She not only slithers, she leaps

Most agents just read their queries to acquire clients.

Barbara Poelle has a different strategy. Here's footage:

IF this was a query

Of course I would have signed him on the spot.

It was so fun we had to make a movie!

Do you know what a momentous day it is?

At first, only those on the cutting edge, the truly over the edge, knew the exciting news!

Then guys who can see into the future started talking

Pretty soon mysterious movie posters about coming attractions appeared.
People started talking!

Songs were written and auditions held in waterfront Parisian bars.

spokesmodel auditions drew candidates from far and wide!














Advance Reader Copies were a harbinger of exciting things to come!

then newspapers were filled with the story!

Men in fast cars carried the news hither and yon!

Hither being Brooklyn, where dogs howled. Anna and Rachel...well, yes, they howled too.











Yon being Utah,
where the news was yodelled from mountaintops!










The news didn't pause to rest, no matter how enticing the hammock!

















The men in fast cars found Seattle Municipal Judge Adam Eisenberg willing to forgive an infraction or two for a good cause!











The news spread halfway across the world by noon;
Gary Corby reports Sidney is awash
in "Happy Birthday Suzie" banners!

By now, even the zombies were caught up in the fun!

Meanwhile, back at FinePrint,
it's a different story:

"It's hard not to look sardonic when you realize
you've been in the biz almost as long as
your assistant has been alive"









"what Peter said!"
--Stephany

"Hey I'm not that old!"
--Heather

Nancy and Joanna, being sweet, reminded everyone that
birthdays mean cupcakes!

Cupcakes!

That made everyone in the office very very happy!

Sara and Gina
"Queries, shmeries! We're ready to help
Suzie celebrate!"

Mer-Bear who lurks in Janet's lair
"I'm not afraid of the Shark!
Bring on the celebration!"

Judith "heck, the door can answer itself.
I'm in! Bring on the frosting!"

and as usual, Janet Reid was nowhere to be found.

Happy Birthday Suzie! You totally rock!

Your friends, your colleagues, your clients
and your doggies
all wish you a
very
VERY
Happy Birthday!

Only read this if you have time to re-do your makeup

and all queries to the Slithery Barbara Poelle should now be accompanied by an airhorn (post on gifts with queries not withstanding)

Death Threats!

I'm working through a backlog of email that stacked up while I was laid low with The Galloping Crud, and found this:

I'm not sure if you're aware, but it appears someone hacked into your Blogger account. I received this creepy comment on my blog last night from your username and it links back to your private profile, with the same Blogger ID number.


Holy Moly!
My email hacked! My blogger account hacked!
To quote one of my favorite writers "what the skedily fuck?"

So I went to the blog in question.

Hey, I remember this. I found it through a link on twitter. There was a nice post on revealing things in the right order.

And then there was the offer to contribute:

Your turn. Share some reveals from your story, or make up some new ones. The funnier, the better.


And I had:


I'm being blackmailed.
If I don't do what they ask, I'll be killed.
What they're asking is for me to kill someone.
That someone is you.


oooops!

Reading that out of context is a little creepy!


This is exactly what can happen in a query. Something you think is edgy or funny, is completely misinterpreted by the reader. Be really careful with things like

"By the time you receive this letter you will know that someone has kidnapped your child—that someone is me. I can promise you that this time you will not be sending me a rejection letter.”


And I guess I should be first in line to follow my own advice, huh.

Listen up!

Don't Listen to Me - a blog post by Myra McEntire - has me reaching for my cut and paste stick so I can steal it in its entirety and recite it at every conference I attend. (Don't tell her, ok?)

Slithery Barbara Poelle strikes again

And here you thought she only represented Edgar nominees.

Going to conferences

Conference season is upon us and many of you will be venturing out in the coming weeks.

Here's some very good advice from publicist Dana Kaye on getting the most out of a conference.

I particularly like her advice on not drinking too much. Hands down this is the one thing that will ruin a conference for you. I'm as fond of scotch as the next shark (ok, MORE fond!) but if you throw up on my shoes, or drunkenly profess your love for me, I'm more likely to remember that than your novel.

What the hell were you thinking?

At first blush, this seems very sweet.
What sours it? It's a query.

No harm, no foul, right?
I mean, gosh, who gets their undies in an uproar about something as harmless as a mug?

Well, it's not so much the mug as the what it indicates about the sender.
If I get something like this I know the querier is tone-deaf about how publishing works, and worse, nuance-impaired. In other words, the exact kind of person who will require extra work, extra handling, extra instruction, extra monitoring, and pre-printed apology letters.

Not the kind of person agents are eager to work with.

In case it's not obvious (and it may not be if you're just starting out learning how publishing works) gimmicks are a bad idea. You spend $10.00 to personalize and mail a mug hoping to get attention. All you really need to do is write a book I want to read, and write it well enough that I want other people to read it too. 12 place settings of Limoges won't help you if you can't do that, let alone a cheap ceramic mug.

And honest to Godiva, do you really think an agent is flattered by "world's greatest agent?" Most of us have a pretty firm grasp on our egos, and those who don't recognize empty flattery when I see it.

This kind of stuff not only doesn't help you, it actively hurts your chances of being taken seriously.

Don't do it.

Sharks in the Desert!

If you look closely you'll see me lounging on a reef, sunning my sharkskin here in Scottsdale. If you'd like to join me, there's a writing conference coming up. The registration deadline is March 17 (holy moly, that's today!)

More on when I want to hear from you with a cameo by Slithery Barbara Poelle

Further to the post below on When Do I Want To Hear From You a commenter posted this:

There was a debate about a specific situation on twitter the other day, which is a variation on your point 5. What if a writer has sent you a query, hasn’t heard anything back from you (30 days haven’t passed), but has received an offer of representation from another agent. Would you want that writer to let you know about the other offer, even if you haven’t gotten to the query yet?

Interesting question. The answer depends on whether the query writer has decided to accept the offer.

If the author has decided to accept, and has only queried me (not sent a full) then no. If I request a full, then the author can reply that s/he has accepted an offer. If I send a rejection, the author can smugly smile and think "you think you're so smart Shark, ha on you."

However, IF the author is uncertain about accepting then yes. I can give the querier a yes or no pretty quickly at the query stage so if I am interested in reading the full, and there's enough time to do it, it's worth knowing about.

Now, I can actually hear all your devilish little minds whirring away here. You're thinking "how about I just email Snookums and tell her I have an offer! That way she'll read my query fast, and maybe request the full since she knows someone else wants it!!"

This is an ill-advised path. For starters, I'm more likely than not to pass on a project even if I like it a lot if I know you've got an agent on the hook. Second, I'm not swayed by someone telling me "another agent" likes this unless I know who it is. And honest to Godiva, you don't want to start telling me slithery Barbara Poelle likes something if she doesn't. She'll carve you up for breakfast sausage and feed you to the shark (yum!)

Does this answer the question?

the hell with green M&Ms

My conference contract will now require a dozen of THESE!!

(thanks to Julie Butcher who knows a thing or two about cupcake parties!)

When do I want to hear from you? (this is not a trick question)

If you think the answer is never, you're wrong.

Here's the checklist (I'm big on checklists, have you noticed?)

1. Do I want to hear from you when you are ready to query? YES
How: email
What: send query. (don't send an email asking if it's ok to query; it is)


2. Do I want to hear from you if you didn't get a reply to your query in 30 days: YES
How: email
What: send the query again (don't ask if I got it, just send)



3. Do I want to hear from you when I ask you for a full: YES
How: email
What: .doc attachment (I acknowledge receipt of all fulls)



4. Do I want to hear from you IF you haven't heard back on a full in the amount of time listed in the acknowledgement: YES
How: email
What: "Dear Snookums, what's up with the hot novel I sent you on (date)"



5. Do I want to hear from you IF you've gotten an offer of representation and I'm reading your full: YES
How: email promptly please.
What: Let me know you're considering an offer, and how much time you have for your decision. I like to know who's offering too.



That's the list. Notice what's NOT on there:

1. You revised the manuscript
2. You revised the query
3. You left something off the query

4. You've got a question about what I want to see (the answer is YES, I want to read your query)
5. You got my request for a full and you'll get back to me when you're back from Pluto, vacation, etc.

Does this help?
I'll add to the list if you post your questions in the comment section.


And please note, this applies ONLY to people who are at the query stage. Hot prospects and clients get a whole new set of guidelines, mostly involving all-night liquor stores and speed dial.

How the hell did THIS happen?

If you have any idea how Sean Ferrell got this way, here's a contest you'll be interested in.

Matterhorn

Last week Marilyn Dahl in a special edition of Shelf Awareness wrote a long piece about MATTERHORN by Karl Marlantes. Here are the first two paragraphs.

Once in a while, a wondrous and remarkable book comes along, written from the deep places of the heart with passion and courage. Matterhorn is that book. Karl Marlantes's timeless tale of bravery, misery, stupidity and love is nothing short of a hero's journey, a quest for meaning. If I had any reservations about reading another novel about the Vietnam War, I soon abandoned them in this mesmerizing, heart-pounding ride through three months of combat, where the rhythm of war gripped me relentlessly.



Matterhorn begins in 1969, during the winter monsoon season in Quang-Tri province, where 2nd Lt. Waino Mellas is assigned to a fire support base with the 1st Battalion, 24th Marines. Commanding a rifle platoon of 40 Marines was not what he had in mind when he joined the reserves nor was actual combat part of the plan, but the shortage of infantry officers has changed that. Still, Mellas is ambitious and is soon trying to work the system to get ahead, take over the company, win a medal and save his own skin. At the same time, he fears he's too chickenshit to lead. He'll find out immediately, since the three platoons of Bravo Company have an assignment--occupy the hill dubbed Matterhorn.



This post is not about MATTERHORN although I did order a copy after reading Shelf Awareness.

Look at the first paragraph again. It's well written. There's nothing overtly wrong with it.

Now look at the second paragraph. Also well-written. Nothing wrong with it.

Which one is the better paragraph to answer the question: what is this book about?

I think it's the second one, hands down.

I see a lot of queries that sound like the first paragraph. What I want to see are queries that sound like the second.

Here's more about MATTERHORN's publishing history.

Beautiful statistics

Hans Rosling's talk about statistics is one of the most visually compelling things I've seen. Don't miss it cause you "hate math" or "don't understand statistics" or you think it might be boring. It's not.

It's also a classic illustration of the the difference between show and tell.

More on platform

Platform is an industry term that means how readers already know about you. Not how readers will find you, or will hear about your book, but know about you now.

Platform is an essential part of a non-fiction book proposal. It's the first, and often the only, thing I look at when reading queries for non fiction. Only because if a writer doesn't have platform, the answer is no.

A lot of writers tell me they have blogs as part of their platform. I look at the blogs. If there are few or no followers, and no comments, the blog isn't platform. If no one is reading or following your blog, it's almost worse than not having a blog at all.

It takes a long time to build readership and encourage interaction with comments. You need to start doing it NOW, long before you query an agent.

Steal this if you have to

Normally I don't advise stealing books.
Normally.

Normally I don't post covers of Advanced Reader Copies and say
"You must read this book, and I don't care how you get a copy; steal it if you have to."
Normally.

Normally I don't read books twice in a single day.
Normally.

Normally I don't call up the editor and yodel the title into the phone.
Normally.

Normal doesn't apply.
Not here.
Not to YOU.

This book makes all those rules seem stupid and pointless.

This book will break your heart and insist you break the heart of every one you know when you make them read it too.

There are five books that changed my life. I remember where I was, and what I was doing when I started reading each of them. YOU by Charles Benoit is the most recent addition to that list.

Steal this if you have to. You'll buy a copy, more than one, when you can.

It's not just writers who fail to recognize form rejections

Remember the line from Steel Magnolias when Truvy says "Louie brought his new girlfriend over, and the nicest thing I can say about her is all her tattoos are spelled correctly."


I thought of that this morning when a friend in the publishing game mentioned s/he had received a submission from an "agent" that included a form rejection from another publisher - literally an unsigned photocopied form rejection from "The Editorial Staff" of another publisher - as proof of the serious consideration given her client's work.


At least all the words on her business card were spelled correctly***

***Not used correctly of course, but that's a rant for another day

Feeling discouraged?

Read this.

and then order the book here.

Another nominee for the new Robert Parker

Dana Cameron is a ferociously talented writer from the Boston area. I think the only reason more people didn't think of her as one of the new faces of Boston crime fiction is she doesn't write specifically about Boston and her work, while full of crime, has been more nice than noir. Till now.

And let me tell you, when Femme Sole was nominated for the short story Edgar, I wasn't surprised in the least. Pleased, happy, grateful, thrilled, oh yes indeed, but not surprised. Read it here on Dana's blog. You'll see.

1-800-DIM SOME

My phone rang this morning and it was a Los Angeles area code, although the number was unfamiliar. I picked up because I am headed out to LA for Left Coast Crime next week and thought it might be someone calling about that.

It wasn't of course.

She rattled on for a good sixty seconds about how a friend suggested she call a literary agent for information. By the time she paused for breath, and I could say "I'm sorry, I can't help you over the phone" my other line was ringing, and it was someone I needed to talk to. I said, "I'm sorry" again and hung up.

Of course, I got an email telling me how rude I was.


I'm ok with being called rude. Usually the people who do are the ones who don't understand how publishing works. They remind me of tourists who are offended people in Paris don't speak very good English.

And honestly, if this poor soul had just emailed me, and said "I'm totally at sea here, I don't know what to do, and I found your name on the internet" chances are I would have actually given her a suggestion or two.

And even if I hadn't, the place to get information is called a library not a literary agency. If you don't know the difference, consult a librarian.

Molly O'Neill must be stopped

Unanswered queries: 209
Unread full mss: 14
Uneaten cupcake on desk: 1





There is a reason for this shameful lack of diligence. This slacking off. This lounging about.
Oh yes there is. And her name is Molly O'Neill.

Now at first glance (or even second through seventy-seventh) you might think Miss O'Neill a fine upstanding citizen. A stalwart example of good character. Not an evil temptress. You would be wrong. Oh yes you would.



Make no mistake about it: Miss Molly O'Neill is a schedule wrecker. A slacker-inducer. (I think she might actually be in league with my most slithery competitor Barbara Poelle. They deny ever meeting, but I have my doubts.)


Miss O'Neill employs a simple but deadly strategy. From her lair on East 53rd street, she invites you to lunch. She plies you with sushi. Then, when you are happy and sated she springs the trap. She gives you a book. Not just any book. Not the one that was nearest her evil claw as she slithered into her sweater before leaving the office. Oh no. She picks the ONE book that will glue you to your chair, force you to turn off the telephone, unplug the internet and read until you are done.

Evil claw caught by newly-installed spy cam

Lest you think I am casting unwarranted aspersions I offer into evidence BEFORE I FALL by Lauren Oliver.
She gave.
I started.
I couldn't stop.
Unread queries....pfft.
Unread fulls....pfffft.
Cupcake arrival in office...didn't even go IN to the office.



Miss O'Neill has informed us via her blog that she's off surfing the Platte River or something for a few days. I suggest this will be a good time to dream up ways to thwart her next salvo of good reading material. All suggestions accepted.


In order to see the depth of her evility on full display I suggest you read BEFORE I FALL. Particularly if you're waiting for me to answer a query or read a full.