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4 Soul-Crushing Realities Indie Writers Must Learn to Face

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The Sauron comparison makes sense: I’m about one more rejection letter away from trying to enslave the human race.

I’ve actually been sitting on this article for several months now, but I never published it because it came from a pretty dark place.  This piece was sort of like Sauron’s ring for me.  I was content to let it sit in the shadows and never speak of it and at one point I even considered destroying it.  How did it come into being?  Well, I was pretty damn disheartened when I could not find an agent or publisher for my first book The Notice.  I spent months slaving away on that book and every person who read it told me it was wonderful.  Maybe that was part of the problem.  My mother cried like four times while reading it.  I was 99% certain I had a bestseller in my hands and you can probably guess what happened:  Not one agent wanted to read it.  I could have written the next Crime & Punishment but it was irrelevant—seemingly because it featured ghosts and Eastern European ethnic tension instead of vampires and/or zombies.

I was defeated.  I was dejected.  I thought about giving up.

Instead, I moved on to Naked in Korea and The Last Cup and wrote this article as an outlet for my frustrations.  For the purposes of including it on my website, I’ve cleaned up its content quite a bit.  I’ve humbled my language and padded out the content.  It’s long, but also funny and, well, mostly TRUE.  I wouldn’t be posting this if I didn’t feel like readers could benefit from it and I want you all to take my advice with a grain of salt.  The 4 points I’m about to lay out will not be 100% true for all of you but they ARE all obstacles that every indie writer must be prepared to face.  You’ve been warned.

Now…enjoy.

4 Soul-Crushing Realities Indie Writers Must Learn to Face

January 26th, 2012:  When deciding that you want to become a writer, you’re probably sure of one thing:  All you have to do is actually sit down and write your book and you will be famous in at least a week—two weeks TOPS.  Within a month, you will be playing epic games of squash with a surprisingly spry Stephen King and drinking champagne out of J.K. Rowling’s navel at author parties while Daft Punk spin the turntables.    DAFT PUNK!  You have probably known for years that this is the kind of life that is out there for you; all you have to do is put in the time and wait for your membership card.

“Yep, good ol’ J.R.R. Tolkien… still in his prime, no less!”

So you write your first novel—an epic fantasy tale that ends up totaling 300,000 words spanning 38 chapters of convoluted history and realms so awesome that Tolkien himself visits you in a dream just to high-five you like Maverick from Top Gun (come to think of it…he even looked an awful lot like Tom Cruise, but you’re still almost positive it was Tolkien).

Okay, you may have overshot that first attempt at a novel.  A little too ambitious, right?  No takers?  Fine.  You can scale it back.  You can reel this in.  You broke the book up into two separate novels, cut out tons of fluff and crafted a perfectly good standalone masterpiece that would set up the next great fantasy series for all ages.  You shipped it off to agents and publishers and waited for the letters to come rolling in.  You eagerly imagined clichés like “breath-taking”, “stunning”, and “a landmark achievement” being hurled in your direction in such volume you’d have to swim through the praise like Scrooge McDuck in coins.

But, of course, nothing happened.  Now it’s time to reevaluate your perception of the publishing world with 4 soul-crushing realities.

“We can wait all day if we have to.”

1.  Agents/Publishers Don’t ALWAYS Know Quality When They See It:  First, I see a need to qualify that the definition of “quality” here refers to “this is a best-seller” and not “this is a very well-written book”.  The distinction is important because this piece is about to refer to Stephanie Meyer as a—grimace—“quality writer” and any literary/English scholars who might be reading this are going to s*** a collective brick at that statement.  No, the point is not that literary agents are idiots.  Agents are usually pretty adept at spotting decent writing.  Of course, they’re better at spotting lousy writing.  But the truth is that agents have no choice but to seek the next best-seller despite the fact that, sadly, predicting popular trends when it comes to literature is kind of like guessing which pigeon in a tree is suddenly going to drop a bomb in your convertible.

If you don’t believe that, just ask J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Meyer.  Both women are two of the highest-grossing authors of our time, but both had to shop their books around almost as much as I did before someone finally rolled the dice on a multi-billion-dollar franchise.  It makes you wonder how many other billion-dollar franchises never found that one agent who took a chance on something others considered “risky” or “derivative”.  The problem is not necessarily with the quality of your work; the problem is that, as a result of being hopelessly jaded by the industry, any given agent may be going into your book with a number of ill-conceived assumptions, including that you have an awful idea, your characters are stereotypes, your grammar is horrendous, your story is cliché, and YOU are an imbecile who scribbled half of your chapters on Arby’s napkins.  And (unfortunately) 95% of what they receive probably fits that bill.

I couldn’t find a funny picture for this paragraph, but my pursuit of one led me to some awesome Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan art. You have GOT to click this link, guys.

Even more frustrating is that in this global age of communication—with wealthy foreign markets on the rise and endless volumes of earthshaking ideas constantly at our fingertips—you would think that there ought to be a hungry mass of people out there looking to give almost any topic a chance.  And that is perfectly true—if you’re wealthy.  The fact is that there is a market for everything, because the only thing that needs to happen for a market to be born is for someone like Oprah Winfrey to say “Buy this book.”  Suddenly, a billion people will buy “Mutant Caveman Summer Vacation Attack Squad!” tomorrow and dub you the next J.D. Salinger.  The first time you picked up “The Kite Runner”, was your first thought “Holy crap!  A book about children in Afghanistan?  I’ve been waiting for this novel my whole life!  This book is so marketable.”  Of course not.  Now there’s a movie and probably a prequel in the works: The Kite Maker.

Looking at Michael Crichton is like staring into the cobalt eyes and reassuring smile of an angel. R.I.P., Sir.

2.  “Write What You Know” Isn’t a Free Pass to a Book Deal:  There may be no more “tried and true” cliché in the whole publishing world than this little gem that you will find in exactly 100% of books offering advice on how to write that first great novel.  It seems like sage advice.  If you’re writing some kind of medical thriller, you had damn well better know your science and medicine—just ask Dr. Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain and Congo and Jurassic Park.  Clearly his medical degree gave him expertise in pissed-off apes, space viruses, and making giant dinosaurs.  He was an expert!

The trick here is that writing about what you know can only get you so far if part of what you know doesn’t include how to write a freaking marketable novel!  You could be writing your fourth book on a topic in which you have two degrees, years of fairly immersive personal experience, and a prior history of conducted research, and you still may not get a single person in the industry to read a word of what you cranked out.

When it comes to writing a novel, writing about what you know only works if A) you are a vampire or zombie, B) already marginally famous or rich, or C) you lived through something absolutely horrendous and the literary world kind of feels like they owe it to you.  Basically, if your book tells the story of your CPR-certified, firefighting, Vietnam-veteran, Holocaust-survivor uncle who died on 9/11 after plummeting from one of the Trade Centers like Hans Gruber while strangling a terrorist and saving a family of kittens, you are set for life.  Honest, how many of you are thinking back through your family trees right now searching for an obscure relative who nearly fits that bill?  I know I would.  The real problem is that, in writing a book, you may only discover how agonizingly boring you are.

I’m like 99% sure that Aron Ralston deliberately rolled a boulder onto himself and cut half of his arm off just because it was a less painful way of getting published than trying to write a great book and going through the proper channels.

This is what a published author looks like. Yes, it’s okay to start crying hysterically. I would judge you if you didn’t.

3.  Being Professional Is Not a Surefire Way to Get Published:  Another piece of absolutely garbage advice that you’re going to hear from experts who write books about how to get published is that professionalism is the key to getting published.  Okay, that’s being unfair.  Don’t get me wrong; being professional can’t hurt your chances as much as being insanely unprofessional.  But if being professional or respectable were the only way to get published, you wouldn’t have books by Paris Hilton and the Kardashians lining shelves across the country.  The fact is that you can do absolutely everything right and get rejected 30 out of 30 times because your book is not about Justin Bieber or what it’s like having 23 children.

It bears repeating that literary agents ARE NOT IDIOTS, but they can be tremendously unfair and cynical.  I don’t feel like that’s a secret anyone is rushing to cover up.  Deep Throat in a trench coat didn’t whisper that to me between cars in a shadowy parking complex through a haze of cigarette smoke.  Agents are oftentimes overworked, depressing people who are terrified of taking a genuine risk on the high-concept idea of a first-time writer.  That’s bad for us, but probably not bad for business, strictly speaking.  But I once read an advice column from an agent who proudly said he rejected “any book that came with a prologue” and (GRAPHIC VISUAL ALERT) my testicles slammed into each other like the moon colliding with the Earth.  That’s like saying, “I don’t adopt orphans if I know where they come from”.

How dare you, Mr. Indie Author, for having a prologue!  Your audacity ASTOUNDS ME.

This is your best friend. He loves that you wrote a book. He has no intent to actually read it.

4.  “At Least My Friends and Family Will Read It” – If you think this is a given, you should probably go ahead and click this link.  Go on, I promise it’s safe.  This can be a very painful truth but your friends are probably lying to you when they say that the idea for your book sounds “really interesting”.  Your friends are lying to you and maybe even looking you in the eyes while they do it.  Some might even have their hand awkwardly positioned on your inner thigh.  Why?   Because they love you.  That’s right, your friends know how much this means to you and they care enough about the hours you put into your book that they are absolutely scared s***less by the idea of dashing your hope or giving you any gleaming of the reality-check you so desperately need in order to find some semblance of a life and make up for the hundreds of days you may have wasted researching your “masterwork” or “manifesto”.  Ay, caramba!

Of course, another possibility is that your closest friends don’t care at all that you wrote a book because society now takes for granted what were once considered lofty accomplishments.  It used to be considered bragging rights to know someone who had published a book or made a video or recorded a song, but nowadays even your roommate’s little sister is dropping an entire album’s worth of nasally Rhianna covers on her Myspace page.  Thanks to pages like YouTube, every other jackass in your apartment building has probably put out at least one video that scored over a million hits which means your own friends can no longer be held responsible for separating the very real achievements of people they know from the superficial ones of those they don’t.

Besides, your friends and family are the last people on Earth who you’re going to trick into buying your crappy novel.  They’ve read your clumsy Facebook notes about how awesome the new Ke$ha album is.  They’ve seen you mercilessly confuse words like “their”, “there”, and “they’re” in your Facebook statuses or Tweets with such animosity that you could almost be brought before a UN criminal tribunal and accused of war crimes.  Now you expect them to suffer 200 pages of garbage tinged with all the inane banter, political or religious rhetoric, shallow social commentary, and terrible jokes with which you annoy them on a daily basis??  If your closest friend randomly comes up to you tomorrow and punches you as hard as he can in the face, you are obligated to let it go.  You probably earned it.

If you’re reading this, I’m not saying your writing is automatically that awful.  I’m just speaking in hyperbole.  But I guarantee that at least one person who happens across this entry is writing a book his or her friends and family will hate.  If I hurt someone’s feelings with this post, here’s a nice cartoon I found on the Internet to make it all better :)

It’s a Trap! Admiral Ackbar’s 6 Indie Author Traps to Avoid

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If my most recent post (“Sean’s Top 7 Indie Author Annoyances”) is any indication, my fine readers seem to love when I vent about the frustrations we indie authors endure.  And why not?  After all, we face so many of them—everything from agents rejecting our masterpieces to critics telling us our masterpieces aren’t actually even masterpieces in the first place to Microsoft Word telling us a green-underlined portion of our manuscript is a “fragment” when we’ve double-checked it a million damn times and it’s not a bloody fragment, MS Word!!!  Whew.  Yes, on any given day we indie authors are probably given a million reasons encouraging us to jump ship on this whole adventure, and these reasons can leave us susceptible to falling into a handful of indie author traps.

Oh, and if you don’t know who Admiral Ackbar is, he’s that character from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi who looks like a cross between a catfish and the actor Peter Lorre (at least he does to me).  It’s not really all that important from here on out.  Let’s continue:

1.  Falling Into Query Limbo – No, this isn’t what happens when you’re querying potential agents/editors in Jamaica (although maybe it should be…).  This is what happens when you get sucked into the black hole of query submission, during which you are not working on other projects.   You send out the first slew of query letters, you hear nothing.  You work a little more on your book, tweaking and editing a few things, and then you send out another batch of letters.  You hear nothing.  This cycle could go on and on, for all you know, and this is a LONG process:  Some agencies require up to 6 weeks to review queries and that’s a long time to wait!

I know as well as anyone that it can be difficult to admit defeat on a project, but if you have sent out 20 query letters without a single response or request for material, you should really reevaluate your project.  Why?  Because it seems evident that you have a fatal flaw with one of the following:  Your query letter, your story, your writing, your genre, or the agencies to whom you are submitting.  I will elaborate on some of the finer points of this bullet below, but the point is to be exploring other projects and writing outlets even while you’re shopping agents/editors for a completed manuscript.  For all you know, the NEXT book you write will actually sell!

Disclaimer: I do not know Dean Koontz.

2.  Period Publishing – When I say “Period Publishing”, I’m not talking about trying to publish a period piece; I’m talking about shipping sample chapters off to agencies and editors the second you type the final period at the end of your manuscript.  I don’t care if you’re Indie-author Jones or Dean F***in’ Koontz (Mr. Koontz and I go way back; he insists that I call him that), your book is not ready to be dropped in the lap of someone in the industry the moment you finish it.  Your book should be treated with all the delicacy and scrutiny as if a friend told you a burglar broke into your house one night, sat down at your computer, opened up your manuscript, and dropped “1-3” absolutely unutterable racial slurs somewhere in your 300 page manuscript and they aren’t ones you’ll be able to find just by hitting CTRL+F.

3.  Refusing to Sell Out – As much as I hate to say it, you also should not be afraid to just sell out.  Maybe you have an absolutely fantastic idea for a vampire, werewolf, zombie book, but you don’t want to write it because the genre is so tired.  Pump the brakes!  Are those genres still marketable/popular?  Yes?  Is your idea really a great one?  Yes?  Then WRITE THAT BOOK.  Write it now!  If there is one thing the YA market has taught us it’s that the world always has room for one more vampire love-triangle.  Is it awesome that you have the integrity to not want to write something that’s already been done?  You betcha, but I would rather pet myself on the back all the way to a paycheck than keep living in squalor with the knowledge that I could have written a book that sold a million copies.  That’s what sucks about integrity:  You can’t purchase things at Best Buy with it.

I’ve tried.

If you’re concerned about selling out, might I point you to the landmark case of Furtado v. Music.  Nelly Furtado burst onto the music scene in 2000 with her popular album Woah, Nelly! which sold a ton of records, had a couple of hot singles, and made her like a bazillion dollars.  Her follow-up to that album?  A more folky, stripped down album that, I’ve always heard, was more of a passion project in keeping with her roots and values but didn’t sell very well.  After THAT album?  A sexed-up, hip-hop album that made her another bazillion dollars, which she ALSO followed up with a more independent, Spanish-language album that didn’t bring her mainstream success but was also probably more in keeping with what she wanted to do, like her folky sophomore effort.  The point is that sometimes you have to sell out in order to write the books that YOU want to write.  Focus on the market first and if you have a passion project in mind, develop that separately.  DON’T ABANDON IT!  Just wait for the right time to release it.

4.  Devoting Too Much Time to Social Media Promotion – I’ve had quite a few fun conversations in the talkback on this site about social media.  Everyone wants to know how to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to increase sells, promote new projects, and establish a market for one’s work independently.  Am I an expert?  Hell no!  Twitter has been invaluable for helping me attract interest in this blog and in my books, but this has been a LONG process and not one that has been extremely beneficial to me in any financial sense.

However, there is one thing that I know for certain:  When I’m screwing around on Twitter or Facebook, I am absolutely NOT writing anything worthwhile.  When I’m tweeting, I’m not editing.  When I’m bookin’, I’m not working on my actual books.  That is a problem for writers!  I have come to realize that, for all my efforts in social media, I will probably never be as successful at promoting my own books as those in the publishing industry, so my incentive turns back to writing something good enough to be formally published.  Unless I get extremely lucky and happen to write the next 50 Shades of Grey (that seems highly unlikely), I will never be able to make a living doing everything on my own.

5.  Falling into Editing Limbo – One aspect of my site that I’m trying to remedy is that I speak mostly to prospective authors like myself who plan to make a long living writing multiple books.  However, I do not wish to alienate the many writers I’ve met through this website who confess to having the noble goal of writing only one book.  Sometimes I downplay what an accomplishment it is to write a book.  Most people do not have the discipline to embark on this journey and anyone who does should be commended.

But why am I mentioning this here, under the headline “Blah blah blah Editing Limbo”?  Because it has been my experience that indie authors who are focusing all their energy on one book are also those who tend to fall into the black hole of editing.  Maybe this isn’t true for you; I only came to this conclusion based on the writers who I met at my most recent conference.  Most of those writers were older than myself and had fallen into the limbo of either endlessly editing their manuscripts or throwing out and rewriting chapters they had already written.  Let’s just lump that ALL together under the same “Limbo”.

If you have fallen into this trap, the best advice I can give you is to seek out a writer’s group.  It sounds like you don’t have confidence in what you’ve written.  The feedback of a writer’s group should give you a better understanding of whether or not you have been right all along to throw out your material and how you might improve going forward.  Such a group might also help bolster your confidence so that you can move forward and write new material or finally wrap up your edits and begin the querying process.  I could keep going for another 5,000 words on this issue, but I need to wrap up this article.

6.  Avoiding Networking – Whatever you do, do not alienate the writers around you.  The writing community can be your greatest resource in pointing you to agencies, editors, peer reviews, writing groups, conferences, theme parks, best hot dogs in town, etc.  If you’ve ever applied for a job in the U.S. in this economy, you have probably learned that 90% of success is who you know.  The same can be true in the publishing industry.  Make a name for yourself, be friendly, and become your own brand.  I have yet to find an industry that has no place for kindness and honesty.

Earlier in this piece, I remarked that on any given day we indie authors are probably given a million reasons encouraging us to jump ship on this whole adventure.  You might agree with that or you might reject it.  Maybe you’re thinking, “Well, I only receive about 400,750 reasons a day…”  Whatever.  There is only one thing I can tell you as reassurance:  In spite of all the frustrations we face, all it takes is one perfectly-chosen word, one startlingly clever piece of dialogue, one period at the end of a newly completed chapter to remind us why we do this.  If every sentence you’ve written throws some fuel on your fire—some burning desire to want to reread that sentence a hundred times and make it better and better and BETTER—then you have the passion and that passion is a gift you should cherish.  If you can look yourself in the mirror and see, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that you have such conviction, never abandon that passion.  Just try to refine that passion and, with any luck, some day you will reach your goal.

A Picture Says a Thousand Words: The 13 Kinds of Authors You Meet on Twitter

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A decent picture, except I look uncharacteristically pissed off.

Okay, fellow indie writers:  I hope you’re ready to laugh at yourselves.  For this entry, I wanted to turn my attention back to everyone’s favorite social media platform…(drumroll)…Twitter.  But before I get into my observations, I want to take a few moments to be self-deprecating, because I feel like it’s one of my better qualities.  Sometimes for the sake of commentary, I like to assume this sarcastic narcissist persona, even though that’s pretty far from the way I am in real life.  It’s kind of a role I play, but I apologize for it from time to time because I’m always legitimately afraid that I might rub someone the wrong way, but I don’t want that to happen.  You all are nice enough to stop by and read my articles, so the last thing I want to do is offend anyone.  If you aren’t laughing, then I’ve done something wrong.

That said, today I want to critique the sorts of profile shots that we authors like to use on Twitter.  I’m not saying that all authors on Twitter use terrible mugshots and I’m certainly not saying that mine is any better than anyone else’s.  What I will say, though, is that a few “aspiring authors” on Twitter are astoundingly lazy or, sadly, insecure with the pictures they choose.  Therefore, I am going to suggest that, if you are on Twitter, perhaps you should use this article to judge for yourself whether you might need to perhaps change your Twitter persona.  Even that tiny picture can tell people a lot, and I can’t help but feel that some of my fellow indie writers are not doing themselves any favors with the Twitter pictures they have chosen to represent themselves.

If writing is what you wish to do, you need to exude professionalism at all times.  Lord knows this can be next to impossible, but you still need to do your best.  You want to look your best and you want to be memorable, without making a mockery of yourself.  It’s okay to be funny in your pic, but you don’t want to be viewed as a joke.  It’s okay to look serious in your pic, but I would avoid looking to self-serious.  It’s hard to pass off the glowering, self-serious author pose if you have 57 followers and you’ve never been published.

Be yourself!  Don’t be afraid of what anyone thinks!  Have the confidence to own your author persona.  No one is expecting you to look like Ryan Gosling and if you do look like Ryan Gosling, why the HELL are you wasting your time writing books?!

Anyway, here are the 13 kinds of authors I routinely see on Twitter.

1.  The Black & White Mugshot Author – This is a step in the right direction when it comes to professionalism, except it’s so overdone.  I’m not saying that a black & white mugshot is taboo.  These are fine shots!  All I’m saying is don’t be afraid to show a little color!  This isn’t the 50s.

2.  The Kitten with a Lime on Its Head Author – I didn’t even become aware of this meme until I got on Twitter, but let me tell you right now:  If you have this picture as your author photo on Twitter, REMOVE IT IMMEDIATELY.  You’re associating yourself with a flippant gag.  I must have 100 followers who are using this as their profile pics and it just screams “amateur”.  Please make this meme end!

3.  The “I’m an Important Author and I’m on a Phone in My Picture” Author – Admittedly, this is a fairly rare form of author, but it always makes me laugh.  Who are you talking to??  Am I supposed to believe you’re on the phone with your agent?  I always assume you’re on the phone with Ted Nugent.  I don’t know why you’d be on the phone with Ted Nugent and, frankly, I don’t want to know, but there it is.  You’re talking to Ted Nugent.  Put the phone down and pretend like you have time to take a decent mugshot.

4.  The 30-Year-Old Glamour Shot Author – My heart goes out to these people.  Most of the time I get the feeling that these sorts of pictures are intended as a substitute for physical appearances that, ahem, may have declined over the years.  At 26 years old, it’s pretty easy for me to point the finger at older ladies & gentlemen who perhaps don’t have my luxury of being able to jog for an hour a day because I don’t have, I don’t know…children?  But there’s nothing wrong with being older!  Unless that 1970s glamshot is simply INCREDIBLE, go ahead and take a more recent picture.  You have NOTHING to prove to people on Twitter and I promise that you have nothing to prove to people like me.

“Son…Somewhere in ‘at egg’s an author waitin’ a hatch.”

5.  The No Picture Whatsoever Author – Please, please, please have at least SOMETHING as your profile picture.  On the one hand, most people who don’t even have a picture generally don’t stick to Twitter very long in the first place.  On the other hand, those who do make me wonder just how ugly they are.  I mean, if you don’t have ANY kind of picture, I’m forced to assume you look like Sloth from “The Goonies”.  If you DO look like Sloth from the Goonies, you still shouldn’t be ashamed.  Buy a nice Armani suit and OWN it.  Also, you may adopt the term “Slauthor”, which I came up with just now.  You’re welcome.

6.  The Hilarious Non-Sequitur Author – Authors tend not to do this as much as those annoying “#Followback” teenagers.  Usually, a hilarious non-sequitur photo is just that:  A funny .GIF or .JPEG that is completely unrelated to the Tweeter.  These pictures might be worth a chuckle, but I almost never follow them because I assume they aren’t real people.

7.  The Inanimate Object Author – An author who followed me this morning has a picture of a hot air balloon.  Now, perhaps he or she is IN the hot air balloon.  I don’t know.  I believe I’ve also been followed by a woman who used a picture of a toaster as her profile picture.  Maybe she’s a Cylon from “Battlestar Galactica”, but something tells me she isn’t actually a toaster.

Of course, if you’re an author like me, I’ll understand that the shadowy picture is not so much the result of pretentiousness as having not been able to pay the electric bill.

8.  The Shadowy, Mysterious Sci-Fi Author – These are my favorite pictures on Twitter and the ones that most lend themselves to that “self-seriousness” I was talking about earlier.  In my opinion, just because you’ve written a 55,000-word, unpublished sci-fi novel does not instantly give you the right to take a mugshot where half of your face is concealed in shadow and you’ve clearly used Photoshop to make one of your eyes red or teal or fuschia or something.  Only two men on Earth are allowed to take photos while standing in that much shadow:  Stephen King and Chris Carter, the creator of “The X-Files”.

9.  The Just a F***ing Lunatic Author – Sometimes you just know a person is not so much an author as an undiagnosed, soon-to-be-incarcerated mental patient.

10.  The Author Made of a Mass of Books – These authors are almost as lazy as the people using the “Lime Cat” memes.  You know who I’m talking about—folks whose pictures are nothing but a stack of books?  You aren’t given any sort of added legitimacy by being represented by a stack of books you may have read but almost certainly didn’t write.  It would be like me walking into a dentist’s office and seeing a gigantic pile of bloody, misshapen teeth on the secretary’s desk and deciding, based on that, “THIS GUY MUST BE A GREAT DENTIST!”

11.  The World Traveler Author – I’ve been guilty of this one.  “Wow!  That guy’s standing in front of The Parthenon!  I can’t wait to buy his dystopian sci-fi novel on Amazon!” said absolutely no one ever.

12.  The Suspiciously Handsome/Attractive Author – Have you ever been in this situation?  “Say, that aspiring YA author looks a lot like Anne Hathaway.  (follows) Come to think of it, she looks almost EXACTLY like Anne Hathaway.  Wait…Yep, that’s definitely a photo of Anne Hathaway.  Here it is on Google when you type ‘Anne Hathaway’. (unfollow)”  Yeah, nothing irks me more than trying to pass yourself off as Anne Hathaway.

I know this picture is a lot to live up to, Folks. Just do your best ;)

13.  The Genuine Author – On the flip side, nothing makes me smile more than seeing someone’s genuine grin in a well-framed, well-lit profile pic.  You’re an aspiring author!  You’re doing something you love!  For crying out loud, be HAPPY about it!  I love seeing young people, middle-aged people, elderly people, skinny people, husky people, poor people, rich people, bald people, fuzzy people, etc. SMILING about putting themselves out there and becoming a part of this bustling indie writer market that is exploding on the Internet.  For me, these are the pictures that make me feel invested in the new world we’re creating.  Be indie, support indie, and be proud!

“Querious George”: 5 Tips for Polishing Your Query Letter

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Ah, my dream agent…

Okay, that headline makes it sound like Curious George just decided to start exploring his sexuality.  My mistake.  What I’m really trying to say is that an author’s query letter might be more important than the book he or she has just finished writing.  First things first (um, this is not part of the 5 Tips), don’t even think of submitting a query letter for fiction until you’ve actually finished your book.  Now let’s go one step further:  Don’t even think of submitting your letter until you have edited your book at least twice—preferably THREE times.  While an agent might appreciate your enthusiasm if you have that query letter ready to go the exact moment you type the final word of your book and complete your first draft, the odds are almost astronomically against the possibility that you nailed every aspect of your story on the first run through.

Now, assuming that your book is ready to go, let’s look at the letter itself.

1.  Explain your market – There is an old saying that you catch more flies with honey and if you’re trying to sell honey, you should probably have some idea of where the flies are.  Where your book’s market lies may not be as obvious to Joe Agent as you might think.  This is something I ran into with my first string of submissions for The Notice.  I expected those to whom I sent my book to automatically see the wider applications of my novel.  I thought it would be understood that my novel transcended its categorical historical fiction genre.  Only when I explained the significance of The Bosnian War, the number of refugees living in the United States, and the book’s similarity to other popular world novels like The Kite Runner did I start to hear back from interested agents.  At least one brief paragraph should state specifically to whom you are trying to sell your book and what evidence you have that such a market exists in the first place.

2.  Who are you again? – Give yourself a little more credit.  I went the humble route on my first line of submissions for The Notice.   I mentioned that I was a teacher and that I had obtained two degrees in international relations and, of course, this was information that I found relevant while pitching The Notice—a book of international themes.  While I received a slew of nice automated-form rejection letters, I came up empty-handed from every single agency to which I applied.  On the second string of queries, I identified myself specially as a private school English teacher (writing cred!) and as an international affairs “expert” (hey, why not?  I’m on my way to a PHD in it…).  Lo and behold, I received an interested reply about a week later.  DO NOT make up credentials that you can’t support—you will eventually be exposed—but do make it clear for agents why you have a “right to write”.

3.  Work on your Hook – This is the most difficult part of writing your query letter and, because of that, most people will never perfect the art of the hook.  If you have a hook before you ever start writing your book, FAN-TAS-TIC.  It makes the process that much easier and probably shows that your idea is a solid one.  Most of us won’t be that lucky, however, and will need to come up with something to draw in an agent after the writing process.  You must zero in on the one aspect of your work that distinguishes it.  For instance, my book The Notice (wow, I hawk my novel way too much in this blog), is “a coming of age story that revolves around a young girl making sense of a terrifying war in her homeland by sharing conversations with the ghost of an elderly Muslim woman who was murdered in her neighborhood.”  That’s not exactly the same hook I’ve been using—I paraphrased it just so I could crank this out fast enough to get back to watching “House”—but it does have the core elements of my book, without giving too much away.  Once you’ve dispensed with the hook, you can get down to divulging a bit more about the plot in the second paragraph of your letter.

4.  Research Your Agent – Nothing works against you more than not researching your prospective agent’s catalog prior to sending your letter.  Any self-respecting agency’s website will have a page that details the interests and publishing history of any given agent.  It goes without saying that you should only submit YA horror to an agent who lists YA fiction and, ideally, horror in their bio as personal interests.  Some agents seem to be open to anything, which might make it seem like your job just got that much easier.  Don’t settle for that, friends!  Find out whether or not any of the books that agent has previously helped publish match or parallel your own novel.  If Joe Agent claims to take any and all fiction but shows a clear bias towards legal thrillers or vampire sagas, then maybe your dystopian story is not for him.

5.  “The 4:1 Rule” – This is just a neurotic, safety-first rule that applies to my own query letter editing process.  The Sean Chandler rule of thumb is to edit your query letter FOUR times for every draft of your book.  If you edited your novel three times, be ready to go over your query a whopping twelve times!  It might seem like overkill, but it underscores the significance of preparing the best letter possible.  It’s better to err on the side of caution than submit a query letter that accidentally prevents an agent from reading your book.  You might as well just email said agent a video of you drunkenly singing “Don’t Stop Believin’” in your underwear; both approaches will undoubtedly prove equally successful in selling your novel.

For more information on query letters, please consult the book “Your First Novel” available here: http://www.amazon.com/Your-First-Novel-Achieving-ebook/dp/B0033ZAVX0/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1338405702&sr=8-2 It contains by far the most helpful and detailed analysis of good query letters that I’ve seen so far.  It’s also a pretty cheap purchase. If you’re young and aspiring like me, it’s definitely worth your coin!

5 Things Agents Say Turn Them Off in Chapter 1

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So, just how little time does one’s masterwork get to spend before the eyes of an agent?  In truth, many manuscripts fall apart in the first chapter.  You can agree or disagree with their methods or reasoning, but the simple fact is that agents want that instant gratification I mentioned in a previous post.  Who wants to sit and suffer while waiting for a book to get good, right?  Agents want action and story right off the bat.  They want to see that bestselling blockbuster from Page 1. 

Here are a few things agents say turn them off in the first chapter:

1.  “Avoid descriptions of the weather.” Because even though approximately 50% of books ever written start with some sort of expository weather description, evidently we’re not allowed to mention it’s raining.  In all seriousness, though, what does a “stormy night” really add to the story we’re trying to tell?

2.  “If it’s not essential to the story then it doesn’t need to be in the first chapter or any other chapters.” This is absolutely true and I think this is something with which many fledgling writers struggle in the beginning.  The first instinct might be to write down anything that pops into one’s head.  Read: Anything.  Keep your story focused at all times.  Have your characters do relevant things and don’t mention peripheral items that serve no purpose.  We don’t need to know a female character keeps a purple hairbrush that belonged to her long-deceased grandmother unless granny’s coming back as a hellspawn to kick some ass and reclaim that brush that was rightfully hers in the next chapter.

3.  “We don’t like grocery list character descriptions.  Eyes, nose, weight, height, age, etc.”

The sign of a good writer is being able to show description instead of telling it.  Although I’m not exactly sure how to “show” a reader that a character’s eyes are blue, for example, perhaps the reader doesn’t need to know that a protagonist’s eyes are blue in the first place.  It’s quite okay to let a reader paint them himself or herself.  If a character is neurotic, obsessive compulsive, vain, insecure, etc., those features are much easier to show without flat-out saying it.  I still prefer some fairly clear-cut physical descriptions, myself, but the point is to not linger.  Dispense with the basic looks in a brief, well-written paragraph and then move on!

4.  “We hate prologues.” 

These agents can straight suck it.  Not that I love prologues.  I’m just saying that a prologue, in my eyes, should not automatically break a whole book.  I’m appalled by the idea of an agent dismissing a book just because it has a prologue.  That’s laziness on their parts.  There are great books that have well-written, necessary prologues.  I’m sure there are some awful books, too.  I’m sure there are even some awful books with prologues that still got published!  My own book, The Notice, for example, once had a prologue that explained four pages of essential background historical information about Yugoslavia.  I ultimately removed it, but I don’t think having the prologue was ultimately detrimental to the story I sought to tell.  Some books have prologues, agents—buck up and read them.  The one favor a prospective authors asks is that you at least give us the benefit of the doubt.

5.  “Avoid clichés wherever possible.”

It speaks for itself.  You may not even know a cliché as you’re writing it, but if you find yourself penning something just because you really liked it in that other book or movie, well it’s probably cliché.  I wish there were a better index on the Internet of clichés, but this site has some decent ones: http://www.joe-ks.com/phrases/phrases.htm

Once again, you may agree or disagree with these entries and that is your prerogative, but these 5 rules are widely reflected throughout the publishing community.  And whether you like them or not, the point should be to have an agent someday finish your entire book.  In order to do this, we have to sell our books to them using only our writing and story-crafting.  We are disposable.  The trick is learning how to put a fresh peel on a stale banana.

…Not sure where I was going with that.  Now it’s all I can think about.  I think I’m hungry.  I’m going to get a banana.