Having earlier covered the extravagant unlikelihood of getting an agent, I have some more cheerless news for would-be writers.
In 2006 The Times sent the opening chapters of a novel to a variety of agents and publishers. And not a new writer's try, either, but the beginning of a Booker prize winner, VS Naipaul's In a Free State.
Not one of the agents or publishers approached recognised the talent they were holding in their hands. We know possible reasons why: the subjectivity of what is "good" and the sheer numbers of submissions...
'Carole Blake, of Blake Friedmann, receives up to 50 novels a day but takes on just six new authors a year. “We have two book agents and we’re pretty full,” she said. “So unless something leaps off the page as amazingly commercial or literary, it is very unlikely we will take new clients on.”'
I make those odds about 6 in 18,000, or about 1 in 3,000, strikingly similar to the odds I mentioned in a previous post. (Assume that when The Times says novel, it means the opening of one.)
So if you have had a polite rejection, you are in good company. A Booker prize winner has had the same treatment (or a virtual one, at least). A new writer should get used to the realities of the craft.
Be prepared for a long winter.
Showing posts with label Submissions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Submissions. Show all posts
Monday, 25 January 2010
Monday, 18 January 2010
The Covering Letter
I have already talked about one aspect of a submission pack, the synopsis. But what about the covering letter?
First of all, the covering letter is going to be brief. Our hassled agent’s assistant is not going to want to read three or four pages of even the best letter writing. My view is that all that needs to be said can be said on one page. Taking into account the addresses, salutations, farewell, signature and Enc, we’re talking about half a page of detail. And it’s no good reducing the font size or the line spacing. 12-pt font, double-spaced lines, and you must say all you want to in half a page. Everything must exude professionalism. That means no typos. Grammar all checked. So, what should be included?
(i)What have you written? Title, genre, length, and target age.
(ii)A plot summary in one or two sentences.
(iii)Why your MS captures the zeitgeist, or why it is a timeless classic, or what it is that is new and unique about it. Who is going to read it, and why. Is there series potential?
(iv)Who you are. What is your experience of writing? What is there to indicate that, even if your book is excellent, you are any more than a one-hit wonder? Are you dedicated to becoming a writer, come what may?
(v)What state is the MS in, i.e. is it complete and ready to read?
All in half a page.
More on the covering letter later.
First of all, the covering letter is going to be brief. Our hassled agent’s assistant is not going to want to read three or four pages of even the best letter writing. My view is that all that needs to be said can be said on one page. Taking into account the addresses, salutations, farewell, signature and Enc, we’re talking about half a page of detail. And it’s no good reducing the font size or the line spacing. 12-pt font, double-spaced lines, and you must say all you want to in half a page. Everything must exude professionalism. That means no typos. Grammar all checked. So, what should be included?
(i)What have you written? Title, genre, length, and target age.
(ii)A plot summary in one or two sentences.
(iii)Why your MS captures the zeitgeist, or why it is a timeless classic, or what it is that is new and unique about it. Who is going to read it, and why. Is there series potential?
(iv)Who you are. What is your experience of writing? What is there to indicate that, even if your book is excellent, you are any more than a one-hit wonder? Are you dedicated to becoming a writer, come what may?
(v)What state is the MS in, i.e. is it complete and ready to read?
All in half a page.
More on the covering letter later.
Friday, 15 January 2010
More on Submissions
Wherever an aspiring writer looks, there he or she will find depressing advice about submissions. The first thing that everyone says is: “Don’t bother with publishers. There’s no hope that a publisher will even read your covering letter, let alone your sample chapters. Get an agent.”
The next piece of advice is, if anything, more depressing. “The odds of getting an agent are akin to those of getting struck by lightning.”
Ann Coburn in this how-to about writing for children mentions odds of 3000:1 for one agent (one new writer after 3000 MSS and 12 years). Another agent received 300 MSS a week for 20 years and took on 3 writers (i.e. odds of 300x52x20 to 3, or about 100,000:1). With odds like that, lightning strikes seem to make a not-too-frivolous comparison.
Of course, the two numbers (3000:1 and 100,000:1) are quite different. One refers to MSS read, the other to MSS received. In other words – and this is completely non-scientific guesstimation, based on the memories of two agents – there is only a 1 in 30 chance of getting your MS read, and a 1 in 3000 chance that your MS, if read, will be taken on by the agent.
And this is calmly overlooking the possibility that the agent may not be able to sell the MS to a publisher. The odds of this are a further unknown (but are certainly much shorter than anything else I’ve mentioned).
So, to the point at last. Your submission (and mine) is going to land on the desk of a hassled assistant whose job it is to winnow the oppressive pile in front of them down to a manageable size, before skim-reading the survivors and passing one or two onto the agent to assess. What we are not going to do is give our lovely assistant any reason to throw us out of the pile, right? That means following the agent’s submission guidelines to the letter. At least then we won’t go straight in the bin without at least being glanced at.
When the agent’s assistant glances at us (I’m going along with this personification, because it seems true somehow), what will they see? Generally, and there are exceptions:
i)Covering letter
ii)Synopsis
iii)3 Chapters of the MS
I’ve already talked about the synopsis. In the next few days I will address the remaining two items in the submissions kit.
The next piece of advice is, if anything, more depressing. “The odds of getting an agent are akin to those of getting struck by lightning.”
Ann Coburn in this how-to about writing for children mentions odds of 3000:1 for one agent (one new writer after 3000 MSS and 12 years). Another agent received 300 MSS a week for 20 years and took on 3 writers (i.e. odds of 300x52x20 to 3, or about 100,000:1). With odds like that, lightning strikes seem to make a not-too-frivolous comparison.
Of course, the two numbers (3000:1 and 100,000:1) are quite different. One refers to MSS read, the other to MSS received. In other words – and this is completely non-scientific guesstimation, based on the memories of two agents – there is only a 1 in 30 chance of getting your MS read, and a 1 in 3000 chance that your MS, if read, will be taken on by the agent.
And this is calmly overlooking the possibility that the agent may not be able to sell the MS to a publisher. The odds of this are a further unknown (but are certainly much shorter than anything else I’ve mentioned).
So, to the point at last. Your submission (and mine) is going to land on the desk of a hassled assistant whose job it is to winnow the oppressive pile in front of them down to a manageable size, before skim-reading the survivors and passing one or two onto the agent to assess. What we are not going to do is give our lovely assistant any reason to throw us out of the pile, right? That means following the agent’s submission guidelines to the letter. At least then we won’t go straight in the bin without at least being glanced at.
When the agent’s assistant glances at us (I’m going along with this personification, because it seems true somehow), what will they see? Generally, and there are exceptions:
i)Covering letter
ii)Synopsis
iii)3 Chapters of the MS
I’ve already talked about the synopsis. In the next few days I will address the remaining two items in the submissions kit.
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
Writing the Synopsis
Writing a synopsis of your work ought to be easy, right?
Well, not for me. It took me about half a dozen goes at a synopsis of Elsie Smith to come up with something that I was remotely happy with.
The problems of writing a synopsis are fairly obvious. You have to compress an entire book into a single page. Enough must be on view on that one sheet of paper to sell your story. Not everything that happens in the plot can be included – some things will have to go. Which ones, and how to decide? Is there room for any discussion of character traits? What about the conclusion of the book – do you really want to give away the ending in a single-page summary?
So much so obvious. Any writer should be able to summarise their work. Just pick out key facts, arrange them in a series, and you’re there. Easy in theory: but every time I started to write the synopsis for Elsie Smith, things quickly went wrong – I ended up with what sounded, baldly stated on a page, like a series of clichés. Elsie Smith is not clichéd. So why did the synopsis come out sounding like it was?
Here’s how one attempt began:
“The world is empty and silent.
Britain is gone. The USA is gone. Civilisation itself has gone. By day the world is an eery, ghostly place, full of rusted cars long abandoned and mouldering buildings falling into ruin. Wild creatures are all that move – but behind blacked-out and boarded-up windows, mad figures lurk and wait for nightfall. There are no prey for the vampyres any more: all are dead, or, like them, in tormented undeath afflicted with the curse of unquenchable thirst…
Only on one isolated island are there survivors. Here a few hundred souls eke out a precarious existence, battered by fierce Atlantic storms and beset by boatloads of vampyres from the mainland.”
Appalling. I’ve used nearly half a page, haven’t mentioned Elsie Smith or anything about what actually happens. It didn’t matter how I started, I always felt that I had to paint the setting first, and that always wasted nearly half the available space. Carry on like that and I’d be looking at two sides at least.
I don’t usually put the ending in my synopses. But I read somewhere on the net that you should, and having read that, I knew at once that this was so. Why? It is the difference between getting someone to read your book for pleasure (blurb on the back of it) and getting someone to read it with a view to selling it to someone else (your approach to an agent, who has to know how an editor will receive it).
That being the case, I hit upon a theory. What if I started the synopsis at its end? Just write down the ending. Then go back a step and put down the important thing that happened before the end. Six such jumps and I was back at the beginning. OK, so I still had a page and a half, but it read a lot better. The opening bit was reduced from the quote above to this:
“Civilisation has been destroyed by a plague of vampyres. Only on one remote, windswept island do people remain.”
Conclusion: there is no room for description in the synopsis. There is very little scope for character traits. “Determined and dutiful” was all I could fit in for Elsie. For Zero, “arrogant and flamboyant.”
One thing about synopses: to write one, you must know what your book is about. If that sounds silly (“You’ve just written the damn book, how can you not know what it’s about?”), it’s not meant to. It’s possible to write a book without ever considering what it’s actually about.
Well, not for me. It took me about half a dozen goes at a synopsis of Elsie Smith to come up with something that I was remotely happy with.
The problems of writing a synopsis are fairly obvious. You have to compress an entire book into a single page. Enough must be on view on that one sheet of paper to sell your story. Not everything that happens in the plot can be included – some things will have to go. Which ones, and how to decide? Is there room for any discussion of character traits? What about the conclusion of the book – do you really want to give away the ending in a single-page summary?
So much so obvious. Any writer should be able to summarise their work. Just pick out key facts, arrange them in a series, and you’re there. Easy in theory: but every time I started to write the synopsis for Elsie Smith, things quickly went wrong – I ended up with what sounded, baldly stated on a page, like a series of clichés. Elsie Smith is not clichéd. So why did the synopsis come out sounding like it was?
Here’s how one attempt began:
“The world is empty and silent.
Britain is gone. The USA is gone. Civilisation itself has gone. By day the world is an eery, ghostly place, full of rusted cars long abandoned and mouldering buildings falling into ruin. Wild creatures are all that move – but behind blacked-out and boarded-up windows, mad figures lurk and wait for nightfall. There are no prey for the vampyres any more: all are dead, or, like them, in tormented undeath afflicted with the curse of unquenchable thirst…
Only on one isolated island are there survivors. Here a few hundred souls eke out a precarious existence, battered by fierce Atlantic storms and beset by boatloads of vampyres from the mainland.”
Appalling. I’ve used nearly half a page, haven’t mentioned Elsie Smith or anything about what actually happens. It didn’t matter how I started, I always felt that I had to paint the setting first, and that always wasted nearly half the available space. Carry on like that and I’d be looking at two sides at least.
I don’t usually put the ending in my synopses. But I read somewhere on the net that you should, and having read that, I knew at once that this was so. Why? It is the difference between getting someone to read your book for pleasure (blurb on the back of it) and getting someone to read it with a view to selling it to someone else (your approach to an agent, who has to know how an editor will receive it).
That being the case, I hit upon a theory. What if I started the synopsis at its end? Just write down the ending. Then go back a step and put down the important thing that happened before the end. Six such jumps and I was back at the beginning. OK, so I still had a page and a half, but it read a lot better. The opening bit was reduced from the quote above to this:
“Civilisation has been destroyed by a plague of vampyres. Only on one remote, windswept island do people remain.”
Conclusion: there is no room for description in the synopsis. There is very little scope for character traits. “Determined and dutiful” was all I could fit in for Elsie. For Zero, “arrogant and flamboyant.”
One thing about synopses: to write one, you must know what your book is about. If that sounds silly (“You’ve just written the damn book, how can you not know what it’s about?”), it’s not meant to. It’s possible to write a book without ever considering what it’s actually about.
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