The Publishing Contrarian

I want to let every rag-tag writer in on a secret: literary agents and editors are always looking for salable books. They make their living off salable books. Not only that, they often have new-book quotas they are required to meet each quarter.

So why not your book?  Why is the submission coming back again and again with a sad little rejection letter attached? Is your book simply awful? Have you wasted all that time and paper thinking you would be the literary darling of 2007, only to discover you’re no Jodi Picoult, whose  The Tenth Circle was #2 on The New York Times Book Review Best Sellers’ list last week or Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, whose Three Cups of Tea was #14 on the list? 

Krista Wilson jumped at the chance to get her submission reviewed by a fresh eye—mine—last week after I offered to review submissions.  Remember, I didn’t judge the entire manuscript. I only looked at her cover letter, marketing plan, and a few first pages of her sample chapter.  Here’s the cover letter she initially sent me.

Original Letter:

Dear Mr. XXXXX: 
     I am seeking representation for a novel I have completed, Path of the Butterfly, which tells the story of Josie Papillon, the product of a short yet passionate marriage between a worldly French chef and a redneck waitress from Buckshot, Alabama. Quick-witted and talented, Josie lacks focus and ambition.  Despite having been her high school’s valedictorian, all she has done since graduation is make floral arrangements for minimum wage and sightsee with her father in whatever exciting city he calls home that year.  But the summer she spends with him in San Francisco changes her life forever. There she meets Julian, a sexy, wisecracking waiter with an enviably independent spirit. As their relationship blossoms, her father’s health withers. When he dies, a distraught Josie finds there is no record of him, anywhere, until he enrolled in culinary school in Paris when he was twenty-six. Before that, apparently Albert Papillon did not exist. The history of her parents’ whirlwind courtship and doomed marriage unfolds in counterpoint to the story of Josie’s own emergence into adulthood. 
     Fans of Rebecca Wells may like this novel for the saucy southern humor among the cast of strong women. And readers of Barbara Kingsolver’s work may enjoy it as well, since nature imagery is lightly woven throughout the story, showing how human lives mirror cycles in the natural world. 
     Path of the Butterfly made semi-finalist in the Novel-in-Progress category in the Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition in New Orleans last year.  
     I am enclosing a synopsis and a sample chapter. Should you wish to read the entire manuscript, I have included an SASE for your reply. Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,

Good, yes? Krista sounds like the intelligent woman she is. The writing is fine, but are you desperate to get to the marketing plan and sample pages? Are you convinced her book will “deliver?” In fact, as Krista told me, the submission package with the original cover letter was rejected 20 times. Here is what we worked on together. I lost count of the email exchanges, but I made many comments in the margins of her cover letter. In her second version she made sure to  

• Direct her letter to a real, live editor, not “Editor” in a publishing company. 
• Let the reader know immediately that her manuscript had won an award to separate her from the pack.
• Compare her book to a successful book the editor had worked on that was similar to hers. 
• Provide a synopsis of the book.
• Touch on some marketing ideas to show she “gets it,” that she’ll be the kind of author who helps with marketing. 

Revised letter: 

Dear Mr. XXXXX::
      Last year my manuscript, Path of the Butterfly, was a semi-finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition in New Orleans for Best Novel-In-Progress. I have since completed the manuscript and am seeking representation while working on my next novel. Having read [name of book of same genre], I found it to be divinely Southern: sad yet humorous, uplifting yet real. I would love the opportunity to work with someone who knows and appreciates Southern fiction as much as you clearly do. I think you will find that my novel is similar in several ways to [name of book of same genre]. Both novels parallel the growth of a mother and her daughter over time. Both stories are set in small southern towns full of familiar charm and dishy secrets. And both novels are written in a literary style, yet have mass-market commercial appeal.
      Path of the Butterflytells the story of Josie Papillon, the product of a short yet passionate marriage between Pam McGuffey, a redneck waitress from Buckshot, Alabama and Albert Papillon, a worldly French chef twelve years her senior. A wonderful hybrid of her two worlds, Josie can guzzle beer and play a mean game of eight ball as well as she can critique fine Italian art—in fluent French. Despite her own artistic talents and her sharp intellect, her greatest flaw is “inaction.” She still holds the same job she had back in high school, has never been to college, and still lives at home. But every year she looks forward to spending the summer with her beloved Papa, in whatever exotic place he calls home that year.
      The summer she spends with him in San Francisco changes her life forever. There she meets Julian, the sexy British waiter at her father’s restaurant who shares her talent with oils as well as her quick wit. As their summer fling progresses, her father’s health withers. When she says goodbye to her Papa at summer’s end, it is for the last time. That autumn, her now estranged Julian makes the trip to Buckshot to tell her in person that Albert has died. Then the worst happens. When a distraught Josie tries to find where the Papillon family is buried, so Albert can be laid to rest next to his parents, she finds that they never existed. In fact, there is no record of Albert Papillon, anywhere, until he enrolled in culinary school in Paris at age twenty-six.
      Her own identity is so wrapped up in her father’s that Josie must find out who he really was and why he hid his past from her and her mother for all those years. She finds that she has an uncle she never knew, her father’s brother, and from him she discovers the sordid story of their life in a Hungarian circus, the tragic death of their mother during a performance, and a crime of passion in which Albert murdered his own father, a cruel man who was to blame for the accident that took their mother’s life. On the run ever since, Albert still managed to live his life to the absolute fullest. Unlike Josie, who, as her grandmother says, has been living “with her life on pause” long enough. A modern day Hamlet, Josie finally gets the courage to act, having been inspired by her father’s brave choices. She doesn’t exactly avenge a death or slay an evildoer, but finally, the reluctant hero “gets a life.”
      Throughout the story, the whirlwind courtship and doomed marriage of her parents unfolds in counterpoint to Josie’s own emergence into adulthood, giving the reader clues along the way to Albert’s hidden life. The story is told with home-cooked southern humor and highbrow wit, as well as a literary touch; nature imagery is woven throughout the story, showing how human lives mirror cycles in the natural world. Fans of both Rebecca Wells and Barbara Kingsolver wouldn’t be disappointed by this lush read.  
      I have already begun working on marketing strategies, including an interview with ABC News in Washington, a signing in the Day Butterfly Center at Callaway Gardens (since it is mentioned in the story), an article in the local newspaper in Montgomery, Alabama (near the setting of the novel) to coincide with a signing at a local bookstore, and an article in Portico magazine in Birmingham with a recommendation from them on a local morning news program there in town. I also have been promised a book signing at Park Road Books in Charlotte, North Carolina, where one of the owners is president of SIBA. She has promised to help me promote this book shamelessly at conventions! 
      Should you wish to read Path of the Butterfly, I have included an SASE for your reply. Thank you for your consideration.
      Sincerely

What do you think about the letters?

I sent Krista out to buy some beige or light gray stationery so that her submission would not only look and sound professional, but would also stand out from the crowd visually. 

By the way, I was really touched by the gratitude of the writers/authors who emailed their “slush pile” submissions to me.  Everyone was incredibly responsive to my suggestions and took action right away. I was pretty tough in my criticisms. I even asked one author “not to be mad at me,” and he replied that he wasn’t at all–just appreciative.  

Find someone to give you a fresh perspective on your submission. You don’t want a line editor, but you do want someone who can recap your synopsis and tell you why, after reading your cover letter, he or she might want to read the book and what makes the book special. Choose a friend who likes and reads the genre you have written. If your friend can’t rave about your book idea, neither will an agent or editor. Make changes to your submission. Fresh eyes can make all the difference.

One of the biggest jokes in publishing is the slush pile–that place no editor wants to go without hip boots, that place where paid “readers” hold their collective noses while they shovel through the manila envelopes, glance at cover letters, and then stuff everything, including a rejection note, into the SASE. So putrid is the stink coming off the slush pile, it is thought, that it is often the lowest of the low in publishing–interns and assistants, who don’t yet know where to hide and look busy–who become the gatekeepers and decision-makers about whether a submission will wind up on an editor’s desk or be tossed quickly onto the cart headed for the mailroom.

Question: How can you get an over-the-transom submission to stand out from the rest of the submissions so that yours gets a serious read?  

Answer: You’ve got to be able to sell the seller, and therein lies the problem. 

Last week I offered to review twenty submissions to try and find out what was wrong with them. Why were they being returned again and again from publishers as large as Random House and as small as…. Well, I didn’t even recognize the names of the publishing companies, but shouldn’t they have been begging for manuscripts?

Anyone who dropped by The Publishing Contrarian was welcome to send a copy of the cover letter, author’s marketing plan, and a few pages of the manuscript. Hundreds of people came to my blog. My behind-the-scenes “counter” went mad. Only nine people turned in submissions. I held spaces for a number of authors who were working on their marketing plans. These writers didn’t show. The doors closed at 6 p.m. on Wednesday.   

Amazingly, my little “slush pile” had only good, plausible story ideas, clearly written by intelligent and articulate people. (Why…let’s call them authors!) The problem was that had I been the gatekeeper with return envelopes in hand, I would have returned every single submission without getting past the cover letter. I’ll bet it’s the cover letter that gives off the stink in every slush pile. True, there may be more fecal matter in the mix, but the first whiff of something bad is originating with a weak and poorly organized cover letter. 

If, as a writer, you cannot can’t grab the attention of a submission reader in the same way a book jacket is supposed to grab the attention of a book buyer, you cannot expect a reader to make it to page one anymore than you can expect a buyer to make it to the cash register with your book. 

Tomorrow I will try and have an example of a letter that a writer and I hammered out over 20+ emails back and forth.

In this letter you will see

• The author establishes her writing credentials and piques interest in her award-winning, but as yet, unpublished, manuscript. (She’s got my attention!)
• She wanders a bookstore and does her research into similar genres to find the name of the publishing company and the editor so she can affix a name to her mailing label and avoid the slush pile completely. (How smart and how flattering I think!) 
• She synopsizes a rip-roaring tale in hard-hitting prose that, if the copy were squeezed onto a book jacket, would have the books flying out the door. (I want to read this book!)

The author is plenty smart and writes really well, but her original cover letter was like everyone else’s: much too general, didn’t emphasize her strong writing credentials (the award was buried at the bottom of her original cover letter), and didn’t really present the story in an exciting way. Actually, I had absolutely no idea what the book was really about until we had an email slug-fest about why people should care about her characters and what happened to them. Once she understood what I was looking for, she pounded out the copy.

No editor or agent cares about your marital status, number of kids, that this is your first or 100th book, that your dog is named Skippy. That’s the kind of info that goes on an inside flap of a book jacket or at the tail end of your book on the last page.

Editors and agents want to know what makes your book unique, and they want to know it upfront in the cover letter. They want to smell the money potential when they open the envelope–not the poop.

Excuse me while I try not to spew my pricey coffee onto my pricey laptop over this one. 

According to the article “Paperback Originals Are a Growing Niche for Literary Novels” in The New York Times today, publishers are adopting a “different model” from the hardcover-first, paperback-second publishing norm. Now they plan to publish paperback-only editions of “literature” written by unknown or, as the article says politely, “lesser-known,” authors. Publishing companies would be willing to forgo “the higher profits afforded by publishing a book in hardcover for a chance at attracting more buyers and a more sustained shelf life” for these books.

What profits? “When you’re taking back 50 to 70 percent of the hardcover copies you shipped,” to quote Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, I don’t think you are seeing much “profit.”

Once again the publishing industry is stepping over and around the giant elephant (you mineral-water-swillin’, 12-step programmers know what I’m talkin’ about) in the penthouse of publishing–the returns policy–that huge, looming, light-blocking, and oxygen-depleting pachyderm for which everyone keeps making excuses.   

What’s it going to take to change this absurd returns policy?

If the cost of shipping and handling (in and out and in and out) of the distribution centers was eliminated because publishing companies did not accept returns, the wholesale price of the book to the bookstores could be reduced dramatically. This savings could also be passed along to the customer in a lower price at the cash register. (I’m struggling to see the downside of this.) When I priced out ”special sales” at Barnes & Noble Books, the price per book dropped significantly when a book could not be returned. A sale was a sale. Period. In exchange the book buyer got a fabulous deal.

What’s it going to take to convince editors and marketing departments in publishing companies that throwing a book up against the wall to see if it will “stick” and sell, rather than carefully marketing a title, is causing the returns problem, too?   

How much more shelf-staying-power will there be in bookstores when a book, packaged-down to original paperback or not, still has to rely primarily on browse-and-buy amid the crammed stacks and overloaded display tables to make it to checkout? 

No expensive subscription necessary to leave a comment at the end of Sara Nelson’s article this week in PW! The article is about the smackdown between Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code. Let’s get over there and throw our comments in the ring.

Everyone reads PW. Actually, everyone fears PW! Even I do, but I left a comment anyhow. (As one friend said: There she goes, happily burning her bridges!)

Opening up a quasi blog in PW is a bold, brave move and one in which bold, brave bloggers should participate.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6316991.html

See you there!

The Wicked Witch of Publishing

Watch to the end!

Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing: This was swiped from Bill Liversidge’s blog, The View from The Pundy House, in Scotland.

Read my previous posting, “Publisher’s Pet — It Takes More Than An Apple.” If you’ve got a covering letter, marketing plan and about thirty sample pages, I’d be happy to take a look at them. Free? Absolutely! Let’s see what you have been sending out to prospective agents and publishers. Let’s see what you’ve been doing right and what you have been doing wrong.

1) Name of the book.
2) Fiction or nonfiction.
3) Where you have submitted your book before–if anywhere.

Also include the following:

4) Covering letter.

5) Marketing Plan.

6) 30 +/- pages of the book.

I’ll tackle about twenty submissions.

Don’t worry, my lips will be sealed. What I might do is recap the good and the bad associated with these submissions, but in general terms, in a posting here later. What I will do, I promise, is get back to you with some suggestions, privately.

This will be fun. Email me!

Offer ends Wednesday, March 21, 2006, at 6 p.m.

It’s Monday, 9:01 a.m. I’m sitting in my office, feet up on the desk. I may look like I am doing nothing, but I’m actually thinking, and thinking hard, about which author’s book will get my attention first. The phone rings. Caller ID tells me which author it is. I ignore the call and let it go into voicemail. The phone rings again. Another author. Another ignored phone call. The phone rings a third time. I grab the receiver. Why? It’s my favorite author, Publisher’s Pet! 

Teacher’s pet. Publisher’s pet. It’s a good thing.

No one gets more of my attention than an author who can help me do my job and make me look good doing it. I’m crazy about authors who can write well, understand marketing and sales, and will roll up their sleeves to promote “our” book.    

I want a well-thought-out marketing plan attached to every book I have to launch, and I want it to come from the author, who should know his market even better than I do. Yes, authors fill out an Author’s Questionnaire, but these forms are rarely taken seriously and are often ignored. The marketing plan is as important as the quality of the book.  Actually, with a great marketing plan an awful book can succeed! People will buy it, though they may not finish it! (I’m thinking Nabokov’s Ada, but feel free to disagree. I just don’t want to hear it!)

Last week I sat in on a writers workshop and listened to members read excerpts from their previous week’s writing. One aspiring writer had completed a lengthy, turn-of-the-century novel and was fine-tuning it by reading it out loud to the group before trying to find an agent. I talked to her about some of the critical sales tools she might use to separate her from the pack: the upbeat covering letter, exciting book outline, and smart marketing plan that would accompany sample chapters of her book. It never occurred to her to develop a marketing plan. Big mistake. And good luck finding an agent.

Unsolicited manuscripts “in them thar hills” of the slush pile may well get a serious read if you attach a marketing plan that proves you know your market and how to reach it with your book. Otherwise, the reader, associate editor, acquisitions editor or agent will just get another paper cut while shoving your manuscript into the self-addressed, stamped return envelope.

I’m good at sussing out a market and moving books, but I’m even better and faster with a helpful author who has taken the time to understand the book’s market (fiction or nonfiction), supplied me with every idea, from the harebrained to the brilliant, that he has, and then sat down to work with me, side-by-side, to combine my harebrained and brilliant ideas with his into a primo marketing plan virtually destined to bust through the competition. 

But to really lock in the position of Publisher’s Pet, I want a proactive author. (Not a pest, asking me what I’ve done lately to promote his or her book and why I haven’t sent a copy to a friend of a friend who works in publishing.) I want someone “out there,” flogging the book with me, implementing those parts of the marketing plan to which he has committed and sustaining the effort. 

James Brady, columnist and author of The Scariest Place in the World and The Marines of Autumn, gets it. We bumped grocery carts in Amagasett last summer and chatted. This author never, ever stops promoting his books. In a telephone conversation we once had, he told me ”flogging” his book came first.

William Hood, coauthor of A Look Over My Shoulder–A Life in the CIA, doesn’t get it. He’d been away for months, and I had assumed he was promoting his and the late Richard Helm’s book. Smart, I thought, but no, he had been summering in Maine. Bill told me he left the publicity entirely up to the publisher. Not smart, I thought.

Rigel Crockett, first-time author who wrote Fair Wind and Plenty of It, a memoir about working on a tall ship as it circumnavigated the globe, sort of got it. He booked himself on his own speaking tour at places like The Explorers Club and Mystic Seaport, but was hesitant to ask his publishing house for reimbursement of some of his expenses. After we spoke, Rigel went back to the publisher, and sure enough, the publishing house found a few pennies to help cover his expenses.  

Sandy Jones, coauthor with Marci Jones of Great Expectations–Your All-in-One Resource for Pregnancy & Childbirth, gets it. She supplied me with well-thought-out marketing plans that included an analysis of her competition, lists of doulas, ob-gyns, associations, and radio and TV shows specializing in family issues. She targeted major companies manufacturing baby products and became a consultant. While Sandy was busy pitching in, I got her a multipage spread in Fit Pregnancy and a massive commitment for content exposure and links to Barnesandnoble.com on Ivillage.com, the #1 women’s network with “25 million unique viewers each quarter.” Sandy, my Publisher’s Pet.

When Publisher’s Pet calls, I reach for the phone every time. Pronto.