody who works in AI would consider this to be part of the field. It's just presenting the results from a survey of self-selected participants in a somewhat novel way.

If you want to see where the data comes from, click on Literature in the upper left corner, and then on Gnod's suggestions. They do the same for music and movies.

Try Quentin Crisp! Only two authors, the close one being Fay Weldon. Huh?

I typed in Dean Koontz and got Janet Evanovich. I like both writers, a lot, but to think their writings bear any similarities to one another is absurd.

The thing that got me is I typed in Lynn Flewelling - and found both Terry Pratchett and Diana Gabaldon's names misspelled.

But hey, it's a free amusement. Why get in a twist about it?

The people I know who read Thomas Pynchon also read Thomas McGuane, Umberto Eco and a few others.

But I can't call them necessarily similiar. I mean... Michael Chabon had some memorable characters, but isn't as gritty as Pychon.

i am so glad you mentioned william vollmann. i have been following his writing with interest since the eighties and think he is one of this country's great writers on so many different levels. it was about time he got a major award these last couple of years.

Wow. What is particularly amazing is if you search for "Emily Bronte," one of the authors that appears is "Jane Eyre." Although...if I were saying this to my English class, they wouldn't understand why that is so hilarious, which is kind of sad.

It certainly shows the limits of this kind of networkind site, at any rate.

The closest author to Tom Holt is Fyodor Dostoyevski (with Pratchett on the outside), which I find hard to believe under any circumstances.

That's probably just lack of data, though, becausew I'm pretty sure thaI remember thinking that the music version worked quite well.

fqsaLol. Enter "Paris Hilton". J.R.R. Tolkein comes up ;)

Enter John Barth and the closest to him is Charles Darwin, and not far away is Jesus.

Cool -

I enter my two current faves and get, in each case, a page full of people I've never heard of.

So many books, so little time.

When you enter in Arthur Conan Doyle, God hovers around quite close...I think works perfectly!

It needs some data cleaning, too. I typed in "Robertson Davies" and found "Rovertson Davies" floating around there. Just to be sure, I googled "Rovertson Davies" and it appears several times, but each time it's clearly a mis-spelling of "Robertson Davies".

To be inaccurate about the facts is not the same as 'having an opinion' and stating it as such. The blogger in question seriously pissed off at least one agent whom I know, and yes, it was done under the veneer of affiliation with PNWA. Blogging can reach back and smack you in the face--think before you slap your words up on the net. You aren't writing in a vacuum, even though it sometimes seems so.

Save your rejection letters for your tax file as proof that you're actively pursuing your goal of writing and, therefore, are entitled to all those huge writeoffs you took in the name of your new profession.

I agree with anonymous. Critiquing job histories and bios is much more 'personal' than commenting on a rejection letter.

Authors aren't supposed to take rejection letters peronally, right? So agents shouldn't take a little good natured ribbing (as long a that's ALL it remains) personally either.

The second it gets berating to the agent personally (or picking on the occasional typo) is the second it should stop, but I can't see the harm in a little rejecting the rejection. :)
I'm assuming these are form rejections - which would make them all sound pretty much the same anyway. I would never post personal rejections, because those are usually encouraging, despite the no.

It's been done, and done, and done, and.....

Everyone Who's Anyone

http://everyonewhosanyone.com/agus1.html

Back to the drawing board to try to come up with an actual new idea.

WOW - having read Miss Snark's post and clicked over the the blog in question, I feel that I have just drunk a taaaalll glass of "Gin and Bitters."

Blogging is a free for all of public info. I've learned this the hard way as many of my autism related words have ended up in OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOGS and then editorialized and twisted and bludgeoned to death - then they turn up in Google searches - well out of my control. It's not fun to read "Kim Stagliano's writing is pathetic" in a Google Search. Trust me. It's scary. So I now mostly blog under "other" even if I use my name. Lesson learned.

Kim Stagliano

Gerard Jones over on everyonewhosanyone has been doing this for a while. He especially likes to post the salty responses and watch agents squirm. Not sure this has helped his career any. Me thinks it's best if you listen to the Snarkalicious One. She's trying to save us from ourselves.

PS I do love his website though.

Now, see, I have another opinion. If an agent or editor gets dissed for something she or he said or did, that's fine. Maybe they shouldn't have said it in the first place. Everything is on the record. Shape up and you won't get gossiped about on blogs or anywhere else.

As the blogger in question, I can state categorically that none of my profiles ever shredded anyone: agents expect the writers who approach them to be familiar with what they represent, and I listed their recent sales so that writers planning to pitch to them would not pitch to the wrong people.

All of which, incidentally, was information they had made available elsewhere, on the net and in books. It is in fact public information, and I did not report anything that had not been reported in another credible source.

Several agents approached me at the conference and thanked me for producing the profiles, as did several of the editors. No one at my agency has ever heard anything negative about my efforts. And at the time, I was the PNWA's blogger, and they knew I was doing these profiles. Not a peep from anyone.

In fact, literally no one complained until this week, 10 months after the original posts and long after I had stopped blogging for the PNWA -- and even then, I have heard it only as a rumor. And in a form so vague that I cannot possibly go back and correct any inaccuracies, if indeed there were any.

That being said, Anonymous, since you are the only person who claims to know who was upset, please have that agent contact me though my blog (Miss Snark has been kind enough to post the link already) as soon as possible, and I will happily delete any inaccuracies.

Heck, I'll delete the post. I don't want to have inaccurate information in my archives.

But if Miss Snark is correct -- and I have to say, hers is the first explanation of the situation that I've heard so far that remotely makes sense -- what I am accused of doing doesn't have anything to do with the accuracy of the profiles themselves. The objection, as nearly as I can tell, is to my having an opinion and sharing it.

As flattering as it is to be mentioned here, I fail to see why that is so shocking that people should be gossiping about it a year aftter the fact.

Not to mention that everyone who would be interested in such a blog has plenty of their own rejection letters, and plenty of their own funny comments. It's like why nobody wants to read a blog about your cat, either.

The thing that bothers me about this plan is not any possible fallout from the agents, but that it seems like a waste of time. It makes me think of those people who wait for days in line to audition for American Idol, not because they want to sing, but because they've thought of an oh-so-clever way to tell Simon Cowell he's a bastard. The plan ends with self-righteous indignation, the ultimate path of the misunderstood artist. You get to make possibly amusing retorts, but first you have to seek out some rejection letters to get outraged about.

It's a given: you will get rejection letters. Even the kind ones will sting. You will go over every word looking for hints: "Oh! She said my book sounds valuable! But then she said it's not commercial!" And your friends who love you will encourage you to be indignant because they're indignant on your behalf.

But in the end, you can play the game ironically, or you can play to win. You can show up to auditions hoping for a moment on TV giving Simon Cowell what-for, or you can show up to auditions--or send your writing out--because you have a voice, and you want people to hear it.

If you need anything more than that to get off your duff and submit, then you're not ready to.

I love my rejection letters. Each one got me closer to finding an agent. I think nothing negative of those agents who rejected me (oh, OK, except for the one who told me she was never having children so she wouldn't even consider my book, to which I replied, "You're never going to murder anyone, so does that mean you don't like books with murders in them?")

Time for an appletini me thinks. It is after 5 already.

I must be from the bygone era where private correspondence is private and is only shared if both parties consent.

And look at it this way: would you want an agent posting verbatim the partial she rejected with "amusing" commentary?

Gerald Jones is considered a bit of a joke by many agents and editors. He can be quite rude and is often inaccurate, and as a result has pretty much alienated himself in the industry. So next time you check out his site just keep that mind...

Oh my gosh, I just looked at one of the "agent blurb critiques" on said blogger's blog, after reading her VERY long-winded and nasty defense -- and I TOTALLY see why agents or editors and/or PNWA are upset. It's not what she says (well, okay, some of it is!) -- it's the incredibly disdainful way she says it.

Just one more example of how the Internet can spread idiocy, ill-manners, insanity (Space Ark, anyone?) or conceit better kept secret.

So true that she is disdainful, self-important, and confrontational in her online critiques of agents' blurb-biographies.

I mean, seriously, would you take this blogger's advice on how to deal with anyone, much less someone with whom you want to form a working relationship? Maybe this confrontational style works for her, but I'm guessing she alienates more often than not.

If you haven't already read it, it's worth reading the famous essay from publisher Teresa Nielsen Hayden about rejectioncollection.com, which posts and discusses rejection letters:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html

She discusses various comments on the site from a publisher's perspective. The lesson there is that it's easy to make yourself look bad doing this; hurt feelings and frustration don't necessarily lead to the soundest of insights. You can wind up alienating people.

It's a high risk. If you don't use your own names, what's to distinguish your site from the many sites that already exist? But if you do it under your own names, do you want to risk publishers seeing your comments and deciding you're too difficult to work with? Because there's a tendency in websites of this kind to start treating agents and publishers as enemies, dark legions of stupidity and meanness that are putting up barriers between you and your dreams, that you have to trick or bludgeon into submission, or fire back at when they've upset you ... and that's an unprofessional attitude. The more you do it, the greater the temptation, especially as you may get applause from angry would-be-published writers who like to hear rejection letters slammed because they've had one too many of them. But if you want to get published, the last thing you want to do is establish a public persona that puts you on one side and everyone who works in publishing on the other.

The kind of things you say to cheer yourself up when you've had a knock-back are generally best kept private. You and your friend could keep a diary between the two of you, e-mail each other about the rejections you've had, meet for dinner and make your amusing comments to each other. As you seem to expect your blog only to be read by the two of you, you'd lose nothing by not posting your remarks. But keep it off the web. You want to impress publishers and agents, not other aspiring writers or each other, and the people you want to impress may not view your jokes the same way you do. That energy you would spend blogging would be better employed writing new application letters and planning your next novels.

On the other hand, congratulations for being realistic about the fact that you'll probably get some rejections along the way and planning on dealing with them. A blog is probably not the best method, but a sense of humour is good. Best of luck with getting published to both of you.

I don't follow the logic of comparing Anne's blog to posting rejection letters. Anne's intent seems to be to prepare writers for the PNWA conference, to avoid wasting time pitching agents who aren't interested in specific genres or who may have not a track record selling similar work. I'm not sure she succeeds at this. All conferences are a crapshoot for writers. Career blurbs don't tell you much, tastes change, markets evolve, people switch jobs.
A more interesting topic might examine why you want to go to PNWA in the first place, what your goals are, and is it worth the cost for what is a generally intangible reward? Fixating on agents can ruin the experience, not because of them, but because of misplaced priorities.

I wasn't talking about Anne's blog; I was addressing the question the author who e-mailed Miss Snark actually asked, which was whether or not she and her friend should post their rejections online.

If the tone of that blogger's reply to the email is anything like her normal posts, I haven't missed anything by not reading her site up till now. What venom and pettiness. Every "sic" was sick (especially when she went on to make typos in her furious rebuttal), as was her nasty "call me Phd" comment that began the response.

What a shock to find an author is touchy and neurotic. But I am pleased for once not to be linked to a site I want to visit again. I have too many bookmarks as it is.

To get back to the question Miss Snark got: There's a whole site dedicated to "humorous" replies to rejection letters (rejectioncollection, I think it's called). It pisses off those who write the letters, and it makes the authors look pathetic, needy, and like they have an axe to grind with little logic to back up their persecution complexes.

I'd have posted my first rant on the blogger's own site, but based on the sycophantic replies she got, it would've been lost in the noise.

I understand wanting to make a joke of rejection letters to take the sting out of them. However,
Anna Louise Genovese (I think) had a post a year or so back that seems relevant. I don't remember the date or the title and can't find same (although I am utterly sure I saved the post and sent the link to every writer in my in-box). The main thrust, however, remains clear in my mind:

DON'T BE STUPID IN PUBLIC [period]

That broad generalization includes, to my mind, sharing your rejection/humiliation with anyone but your closest writing buddies and your gin bottle; picking on agents or editors or other people's mothers on your blog; deliberately foregoing hygiene at a writers conference to 'make a point' about the shallowness of agents who won't look past your egg-stained old sweatshirt to appreciate your deathless saga.

As for that linked blog, the tone speaks volumes. The wannabe-writers' corollory to 'Don't Be Stupid In Public' might be 'Play Well With Others'. If you don't, I don't want to know you, much less have a business relationship with you.

Whoa, that blogger is a bit paranoid. If someone told you that, 'For your own reputation,' you should get the fact right on your web site...

would you actually believe they were making a "threat" to your reputation?

"We don't want clients who are going to fuck us"...unlike say Xavier Hollander...OK as you were!

Sounds like someone needs to visit the Nitwit Lounge and see a demonstration of Miss Snark's special vegetable chopper.

My husband isn't even a writer and he wouldn't do anything this stupid. He laughed his ass off at your headline. Now he knows why I'm always quoting you.

Before your agent finds out through someone who knows someone, I would fess up in a second email 0- and then a call if needs be - about what you did, how it happened, and why you've realized it was a dumb mistake. After your agent reads this, you'll know everything you need to. Did s/he see the proposal in the first place, will s/he still represent you, and if so, will s/he represent this new project.

Unless, of course, there's more to the story than what you've shared, and you meant to say that you not only heard nothing back after one email, but after a succession of emails and even a call. This happened to me, but I emailed several times, then called several times, then found a new agent. If you seriously only sent one email, then Miss Snark was right about the nitwit of the year award. Sorry.

The reason your agent may have put your query aside is that you might not be contractually free to submit another book proposal. Many contracts stipulate that you have to turn in your current book and have it accepted before you're free to submit another book proposal.

Does the writer have any concept of a contract? That piece of paper with words printed on it he/she/it signed?

I'll bet he/she/it didn't read it!

it's nice to know that whatever dumb-ass things i do between now and december 31, 2007, i sure as hell won't risk the title of "nitwit of the fucking year" being given to me on a silver platter.

Somebody just got a new hole in their derrière.

I'm still stuck on the submitting a proposal for book #2 when book #1 isn't finished yet. Once you've got book #1 finished, then you can have multiple projects in the pipeline, but until then, it seems like as agent, editor or concerned blog reader, I want to know that you can finish a book before I'm willing to deal with the prospect of your starting the next one.

On the other hand, it seems more acceptable to submit a query on book #3 while book #2 is being written, assuming that book #1 was done on time and with decent quality.

Um--how about finishing the first project and really making your name mean something w/your agent and publisher and publicity people? I know it's flattering that 15 people want to see your proposal but you are shooting yourself in the foot. Doesn't your current publisher have first right of refusal? You should work hard to make your first book a success and get in good w/all involved. That way, you will get a bigger advance for the 2nd. And you have to be loyal to your agent unless they have given you are reason not to be. Geez.

a quick courteous email with 'just touching base' as a subject header works wonders nineteen times out of twenty. assuming you're communicating with someone you already have a professional relationship with, that is.

i also suggest doublechecking and maybe resetting your internal clock before taking anything resembling a radical step. when they're in waiting-to-hear-back mode, writers' internal clocks tend to rack up imaginary time the way that funky clock on the old stove in your grandmother's kitchen does.

If I would you, I'd call my agent groveling for forgiveness. Someone earlier said to send an email, but you have way more explaining to do than an email allows. Then I would finish the first book! No publisher wants a one title author. They want a brand. If you can't finish the first book, then you have no right to be wheeling and dealing on a second.

How can this person, obviously lacking any common sense whatsoever, have acquired an agent without knowing ANY of the ropes?

As lovely as Nitwit's newly-ripped keister hole may be, you've got to grant a couple kudos for what must have been some damn fine writing.

Wow.
I need a nap.

If you (Nitwit of the fucking year) do not even know if your agent has seen your query, why the hell don't you find out before making a complete ass out of yourself?

Another reason why it's a good idea to send the first chapters is that, odds are, those are the chapters that people will read in the bookshop to decide whether or not they want to buy the book. Hence, the agent needs to know if they're engaging or not.

If you are't happy with the first chapters, they'll need rewriting anyway. But if they're funny, then that should be fine. I'm only guessing here, but I suspect that one reason why your book gets into 'full-tilt craziness' around page 50 is that it takes 50 pages to set up the situation enough that disrupting it becomes funny. In which case, without reading the first 50 pages, the agent won't fully get the joke.

Readers will read the first 50 pages first unless they're very eccentric, so go with those. Good luck...

Why do you want to do this?

When your book is published, do you think you'll be able to put a sticker on the front cover saying 'Readers are advised to read chapters one and two then skip to chapter ten where the action really gets going.'

Your prospective agent is a reader. If s/he isn't engaged by chapters one to three, how do you know a book-buyer will be?

I knew my book wasn't ready to send yet when I wanted to send the third and fourth chapter instead of the first and second.


I fixed up 1st and 2nd but then I realized that the second chapter was better.

It's chapter one now!

Maybe your novel just needs to start at Chapter 10. Just sayin'.

I've always believed this was a standard practice (Miss Snark's reply), and then the other day I receive this from an editor: "We would be interested in seeing a short excerpt that reflects the conflict within the story."

And that's exactly what I sent. But having worked as an editor, I don't think I would have requested material this way.

This is a ridiculous practice. I'm not suggesting you go against what they ask for, but the idea that starting at page one every time gives the reader a better understanding of the overall book is not always true, especially when you then cut them off at page ten. Guess that's what a synopsis is for.

It's this notion that books have to pack big thrills into the first few pages to get noticed that disturbs me. This is why we write books, because we have 300 pages and several evenings of someone's time to weave a rich tale that develops at a slower pace, instead of a 90-minute film with explosions before the title cards. We don't have to "hook" people in that sense. Not that it's an excuse to be boring, but the first couple of chapters might be a lot more expository than plotty or flowery.

I disagree about bookstore browsers, doubting most flip to page one to see if they like you. No, they peep a blurb, maybe the inside flap, and then probably scan some random paragraphs in the middle to feel out the prose.

I'd be sure your intro is strong and representative, but if the reader already knows what the story is about, I wish they'd let me send them a brilliant Chapter Three than a fluffy Chapter One, especially with nonlinear structure where the third is more like the beginning. This is a writing sample. Even an iTunes Store sample starts :30 into the song so that you can hopefully catch part of the chorus before time runs out.

This is sound advice for fiction, but what about non-fiction?

Since it is sold on proposal, many guides recommend you write the first chapter and then another chapter that reflects a different part of the book. I have seen agent websites specifically detail to carefully choose what chapters you send. My book has two sections, so I wrote chapter 1 and then a chapter of section 2.

If an agent does not specify when requesting two non-fiction chapters, can I still send these two separate chapters, or is this utter nitwittery?

G: I suppose you may be right for certain types of fiction. But I suspect that mystery/thriller/genre readers like to start with a pop. Myself, I do read the first few pages to see if I like the style, can get into the story, etc.

calling things "stupid ass shit" when they're stupid ass shit is one of the things i respect about miss snark.

i read this blog just for my daily dose of that.

G,

If chapter 1 is fluffy and chapter 3 is brilliant. You should kill off chapters 1 and 2 and start with 3.

Just saying

Julia, I'm not so much hung up about the quality or evenness of the writing, I'm more talking about how what comes first in a book is not always indicative of the rest of the work. I'd rather submit a "representative sample." I don't think as many people would've bought Dark Side of the Moon or 1984 after judging the opening minute.

g's statements are a reminder of why it is meaningless to pursue the purposes driving authorial intent.

sort of.

as a literary scholar, i learned that it is a pointless endeavor to try to understand or pinpoint what an author's intent is behind pursuing a particular theme or using a particular literary device.

g's comments illustrate an issue on the other side of the coin: an author who does not intend to introduce even the beginnings of a story's conflict in the first coupla pages and chapters but still thinks those introductory pages/chapters will be entertaining/interesting/whatever to the reader.

all's i







know is, as your typical reader at large, that when i buy a book, the first few pages should at least be related to the back cover's summary. if the back cover says something like "insecure jane, as the middle child of her family, is unhappy with her overbearing parents and bullying siblings until the day she meets mr. x who introduces her to glorious murder and mayhem," then, even if mr. x doesn't get introduced until page 2031, i still expect the first chapter or so to show jane in all her insecure glory or to accurately reflect that description of her family or show why an intervention of mr. x will be a welcome or unwelcome invasion into that existence.

the best books do that. case in point: henry miller's tropic of cancer. the opening chapter says, "people are like lice. they get under your skin and bury themselves there. you scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused." and the whole novel is totally fixated on this theme. awesome book!

----------------------------
re: g's reference to dark side of the moon

as in pink floyd's masterpiece album??

imho, that opening sequence for the first song on there is absolutely awesome and fitting for the entire concept of that album. i don't see how it can be considered extraneous or there-just-for-the-sake-of-being-there, filler music. most of pink floyd's albums in the post-barrett era are entirely mood albums; dark side is no different. and as a lover of all their albums, i can't think of a single one where a song detracted or didn't at least go along with the overall theme of the album. . . .

so i don't get it.

I'm not saying Dark Side's opening isn't fitting or brilliant – I think it's perfect – just that it's musique-concrete, sound effects and whatnot that doesn't precisely allude to the melodic brilliance that follows. Same with 1984 (Van Halen), it's a long, droning solo synth. Sorry, first examples I could think of.

Maybe your books starts off with some gimmicky medical report, or a written letter in a third-party voice. Stuff like that.

One thing worth remembering is that a writer's style is an important factor. I don't necessarily mean that all novelists have to be amazing stylists - but they do have to be able to string a sentence together, in a way that can be understood, can be read without pain, and will make readers want to read the next one. That, you can tell from the first chapter.

Presumably the agent will request the rest of the book if she likes the first three chapters, so she can see how the plot pans out if you get to that stage. But one thing she'll be checking out is simply whether the author can, at the most fundamental level, actually write. That'll be evident in the first chapters.

There's a reason why the agents ask for the first three chapters. Many writers waste these chapters trying to warm up into the story--they introduce all the characters, explain the backstory, might do a flashback or two, but never start the story itself. This is so common it's why writing books start out with advice like "Throw out the first fifty pages."

You don't need to start with a big bang in the first chapter, but you do need to show that the story is moving forward and something interesting is happening.

My friend is planning to do this. She told me, "I'm going to buck tradition and send the most interesting chapters; to heck with the rules." She fears that the first three chapters are rather dull and the action doesn't kick in until chapter 8 (which is her "favorite" chapter), so why not send her "best chapters" out?

I've given up trying to reason with her.

Of course, Chapter 14 is always the exception to the rule. ;)

About the Dark Side of the Moon comparison, I think there are two things that differ:

1. An album of music is not the same as a novel. Even a concept album, which has a focused flow, still has separate songs that can stand outside of the album. People's first exposure to DSOTM could have been hearing "Money" on the radio, and they'd decide to buy the album based on that. However, very few people get exposed to novels on the basis of overhearing a chapter in the middle of the book. Perhaps a short story, and if you were querying a collection of short stories you might send a story from the middle of the book... but then, if you're querying short stories, you need all the luck you can get.

2. Dark Side of the Moon was Pink Floyd's eighth album. They had a fan base who was willing to listen to their new stuff and get into it. As beginning writers, we don't have that. If a new Stephen King novel starts with a long confusing experimental chapter, King's readers will read through it eagerly, to get to the good stuff. As a new writer, you want to put the hit single first.

Heidi the Hick said: "I knew my book wasn't ready to send yet when I wanted to send the third and fourth chapter instead of the first and second."

Seriously; the fact that my first chapter of my superhero-antics masterwork isn't representative bothers me muchly. It's something I'm fighting. Don't go down like a lily-livered cop-out...inflict damage till you're out!
Okay. I just mean, this is not a good thing. And I know where you're coming from, but it's not good.

Listen to Miss Snark!

UNLESS YOU ARE WOODY ALLEN!
then you can marry young girls. Or,
since you are a proven comic genius, you can play a japanese detective movie out of order, backwards, sideways and any way you can arrange the scenes.
DUB idiotic dialog into it and call it WHAT's UP Tiger Lily!

But if you have no track record, no published novel. Then Listen To Miss Snark.

Alternatively, you can pick up a book and read three chapters out of order to see if it makes any sense!

It doesn't, it won't and it can't

And music is not prose. Poetry is not music. Prose is not poetry.
Is is not not is (as the poet says)

Listen to Miss Snark!

in g's defense, dark side of the moon is a good analogy for what s/he was trying to explain. i totally understand what s/he was trying to say. i mean, it was a totally bull-shit argument --

but i still give it, eh, 2 out of four stars.

Good points, Andrew; they are very different case studies, and music definitely isn't sold the same way. Maybe my iTunes analogy was more appropriate (if it's an unfamiliar artist).

I agree that your style/tone/skillz should be apparent from the beginning. I've really learned how challenging it is to maintain that voice consistency over a several-year project (when in first-person character, I mean, not just the writer's own generic POV).

So if a reader senses competence and enjoys my narrator's style in the page-one sample, they'll just have to trust that the plot is coming. I direct videos for a living, and look to books (and my own non-screen writing) to slow things down and dig deeper at my own pace.

I think too many literary novelists these days think it's necessary to put something stunning and shocking in the first chapter or even sentence, to entice the reader. I'm kind of getting tired of reading books that start with statements like "When I found the body, it was still warm." Yeah, whatever.

But when I browse a book, I do look for evidence of the writer's strong voice in the first paragraph. Nothing much happens on the first page of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections-- a prairie wind blows, a clock strikes--but he manages to describe it in such a way that you will know instantly whether you like his style or you don't. I suppose an agent should be able to tell the same from your first chapters (even first page).

Now, as a person who sometimes reads books for professional reasons that I wouldn't have chosen if left to my own devices, I know a great novel CAN have a flabby, uninspired beginning. Indecision is one title that comes to mind-- I was ready to put it down after the first chapter, but I ended up loving it. I guess some agent was more perceptive than I.

But... I know a woman who self-published a really, really excellent novel. An excellent novel with an awkward first chapter that didn't represent what was great about the book. I can't help thinking that if she'd changed the beginning, her two-year agent search might have paid off.

That's a good point, Fuchsia. Perhaps beginning novelists think the only way to attract an agent's attention is with shock and awe, and either put an attempt at shock in the first paragraph, or are tempted to show agents the sixth chapter when the REALLY shocking stuff happens.

Yet agents have seen all the shocking stuff. When they read the first chapter, they're looking for whether you're able to competently write a first chapter. If they like the first chapter, then they'll read the whole thing and get the Chapter 6 shocker.

To get this done, the first chapter doesn't have to be mind-blowing. It just has to be good.

Thank you. (:

Great question, particularly because the exact same thing has happened to me in the last four days. The question for me is not when does one requery, but when does one rewrite. How many rejections does one burn through before backing off and doing a serious rewrite (especially in the Prelude and Chapter 1 to make them more exciting)?

Based on the wording of your question, I am pretty darn sure I know which agent this is and she has a lo-o-o-o-o-ng memory. I was seriously impressed. After my initial query I queried her with another book almost six months later in a new genre, from a different e-mail address, and after moving out of state (wasn't trying to trick her, that's just how the circumstances ended up.) And she remembered who I was and mentioned the title of the last book I'd queried her with.

So yeah, don' query her again so soon.:)

Sounds like you don't need to mention that the agency liked it anyway. They thought it was good - and it must be, because agents don't praise lightly. In which case, other agents will be able to see its quality as well. They'll hopefully like it just on its own merits. Take heart; this is encouraging news.

My mom: You should write something like Harry Potter. Look how well that did.

Me: If I tried to write children's fiction, someone would probably still get shot, stabbed, or decapitated.

Kill Voldemort, Vol. I, co-authored by Quentin Tarantino.

Whenever someone asks me what my book is about, I just smile and say, "It's a thriller." They have to drag the description out of me, bit by bit.

Exellent advice Miss Snark. The gin's on me whenever you're passing thru Dragoon, Az.
We could chat about anything atall, from Choo's shoes vs Tony Lama's boots, to really bad hair days at the poodle grooming parlor.
Or perhaps just admire the scenery; there's some pretty hunky cowboys sippin sasparilla out on the patio..

And if you're in progress in a story, you can 'spill' the story out of your brain. And then you're done for. For me, if I get a good idea/scene/whatever I need to WRITE or TYPE it down because my day job and general ditziness can cause me to forget it in an instant.

After a long hiatus I've started getting serious about my writing again, but I'm sure not telling anyone, not even my critique group, about ANYTHING unless it's all finished, written out and needing criticism.

Reason #7 -- people talk. You tell someone a bit about the novel, they tell someone else, and pretty soon people you would never ever have mentioned the damn thing to decide to show off to your co-workers / relatives / friends etc. by jabbering about the book they think you're writing, but whoa! are they mis-informed! and once these rumors start, you cannot squelch them.

Reason #8, to avoid awkward conversations like in this Family Guy clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJDt2CMjmiY

I've talked about my novel socially, and I regret it.

I find it's near impossible not to mention my unpublished (and unfinished) novel sometimes. I keep a couple of hours reserved every day for writing. Whenever someone tries to schedule me for something during that time, I say, "Nope, can't do it then. That's my writing time." Then they inevitably ask, "Oh, what are you writing?" "A novel," I answer. If they keep pushing, I might say, "A fantasy novel," which is all they're going to get out of me.

anon's reason #7 is very true.

It's the epitome of rudeness to go round telling everyone you're a literary agent.

If you must talk about your writing in some fashion, try turning your creative talents toward compulsive lying. Actual conversation I have had:

"I'm a writer."
"Oh, what do you write?"
"Scripts for porn movies."
"Porn movies have scripts?"
"What, you think those talented thespians ad lib all that scintillating dialogue?"

Everybody would rather talk about porn than anything resembling the truth, plus I get all the eccentric writer cache while revealing nothing about my vulnerable fledgling babies.

It really depends on the circles in which you move. If you're a writer and hanging out with other writers - or SF/Fantasy fans - then the talk will come around to novels and stories - written and unwritten - pretty soon. It's a big step to come out and say 'I write' but I'm glad I did it - in the circles I move it's not particularly uncommon, and not overly embarassing either.

I don't go out and shove my half-written mss into people's faces, but to talk about writing doesn't make you a pariah at all.

Seems like Miss Snark's true passion for this subject comes up in the context of discussing the unpublished novel socially with agents and editors. That, I totally get. That would be taking advantage--like haranguing a doctor or lawyer about your med- or law-related problems at a social gathering. I would know enough not to do that. But I do think that some writers can determine who among their social circle is truly interested and how much they want to hear. And I think some writers can handle "why don't you write a romance instead?" or similar such comments. So, I don't think it's such a hard-line rule, although something definitely to keep in mind.

Having someone tell you about their unpublished work is, for me, akin to hearing new parents gush about their baby ad nauseum.

If you are fellow writers brainstorming, or talking shop, that's different.

But it's never cool to hog the conversation and tell people all about some aspect of your life about which they don't gave a rat's hind end.

I tell them I do research, which explains my reclusiveness.
But.
I may kill my husband.

I fight the temptation even to talk about my to-be-published book. I'm hoping it will spring to life full born, like Aphrodite on a half-shell. (Although PR considerations will require me to do some pre-pub yakking, I still avoid talking about it in casual social situations.)

I don't like to talk about my current WIP and anyone who asks is likely to get the "it's coming along fine" even when I'm about to set my hair on fire because my characters just won't see reason.

And it never fails that, at a family gathering, someone will always say "You should put this in your book" and point to the fighting couple. Meanwhile, I'm wishing the floor would open up and swallow them so I can finish up my drink in peace.

I don't like to tell people I'm a writer. I don't like to talk about what I am working on, or the finished product. I also don't like having to say, no I don't want to read the manuscript you've been working on for years, or no I don't want to edit your son or daughter's term paper. I have enough of my own stuff to keep me busy.

Whew - I feel better now :)

Agreed.

I don't talk about my completed manuscript or my WIP. On my blog, I mention my writing pursuits in general terms.

I won't even offer a title if I do mention to a friend that I've got a book under consideration at a few places.

And if I happen to feel like leaving a comment on an agent blog -- and it's someone I've queried -- I remain anonymous.

I'll never forget having shared the first 8 chapters of my Very First Novel with my brother-in-law. He's a great guy and loves fantasy...and he proceeded to say, "What if you..." followed by his own idea of where my story might lead.

Nope. Didn't go there, won't go there again.

Once I really got into my first novel I did talk about it with friends and family, who ultimately read it. Of course they said it was good (though I know it's not publishable) and was accused of all sorts of things, to this being my innermost fantasy to you've ruined my memories of X place.

My WIP remains firmly in my head, thank you.

I don't talk about my writing in social situations for 2 reasons: 1) because it's hard to define what my writing is about until I finish; and 2)Brande's advice, relayed by kiskadee, is too true. Talk about your work and you lose the urgency to write it.

The third reason is that if my mother hears what I'm working on she'll include it in the Xmas Newsletter.

I hate telling people I write. The inevitable question is, "What do you write?" and with an inward sigh, I tell them, "Fantasy." After which it's as if I've emitted a bad smell, because they act like they're embarrassed for me and try to change the subject. My family (bless their well-meaning little hearts) simply keep asking, "How's the book coming? Are you done yet?", making me rue the day I ever told any of them I was working on a novel. (They only found out because my mother kept asking me what I did all day. Since she was a stay-at-home mom herself (but not a writer), this question surprised me, since running a household and raising children is a full-time occupation all by itself, without adding creative endeavors into the mix.)

To comment on something Kiskadee mentioned: if you talk about your still-untold story, your subconscious believes you have already "told" it, and dries up.

Absolutely. In fact, this is one of the reasons why I don't outline or do any preplanning. I never, never, never discuss plot ideas with anyone but myself. And even then, I'm sparing with the details.

So this advice applies to even, say, Janet Evanovich? Cuz I gotta tell'ya that I would love hearing about the next adventures of Stephanie Plum. And I would have paid good money to hear Nora Ephron talk about her then-unpublished book Heartburn.

Otherwise, I absolutely agree.

At certain stages of my work, I'll discuss it with a few other writers of lit fic who happen to be very close friends. They always ask exactly the right questions (and get excited about exactly the right things). On the other hand, I never, ever tell my husband, who is my best friend in the whole world, but not a fiction writer. His comments are slightly "off" and it makes me doubt my own work.
Karen, when people ask what I'm writing about, I just say that I'm terrified I'll jinx it if I talk about it. Strangely, people seem to understand that. Then I whiplash the conversation around and ask them a question in return. It always works.

For years I remained oblivious to the rudeness of babbling on about my novels (even to the point where family members who'd read some of them would start enthusiastic conversations about who should play my characters in the movie, ha ha).

Now, if anyone asks what I'm working on, I say "You know, work" (I'm a freelance writer by day) and then change the subject as quickly as possible. I'm even hesitant to talk about a WIP with writer friends, because as many have commented here, you do lose the drive to finish it.

Unfortunately, it's a hard habit to break, especially when people already know you're a writer.

Who wants to start a support group? "Hi, my name is S, and I talk about my novels socially... it's been ten days since I last blathered boorishly about my marvelous writing."

Maybe we could get Ed Norton to join. :-)

I kept looking for the most important reason, but Miss Snark didn't mention it. Writing a novel AND GETTING IT PUBLISHED can be a very, very long process. In fact, the second part may not work out at all unless you're fanatically persistent--and a fanatic. If you tell people you're writing a novel they will ask about it the next time they see you, and the time after that, and the time after that. "Finished it yet?" "Sold it yet?" Your response in the negative becomes increasingly stiff. You begin to wish you'd never mentioned it in the first place. Aside from the discomfort this causes, I believe a power leakage takes place. A chipping away at your vision. Better to nurture and protect your dream until it has fully bloomed in the real world.

I was invited to meet some agents and publishers over lunch to pitch my book. They were more interested in the wine, juicy gossip and the dessert menu. Is this unusual?

Some people will ask what you're writing to be polite or make you fill the coversational void. You can respond with the simple truth -- I'd rather not talk about that. Then you can banish them by tossing out some other charming topic, such as -- How is Bob, you both still drinking? Your facelift looks terrific, who dyes your hair?

One of the reasons I don't talk about my book socially is because people don't get it. If you are not trying to get into the publishing industry (or at least closely acquainted with someone who is) you don't understand the milestones. My husband loves to brag that I'm a writer and he always follows it up with my first accomplishment which is that I have a really great agent. But that doesn't mean anything to most people, they just say, well, are you published? To tell them my agent is currently subbing my MS to it's first round of editors means NOTHING to them. But to me it's huge!

I'm going to steal writtenwyrd's metaphor about your book being like a new baby. I'm not showing mine off, but it seems like whenever it comes up in conversation people are like, oh, there's your baby . . . is that all? And here I thought it would be something big, or cute at least. I don't need that. I'm angsty enough about my book being on submission. I can give myself enough negative vibes, thank you very much!:)

Maprilynne

Here's another reason not to talk about anything you write, published or unpublished, in a social setting: People tend to think all fiction is based on the writer's real life, and those of us who write fiction know that's not how it works at all.

I keep a couple of hours reserved every day for writing. Whenever someone tries to schedule me for something during that time, I say, "Nope, can't do it then. That's my writing time."

I made that mistake at my old job, and by the end of my tenure there much of my "writing time" was filled with coworkers coming up to my desk to see how my novel was coming and to offer advice on where I should get it published when it was done.

At my current job, I just tell people (truthfully) that I don't have 'net access at home and I need to come in early to work on personal stuff. Nobody here knows I'm a writer. The only person in my real life who knows I'm working on a novel is my husband, and I try not to talk about it with him, because he's chock full of ideas for what I should include in my story.

I do talk about it ad nauseum in my blog, but at least there nobody's forced to read or required to offer comment. Plus most of my regular readers are fellow writers, and if they do comment it's usually to offer understanding and encouragement. Nobody from my real life reads my blog, so it all works out.

this question provides very telling insight into the mind of the amateur writer. have you ever noticed that real writers don't talk about their work in public? maybe, rarely, with a professional colleague, but certainly never with lay people. i feel sorry for everyone who's been harassed by these morons.

Tried to comment yesterday, but the word verify wouldn't work...
This occurred to me: Famous writer asked ME in a social situation about how the ms was coming, having heard about same from my critic readers (also at said function). Said author then (literally!) dragged me off to said author's friends and told THEM all about my ms, had me detail some plot, etc. Tried to keep toned down (thank-goodness it's done and through several edits) but still this was definately "talking about my ms in a social situation". Of course we also talked about famous author's upcoming book(s) and I got some sneak info on plots in the new book. (wink wink) Got a lot of encouragement in the query aspect, as said author's first book was not an easy sell. Social indiscretion, maybe, but I felt pretty good afterwards, and the author seemed upbeat and enthusiastic. Maybe just being nice to the struggling writer, but maybe that author's really nice personality.

I talk about it with my friends who are also writers, just like they talk about their unpublished books with me; some of it is because we love to bounce ideas off each other and get good feedback, and some of it is, "Oh, okay, you get to gush if I get to gush." It works out. The trick is not to talk about it with friends who AREN'T writers or with my agent or editor outside of a business-related conversation.

I dunno, Miss Snark, for me it's like talking about my job cos I'm writing a novel full-time. I ask my friends in earnest how their jobs are and what they do, and they ask me too. I don't go yapping about it to anyone but if people ask what I'm doing I give them a short answer and if they ask more I say more.

You are right though, it's annoying to talk about things no one else knows anything about. I *try* to avoid it, but people keep asking.

Wow. I'm an ex-cop who learned the lesson long ago. Never tell anyone what you do or did for a living. Before I was forced to retire due to injuries I would tell people I was a plumber. Like agents who don't want to be bothered, I got sick of listening to people gripe about that ticket they got.

I talk about my novel socially but I've never had the negative experiences Miss Snark & some of the Snarklings talk about. IMO, the biggest danger I (or any other writer) faces is boring the ass off the person who asked. Let's face it, we're a pretty egotistical bunch and asking a writer, "So what's your novel about?' or "How's the novel coming along?" is akin to asking your great-great-aunt Elsie how she's feeling today. Got an hour or three?

I didn't tell people for the first year I worked on my novel because I didn't want to sound like just another clueless loser who was never going to finish it or never going to try to get it published. After a year when I'd convinced myself that yes I *was* quite serious about this, I started telling people, also partly because it gave me incentive to not fall into clueless loserdom. And hell, I've GOT to be able to tell my friends what I'm doing, they're the folks who can often point me in the right direction for my research! Like asking an Indian friend what the fashionistas are drinking in Goa, or my medieval re-creation friends the finer details of ancient books.

Of course, I never tell anyone enough that they could actually steal my ideas. I strive mightily to keep my answers short and sweet on how things are coming along lest I bore my friends and relations into a coma. And I would NEVER NEVER NEVER torture an agent I met personally (or a publisher).

Pretty much everyone who knows I'm writing a novel (actually, working on the second while I put the finishing touches on #1) knows I'm serious about this; they know I attend writer's group meetings, read a lot of books about writing & getting published, and are quite frankly annoyed that I often forego social functions with them so I can stay home and write/edit/revise. Hardly the profile of a wannabe who will just let it ultimately languish, half-finished, on one's hard drive.

All the arguments against talking about your novel socially are all very good ones; however I personally haven't had the problems listed, and I try to be intelligent about who and what I talk to and why.

My problem is that I'm young, and I was even younger when I began this book- so of course I went "look what I can do, Mommy!" Now I think it's common knowledge I'm writing a book. My mother likes showing me off, and going "she's writing a book" to all and sundry seems perfectly acceptable to her.

However, I have an absolutely wonderful friend who I also talked about my book to- and that turned out beautifully. She also writes, and we've helped each other with great ideas and playing out characters... most everything. It's not a writing group (I'm assuming those are acceptable social situations to talk about books), but it's helped a lot.

Of course, I don't summarize my plot to her, and she never bugs me about "when's the book coming out" or gives unwanted suggestions, so she's probably rare among people.

I told family members about my novel and they were so concerned about the time it took me to get published, they suggested their author friend might agree to help me. He was with Publish America.

That was my rock-bottom moment.

Then the Gods smiled on me. About a month later my novel sold, film rights sold, foreign rights sold, my YA series sold.

I never did hear from the PA guy. I guess he was too busy.

Poodle Girl
P.S. Bernita - don't kill your husband. You're too pretty for prison.

I don't talk about specifics of my book. I'll tell people I'm a writer, but not much more. Sometimes they ask what I write, but answering that proved to be dangerous once. When this employee of my friend's asked me what I wrote and I said fantasy, she replied, "Oh, you mean like one of those sexy romances?" Uh... no.

And I do agree that it's okay to discuss writing with other writers to an extent. The reason I feel this way is because I don't count that as discussing the novel socially. It's business. And considering that so much of a writer's work is done in isolation, it's almost essential to find someone else who can understand this thing we do and offer encouragement. For example, I love my husband, but his writing is a hobby thing, and he's supportive, but he doesn't get it. But my writer friends understand why it's taken me over four months to revise Chapter 3.

Miss Snark,

I find that I agree with most of your suggestions. For the most part, I don't agree with this one, and rather than try to argue the point, I'll just take the opportunity to thank-you again for your blog and your willingness to help writers.

EGP

This is difficult because us writers have that damn mistique to overcome. I find this is where my hook line comes in handy.

"What do you do?"
"I'm a writer."
"I always wanted to write a book, love to read, wrote stories in high school, blah blah. What's your book about?"
I have five, so I can usually pick one that's finished. "A bounty hunter follows his wife's murderer into another world." (Or whatever it is)
Usually it's a great chance to practice a hook line in a relaxed setting, because if it satisfies them, then it's a good one. If they give you a puzzled look, then your hook needs work. But dang, don't take it beyond the hookline!
However, the porn script idea is a really good one, too.

I used to talk about my WIPs to non-writers. Not (I hope) in an annoying way, but from a one-thing-led-to-another way. "Wanna hang out next week?" "Can't, I'm at a writing conference/chapter meeting/whatever." "Oh yeah? Whatcha writing?" And it's not a case of not finishing the book (thanks to Anon for the FG link, tho, hilarious) because in the 1.5 years I've been doing this, I've written 4 novels. The problem is like kiskadee said--my friends and family constantly ask when they'll see the book at Borders. Lately they've been suggesting self-publishing because it's "taking so long". (1.5 years!! Drop in the bucket.) So now I regret mentioning it at all. I no longer describe plots (other than basic blurb, if that) and I definitely don't let them read parts anymore. I can't believe I ever did that. But no matter how little I discuss my WIPs with non-writers these days, the cat's well out of the bag and I will forever have to field "Why won't anybody publish your stories?" questions unless/until that shiny happy day ever comes.

Many of my neighbors who I see daily, and do things socially with, have no idea I've written a novel. If it ever sees the light of day in a bookstore, they're going to be like, "I HAD NO IDEA!"

I just don't like talking about it to people who really just won't get it. Hell, when it is discovered that I've written a book and it is being shopped around right now, when the person asks me what it's about, I say, "Uh, ummm, it's kinda about... shit, I don't know!"

I finished the first draft of my first novel while my daughter's friend was spending the night, and I guess my vague sense of celebration and accomplishment (I yelled, "Leeeerooooy Jennkinnns!" at the top of my lungs and jumped fully dressed into the swimming pool) made an impression on the child because her parents surprised me a few months later by asking how the book was coming along. No one had ever done that before because no one knew what I was doing. And I was caught off guard and launched into a six-minute answer, which touched on character arcs and whether I should kill off my main character's brother, and so on, and so on, and became perhaps the single most self-indulgent asshole these nice people ever had in their kitchen. I could see they had no f-ing idea what I was talking about, and no interest beyond polite small talk, but I couldn't help myself. Once I was into it I felt I owed it to my audience to make them understand. It remains the most painful conversation I've had that did not include the word prostate.

Another pitfall -- when I started writing, I focused on "sweet" romance, and my husband's colleagues all knew I was writing while being a stay at home mom.

Well, I've sold, and am doing well with a small press, but it's with much spicier stuff. Because of hubby's job, and the conservative community we live in, I haven't told ANYONE about my books or the pen name I'm using.

So now, when anyone asks how the writing's going, I have to act like I'm still unpublished. Argh.

I am an artist for my "day job", and I make money at it. In social settings the conversation goes:
"So what do you do?"
"I'm an artist."
"Oh. You paint pictures?"
"Yes."
"How nice. Did you see the game last night?"
Basically, most folks don't know anything about creative jobs and are uncomfortable talking with "arty" people. I talk about art with artists, writing with writers, and music with musicians. Everyone's happier that way.

1) Take this advice at face value, and apply some damn sense to it. Miss snark does not mean that you should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever mention anything to anyone about your novel, ever. Think, people! In certain situations, it's fine. If you're sitting in a writer's group... it's not only fine it's expected.

2) If you're worried about someone stealing your idea, get over yourself. Seriously. You can't copyright ideas, and people who steal ideas from others are unlikely to ever get published, anyway (unlikely, not impossible), so don't freaking worry over it. Besides, you've got a head start, and should finish first anyway. Right? Right?

ha ha miss snark talking about whats RUDE or not

ha ha get real

I'm late to the party, but I wonder how this advice applies to blogging. There seem to be more and more writers blogging about their WIPs.

Not me, mind. (And I don't usually read blogs about novels-in-progress, either. Just not interested! I may like the novel, but I don't need to know how every word was wrestled to the ground and pinned in place.)

When people ask me, "What's your book about?" I answer, "Um... about 75,000 words." They give me a funny look and just sort of wander away usually.

This is the first time I've felt "WTF?" about something Miss Snark has ranted about. I think the strangeness to me is in how to take the phrases "talk about" (spewing a verbal outline of the entire plot, or simply admitting to writing at all) and "social situations" (party with strangers, or sharing one's hopes with a close friend). I can totally understand advice not to give blow-by-blows of the plot to a publishing professional whom you've only just met at what is supposed to be a non-work, fun party. But from Miss Snark's reasons, and from comments here, the "rule" from the rant is being interpreted to mean "never let anyone know that you write; cover up the computer screen and pretend it's a billpay spreadsheet even if you're closest friend walks by". That's...paranoid, bizarre and impractical. Sure, we all know *some* people who don't do well with the information that you're writing a book. I can see how letting the cat out of the bag to all and sundry at your day job can become a problem. I can see how certain personalities within one's family or circle of friends might not do well with the information. But to project that onto EVERYONE is excessive.
My mother is a painter, my father is an inventer, my sister is an actress, my husband is a designer, my friends are actors, writers, composers, startup founders, etc etc etc. They're not all writers themselves, but they're creative people, and have done darned well with the knowing that I'm writing a book. No, I don't tell them the plot, but yes, we do talk about the struggles of the work itself. They talk about theirs, I talk about mine. It's friendship. We share. I cannot get behind the pride being expressed her in declaring, "No one knows I'm writing! It's all top secret!" That's just weird to me.

They talk about theirs, I talk about mine. It's friendship. We share. I cannot get behind the pride being expressed her in declaring, "No one knows I'm writing! It's all top secret!" That's just weird to me.

Weird to you maybe; to me it's natural. It has nothing to do with pride. There are some things that are intimate to me, and writing is one of them.
Of course, now I'm published people do know that I spend much of my time writing. But before I was published it was a huge no-no for the reasons I gave. It was like a delicious secret I had inside me, and letting anyone into the secret would be like releasing the magic.

Yes, Kiskadee, I can see how an *individual* person, given their personality or situation, would feel like keeping their writing to themselves. I don't think that's weird at all (you sound very sensible). What I think is "weird" is the projection that EVERYONE ought to do the same--regardeless of their personality or social circle.
And the pride I'm talking about isn't in the decision whether or not to keep one's writing secret; the pride I'm talking about is "I agree with Miss Snark! I'm so cool! She would approve of me! Everyone else who has ever talked about their book with their significant other is a LOSER!" That's the pride I'm seeing in a lot of these comments...
I can see how Miss Snark, actually being an agent and all, would like to not hear about unpubbed novels in *any* social situation. But fellow writers, c'mon. It takes all kinds to make a world--people who are different from you, and perhaps different from the crowd you hang out with. Surely with your writerly imagination you can conjure up an image of two people having a *civilised* conversation about writing. That's the pride I'm talking about--the eagerness to apply this "rule" so broad and so thick that it becomes ridiculous.

It would be off-putting on the first page but it might be intriguing as cover decoration or in some other atmospheric context.

I can't read it, Sha'el, I admit it.

Damned public school education.

Well you see, I was guessing from the question that the author maybe wrote some sci fi or fantasy and wanted to include a page of a non-human language to add atmosphere. That was my guess.

Having a hard time figuring out who's the pretentious one, really.

I should never make blog comments when I'm on medication.

For "Don't do this fooling thing," read "Don't do this foolish thing."

And insert the ";" where it belongs.

I can read, at least on an elementary level, languages other than English. It usually irritates me to do so.

It was once the convention that scholarly and pretentious books have Greek and Latin Text. It was a way of saying, "Oh, my, we're smart, you and I, we can read this, and no one else can." (An exception to the "I'm smart and you're not" rule is a Biblical commentary that must include original language text.)

Oh, it was also a way of telling dirty stories safely. You think I'm kidding? Ha! I am not!

Oh, ya, and a few scattered furin' words in something like an Agatha Christie novel can create "atmosphere." But I still find it as irritating to read them as a child would find wearing a starched cloth diaper irritating to their little bum!

Don't do this fooling thing ...

For instance, doesn't it irritate the heck outa you that I can read this and you can't:

οτι το μωρον του θεου σοφωτερον των ανθρωπων εστιν και το ασθενες του θεου ισχυροτερον των ανθρωπων

Okay, so a few of you can read this. There's always someone!

I have done as many insane, death-defying and moronic things any person living has ever done. And even I recognize this is a seriously bad idea.

While I agree that it's useless, if as the author says, it's important to the story to open it that way, here's what I might suggest: Write it in English but italicize it, set it apart with indentation.

I may be on the wrong track here, but I'm imagining it as a mysterious message or letter that starts off the story for the protagonist. There are ways of opening into it also, and if it's real short, (certainly shorter than a page) it might be acceptable. But if you start off in English--even if the mystery would be revealed--it doesn't spoil the whole book if an agent is reading just a few pages. And the author could switch back to Plan A once someone showed more serious interest in the work, and explained then.

I say include the page in another language.

After you run it through an on-line translation program you'll have a great laugh.

Hint--its even more fun to run it through several languages first before putting it in Engrish.

--All your base are belong to us!

http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/All_your_
base_are_belong_to_us

Why in the world would you want to do this?

I'm not being snarky. I'm genuinely baffled.

Uh, is this the Mel Gibson school of writing?

For "Don't do this fooling thing," read "Don't do this foolish thing."
Actually, I liked the first way you had it -- more pithy.

On second thought, there is always this:

oo-yah an-kay ite-wray it-tay in-ya
Ig-Pay Atin-Lay.

Everyone reads that! Don't they?

Or this:

tenkyu Goda longa i na slip, so i lukim maritman pulim nus. i tok em no bilong mi!

Everyone can read that, can't they?

Sure, use your other-language text. Just provide us with a translation so we can skip it.

what depresses me is how this aspiring writer (and so many like her) are so caught up fantasizing about add-ins and acknowledgement pages of best selling books they won't ever write that they have little time to spend reading, revising, and thinking about the reality of the flawed writing in front of them, to say nothing of the horribly skewed thought process.

If you think it's right for your story, then follow Miss Snark's advice. You may have to argue the matter out with your agent, then your editor, then your readers...but it's your story.

It can't be any worse than this freaking word verification!

I can see why you'd want to do it, but you'll frustate 99% of readers, so why do it on the first page? In fact why not interleave sentences (with translations), like a breadcrumb trail, throughout the book. Be loving towards your readers and they will love you back.

Oooh - why not include it in the special edition version that will be published after the rest of the books in the series make bestseller? Author: "It's how I always envisioned it, my true masterpiece, uncut."

Why not dream a little dream?

When I pick up a book by a new/unknown (to me) author, the first thing I do is flip it over and read the back. If that interests me, I open it to the first page and read the first paragraph or two, and that is what actually convinces me to read the book. If I flipped it open and found the entire first paragraph, not to mention the first page, in another language, I'd roll my eyes and put it back on the shelf. The book would never get a second chance for me to find out that there was a 'very good reason' for the passage to be there. That one look would be it for me, and I've worked in enough bookstores to know I'm not alone in the practice.

Wow, you gave six pitches at one conference? Please tell us which one. I'm signing up for next year.

More importantly, in my opinion, did you have to pay extra for these pitches?

I just want to add, that some quite legit agents specifically ask to know how many other agents are reading partials/fulls, and want to be kept updated.

But then, that falls under the following directions thing. I wouldn't bring it up, otherwise. It's just so awkward...

Not to be snarky, but in all seriousness: if you feel like an editor won't "get it" from your writing alone, or won't be sufficiently interested, you need to take another look at that writing. Really.

Best of luck,
Chris

I am sure there is a writer out there who is going to push the limit and this will be a break out book (published with the side bar notes and all)

No comment about if it is a WIP - why is it being submitted to an agent?

Unless, of course, you're doing one of those postmodern things (dog help us) and really think the footnotes are part of the book in some hypertexty kind of way...

In fact, such a thing might make a mediocre novel seem artsy. If you don't get nibbles from agents without the footnotes, try sending it out to a few select agents (find out who handles David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers) with the footnotes.

This question actually came about by accident. I sent out the first three chapters (reworked again) to my beta readers and noticed I had not removed the footnotes before printing. I gave them to the beta readers as they were and wondered: ‘What if I hadn’t caught that? What if I had been in a hurry, stuffed them in an envelope, and mailed it out to an agent?’

Hence, the question was asked.

It had nothing to do with artistic expression or other intelligent reasoning. It was a simple ‘f*uck up’ and I thought Ms. Snark would enjoy another gin and flaming hair moment.. :D

Jonathan Stroud uses footnotes in the Bartimaeus Trilogy, but they're asides from one of the characters (often riotously funny), not the writer's explanation of what the reader is supposed to get from the text and obviously isn't.

Unless you're so wicked clever that your footnotes are gems themselves, never ever yank a reader out of your story to look at something else. They might not go back...

Wouldn't the synopsis be the place to explain out all of the twists and turns? And shouldn't the first chapter (or first 3 chapters) be enticing enough to make an agent want to read more?

Footnotes annoy me - I have a copy of War of the Worlds with footnotes and, I kid you not, they explain things like shrub* and below it says "shrub is another word for bush" Grrr...

I'm wanting to know why you're sending parts of an unfinished WIP to agents.

Agents don't want WIP. They want FINISHED PRODUCTS. Nitwit.

hplgphr - help that gopher!

Unless your name is Jonathan Stroud and your footnotes are the thoughts of a supernatural creature and really, really funny.

Regardless of nitwit or no, I lurrve the idea of using footnotes for my own reference. Good idear!

heather said:
I'm wanting to know why you're sending parts of an unfinished WIP to agents.

Agents don't want WIP. They want FINISHED PRODUCTS. Nitwit.

I can give you a simple answer for that, heather:

Until I edit and polish the MS to the point I'm satisfied it is the best possible work, I consider it a WIP. All 25 chapters. I'm reaching this point on the 5th edit.

If you consider a WIP as an unedited, unpolished work, that's your definition; not mine.

And note: There are agents on my list who specifically ask for the first 5 pages or full 1st chapter with a query. Ms. Snark has pointed out on the crapometer that query letters are not always the best. Pages say a lot more, so if an agent is asking for them, up front, I'm going to consider them first.

Wait a minute, wait a minute. You're sending the revised first chapter of a Work In Progress? You mean the book isn't finished?
Halt. Don't send it to an agent until it's done, is what I've always heard.

Interesting to see such different definitions of WIP. Maybe we should institute a new acronym "WIR" for "Work in Revision"?

"WIR" would be for rewrites or polishes after the third full draft, especially if the revisions in question were requested by an editor or agent (even a good freelance editor).

"Don't ever talk about your novel to anyone socially until it's published. Ever.

Man oh man, oh man. Another perfect Snark Raving Truth.

Yes. Preach it, sister.

Hold on...are we calling this guy an editor, an agent, or both? Isn't "simultaneous submission" a no-no, if he's being queried as an editor?

Brings to mind Ruth Schwartz "All is Vanity."

And what's this business with agents being nice???

"Don't ever talk about your novel socially until it's published. Ever."

Damn, wish I'd heard this before.

Could someone explain this rule against discussing the novel socially before it's published? I'd appreciate it.

Don't ever talk about your novel socially until it's published. Ever.

In general I'm in complete agreement with Miss Snark, but I'm not sure I buy this one for a number of reasons, some of which may be genre specific.

I'm an F&SF author, and making the rounds of cons and talking about your work in progress is a big part of career development.

I wrote full time for a while before selling a novel. If I hadn't talked about the novels I was writing I'd have had an awfully hard time explaining what I did during those years.

Much of my social circle is now made up of professional and aspiring novelists and English professors. Talking about unpublished novels is a huge part of the normal conversation. It was not always this way, but developed in part because of a willingness on my part to both talk about my work and to welcome other writers into my life.

My life wouldn't be nearly as rich if I hadn't always been willing to talk about my writing. Further, those aspiring novelist connections really helped me get through some rough times on the way to publication.

On the other hand, I don't think I talked about my first novel socially before it was finished, and that I would highly recommend because a lot of novel are never finished.

"Here is a bonus clue cause clues come in threes today: don't ever talk about your novel to anyone socially until it's published. Ever."

I'm having that tatooed on my forehead.

This editor hasn't gotten back to you in 8 months. It's his way of giving you a very nice "no." He's hoping you'll sell it elsewhere in the meantime. It's awkward because you know him socially, so he feels weird sending you a rejection slip. Just consider it a no and move on.

Anon 2 - That confused me as well. Also, if someone told me he was an editor who occasionally did editing, my gut reaction would be to think that he's not particularly good at agenting or editing... or he would have chosen one over the other at some point. Red flags all over this one, novelist!

I agree that "don't talk about your novel socially until it's published" is very fine advice. I need to modify this for my husband: Don't bring up wife's (messy, unfinished) novel at parties and boast about its brilliance, then go to grab a beer, leaving wife to answer all questions about decidedly unbrilliant novel.

"Don't ever talk about your novel socially until it's published. Ever."

I've tried to obey this rule. But my loving husband told his mother before I could stop him, so now every time we talk, she asks about it. She also sends me magazine clippings of ads for vanity presses.

Miss Snark, you have a lot of great info here, but this is far and away the best clue you've ever delivered. Or at least my favorite: "Here is a bonus clue cause clues come in threes today: don't ever talk about your novel to anyone socially until it's published. Ever."

Any chance you could get the flipside out to the masses? I.e., that one should never ask about a writer's unpublished novel. If I felt at all capable of discussing stories over coffee I'd probably be an agent. Or better, a screenwriter.

I don't understand the reasoning behind not discussing an unpublished novel socially. I can understand not mischaracterizing yourself, and not mentioning a "not-ready-to-submit" work to someone who is in the industry. But unless I don't want to talk about it, why wouldn't I mention it?

To the original poster: Miss Snark has said this time and again, and it bears repeating: Query wide. Query often. Query again. Don't stop querying. Etc. It's terrific advice!

The sooner you prepare a few other query letters (along with a few pages) and get them out the door, the quicker your anxiety about this guy will dissipate. He's just one guy. The wider you cast your net, the more likely you are to snag an agent. Keep writing too. Take a deep breath, don't be angry at his lazy ass, and do something to be positive and proactive about the situation. Continue to write. Continue to query. And good luck!

Thank you so much, Miss Snark, for the best advice ever.

My opinions on why you shouldn't talk about your novel socially until it's published, for those who want reasons:

1. It's annoying.

2. It makes it that much more disappointing and embarrassing if you don't ever get it published.

3. Because every clueless wannabe constantly does this, and you don't want people to confuse you with clueless wannabes. Seriously, it's right up there with people who say, "I never read books, because I don't want to subconciously copy another writer's style!"

4. If people really cared to know what you were writing about, they'd buy your books. But you don't have books for them to buy. So... hush. Just please, for the love of God, quit telling me all about the book that you're working on, or that you might write, or that you're thinking about maybe writing some day. I don't care. Go home and write. Put your keyboard where you mouth is.

Well, I'm still not getting it (why not to talk about one's unpublished novel), so I think the only thing to do is ask Miss Snark directly. I get that it's annoying to have people ask about it if it's become a hopeless cause, but I'm not sure that's what MS meant. Here I go to ask her.

yet it's ok for you agents to take a frigging year to reply.

Anon,
the situation Miss Snark is describing is after a writer has leaped tall buildings, etc., to arrive at a state of representation. You know what that takes, since you are obviously laboring in the fields of attempted representation.
It's a lot of frigging work to get there!!
Once you've achieved/earned that lofty status where your work has been recognized by at least one person and vetted, the air is rarified and very, very familiar. Agents and editors actually speak with one another, which is why you'd like to be attached to such a group. On the other hand, they actually speak with one another about clients.
Would you actually want to screw it up by being an idiot and burning bridges by pulling a dumbass move like this? There are certain protocols and basic courtesies that apply, one major one of which is to formally sever your relationship with your previous agent prior to looking for new representation. If you do not, and if you get caught, well, let's just say you'll get the representation you so justly deserve.

*I was 3/4 of the way through this post when my laptop wigged out on me. So my apologies if this is a double posting.*

This has to do with editors rather than agents, but I had a reminder the other day of just how small the publishing world really is. My wonderful fabulous agent has submitted my book to six equally wonderful and fabulous editors so, like any newbie author, I Googled the hell out of their names gleaning tidbits of information. Lo and behold I found a website with a photo album that featured three of these six agents all partying together.

It does, however, make me wonder if the next time they all decide to gather and get sloshed they will discuss how they all got this total piece of sh*& manuscript the other day.

Of course, maybe they'll make the winner of the auction buy the losers a drink.:)

But really, everyone knows everyone in the publishing world.

Maprilynne

A year to reply, leading you on about send me the next manuscript and I will work with you and then four months go by and no response, no email, complete and utter silence. Look at your contract and end the damn deal and move on.
Writers have to stop living out lives according to the silences of people we never even met!!!

"yet it's ok for you agents to take a frigging year to reply."

No one says you have to stop submitting, or wait on a single agent.

Yo, anon -

It's a business relationship, and an exclusive one. Once you are *represented*, you're in for the whole dance until you end that relationship. And yes, the exclusivity is only one-way. That's because you don't write enough for *you* to live on, let alone an agent to live on 15% of.

The agent is taking you on as a client because she believes you have long-term potential to build a career that you *can* live on. (Potential, not to say it usually happens.)

If you're querying around when you're supposed to be exclusive, then that marks you as someone who doesn't care about their word given to their partners. Why would a new agent take that on?

(I too have had computer problems today, so sorry if this is a repeat comment.)

Imagine the following: you're a woman being flirted with by an attractive man - when suddenly a friend of yours comes up and says, 'Why are you flirting with my boyfriend?' And it turns out that this man has been dating your friend for some time ... but he wasn't quite happy with her. Not wanting to risk being single, he decided to proposition other women behind her back until he found someone else willing to go ou with him.

Would you go out with this man?

No agent will want to take on a writer they can't trust to go behind their backs. If you terminate your relationship with your agent, you'll be taking the risk of finding yourself agentless, but that's the gamble: you might find a better agent, you might not. You don't have to take the gamble if you're not comfortable with it. But you have to be honest. It's not fair to two-time your agent like that, especially as you say she's 'doing her job'.

If you really feel that she and your next book are a bad match, polish up your tact and discuss it with her. You might be able to work something out. But whatever you do, tell the truth: your sins can find you out in publishing very quickly, and you'll have to live down any mistakes you make for a long time.

I second Miss Snark on severing with the first before signing with the second--it's a Business Thing. You're only as good as your word, so it is not the done thing to get a bad rep for non-professional behavior.

I was in the process of severing my first agent when I met with the person who would become my present agent. From the start I was upfront about untangling from the other person and gave a timetable on when I expected things to be resolved. Only THEN would we shake hands for our own partnership. She understood perfectly, waited, things wroked out, and the last ten years have been profitable for us both.

Anon, I'm one of those sticklers who believes you shouldn't even be talking to another agent about your situation until you've severed ties with the first.

While you're lining your ducks in a row, your first agent is still scrambling (like any decent agent does, since they have to make a living) to try and sell your manuscript.

If she'd managed at the last moment to sell something, would you have stayed, or left? (that sale would have stayed with the agent who made the sale)

I'm getting the feeling after speaking to a number of agents that they are able to "sniff out" potential, and try to work it, help the writer grow into it. Meanwhile, developing writer is in a rush to be the latest Page Six entry.

I heard basically the same story from a couple of agents, they were the dumped. After that experience, they were less inclined to be as charitable, to take on writers who were "almost there" and to offer constructive criticism.

One agent called them the "user class" of writer.

Gives the rest of us a bad name and limits our chances. I therefore target newer agents who are probably less experienced, but at the same time less apt to be burned by assholes looking for a back to climb up.

Just to clarify, because all the references I've seen to this have been for just the next book after the published one . . . This contract means the publisher has first-refusal rights on every book this author writes for the next seven years.

Nuts is right.

Yikes. Worse case scenario is that the publisher could hold onto everything your friend writes for the next seven years, neither accepting nor releasing it.

Unlikely, yes, but why take that chance? I know people who've had very bad experiences with first-refusal clauses, so I'm very wary of them.

Sounds like our favorite publishing scam, Publish America. (From what I understand, they take everyone and then lock 'em into a seven-year contract, trickling 'royalty' checks of a dollar a pop along the way. No bookstore will stock these books because it's all POD, pre-order, non-returnable dreck.)

I was recently at a party where not one but two(!) would-be authors tried to get me--no, let's be frank, beggedme--to order their 'PA' books. I tossed back one for the road and got the hell out of there.

Actually it's not PA. It's a legitimate publisher that has a good reputation in the niche it's in.

According to the author, she investigated other publishers in this niche market and several of them also had similar terms. One was for more than seven years. These publishers aren't scammers, just sadly misguided because most of them had no background in publishing before starting their companies.

I don't want to go into any more detail because I don't want to get the author in trouble. The publishing niche is very small.

I especially like #13.
Great Post!

Oy!
Mlle Snarque:
I attended a Leave No Crime Unpublished SinC conference here in So Ca. The great Lee Child himself said to include a photo.
Go figure!

RE #13 It may be late in the day, but lose the "entire" is the only thing I can find fault with right now. Of course the species can only do this once. Is this the time? I say this as a biologist who has worked on such a study.

Thank all the greater and lesser Gods that I am not the only person in possession of the secret knowledge that "impactful" is not a fucking word.

Someone needs to inform the retail sector of this (especially my company, which seems overly fond of the phrase "more impactful").

I don't understand number 5. At least the first part of it.

I just started writing my first MG in September, so I'm new to writing.

I sent my first 50 pages to a book doctor. She sent back a one and a half page critique. It was under $200.

She told me areas where my writing was weak, asked a few questions that made me think of the logical flow of my story, and gave me great advice for character development.

It was like having a mentor over my shoulder. I needed the information she gave me. It was a personalized crash-course in fiction writing.

I won't do it a second time. But the first time was well worth it.

WTF???I QUIT! And I am going to fire my favorite fact checking editor... my novel is about the war of 1812 and Abe Lincoln winning it single handed with Kennedy losing...... Or was it Kennedy who freed the slaves over in Hawaii? Should I still Query this one?

Poor Takoda.... You hired a book doctor on your first MS? Paid 200 for the first 50pgs? Tsk. Tsk. Tsk....

Send Snarky dear a letter about that.... Be careful about those services. They can be bad, very baddddddd. And they are in it for the money. Of course. It's better to save up and go to a conference and talk to an agent, or better yet, go to barnes and noble, buy 200 dollars worth of books and read read read read read and then read some more. The more you read, the better your prose.

Love love luv this post. And dammit, I have committed none of these sins, so why am I still unagented? Grr.

Particularly love the gripe about "impacting" one's life. My teeth grind to the point to the impaction when I hear people use the word in that sense. It's as bad as telling someone you're nauseous.

Takoda: seeking feedback is good. Accepting there is room for improvement is good. But I'm glad you don't intend to rely on book doctors. There are many ways to get feedback, and you want as many different opinions as you can so you end up with a balance. Critique goups online or locally, and competitions, are the most obvious.

As to telling a potential agent you used a book doctor for the work you are sending them... that's the problem. It's essentially saying "please find enclosed the novel I couldn't write by myself". With perhaps a footnote of "I'd like you to pay me as a qualified author even though I'm still doing the apprenticeship".
A book doctor's opinion on the opening of your first MS? Fine! By the time you get the whole MS shining for submission, you're going to have re-edited that sucker so much the book doctor's only remaining contribution will have been to your own education. In which case you wouldn't think of mentioning the paid editor to the agent.
And I doubt you need to hear why the positive opinion of someone who was PAID is not worth anything to an agent.

PS I too hold a malicious hatred for words like 'impactful'. There are, occasionally, invented words that at least have an element of beauty. But 'impactful' is just mud ugly.

Hey, Mark, it took me a minute to figure it out and I've got this gigantic cerebral lump growing out the side of my head to store all the extra scientific stuff needed for my work. Okay, the young will eventually be such--sterile--but they start off as eggs. Frogs bear freakin' eggs, not young. I'm perdy sure that's what Miss Snark meant. If not, find me something to shrink this thang.

Takoda, I read No. 5 to mean, "If you cannot get your MS into showing-off shape without hiring an editor, you don't want to brag about that in a query letter. And agents don't care what your hired help -- skillful though they may be -- think of the finished work."

Me, I see nothing at all wrong with paying a reputable pro to help get an MS on track. But I'd rather leave an agent the impression that my submission is the product of my adept and confident hand.

Takoda - a) you were ripped off, and b) even if you weren't, why would you mention this in your query letter?

Clue gun me about # 13 too please.

Ah, Ms Snark. Thank you. You have helped me understand why I should never send away anything I have written to an agent or publishing house. Ever. EVER.

But yes, "impactful" is a far cry from being a word, and if only people could fact check. I've reviewed books where even a tiny smidgen of fact checking would have made the whole experience so much more fulfilling, damn their collective eyes.

I actually taught high school biology annd am clueless about what's wrong with the frogs. Someone shoot me with a clue gun.

I'd love to see a frog bearing its young. It would be a huge jump in the evolutionary scale. (Pardon the pun.) Although, maybe that's why all the frogs who do so have sterile young.

And whaddya mean Missouri's not in Central America? It's central. It's America. Right?

Reading this post, I was thanking dog I don't do any of these things. I'd have to shoot myself with a clue gun.

Next you'll be telling me Georgia isn't in South America. Sheesh.

I just stumbled across a great phrase. I came up twice on the jacket flap of a book I just read which shall remain nameless here.

"Unspeakable terror"

It wasn't very terrifying.

"Including a photo of yourself. This just boggles the mind. Thank all dogs you weren't naked."

What if I look like George Clooney when I'm naked.

I'm not saying I do. I'm just curious about the rules in that situation.

Love #7! The "final...ending" as opposed to an earlier one? Now that's good stuff!

#10 and #13, LOL! Priceless!

A book priest is cheaper.

I got an A+ in biology but it was 20 years ago. Can someone tell me why the frog thing can't happen?

You have to get a laugh where you can MS. :)

for the third time - repeat after me, snarklings:

Frogs lay eggs, humans bear children.

It's my new mantra.
Frogs lay eggs, humans bear children.
Frogs lay eggs, humans bear children.
Frogs lay eggs, humans bear children.

This is a good example of why beginning writers have a god-awful fear of slush pile readers wielding totalitarian power in a completely arbitrary manner.

I love you, MS, but rejecting a manuscript based on 10, 11, 12, and 13 is being really picky. Especially 13. I am a physicist/biologist and while 13 isn't one-hundred percent technically correct, it is colloquially acceptable.

Maybe you were just in a bad moon after reading the moronic submissions that represented 1 through 9, but I feel bad for those last authors.

Actually, that's wrong: 'to bear' means 'to bring forth; to give birth to', so while frogs do lay eggs, they also do 'bear young'. The sentence is fine as-is.

Yay! Miss Snark's back - and she's hot!

Sic 'em, KY.....

(Word Ver: wfsukby. Perfect.)

I disagree with whoever said the book doctor was a "rip off". Obviously the writer was pleased with the feedback and found it helpful. There are all kinds of ways to get feedback. You can get some of them for free. Others, like conferences, or workshops, or classes, cost money. He was happy with the feedback he purchased. I know people want to avoid advising that paying is necessary, or open for the door for scammers. But not every paid critque is a scam. Calm down, people.

" Frogs bear freakin' eggs, not young"

Yeah, I was two stages beyond and not taking that literally. In retrospect I settled on the biological species concept definition i.e. have viable young. Must be all that time spent identifying tadpoles. Try that for tricky. I'm also bad at parlor jokes so...

Um ... I think some species of frogs do bear live young.

From http://www.globalamphibians.org/photos.htm:

"Nectophrynoides viviparus (Vulnerable) occurs in the Uluguru and Udzungwa Mountains and in the Southern Highlands of eastern and southern Tanzania. It is threatened by ongoing forest loss. It is one of very few species of frogs that gives birth to live young."

From http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-407813/Nectophrynoides:

”The most advanced form of reproduction known in frogs takes place in the small African bufonids of the genus Nectophrynoides. By some unknown means, fertilization is internal, and the young are born alive. It is noteworthy that the evolution of live birth has taken place independently in all three living orders of amphibians, for this phenomenon also occurs in salamanders ….”

I actually thought bufonids were toads, but who am I to quibble with Britannica? Like Mark, I thought Miss Snark didn’t like the “entire,” maybe 'cuz it implied that male frogs bore young?

Hi Ozal, Anon, and Greta,

What you've all said is valid, but this person really was helpful in my case. She didn't include praise in her comments. Just ideas for improvements. For example, my two characters go back in time to another country. I never explicity said 'why' everyone speaks English. So I had to spell that one out. And she suggested to connect their journey back in time to their relationships with their fathers. She didn't say 'how,' just to do it. There were a few other suggestions which helped me to give more dimensions to my story.

She did not in any way 'write' any of my ms- which is why I feel really good. I truly learned more about the writing craft, which I can apply to my future MGs.

I realize there are people (tons of them) out to part a fool and his money. I appreciate the support and suggestions....but this wasn't the case for me. And I do belong to an online critique group--if you're reading this--you guys are the best!!

Many cheers!!!

Dear Ms. (or Mrs.) Snark,

For your consideration I'm including in the body of my e-query (yes, I know you don't take them, but this one truly IS *special!!!*) my 90,000 word piece of work.

It is an impactful observation of the mind set of the Central American public of Hometown, Missouri and follows three shattered lives, people dealing with the pain of living in the 1947 post-Civil War era beginning on the day they leave the memorial service for their late friend. The absurdity of their errors in life leads to a final bizarre shocking twist ending. One character, a devoted ecologist, collapses after learning an entire species of frog in his favorite pond are now bearing sterile young.

I've already paid for an edit on the book--a tasty temptation you can dangle before the publisher!

I'll phone you in a few days to get a ballpark on the advance. It will have to be in the 7-figure bracket as I've already made a down-payment on a Miami time-share.

Dan Brown has given me permission to use his name as a professional reference; enclosed please find the picture of us at a signing party. I apologize that we are both naked, but the copies of his last best-seller *are* strategically located. If you hold the picture at the right angle you can clearly see which of us is the best man. Ha-ha! Just kidding!

Some of these howlers are perpetrated by old information. I have a copy of Jeff Hermann's guide from the '90s that suggests sending a photo with a query. And at a writer's conference I attended about the same time, we were told that many West Coast agents wouldn't take on an author who was overweight or otherwise didn't have a "TV-friendly" look.

Much like a list I did a while back.

13) Is it because there would soon (in one generation)be no more frogs if this fact is true?

14) Learn to use correctly lie, lay, it, it's, its and the most abused word of all: hopefully.

Dear Agent type personage,

My novel, The Absurdity of Innocence In Howard Stern's Greenroom is a 90,000 word work of art impacting the Central American state of Missouri and their terrifying crusade against frogs and their live-birthed offspring. Please find enclosed a picture of me which proves what a great writer I am. Thank you for your time.

i think miss snark is incorrect with her indictment of "absurdity." complex nouns can bear out the idea. the absurdity of SUVs, for example. the noun alludes to the contrasting element. the absurdity of fast food. i pitch queries (and excoriate senders of queries) all the time for being excessively wordy. why say "the absurdity of driving a gas-guzzling luxury car during this war of terror (thank you, barat)-induced economy of conspicuous consumption under the guise of asceticism" if you don't have to?

I find it all incredulous.

Anon who doesn't think #10-12 are so bad:

#10-12 show signs of blah, sloppy writing. Perhaps the strongest hallmark of a mediocre book is that the writer uses superfluous words and/or cliches. The odds of the book being boring if the query letter contains drab prose are huge.

John Adams and Abraham Lincoln didn't take tea together. If you don't know why, don't ever query me.

Because they'd thrown all the tea into Boston Harbor?

Funny thing...my last experience with a "final bizarre shocking twist ending" resulted in a baby ...

I especially liked #3. After I read this, my husband yelled at me from the other end of the house, asking if I was choking on something.

Still, my favorite is from my shameful past when I tuned in to "QVC" for background noise, only to be told by a chatty TV host that a certain garment's "fabrication" meant whether it was made out of cotton or polyester.

When did "impacted" replace "affected"? Affected is just so much better, and comes without the dental reference.

As for rejecting for reasons 10-13. Miss Snark is the expert. She has her reasons. She shares them with us. If we choose to ignore her, then we can't expect to get published...

Having a bad week, Miss Snark? Here, [hands over a gold-plated bucket of gin and some Stilton and cracked pepper crackers] enjoy.

diamond lil, here's another frog for ya!

In the rainforests of northern Australia, there is a frog that turns off its stomach acids, swallows its eggs, and gestates them in its stomach. The live babies emerge from the frog's mouth.

Isn't the world a fabulous place!

(Anyone out there with ulcers wondering how they can learn that acid trick from the frog?)

And save "in a world where..." for "that announcer guy from the movies".

OMG this is the most hilarious thing I've read all day. Thank you for making me laugh. I don't think you're being harsh at all. You're asking for those who query you to at least demonstrate some sign of intelligence. Which should be common sense. If adults wanted to read something written in a child-like manner, they'd teach. You don't enough said. Great Blog!

He lil, Bufonids are toads, but in biology there is always an exception to the rule. Good catch.

impacted: I used to be a hospital nurse. Bowel care was a topic of lengthy discussion, activity, and charting. The word "impacted" was oft-used in this context. So I love it when my bosses talk about how some blahblah has impacted us. Ah, it takes me back...

More about frogs than I ever wanted to know, but this was a great freakin' post - who the hell puts Missouri in Central America? Everyone knows it's South America. Er... that is... And of course Lincoln didn't have tea with John Adams - he was meeting George Washington for dinner so they could discuss Texas' bid for independence.

erm... wanna see a picture of my dog?

'Impactful'?

Please tell me you're joking. Oh ye gods and goddesses, please tell me you're joking.

I've heard 'impact' used as a verb, and even that makes my ears bleed. Anyone who has EVER thought for a second that 'impactful' was a word should have his or her language licence revoked.

I work in marketing and you wouldn't believe how often "impactful" is bandied about.

I am ashamed to say sometimes I'm the one doing said bandying. This industry has done bad, bad things to my vocabulary.

My favorite part of this post was the tags, with the delightful neologism "nitwittery."

BTW, to all who are taking issue with the private editing . . . no problem hiring one, but the agent doesn't want to know that in the query letter. If you wouldn't say "My writers' group read this and I made a lot of significant changes based on their input, so it's much better than it used to be," then you shouldn't mention your freelance editor, either.

For the picture, publisher's don't give a damn what you look like, they care about whether you can write well enough to make them money. Unfortunately, I've seen a LOT of bad advice given on panels at conventions, usually by people who are either self-published or are published by a small press. And writer's groups are frequently the blind leading the blind - most published authors who are still writing don't have TIME to do writer's groups.

This happened to me--well, kind of this. I received somebody else's complete manuscript and rejection letter. The other person's book was gay erotica...a whole lot of gay erotica. I emailed the author. He wrote back to thank me and to tell me that he'd be happy to have me read the book and tell him what I thought.

I received another author's royalty statement once. Unfortunately, not her money.

Ah, well, Bonnie. You almost ruined my keyboard today.

Yep, happened to me. I found out a publishing house that had been considering my full for over a year had sent it (plus a rejection) to another author. She e-mailed to ask if I wanted it back and oh, by the way, did I happen to get hers?

And no, it wasn't gay erotica. :)

I once received a script from Fox sent to me in Malibu from their studio in Century City. They wanted to know if I would do a quick ghost rewrite for them - but it arrived three months late.

The envelope had meanwhile been torn, shredded and then re-taped with a huge rubber stamp in red ink across it saying - Fund Unbound in Altadena - which is on the other side of LA County, nowhere near Malibu or Century City.

So I didn't know what worried me more; that my mail was suddenly being routed though... Altadena... or that they needed to have a rubber stamp in Altadena saying - Found Unbound in Altadena.

I once got audited for somebody else's tax return...

least, that's what I kept telling the judge.

Must be the water. I read of a similar situation on one of the writer's email lists and then the following week it happened to me. First I got a rejection letter and not my partial. When I contacted the agent asking for my material back, I was told they had shredded it already, so sorry. The next week my SASE showed with someone else's rejection/partial inside. Emailed the agent again: what do you want done with this? Answer: so sorry, what a mess, I'll post a prepaid addressed pouch. It came yesterday and I mailed the material back to the city where they were.

I know agents are busy creatures, Miss Snark, but my confidence in this one was shaken. Made me really question if they were up to the job of repping any of my work.

Not happy, Jan in Australia.

ha ha yeah MISS snark- i'll go to the yellow pages and get that editors number.

get real- in the real world these people make a serious effort to HIDE their numbers from the psycho masses.

your answer is from a school textbook that is oh so proper but not based in reality-

MAIL THE LETTER BACK directly to the editor and ask about YOUR manuscript= the end

you are so clueless sometimes snark that im SURE you are not a real new yorker

The New York phone book, in fact, does list the telephone number of publishing companies. When you call, and ask to be connected to an editor by name, you get connected.

You don't need the direct number to make the call.

If you mail the letter back they won't have a clue why.

And yet, at conferences, I've heard agents and editors say things like, "If the query packet is not pristine, why should I trust the writer's capability? It's an obvious sign of trouble, and would result in an instant rejection."

I wish "these things happen" swung both ways.

I also wish for world peace and to win the lottery -- good luck, right?

Did someone say LOTTERY?

Well done Miss S for bothering to reply to rude anonymous. And better yet, advising the poster to get in touch with the possible assistant so she/he can clean up the mess without getting into trouble. A 10/10 result.

Ouch. Poor secretary.

The main reason, other than the fact that a) if you lack social skills, it becomes painfully obvious on the phone, and b) desperation tends to lower the social skill quotient in the best of us, is purely practical.

Editors don't buy writers, they buy books. Writers always think their books are good, and they're not all correct, so reading them is the only way to tell whether they're worth buying. And you can't read a book over the telephone. Therefore, any cold call conversation is going to be entirely useless. All it'll tell the editor is that they're speaking to someone who wants to get published - and they could have worked that out just as easily if the person sent in their manuscript.

Unless, of course, someone tries to read their manuscript down the phone, which is just bizarre.

Calling an editor to ask a ten-second question about their submissions policy does no harm if you're polite, but calling them to talk them into buying a book is ineffective from the writer's point of view, time-wasting and uncomfortable from the editor's.

It amazes me that with the amount of information out there for writers that people still make these mistakes. Whatever books these people are getting your numbers from must also have a chapter about the rules of ettiquette for this particular business, unless they are just looking up 'literary agents' in the phone book. You're not taking out ads in the yellow pages, are you?

O, I hate when editors get like that. I often wait for my editor outside her office. I jump out from behind telephone booths and yell GOTCHA! She doesn't mind. I mean she doesn't laugh with me...not on the outside. But I can tell she's cracking up INSIDE. She's even invented cute pet names for our encounters like STRANGE and CREEPY. Question. What exactly is a restraining order? Sounds technical.

My guess is the guy was having his secretary make these calls before writing the novel. I mean, no sense wasting time writing without a deal on the other end.

Thanks Kit, for your nice explanation. When I receive these sorts of cold calls, I usually just tell the caller, "I can't tell if you're a good writer by the sound of your voice."

I often ask the writers who 'phone in their submissions what they're reading. Many of them have told me that they don't read. And a good chunk of those tell me that they don't read because they want to make sure that their work is completely original. Ack.

Part of me wonders if people do these cold calls as a means of "building relationships", because "it's all about who you know". But it's about the product. Books aren't fungible, and that's what makes publishing different from producing paper towels.

I can't stress enough that aspiring authors should get involved in the community of which they want to be a part. Join critique groups, read the trade mags, review books for the trade mags, send pieces to lit magazines, read said magazines, attend events, read even more, write even more...people will get to know to know your name, and eventually, you.

I called an editor once, to get clarification on a submission requirement (specific to his house) and I was so terrified he would ask for my name or in some other way identify me and then black list any manuscript from me as a result that I could barely manage to spit out my question over the phone. If I had had access to one of those voice modification devices I would have used it.

It amazes me that with the amount of information out there for writers that people still make these mistakes.

This presupposes that most people are willing to put in the time and effort needed to seek out this information. I don't find that to be the case.

And this guy seems a couple more steps removed from the research process than most, since he had his secretary doing cold calls. If she got the agent info through a Google search, which seems likely, she probably figured out fairly quickly that agents don't work this way. But secretaries are routinely handed tasks and told, "Make it happen." Is that task unreasonable, unprofessional, or even impossible? Irrelevant.

On Secretary Day, these gals (and guys) should get diamonds and compact cars, not greeting cards. At the very least, Hallmark should acknowledge reality with something that reads, "You're underpaid and you work for an [BLEEP], but at least the benefits are decent."

Think of the good karma points you could have scored if you'd saved that poor assistant by telling her to put nitwit on the phone to set him straight.
I realize it's not something you'd really want to waste your time with, but that poor, poor assistant.
Won't somebody think of the assistants!?

A "restraining order" is a legally sanctioned demand that you maintain a distance of no more than 3 feet (the length of a dog leash) from your editor or agent or other beloved individual, thereby ensuring that you are "restrained" in their company so that such STRANGE and CREEPY encounters can occur with more satisfying frequency.

I like to think this is ignorance of protocol. I guess most executives are used to passing on the orders, and the job getting done.

It must come as a shock when they learn they have to submit work. But come to think of it, they probably have their secretaries do that, too.

I got a phone call from a guy who sounded like he was maybe 130 years old. He was calling from Bleak House's hometown and he asked if I'd be interested in taking a look at his science fiction novel that he had recently completed.

I told him that (a) we don't do science fiction, and (b) we don't take phone calls like his. He reminded me that he was from our hometown, as though that were the magic elixir to make all things better and that, having been handed that fact, I should have gotten out my contract signing pen.

He became even more agitated when I told him that didn't hold much sway either.

I have so far managed to avoid his further wrath, though I sometimes have visions of him showing up with his Civil War issue musket in a final attempt to persuade me into publishing his book.

Oh boy, the 'I don't read because I don't want other writers contaminating my originality' theory.

There's a grain of truth in it, of course. Other writers do contaminate your originality. Usually they contaminate it with such foreign concepts as competent prose.

Not reading and trying to write is like trying to raise a child by locking him in a sealed chamber. His opinions will undoubtedly be original, but they won't necessarily be sound.

I have so far managed to avoid his further wrath, though I sometimes have visions of him showing up with his Civil War issue musket in a final attempt to persuade me into publishing his book.

Heh. Okay, NOW I see the significance of the home town reference--it was a subtle way of saying, "I not only known where you work, I can get there in 20 minutes..."

My guess is the guy was having his secretary make these calls before writing the novel. I mean, no sense wasting time writing without a deal on the other end.

I am certain you are right. Part of my day job is to support upper managers in a big company. On the one hand, it irks me no end that they rely on their assistants for literally everything. On the other hand, it means I get to deal with the assistants instead of the managers, and about 99% of them are the nicest people you'd ever want to meet.

And, I'm sure this nitwit was going to have his secretary write the novel as well... if agents were interested in it.

I pity the assistant. If Miranda Priestly tells you to call the pope and arrange for dinner during your weekend in Rome, you pretty much have to either (a) make the calls using a pseudonym or (b) spend all day pretending to make the calls and make up fake notes.

I'd have told the boss that after calling 30 agents, they all told me the best place to go was Publish America.

And look for a differnet job. :)

After a merger, my Division (about 12 people) relocated their offices to the same hallway. I used to listen to 6, 8 or ten phones ring one after another until mine rang. It was one of the bosses looking for a live body to do useless crap. After two frustrating weeks, he bought everyone pagers and cell phones so they couldn't hide.

I feel sorry for that assistant/secretary.

I don't even call my agent. If I have a question/problem, I e-mail her. That way she can get to me when she has a minute.

Just in case you didn't understand Miss Snark's simple - NO!

Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes and his fans nearly lynched him.

A more modern example is the SOUTH PARK guys who never revealed who Cartman's Father was and their fans nearly destroyed Comedy Central. They actually got death threats.

Don't do it.

The issue is basically that a first novel needs to be able to stand alone. If it's popular enough to build up some reader loyalty, then readers might be prepared to accept a cliffhanger ending for your next book, or the one after. But with a first novel, I think readers would find it irritating, because of the way suspense and resolution are consumed.

The assumption of a cliffhanger is that the audience can reliably be expected to buy/watch the next installment - otherwise they're just being cheated of a satisfactory ending. But you can't assume that with a first novel. You've got to win their support, and the way to do that is to prove you can provide a good story with a beginning, middle and end. A cliffhanger leaves the story in the middle, and if they've never seen you end a story, they've got no proof that you give good ending. Hence, the motivation to buy the next book to find out how it ends is lessened: they don't have any proof that the ending will be worth the price of two books rather than one. They may well just think, 'Ah, to heck with it, I'll keep my money and spend it on a book that ends properly.'

Cliffhangers strain the audience's patience - that's how they work, by making them impatient for the next installment. But their patience with you will be more and more extendable the more books of yours they've read. Janet Evanovich has entertained her readers so well and so consistently that they'll put up with some demands on their patience, because all her previous books have created a big stockpile of trust and good will. A first novel is the beginning of building that stockpile, but it won't heap up enough to get away with an unresolved ending.

Readers, in short, will feel presumed upon, because you're treating them as if you can rely on their continued custom as a matter of course, rather than something you've got to win with lots of good books. Would you read a first novel, by an unknown author, knowing that it was going to leave you hanging?

If you can do good cliffhangers, that's a fine thing, because it means you can handle suspense. So make your first book suspenseful. Keep the readers on the edge of their seats, desperate to find out what's going to happen next. And then settle it with a great, satisfying ending, that makes them feel it was worth the wait. Do that a few times, and you'll have yourself an audience willing to accept riskier strategies like cliffhanging endings. But not yet. Start building up that audience first.

Good luck.

Which Evanovich book was that? It sounds like something Ranger would say -- or Morelli.

While I was getting close to the end of Garth Nix's Lirael, which I believe was the second book of his to be published, I started wondering how the heck he was going to wrap up the story in the number of pages left. The answer? He wasn't. The book turned out to be part one of a duology, and just left me hanging. I wouldn't have minded so much had I known in advance. But there was nothing on the cover to indicate the story was incomplete.

Personally I think that a risky strategy. Yes, I did go out and buy Book Two to find out what happened, but I wasn't very pleased about it.

The second time this happened was more recently. I was reading a first novel I'd purchased after being friended by the author on MySpace, and it just...stopped. Apparently, it's the first in a trilogy. There was no satisfactory resolution. Book, meet wall. And no, I'm not going to buy the next one. I have lost faith in the author. Endings are important, damnit!

Thank you MS! I have run across a couple of cliff hangar endings lately-- real cliff hangars with someone in dread peril-- and it turned me off getting the sequel. Publishers who do that to a reader should be taken out and shot. It's bad enough when in a long series major plot elements or subplots are left dangling for the next volume; but at least these make sense in a long-running series.

word veri: sxnolid. Sex no lid?

It's at the end of HIGH FIVE. Morelli said it, but you didn't find out until several, several pages into the next book. I know this because I was so angry that she didn't say that I started the next book (HOT SIX) immediately to find it, realized the lack of details (as usual for Evanovich - ugh) and then stayed up rest of the night to finish that book, because once you start an Evanovich, you have to finish an Evanovich.

Evanovich is Satan.

I agree with Miss Snark, but nonetheless, books ending on cliffhangers do make it into print. Most notably, I remember a new book by Stephen R. Donaldson (appearing after he wrapped up the successful Thomas Covenant series), called The Mirror of Her Dreams. Terrific story, unusual premise--and it ended on an absolute cliffhanger. The second (and concluding) volume was not published until a year later.

It was a long year.

However, I seriously doubt an unknown author would be allowed to get away with that.

P.S. Anyone here having trouble posting comments? I have to word-verify over and over sometimes.

I wish more writers would listen to Miss Snark. I used to be a big Anne Rice fan (look, being 14 was hard on all of us, ok?) until I read "Lasher" which ends... oh, wait, it doesn't end at all, it just peters out in the middle of the story and expects me to wait for the next book. It made me so angry that I threw out all of her books and never read another one.
Now, a lack of Anne Rice is probably an improvement in a reader's life, but a pissed-off ex-readership is generally not what you're looking for as an author.

I've come across the cliffhanger ending too and hated it.

Sure, I know the author wants to sell the next book too but gee, give the reader the satisfaction of knowing if the main characters live or die. This was the sixth or seventh in a major series with at least a year until the next book came out(hardback at that). I was so mad at the author I swore never to buy another of their books and haven't.

But, this taught me a valuable lesson as a writer. Endings are darn important so do them just as well as the beginning.

Elizabeth George.

I won't read her again.

I think you can leave threads hanging with secondary characters and plotlines (these are proven methods to get people to grab up the next book without their getting so mad they write you off entirely), but settle the main story problem.

There are exceptions in genre series, but a well done series completes story arcs for each book and leaves the series arc open-ended. That proves to the reader that the author can finish a story and it's worth it to read to the end of the series to see the final resolution.

Every book is a contract between a reader and a writer, and it's our job to let them know what will be solved--and what won't be--early on. It's part of the fine print of writing, and it can be the hardest bit to nail.

LOL - Stephen King, anyone?

I was going to swim across the ocean and tie him to his typewriter until he finished his series!

Let's just say that great writers can get away with cliffhangers. The rest of us have to wrap up the loose ends.
:-)

Author Deborah Donnelly wrote several books in her Wedding Planner Mystery Series with cliffhangers at the end. I don't know if this was her idea or her editor's idea. I enjoyed them, but I think some of her other fans got annoyed. Later in the series, she dropped the cliffhangers.

I read that book (Janet's) - it totally killed me!

Out of Time by Lynn Abbey. She ran out of time to finish the story.

As someone mentioned, I like to be forewarned that the story isn't complete in the one book. I don't mind investing both time and money in buying sequels and trilogies. Heck, in a lot of cases where I KNOW it's a trilogy, I won't start reading until I have all the books. (Novik & Roberts, etc.)

I don't like feeling manipulated by an author. I don't think it's kosher to keep readers hanging without warning. Let us make the choice.

Yep, and sometimes the choice is to never read the author again, especially if he's a serial cliff-hangerer (Terry Brooks, I am looking at you. Three--THREE--books of a quartet were cliff-hangers. I don't have the patience for that sort of nonsense).

buffysquirrell: That Garth Nix series now has 3 books, and a short story in a 4th (or maybe 5th?)!
I thought Lirael stood on its own pretty well, but did then go buy the book before it, Sabriel, and the others when they came out.

I believe that in Victorian times, Charles Dickens, among others, serialized novels in newspapers. That was then, this is now. Today, instant gratification is easy to come by. Who is going to wait, what, a year (minimum) for your next book? Give the readers resolution now, not later.

Didn't Tolkien do this before he was well known?

Tolkien - and a lot of fantasy authors - write/wrote the entire trilogy first. It's understood there'll be an ending, in a set number of books. One story that just doesn't fit neatly into one volume. Doing it in an open ended series...? Not a good idea unless you're already BIG. If you're pitching a trilogy - have the rest finished. Pitch the triloy. It's just one story.

On a related note, I read George R. R. Martin on a recomendation, finished book three, expecting a trilogy, and went "waaahhh?". Some plotlines resolved and the rest either cliffhangered or petering off. Okay. It's gonna be five books. Woulda been nice to know before I went in.

Didn't Tolkien do this before he was well known?

Can we all please get over Tolkien? Tolkien wasn't trying to sell LOTR in 2007. The industry has changed. Change with it.

If you're pitching a trilogy - have the rest finished. Pitch the triloy. It's just one story.

True enough, BUT--if you're previously unpublished, set the trilogy aside. Write, query, and sell a standalone. Then tell your agent, "By the way, I have this trilogy...."

I like Limyaael's comments on the subject. Basically, leaving unresolved issues in a series is fine, and should be encouraged. Leaving an immediate plot point unresolved is not okay. The most annoying example is the "Did person A live or die? Buy the next book!" type of cliffhanger. So, while it's fine to, say, have War for Rabbitania unresolved with the Dark Lord Fluffy's troops ever-advancing toward the last sanctuary of Floppy-Tail the White, you shouldn't end in the middle of the Battle of Bedrock Warren.

I can see this working just fine, as long as the cliffhanger is a bounce into Book 2 rather than a leftover from Book 1. Say the heroine has just solved the mystery and caught the bad guy and everything looks rosy, and she's thinking about how she's gonna head off to somewhere involving elaborate cocktails and a cabana boy, and then a new case comes galloping over the horizon...

Didn't Patricia Cornwell do this once? Just when Scarpetta had everything neatly tied up, she saw Gault (the bad guy who carries across several books) standing there looking Deeply Sinister, and it became clear that something nasty was about to happen, The End.

I also had trouble with the word verification when I first tried to post on this thread a couple of days ago - no image came up.

Ending on a cliffhanger reminds me of the book The Far Edge of Darkness. I wonderful, exciting book that ended with the main characters about to, almost certainly, be killed. There was supposed to be a sequel right? Guess what? She went on to co-write a slew of books in a different series and after about 8 years there's still no way to find out if those characters lived or died.

I wish the editor had just said NO, end it a few pages earlier.

Anna

There's an assumption in a lot of these comments that the cliffhanger ending is the author's choice. But of late a log of bigger books have been split in half by their publishers because they've decided the price point is too high on a large single book or because the chains have said they won't take large numbers of an expensive hardcover by a non-big name author. This is especially true in sf and fantasy.

You're proofreading her novel for free?
She's either a lazy-ass, a user, or too cheap to pay for proofreading.
And you're expecting a return favor out of this?
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

I think I would jump at the chance to get a draft copy of a book by a favorite author. As far as the work goes, I think it would depend on how clean a draft I was given. There's a difference between fixing grammar and spelling errors on every page and lending a fresh pair of eyes to a book the author thinks is clean.

I had an editor assigned to me by a publisher. The editor also worked freelance and wanted a recommendation. That did not make me appreciative. --Withholding my name on purpose.

Can anyone guess the reason for this very astute statement:

Quote: "I specifically forbid my authors from reading unpublished work like this."

It's because Miss Snark doesn't want the lawsuit for accidental plagerism of an idea, or the lawsuit for just the accusation.

The human mind is a strange thing and it can unconsiously remember a good scene.

Consider too, Hollywood scripts are always being contested for not being original. That's why scriptwriting is such a bitchy business. When producers and actors talk about having a script for ten or even twenty years, the not-so-legitimate legal buzzards take advantage.

I would encourage Miss Snark to add to this comment about reading unpublished novels.

Actually anonymous, this is not that unusual. I met an author at a conference who found out I had just done a passage across the Pacific in a small sailboat. She asked me to look at her newest work to check for sailing facts/ impressions. I was happy to do it and learned a LOT about the editing process. People do this all the time. When I got an agent I wrote her letting her know. She OFFERED to read my novel -- She would not have been able to until I was represented.
And that is how I got my blurb.
Authors know about this - when you are represented and have this kind of connection you do not have to ask - they will offer.

It is one thing to ask for someone to check facts, as in asking the local CSI or police detective or prosecutor for info, or as mentioned, sailing facts. That is research. It is indeed done all the time, and it is that particular contribution that is acknowledged in the front of the book.
On the other hand, to ask someone to read through your novel to "proofread" is asking for free work. And for a multi-published (and I'll assume successful) author to ask someone to do this gratis, is abuse of status. Of course you'll have a lot of desperate want-to-be authors sucking up to read your manuscript. How "honored" they'll be that you asked them! Their time is so much less valuable than yours, because you're working on your next novel while the author doing your scutwork has put aside hers to do your....scutwork.
Proofreading is a skill and a good proofreader is worth his fee. Better still, do it yourself and turn in a clean manuscript.

From the author's point of view, there's a great deal of potential awkwardness here, which is worth considering.

Statistically speaking, the odds are that any given novel will be bad. (Not yours, obviously, but there are far more novels than good novels on there in the unpublished ether.) The author will be aware of this. Hence, asking her to look at your novel, especially when you can't cite an agent or publisher's opinion to vouch for its quality, will probably send the following thought sequence through her head:

'Oh no, this nice person wants me to read their novel. It may well be bad! Or maybe it just won't be to my taste! And then she'll want my opinion, and a blurb, and I'll want to say no, and that'll be horribly awkward because she did a good job on my novel and I really am grateful, but I don't want to blurb a book I don't like ... Oh no!'

And possibly:

'Oh no, not this again.'

Because if the author is very successful, it's quite likely that she gets asked for favours a lot. Many people who ask for favours lack social graces (again, not you, I'm sure), and it can make people quite resistant to the whole idea.

Do the job on her book, and do it well. Be friendly and polite, and by all means tell her what a pleasure it was for you to work on a novel by someone you admire so much. Then, when you find a publisher for your work, you can mention this author to your PR people. The publisher can then approach her, and unless she's forgetful (possible, but you'll just have to risk it), her thought process will be:

'Oh yes, that's that nice young person who proofread Novel X. Well sure, I'll look at this. After all, the publisher can be a buffer if I don't want to blurb it, but I may as well check it out.'

Much more positive.

Asking now will embarrass the author, and she really can't do much for you at this stage. Just sit tight. It may be useful later, but right now, focus on getting an agent. Who knows, you may have a publisher soon, and then you can bring it up.

The editor in question wasn't nearly as skilled as was expected and tampered with the story. My recommendation of that editor would not have been fair to other authors. --Still withholding my name on purpose.

dave quoted Miss Snark: "I specifically forbid my authors from reading unpublished work like this. . . "

...and then added:

It's because Miss Snark doesn't want the lawsuit for accidental plagerism of an idea, or the lawsuit for just the accusation.

The human mind is a strange thing and it can unconsiously remember a good scene.



dave, you may not have intended it as such, but this makes a damn fine argument against reading fanfic.