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