Think

Opinion pieces offering commentary on various aspects of book culture, publishing and self-publishing.

Manuscript Pitch Websites: Do Literary Agents Use Them?

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This post by Victoria Strauss originally appeared on Writer Beware on 3/10/15.

Last week, a writer contacted me to ask about WriterPitch.com,”a website that blends the worlds of literary agents and writers under one roof.”

How?

For Writers:
You’ll have the ability to have your pitch/pitches read by hundreds of literary agents. With the click of a button an agent can request your manuscript and instantly an email will be sent to you as well as a notice to your homepage….

For Agents:
As an agent you’ll have the ability to search through pitches by specific genres. With the click of a button a request of materials will be sent to any pitch you like, this request letter will be completely customized by you as a field in your personal profile.

The question the writer wanted to ask me was whether WriterPitch’s Terms and Conditions posed a problem, specifically the User Content clause:

You grant to WriterPitch.com a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, adapt, publish, translate and distribute your user content in any existing or future media. You also grant to WriterPitch.com the right to sub-license these rights, and the right to bring an action for infringement of these rights.

I told her that this language was not ideal–it’d be preferable if the license were limited to operation of the service–but that it’s also very common. You’ll find similar language on just about any website that accepts user content. It’s not intended to enable the site to rip off users’ intellectual property, but to allow the site to operate online.

Such language is a concern, and if you’re going to participate in a website whose Terms include it, you need to understand it and its implications. With WriterPitch, however, there’s a much more pressing question.

Will agents use it?

 

Read the full post, which includes many direct Twitter replies from literary agents, on Writer Beware.

 

The Delivered Story; The Interpreted Story

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This post by David Baboulene originally appeared on his The Science of Story blog on 1/20/15.

Whenever you absorb a story, you are actually experiencing *two* stories. Or at least, two versions of the same story. This is well accepted in academia, and was first documented by the Russian Formalists in the 1920s, (Victor Shlovsky, Vladmir Propp et al) who called the first version the Syuzhet and the second version the Fabula. Great words, but let me try to simplify it to what can help a writer deliver better story today.

The first version is the delivered story. All the tangible sensory stimulation you receive from having the story communicated to your eyes and ears. So, in a film, this includes the music, images, dialogue, action, character behaviours, the poster, the trailer, the reviews you read, the blog-post, your knowledge of the star’s personal life – everything that contributes to what you think about the story.

In a book, of course, the written words are the total sensory stimulation. Here is, allegedly, the shortest novel ever written:

“For Sale. Baby’s Shoes. Never Worn.”

In this case, the total delivered story is just those six words (and whatever else you might overlay if you know it was (allegedly) written by Ernest Hemingway).

 

Read the full post on The Science of Story.

 

Your Book’s Genre and Classification Matter

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This post by Bob Hughes originally appeared on Beneath the Cover on 3/5/15.

For many novelists, the genre of their work matters a great deal. Even if there’s an element of fantasy in their work, they dread that it be labeled as something less than their ideal, as you can see from a New York Times interview with the acclaimed British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (“The Remains of the Day”), concerning his new novel, “The Buried Giant.”

He asks the Times reporter Alexandra Alter, “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

A fantasy novel from a serious novelist! Oh, no. It shouldn’t matter for a writer as acclaimed as Ishiguro. But it does. Even though so-called literary novelists as celebrated as David Mitchell have explored fantasy in their work (such as Mitchell’s latest, “The Bone Clocks”), critics of literary fiction tend to look down on fantasy as a serious art form, despite the literary success of J.R.R. Tolkien or George R. R. Martin.

 

Read the full post on Beneath the Cover.

 

The Weird Agonies And Little-Known Science Of Wordnesia

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This article by Matthew J.X. Malady originally appeared on Slate on 3/4/15.

One hour and seven minutes into the decidedly hit-or-miss 1996 comedy Black Sheep, the wiseass sidekick character played by David Spade finds himself at an unusually pronounced loss for words. While riding in a car driven by Chris Farley’s character, he glances at a fold-up map and realizes he somehow has become unfamiliar with the name for paved driving surfaces. “Robes? Rouges? Rudes?” Nothing seems right. Even when informed by Farley that the word he’s looking for is roads, Spade’s character continues to struggle: “Rowds. Row-ads.” By this point, he’s become transfixed. “That’s a total weird word,” he says, “isn’t it?”

Now, it’s perhaps necessary to mention that, in the context of the film, Spade’s character is high off nitrous oxide that has leaked from the car’s engine boosters. But never mind that. Row-ad-type word wig outs similar to the one portrayed in that movie are things that actually happen, in real life, to people with full and total control over their mental capacities. These wordnesias sneak up on us at odd times when we’re writing or reading text.

Here’s how they work: Every now and again, for no good or apparent reason, you peer at a standard, uncomplicated word in a section of text and, well, go all row-ads on it. If you’re typing, that means inexplicably blanking on how to spell something easy like cake or design. The reading version of wordnesia occurs when a common, correctly spelled word either seems as though it can’t possibly be spelled correctly, or like it’s some bizarre combination of letters you’ve never before seen—a grouping that, in some cases, you can’t even imagine being the proper way to compose the relevant term.

 

Read the full article on Slate.

 

Do Publishers Deserve to Exist?

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This post by Peter Ginna originally appeared on his Dr. Syntax blog on 10/24/15.

This week’s screed against book publishers comes from Matt Yglesias at Vox.com, who proclaims, “Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers”–a headline that shouts clickbait but fairly reflects his piece. Yglesias, whose work I have often admired, notes that he’s the child of two authors and has published a book himself, so his hatred seems to be honestly earned. Writing of the “fundamental uselessness” of publishers, he says they are going to be “wiped off the face of the earth soon” by Amazon “and readers will be better for it.”

Book-business types rolled their eyes at Yglesias’ hostile tone and ignorance of some key facts, but I saw it cited as smart and “thoughtful” by a number of media people and others who I’d have hoped would know better. So at the risk of repeating points that have been made many times before (but seem still to be widely un-apprehended), maybe it’s worth briefly reminding ourselves just how publishers do add value in connecting writers and readers. So, pace Matt Yglesias, here are some of the services publishers perform.

Curation. The function of choosing what work is most worth presenting to readers is derided by some as a retrograde, “elitist” notion. Why should publishers appoint themselves as selectors of what people ought to read, when everybody can put their work online and let readers judge for themselves?

 

Read the full post on Dr. Syntax.

 

Once Upon a Time…

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This post by Lee Kofman originally appeared on Writers Victoria on 1/20/15.

The beginning of yet another year makes me think about other beginnings – those first pages, paragraphs, sentences, words that pull readers into our tales. How do we make them sing?

Most obviously, banality is the enemy of good writing. Yet in many openings of published and unpublished works I read clichés creep in, often because of the current fashion to begin stories mid-scene, where characters are ‘doing’ something. Such an opening can be effective of course, yet scene-writing – with its focus on the action – lends itself to clichés. How many books begin with someone staring out of the window at a meadow, or running for their lives, or tracing something cool with their finger? We can get away more easily with such descriptions in the middle, but to entice intelligent strangers to stick with our stories we need to work harder.

Think of this beginning:

‘In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”’

This is the opening of ‘The Great Gatsby’, hailed by some critics as ‘the perfect novel’. Here we are at once plunged not into the action, but into the mind of the narrator who confides something urgent to us, thereby immediately creating intimacy with the readers. Moreover, this start hints at a dramatic narrative to do with moral dilemmas around our tendency to both judge and empathise, and the problem of social inequality. In short, these first sentences suggest that this novel is going to be one of substance, and do so without pomposity. This suggestion is conveyed by the measured voice of a sympathetic narrator.

 

Read the full post on Writers Victoria.

 

The Myth of the Unearned Advance

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This post by Steve Laube originally appeared on his The Steve Laube Agency blog on 6/13/11.

A common myth permeating the industry is that a book is not profitable if the author’s advance does not earn out. I would like to attempt to dispel this myth.

First let’s define the term “Advance.” When a book contract is created between a publisher and an author, the author is usually paid an advance. This is like getting an advance against your allowance when you were a kid. It isn’t an amount that is in addition to any future earnings from the sale of the book. Instead, like that allowance, it is money paid in advance against all future royalties, and it must therefore be covered by royalty revenue (i.e. earned out) before any new royalty earnings are paid.

The advance is usually determined by a series of assumptions that the publisher makes with regard to the projected performance of each title. The publisher hopes/plans that the book will earn enough royalty revenue to cover the advance within the first year of sales.

A NY Times essay a couple years ago casually claimed “the fact that 7 out of 10 titles do not earn back their advance.” Of course they did not cite a source for that “fact.” But I have seen it quoted so often is must be true! (and it isn’t.) The implication then is that a book isn’t profitable if it doesn’t earn out its advance. The publisher overpaid and has lost money. The author is the happy camper who is counting their cash gleefully celebrating the failure of their publisher to project sales correctly.
– See more at: http://www.stevelaube.com/the-myth-of-the-unearned-advance/#sthash.NsjuD9CI.dpuf

 

Read the full post on The Steve Laube Agency blog.

27 Free Writing Contests: Legitimate Competitions With Cash Prizes

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This post by Kelly Gurnett originally appeared on The Write Life on 2/16/15.

When I was about 12, I saw an ad in a magazine for a poetry contest that sounded fancy and impressive, something like “International Library of Poetry.” I bled poetry at that age, so I crossed my fingers and sent in a poem I’d been slaving over for weeks.

And, lo and behold, the people behind the contest quickly wrote back to tell me my poem had been selected as a winner!

I was speechless with honor. Of the thousands of poets who must have submitted to the contest — no doubt many of them adults much wiser and more skilled than me — my poem had been chosen to be featured in an exclusive, hardcover anthology! And honored on a something-karat-gold plaque!

Of course, I had to pay $50 if I wanted to see my work in print in the anthology, and I had to pay another $100 if I wanted the plaque. Those were the only “prizes.”

Even as a pre-teen, I sensed a scam.

Sadly, not much has changed when it comes to companies trying to take advantage of writers who want a chance at recognition and maybe a little bit of money. Google the term “writing contests,” and you’ll come up with approximately 7.9 million results. It can be hard for a writer to know where to start looking for competitions, and how to tell if they’re legitimate or not.

So I’ve done the legwork for you.

 

Read the full post on The Write Life.

 

Do Awards Boost Anything Except Egos?

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This post by Tracy Weber originally appeared on InkSpot on 2/23/15.

My editor, the fabulous Terri Bischoff here at Midnight Ink, recently published a blog article in which she wondered out loud if winning an award—be it the Agatha, Lefty, or Edgar—meant anything to readers or to the future sales of an author.

It’s a valid question. We all bemoan poorly written manuscripts that manage to become New York Times bestsellers. I’ve yet to see a positive correlation between number of awards won and number of copies sold. So, other than hoping for an ego boost, why even bother?

The answer, for me, became clear last Sunday night when my first book, Murder Strikes a Pose, won the Maxwell Award for Fiction. Most of you have probably never heard of the Maxwell awards. In the mystery world, they are barely a blip on the radar. But in another writing community—people who write about dogs—the Maxwell Awards are important. They are the Academy Awards, if you will, of the dog writing community.

If you’ve read my work, you know that I’m dog crazy, and that a 100-pound German shepherd plays a prominent role in my series. Still, I’m a crime writer and my primary goal is to entertain readers.

But that’s not my only goal. My second goal is to save lives.

 

Read the full post on InkSpot.

 

My Book Is Not My Baby, Though Sometimes It Does Reek of Poo.

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This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her The Amazon Iowan blog on 1/15/15.

“My book is my baby.” You hear that a lot from authors, especially of novels, and as one of that number, I get it. Most of us don’t mean it more than a very loose metaphor, an image-intense description of what it’s like to create something out of almost nothing and have it become something much more. We imprint hopes and dreams on this creation, and we feel great affection for it. Ergo, baby.

While I won’t try to stop anyone else who insists on calling their books their babies, because it’s still a free country, etc, I am not one of those people. And because I just read something about books being babies that kind of made my eye twitch, I feel like clarifying why I am, in this particular instance, anti-baby.

When I write a story, there’s definitely a big stage where the thing is unformed, but it’s not an infant I’m teaching to walk or hold its head upright. I’m trying to find eyeballs and get rid of that weird third ear on top of its head. It’s clay, not flesh. Absolutely I talk to it and nurture it, but I also rip it apart, and kick it, and yell at it—if my books were my babies, they’d all be taken away by child protective services.

But even if I were to pretend that was all somehow okay baby-tending behavior, what I do next is even worse. I guess I could go with the editing and proofing and beta-reading as sending the kid to school, but…holy hell, I’m not letting it learn. I’m forcing it into a mold, making it acceptable to society in a way which, again, would probably get me arrested if I tried it with my actual flesh and blood child.

 

Read the full post on The Amazon Iowan.

 

A Step-by-Step Guide to Dealing with Content Theft

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This post by Helen Sedwick originally appeared on The Book Designer on 2/27/15.

Content theft is big business, whether it’s illegally downloading movies or reposting blog posts without attribution. Every month Google receives more than 30 million requests to remove search results that link to allegedly infringing material. Thirty million a month!

Sooner or later, every blogger and writer will find her work reposted or republished without permission. Or she may find websites offering free PDFs downloads of her books.

The good news is writers have various options for dealing with content theft, and 99% of the time, they will not need an attorney. A little research and a few emails may do the trick.

 

Dealing with Online Piracy

1. Contact the site directly.

In most cases, if you email the infringing site and demand they remove your material, the site will comply. You may even get an apology. Believe it or not, some people still think everything on the internet is free to use.

 

Read the full post on The Book Designer.

 

15 Terrifying Things That Will Make You A Better Writer

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This post by Chris Brecheen originally appeared on Writing About Writing on 9/6/12.

Ready to do some things for your craft that will terrify you even more than a sewer-dwelling clown?

Tired of the same ten articles online giving you the same twenty bits of advice about writing punchy verbs or sitting down at the same time each day? Are the thousands of clones of “How to be a Better Writer” articles getting you down? Do you think, “Okay, already! I’m already carrying the damned notebook everywhere I go. What’s next?” Ready for some new advice?

Then this list is for you!

But be warned. This is not a happy list, an easy list, or a list filled with fluffy easily-implementable things you can do in an afternoon to make yourself feel incredibly productive. It’s not a list for those who want to think themselves writers without doing the work. I have a list like that over here. This is a list for people ready to take their writing, and possibly their craft to the next level but aren’t sure how. Maybe they’ve run into a wall or two or maybe they just feel like there’s something they could be doing to write better. Many of these things will not be fun or enjoyable or may even add an “unpleasant” dynamic to your writing.

But they will make you a better writer without ever using a word like “punchy.”

There are hundreds of craft books that will help you dissect every word choice of your prose, and there are millions of articles with those same 20 bits of advice. But somewhere between those two is this list: things you can do that are less well known, but that writers swear by.

1- Write When You Don’t Want To/Keep Going When It Hurts

This is the flip side to “write every day.” This is the side no one talks about. This is the shitty reality of that plucky wisdom.

Eventually even the best writer doesn’t feel in the mood. No matter how much joy and pleasure the simple act of writing brings you, one day, you will face the fact that you won’t want to. And you won’t want to a lot. Some days it’s like your desire to just take a day off is Aragorn wielding Narsil and your motivation is one of those comic relief orcs. But these are the days when it’s most important to do push through and do something. Even if you just write a couple of pages. Even if it’s just a freewrite.

 

Read the full post on Writing About Writing.

 

An Open Letter To That Ex-MFA Creative Writing Teacher Dude

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 3/1/15. Note that the full post contains strong language.

(Alternate title: Things I Can Say About That Article Written By That Creative Writing Ex-MFA Teacher Guy Now That I’ve Read It And Gotten So Angry It’s Like My Urethra Is Filled With Bees.)

Okay, fine, go read the article.

I’ll wait here.

*checks watch*

Ah, there you are.

I see you’re trembling with barely-concealed rage. Good on you.

I will now whittle down this very bad, very poisonous article — I say “poisonous” because it does a very good job of spreading a lot of mostly bad and provably false information.

Let us begin.

“Writers are born with talent.”

Yep. There I am. Already angry. I’m so angry, I’m actually just peeing bees. If you’re wondering where all these bees came from? I have peed them into the world.

This is one of the worst, most toxic memes that exists when it comes to writers. That somehow, we slide out of the womb with a fountain pen in our mucus-slick hands, a bestseller gleam in our rheumy eyes. We like to believe in talent, as if it’s a definable thing — as if, like with the retconned Jedi, we can just take a blood test and look for literary Midichlorians to chart your authorial potential. Is talent real? Some genetic quirk that makes us good at one thing, bad at another? Don’t know, don’t care.

What I know is this: your desire matters. If you desire something bad enough, if you really want it, you will be driven to reach for it. No promises you’ll find success, but a persistent, almost psychopathic urge forward will allow you to clamber up over those muddy humps of failure and into the eventual fresh green grass of actual accomplishment.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.

 

The Seven Deadly Sins of Dialogue

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This post by Susan DeFreitas originally appeared on Lit Reactor on 2/23/15.

Ursula K. Le Guin has said that scenes with dialogue are where emotion happens in fiction. According to the emerging body of neuroscience on fiction, such scenes are also where fiction most clearly approximates actual lived experience, that “vivid and continuous dream” of which John Gardner spoke.

That may help to explain why readers love dialogue—some so much so that they’ll skip right over your meticulously written descriptions and summaries to get straight to the goods: people talking to each other.

But dialogue is also a place where things can easily go south. As an editor, I have become far too acquainted with all the ways that otherwise competent writers can absolutely hamstring their fiction—precisely at the point it counts most.

 

1. Said Bookisms

Say what you will about the Bible, The Prince, and Fifty Shades of Grey—as far as I’m concerned, one of the documents most destructive to the project of civilization is Said Is Dead. Starting in the eighties and continuing to this day, many elementary-school English teachers have seen fit to foist this guide upon their hapless students, to the detriment of us all.

In it, the writer is instructed to throw over plain old said and asked for such highfalutin alternatives as queried, snarled, intoned, and god help us, even cajoled. Which, after all, are more specific verbs, and they help us avoid repetition. So what’s the problem?

 

Read the full post on Lit Reactor.

 

Teenager’s 10 Steps To Become Successfully Self-Published

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This editorial by Aaron Ozee originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 2/19/15.

Aaron Ozee, a prolific 18-year-old self-published poet, offers his sometimes unorthodox methodology for becoming a bestselling author.

When a writer gets the initial idea that their work is valuable enough to see the light of day and deserves public attention, that is when everything gets seriously tricky. Traditional publishing is a very attractive yet competitive method of releasing a book into the marketplace, especially since there are a limited number of manuscripts actually accepted annually by publishing houses. Most manuscripts that are submitted for review are tossed away into the black abyss of a cold file cabinet with no assurance that they will ever crawl to the surface again.

Feeling sad yet? You should be.

Though it is almost impossible to get anywhere by reserving your publication for a high-priced review and potential consideration by a literary agent, it does not mean the end of all things written. Self-publishing, the best alternative to traditional publishing, is the way to go, specifically because it is inexpensive, and in some cases, completely free and can easily be controlled by the author as the process begins to unfold. Now, self-publishing may be a fantasy to aspiring writers, but it can usually be confusing to those who have never had experience in taking that route to the top.

I published my first book when I was only 15 years old and in the following 4 years published another 8, became a bestselling author at the age of 17, translated my works into 6 foreign languages, made my publications available for purchase in 100 different countries and territories worldwide, and became perhaps the youngest bestselling American poet.

 

Read the full editorial on Publishing Perspectives.