Query: intent is an essential element of the crime

On the Absolute Write discussion board, I just read a post by a writer who wants to self-publish, but also wants to make sure the manuscript is as good as possible first. The writer said one way to do this was to "pursue a traditional publishing contract, but reject it & self-publish".

The writer added "If I do decide to do something like this, I will be offering the agent his/her stated commission irrespective of whether I trade publish or self-publish."


This  sounded both inconsiderate and unethical, and I felt sure agency contracts took this sort of trick into consideration, but I wanted to check with someone who could clarify whether or not they do. 

Actually, my author agency agreement doesn't cover this.
It never dawned on me that an author would behave this abominably.

It's one thing to reject a contract offer that is unsatisfactory. Sadly, I have experience doing that. It's never an easy choice, and when it happens, the clients and I spend quite some time discussing the matter before reaching a decision together.

To have a client reject a contract offer and say s/he is going to self-publish, but will "offer the stated commission" is quite a different matter.

For starters, contract offers that I bring to clients usually involve an advance, so that the author and I both get paid before the book is offered for sale.

Self-publishing is much more of a crapshoot on getting paid.

And let's all remember the dirty little secret that people forget to tell you when they tout the many benefits of self-publishing.  Most traditionally published books don't earn out. If you self-publish and sell to EVERY SINGLE PERSON who would buy the book from a publisher, you're probably not going to make as much money as you would with an advance.

Yes you might earn more money. Most people find they don't.

But the deeper problem is that this writer thinks that an agent's time and expertise are available to him at no cost.  If the book doesn't sell, he feels he has no obligation to pay the agent at all, even having turned down a contract that would have paid them both.

This is the kind of statement from people who tout self-publishing that makes everyone reach for their light sabers.

I will tell you that if this happened to me, I would fire the client, but only after I consulted my attorney about what civil recourse was available to me.

Even after answering this question, I don't think I'm going to change my author agency agreement. I prefer to approach potential clients with the belief they are people with honorable intentions, not nefarious scalawags out to fleece me.

Now, THIS is interesting

A post at GoodEReader.com shows results of a survey of British travellers: they'd rather haul paper books on holiday than an e-reader (not just sort of either: 71%!)

The full post.**


This is fascinating! You'd think the most logical place to use an e-reader would be on holiday. It has  all the advantages: you can take a lot of books without weighing down a suitcase; you can take a variety of titles.  And yet, there it is: they "like the feel of a real book"

Well, me too.

I had a Kindle for reading manuscripts. When it broke or wore out after three years, I didn't replace it.  I actually went back to reading manuscripts on my laptop and editing on paper as often now as I do on screen.

And I read paper books. I have a gazillion e-titles somewhere on my laptop. I've read about three of them.

For a long time I thought I was just an old fogey.  (Get off my publishing lawn you electronic urchins!) Maybe there are a lot more of us out there.


Are you reading ebooks more than paper?
What do you pack on vacation?

**hat tip to ShelfAwareness for the link!

Makes me wonder...

.....what happened 29 days ago?

got it here

(via an Amazing Editor who cracks me up)

2012

When you see 2012 in a query you think it's the year.

Not the number of printed pages.

If you don't understand what the Higgs boson particle is you're not stupid

You just haven't heard it explained the right way.

[I hate that so many people feel stupid about math and science. Math and science are beautiful]

Gary Corby, my amazing client, who writes mysteries set in the mean streets of ancient Athens also writes beautifully about matters of the modern age.

Here's his blog post on  the Higgs boson.  Since I'm one of the folks who tweeted to Gary about this a while back, I take 15% of the credit for his fun elegant explanation.

"Be relentless"

FSG recently posted an article by Sarah Manguso "How to Have a Career: Advice to Young Writers."  

I definitely like the relentless part ("Work".) And I really REALLY like the part about pretending not to know who the ad hominem attacker is (Enemies.)

What do you think?

The things you love don’t owe you anything

"the things you love don’t owe you anything – not success, not plaudits, not a decent night’s sleep, nothing. You give them your effort and devotion because they deserve it, because their presence turns a light on in your dim little life and there will never be enough ways to say thank you.

You can’t confuse what you do in the service of ambition with what you do for love. I love my kid and she literally vomits all over me constantly and I don’t care. I love writing, too, and I’m sorry to admit that I was using it to selfish ends."

This is drawn from "My Book Was a Bad Idea" by Corinne Purtill

The full Salon article is here:

I really like that paragraph above, but I profoundly disagree with the conclusion of the article. I don't think writing a book is a bad idea, even if it's bad or doesn't sell. I don't think it's bad to fail.  I think it can be damn valuable.

Read the article and tell me what you think, ok?

take a guess what these are--UPDATED

post your guess in the comments column.


Those of you who guessed or knew it was Daxophone tongues are right of course.
I found this image and a lot of amazing other ones at my new favorite site: Things Organized Neatly

Wondering

I'm a devoted fan of Shelf Awareness as regular readers of this blog know. Their daily email is a must-read start to the morning and I follow Marilyn Dahl's book recommendations devotedly. They've run promotional pieces on my clients and I've met many of their contributors in person.

I've never seen anything there, before today, that made me pause and think "huh?"


But today I did, and here's what I saw:

This new TV show stars Ving Rhames. Mr. Rhames is African-American. It also stars Alfred Molina. Mr. Molina is Spanish/Italian and often mistaken for Hispanic.

Both actors are well known, recognizable faces.

So why is the photo with this news item that of two white-white-white actors?

I don't ascribe this to racism because I know and respect he people at Shelf Awareness. If I were to guess I'd say the press release had this photo with it and they ran it. I don't know how that happened to be the one chosen for the press release, and I don't want to start throwing around "it must have beens" or "I'm sure it was" cause I'm not and no one is.

But, I noticed. It felt jarring to me that a press release with two recognizable names did not use their photo.

And I have a feeling that when people of color talk about being invisible, this is the the kind of thing they point to.

But I don't want to start a blame game here. We all have enough of that to go around. What I simply want to do is say "I noticed" and by posting this, ask you to notice too.

And if we all start noticing, maybe the world will change. One still photo at a time.

Dictionary of Publishing Terms

Those amazing agents at BookEnds LLC have updated their very handy list of publishing terms here.

There's really only one thing left to say:

Quote of the Day

"I could quote Moby Dick all day, but when I go to write, when I clear my imaginative space of all the clutter and to-do lists of normal life, when I'm just about able to inhabit the blankness of creation but before I actually invent something, the Dickinson poem "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" tends to creep in."

--Adam Johnson

Adam Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, the Paris Review, Harper's, Tin House, Granta and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories. His other books include the story collection Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us. 

His new book is The Orphan Master's Son (Random House, January 10, 2012), which follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Johnson lives in San Francisco.











The contents of this post were lifted whole, and shamelessly, from the good people at ShelfAwareness whose daily email is a MUST read for everyone in publishing.  You don't subscribe? Fix that now.

Will "writing a book" be on your list of New Year resolutions?

Here's a blog post with some helpful ideas to get you started.

From the mouths of babes

tip of the hat to Jezebel.com

A great opportunity for a kid you know

This announcement from the Mayborn School of Journalism sounds like a pretty cool deal!

The Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas is conducting a national biography contest and writing seminar for high school and community college students. 

The competition will provide scholarships to 10 winners and a teacher of each winner’s choice to attend the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference July 22-24 in Grapevine, Texas.

The Mayborn Conference is a gathering of renowned nonfiction storytellers from across the nation.  Focusing exclusively on non-fiction, the Mayborn has risen from obscurity to become, in the words of Esquire, “one of the most vital gatherings of writers in America.”

Last summer, Harvard's Nieman Narrative Digest sent its editor, Andrea Pitzer, to cover the Mayborn Conference. 
 
The summer before, the Columbia Journalism Review covered the conference.


The 2011 conference will feature some of the nation’s most prominent narrative nonfiction storytellers. Topping the list is the Mayborn’s Saturday night keynote speaker, Ted Conover, who has ridden the rails with hoboes, snuck across the border with Mexicans, traveled with truck drivers on East Africa’s “AIDS highway,” worked as a prison officer and much more to live inside his subjects’ stories. 

Susan Casey, the editor-in-chief of O, The Oprah Magazine, puts herself in harm’s way to write about gigantic rogue waves that sink massive freighters and great white sharks, giving new meaning to the term “immersion reporting.”  

And, at age 24, Joshua Foer, a science writer for Slate magazine, spent a year training for the U.S. Memory Championship by extracting secrets from the world's memory savants. Not only did he become a memory champion, he was also offered a $1.2 million contract to write a book about his adventures.

Besides Conover, this year’s keynote speakers are Diane Ackerman, author of One Hundred Names for Love, a memoir that Joyce Carol Oates describes as “intimate, richly documented, and beautiful,” and The Zookeepers Wife: A War Story, a WWII saga of a courageous zookeeper’s wife who sheltered 300 Jews and Polish resisters in her villa and in animal cages and sheds, and the only two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, the Washington Post’s syndicated-columnist Gene Weingarten. One of his Pulitzer Prize winners began as a stunt. He put a world-class musician in the basement of a Washington, D.C., subway station to see if passers-by would stop and listen.

In total, the conference will feature more than 25 of the nation’s pre-eminent journalists and authors. Bob Shacochis, a National Book Award Winner (Swimming in the Volcano) who spoke at last year's conference, says the Mayborn is "the most compelling, remarkable writers' conference I've attended in more than 20 years of writers' conferences around the nation. Thanks to the Mayborn tribe of storytellers, I think of Dallas as a preferred destination, a center of literary gravity, perhaps the very heart of the universe these days for nonfiction writers in America.”


Biography Contest Details


The competition will provide scholarships to 10 winners and a teacher of each winner’s choice to attend the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference July 22-24.

The 10 winning students and their teachers will be recognized at the Mayborn Conference’s Saturday's night Literary Lights Dinner, and their biographies will be published in The Dallas Morning News. In addition to free conference registration, the 10 winning students will get to participate an all-day workshop with Pulitzer biographer, James McGrath Morris.

Our partners in this endeavor include Shirley Hammond, Barbara Bush's education director in Texas, and Dallas-based Big Thought, a nationally renowned non-profit building partnerships that allow all children access to quality learning opportunities. The contest is funded by Lee Hancock, a reporter at The Dallas Morning News, and Jim Moroney, publisher of The Dallas Morning News.

The deadline for entering the Mayborn's Biography Contest is Monday, June 20, at midnight.

To enter the competition, teachers and their students must register and listen to the archived recording of James McGrath Morris's lecture on narrative nonfiction and biography writing at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum. To do that, please go to: http://dl.esc6.net

There's a three-step process to enter our biography writing contest:

1) Register by filling out the registration information at the bottom of the homepage.

2) Watch the video of the March 3 event at the Bush Library on the Art and Craft Nonfiction Event. To do that, please click on the streaming link on this page. If the streaming link doesn't function on your computer, please click on the "download" function.

3) Read the contest rules carefully, fill out the application form and send your biography to George Getschow at the address listed on the application form.



Details about the contest can also be found at the Mayborn Conference website

I wanted to go to this but I found out about it too late. I'll be there next year for sure!

No, you can't replace it!

End of the  year cleaning up is a tradition in my office.  Godsend Meredith Barnes has an eagle eye out for all the things that washed up on the Reef this year that need to be polished, discarded or otherwise dealt with.

There aren't very many things that I've lunged across the desk to seize from her tidy paws, but this is one.


Yes, it's old. It's never going to be really clean again (you try getting dust out of glued on geometric pieces of foam!) It doesn't look professional in the slightest.

And I love it.  (alot!)

I love it cause my darling niece made it for me for Christmas when she was five.  She saw it a couple years back and rolled her eyes and said "Aunt Sharkly One, I can't believe you still have that!"

Believe it!

What's on your desk that you'll never throw out?

AND the horse you rode in on!

In case you can't see the text of the letter accompanying the shredded rejection letter and envelope:


"A man of my brilliance and talent should not suffer immediate form rejection letters. So fuck you and good luck in your future endeavors. With your 'judgment' you'll need it."

Query as haiku

Look what turned up in the mailbag this morning!

Recently, I read a fascinating comment about the query letter: "...because it is short, it's like the haiku of writing. It has to convey a vivid and memorable impression with as few words as possible."

What a wonderful image! And that sparked an idea. I looked over several haiku by Bashō, the famed Japanese poet of the Edo era, and tried to imagine which author might have used which haiku for one of their query letters. Here goes!

Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die

(James Patterson)

Wrapping dumplings in
bamboo leaves, with one finger
she tidies her hair

(Margaret Atwood)

A weathered skeleton

in windy fields of memory,

piercing like a knife

(The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold)

I would like to use
that scarecrow's tattered clothes
in this midnight frost 

(To be used by Neil Gaiman if he ever decides to re-imagine The Wizard of Oz)

 

here's the source

17 Reasons your film script was rejected...in 1925!

From BoingBoing (via the amazing Steve Ulfelder--thanks!)

Slushpile Hell FTW

Slushpile Hell pulls brief sentences from Those Who Shall Remain Clueless^TM

If you read the blog, you're never going to end up on it.

Today's example:

I don’t have a particular book to propose, as I am comfortable in many areas. I’ve written a few lines below to give you my style. You can tell me what kind of book I should write.

And I’ve written a few lines below to give you my style. You can tell me which one you like as an answer to your query:

a. No

b. Hell no

c. Please direct all your future queries to the fine agents at William Morris

ok, this IS weird

I realize I have stuffed animals in my office, but I'm forced to say (after reading this) that they were never actually REAL animals.

And I really don't want to know how one of The Fabulosity of Clients found this info. No, some things are better left unreported!