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Our writing club is self publishing a book an anthology this summer. It does not have an ISBN number. Are these short stories considered published? Some of us would like to submit our stories to contests that say “no previously published” stories.
Your thoughts are appreciated.
Contests that say "no previously published" stories pretty much mean no stories that have seen the light of day: no blogs, no websites, no ezines, and no anthologies published on Lulu.
The industry standards on this are not exact, they're in flux.
You may be confused because I've previously said that publishing things on the web or at Lulu doesn't count as "published" as far as book publishers are concerned. That still holds.
The answer to "is this published" really depends on who's making the rules. In this instance the contest is writing the rules for material they will consider and yours doesn't qualify.
Dear Miss Snark,
A week ago an agent mentioned to me his new associate recently informed him there were over five hundred e-queries that hadn't been read; some over six months old. He was innocently shocked by this and told her to go through them all and respond as soon as possible. One of them turned out to be fantastic, and he wound up selling the book for a nice figure.
The point here is that while so many of us are electronically oriented these days, there are still a lot of people (including some excellent agents) who aren't. Unless the agent's guidelines specifically state they don't respond to e-queries unless they are interested, would this be an example of why it's important for writers to re-query if they don't hear anything? Would three months be a decent time frame to re-query? Or is it all just a matter of wait and see?
I despise equeries.
If an agent doesn't say they prefer e-queries, I'd always go snail with an SASE.
On the other hand, there's no logical explanation for letting six months slide by on email. The only advantage of equeries is they are fast. Fast to answer with a form letter, and fast to send.
The same rules apply though: a month on queries. I know that sounds like forever with equeries but honestly, some people let them stack up and then read them in batches.
The thing is though---during that time you are busily querying OTHER agents. Preferably ones who answer their email.
Dear Esteemed Miss Snark,
I was horrified recently when an editor informed me that the short story I had attached (as per the guidelines that I read in their entirety) came through as gibberish at the foot of the email. The lovely (truly lovely, possible the best eventual reject I've gotten in a while) editor asked me to resend with the story pasted in the body of the email. I tried changing every setting I could find and sent emails to a yahoo account I keep for signing up for things (you know, in case it's likely the address will get sold and spammed). I discovered without a doubt it was my email program and not my ISP. I have fixed said program (again, tested and confirmed) by installing a newer version. But looking back, I have no clue how long this problem was a problem. I have over thirty submissions this year, and many of them have not yet been responded to.
Do I send apologies out? Or do I just pretend it didn't happen unless the editor mentions it? And, I know I deserve a quit obsessing, but is this an annoying enough offense to get automatically rejected?
This is not a quit obsessing. Sorry.
You've got a sweet little problem here, and one that I haven't seen before.
I think you've got to assume your submissions didn't get through in good order. You don't need to apologize --technology happens.
You do need to resend those you can with a SHORT note of explanation at the bottom of the email along the lines of "I've discovered my email program was toasting my attachments so I'm resending in case it was not received properly".
Particularly since you received no replies to your work you should resend. If I get gibberish I assume spam, not email glitch and I just toss it in the trash and set it on fire.
There's a lot to be said for gmail, one of which is I don't think it fucks up like this.
Miss Snark,
I recently purchased an iMac. As a struggling writer, I could ill afford the $250 Microsoft wants for Microsoft Office for Mac. After a lengthy search, I found what appears to be a simple, functional word processing program called Nisus Writer Express. It does everything I need it to, and claims to create and read files compatible with any program but I worry that I might someday find myself in the position of having written the publishable American novel and have it requested by an agent of your snarkotimous stature, only to discover that she is unable to open my document and therefore, unable to offer me the sage and intuitive representation my budding masterpiece may someday require.
My question to you: Have you ever had difficulty opening a file generated on a Mac? My Nisus program recommends RTF format which is supposed to be universal. Is this better/more universally accessible than Word's format? Do you or your more gifted cohorts use Macs? PC's? Typewriters?
Miss Snark uses a Mac, as does anyone with style and savoir faire.
Miss Snark also requires clients to submit work electronically, thus she is fully informed on the perils of platform.
Here's how it works at Snark Central. You send it. I open it and convert it to my program. I can do that cause the Mac I have is designed to read damn near anything. I use MS Word cause that's the program editors read and use.
What you need to worry about though are the agents who aren't on Mac, and there are more of them than there are of us. What you can do is email yourself a saved version of your document in RTF and then go to Kinkos or your library, log onto your email and try to open the doc. See if it works. If not, you'll need to figure out what does.
And I spent $4o0 on Microsoft Office for Mac just last year and I have this terrible feeling they're about to upgrade and I'll need to do it all over again. Harumph.
Dear Miss Snark,
A protocol question.
Many agents who accept or even prefer email queries indicate in their listings that they will respond only if they're interested in seeing more. Aside from whether a no-repsonse policy is "fucking rude" (your words for it more than a year ago) or whether it's even logical (it takes less time to hit REPLY, paste in a form rejection and hit SEND than it does to stuff the same letter into a SASE and seal it), it also creates a problem for writers considering a subsequent query to another agent at the same agency.
Let's say I do my homework and assemble a list of twenty agents to start with. Agent 5 and Agent 19 both work at the same large agency. Both accept only electronic queries, but due to the overwhelming number of submissions they receive, they are afraid they can't respond to each of them.
I email a letter and some embedded pages to Agent 5 and wait, oh, six weeks. Does her lack of reply mean a lack of interest? Probably, and I'm okay with it. But I've worked my way down to Agent 19 in the meantime.
I know enough not to send simultaneous queries. I could shoot Ms. Five a quick email to make sure she's already moved on, but how clueless does that look -- and how effective is it likely to be -- in an environment in which replying to a query is too much trouble? I could assume that two months on a query is long enough, but that would be just a guess, and I once received a positive response after waiting longer than that.
So at what point does " " shift from "I'm working, be patient" to "not right for me, thanks"?
30 days minimum, 45 maximum. If someone can't bother to reply to an email in 45 days, fuck em.
I find it loathsome that my colleagues do this. And if you're reading this, and you're an agent, and you do this, stop it. You're making us all look like arrogant asswipes, and frankly I don't need any help on that score.
At Publishers Marketplace Daniel Lazar writes in her profile:
"** If you email: a) NO ATTACHMENTS; b) if you copy me and every other agent in the industry, save us the time. Reject yourself."
Now, that sounds a lot like Miss Snarkliness herself, but it conflicts directly with your statement that everyone assumes a query is being sent to the world.
Is Writer's House high-falutin enough to demand (and get) exclusive queries or am I nitwit?
Pat 'fer Yapper
You're passing through Nitwitville but you don't get to take up residence because it's clear you don't understand what Dan is referring to, what the TRUE nitwits do (a good thing).
What Dan Lazar says on (ahem) his site means do NOT send a query as a cc. Send each agent a separate email. With their name and ONLY their name in the TO box. (And Writers House asks only that you query their agents one at a time, not their agents exclusively).
We ALL laugh about the cc emails we get cause they are instant rejection. INSTANT.
You might think twice about patting down Killer Yapp. He's been reading too much noir fiction and he's liable to bite just for the sake of the story line.
Hi Miss Snark,
I recently started subscribing to Publisher's Marketplace and noted a lot of writers have their own pages. They are all, of course, seeking agents. This is probably a silly question, but do agents actually look at this stuff? I would assume you couldn't possibly have the time nor the need to search for clients this way.
Thanks!
I don't look for clients that way but if I happen to google you cause you queried me, your Pub Mkt page comes up and I'll go look at it.
I do know however that people DO search these pages and the offerings page cause I've gotten calls from editors myself.
Dear Miss Snark
I was intrigued to come across this website with a detailed list of terms and conditions for submissions (can't get link to work here)
A little over the top? I'm not good at reading legalese so it kind of puts me off submitting in case there's something weird in there and I'm accidentally signing over my firstborn. Or maybe I just need a good whack with the clue stick.
I have no idea what prompted Inkwell to put that on their website but I bet it's a pretty good story. That list is only for electronic submissions. If it troubles you (and I read it and it seemed ok to me) send your submission by mail. They don't ask you to print it out, sign and notarize it, and include it with your submission.
Inkwell is one of the most respected agencies in town. They're not trying to pull a fast one. I think it's more that they are protecting their own clients many of whom could be targets for "you made a lot of money and I want some of it" lawsuits.
Many e-zines and internet publications want the writer to bring readers with him or her. They consider a blog or website as competition. And therefore, they consider posted on a website as published.
Even if only 200 people read your website a month, that's 200 less customers for an e-zine or internet publication.
In my many years of entering poetry contests (having fun and earning enough money to go out to lunch now and then), I have found that the consensus in such groups is that 20 or so photocopies passed around to beta readers or friends is not "published." More than about 30 people seeing it in printed form (or on a screen) is "published."
I'm guessing this would also be true of short stories.
How about putting stories on blogs for critique? I vaguely thought that was OK if they were up short term. But with rules in flux...
Neither the US Copyright Act nor the Berne Convention on Copyright defines when a textual work has been "published," even though whether a work has been "previously published" has some significant (ok, significant to hairsplitting lawyers) effects on rights, responsibilities, statutes of limitations, etc. Really.
If one wished to go with the historical definition, one would get a nasty surprise: for purposes of libel, a work is "published" if it is shown to as many as one other person. (That's yet another reason that "publishing industry" is such an oxymoron... and inapt/inept term.)
This is how Glimmer Train would draw the distinction with the book:
The question of what is considered “published” can be a tough one. If you’ve made 50 copies of your manuscript for classmates and friends, for instance, we'd call that piece unpublished. Heck, even if you had Kinko's bind them, we'd go for that. But if someone else put it out--say the school newspaper, or your writing group, we would look at that as published, especially if more than one piece of work (all yours, or yours and someone else's) were included in the pages. (Fifty copies of a collection of people’s writing in it just about qualifies as a “litmag” these days.) And if there is ANY advertising, no matter the number of copies printed, it will be considered “previously published” by anyone I know.
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