selling your work |

Looking for a literary agent? Ever wonder what might happen if more than one of the agents you queried wanted to represent your book? Hey, it could happen, and it did for today’s guest blogger, Mike Chen. Mike is a very talented writer of sci-fi and someone you will be hearing more about soon. Check out his website and drop him a tweet @mikechenwriter.

When I started querying my latest manuscript, my critique partners told me that this was THE ONE. I didn’t believe them. After all, there was no practical reason why this would work out for me. Surely it’d result in more disappointment and heartache, along with the consolation prize of “Well, at least I learned a bit about plot and character.”

I was wrong. And they were right. I thought I wouldn’t even get one offer. I got multiple agent offers.

After getting over the shock of “this is really happening,” a new question took over all of my thoughts: how could I possibly choose?

Never, ever, ever in my wildest dreams did I think I could get multiple offers. Not only did I have multiple offers, several of them were from my top tier of agents. Turning one of those down seemed like something universally wrong, like eating nachos without jalapeños.

But I had to pick. And I had committed to a one-week turnaround to figure this all out. Here are the steps I took to whittle down my choices. To whoever is reading this, I hope you have this dilemma as well. It’s a pretty great problem to have.

Step 1: Consider your long-term genre plans.

First, I thought about the long term. I write cross-genre stuff, essentially commercial stories in a sci-fi setting. That led me to withdraw from one agent who was still reading, as she was purely a commercial agent with no sci-fi background. Another agent had cross-genre experience, but his primary strength was in literary fiction. Again, no pure sci-fi in his repertoire, and I knew that at some points in my career, I planned to dip more into genre elements. That crossed that agent off my list.

Step 2: See if you get along.

That left me with only agents with strong sci-fi backgrounds. I interviewed all of them and felt like I got along with each of them, so I couldn’t cross any off based on them being a jerk! All had good sales records; all worked for reputable agencies.

Step 3: Weigh their feedback on your manuscript.

So I went deeper. I looked at the non-SF material they represented and read. More importantly, I considered the different feedback they provided. I like to think I keep an open mind to all feedback, and during interviews, I made a point to not question or get defensive with any of the feedback, even if it didn’t feel right.

For the most part, I agreed with each agent’s feedback, and there was a significant level of overlap among them. But there were a handful of moments that made me scratch my head or didn’t sit right with me. I wound up weighing all of the different feedback, considering what mattered more and what was essentially a lateral move from my original vision.

That whittled the list down to two agents.

Step 4: Find the right fit.

This is where background and preference came into play. Outside of SF, the first agent worked with romance and cozy mysteries—two genres I didn’t read and certainly didn’t plan on integrating into my writing. The second agent used to work at Quirk Books, which supported SF crossover work, and as a published writer, his biggest influence is Nick Hornby—the same writer that had the biggest influence on my work.

Taking that into account, I was able to make my decision—those few things gave the second agent the advantage. And after a few days of pondering my decision rather than thinking about my real-life responsibilities, I accepted an offer of representation from Eric Smith of PS Literary Agency.

Now that we’ve gotten deeper into revisions, I can see that this was truly the right choice. Eric’s notes provide smart feedback while demonstrating a clear understanding of what I’m trying to do by blending commercial and SF. The fact that we can also talk about video games and being Corgi owners is just a bonus.

Could I have found success with the other agents? Quite possibly. However, by carefully weeding through deeper factors, I was able to hitch my work to an agent who understands both my influences and my future aspirations. I couldn’t have asked for a better fit—and it took a lot of careful consideration to get there.

cross-pollination selling your work

Go monkey, choose monkey.

on October 19, 2014October 19, 2014

Or, yet another way writers earn money besides writing

So, it’s been a while. In addition to the usual hail of deadlines, I’ve been occupied with maintaining websites and blogs and handling related social media activities for other organizations. This has taken up most of the energy I ordinarily siphon from my editing and writing work to pontificate here. Yes, dear friends, I am now officially a web monkey. I’d put that on my business cards (if I had any): writer/editor/monkey.

It’s not a bad gig: it encompasses ghostwriting, a small degree of scheduling expertise (think of it as pacing a narrative), and troubleshooting code (not unlike filling plot holes). In my case, troubleshooting usually means typing questions into a search box or emailing someone more proficient. If you know people like that, proficient coders who haven’t blocked your address yet, be extra nice to them. Bring them cookies.

The hardest part of the monkey gig so far has been extracting information from the owners of the blogs so I can then translate it into welcoming copy and upload it. I have no advice for that. Cookies again?

The best part? That would be surveying my creations and starting each day nerding out about stats. Oh, the other best part? It takes very little time and makes for a nice break between or during book-length editing projects. Let me rephrase: it’s a more lucrative form of avoidance behavior than Buzzfeed.

If you have tolerable WordPress skills, give it a try. Extra income is always good. What’s that you’re thinking? You don’t have tolerable WordPress skills; in fact, WordPress gives you fits? And you were just wishing that some magical fairy monkey with outstanding grammar would appear to help you keep your professional blog or site up to date? Hey, you know where to find me.

cross-pollination selling your work writing

Social Media as Formal Poetry and Other News

on August 18, 2014August 18, 2014

Today, the sun rises on a glorious time here in the Bay Area, a holiday I like to call the first day of school. Today, I lose my unpaid interns to third and fourth grade and gain five hours a day of quiet work time. Gaudeamus igitur and laborare est orare.*

So here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately (and yes, the Latin does enter in). In addition to editing manuscripts and articles, I’ve been picking up odd jobs maintaining website content for others. The most recent of those jobs involves a social media management component, including Twitter.

How can Twitter be an effective social media marketing tool and a source of entertaining and thoughtful content? Well, as one example there’s this guy, who is promoting his book using Twitter, not in the usual way but by releasing a short story one tweet at a time: a free sample in serial form.

I’ve written before about how formal constraints can help a writer focus, so I’m approaching this Twitter thing the way I would take on the task of writing a sonnet: use the rules as scaffolding, not obstacles. A single Twitter resembles haiku, whereas an ongoing feed would be more like an epic poem, or like this (if you like Victorians—seriously, every stanza would fit), or this (for those who prefer the moderns). I may be approaching the task sort of like this.

Digress? Me? Anyway, that’s the challenge that will occupy my quiet hours this fall. Content generation is easy, but how to make it both promotion and poetry? Not obviously either, of course, but delayed reaction poetry, an afterimage that blossoms in the reader’s memory.

* “Let us rejoice” and “to work is to pray.” The organization that has hired me for the tweeting is spiritual in nature—told you there was a reason for the Latin.

selling your work writing

Notes from the Field: Special Fiction Edition

on June 17, 2014June 17, 2014

It’s summer vacation time, which means school’s out and my office hours shift toward the nocturnal because during the day I am surrounded by people who are boooored. What do we do when we’re bored? Read a good book, obviously. Or write one. For those of you struggling with drafts of your fiction, here are the top three problems I run across in novel manuscripts and what to do about them.

1. throat clearing

By this I mean taking the first two or three chapters to find your voice, to really get your story rolling. Guess how long an agent will read a book that doesn’t grab her by the eyeballs in the first paragraph. About as long as it takes to read that first paragraph, possibly less. Skipping the whole agent thing and self-pubbing? Most prospective readers of fiction will give you even less.

This is one of the easiest problems to fix, however. Simply take everything that precedes the scene in which everything starts happening for your main character and delete it. You might have to add a sentence here and there for exposition. That’s it. “But—” No. You don’t need it. Listen to your inner 7-year-old moaning about the second week of summer vacation, and jump right into the action.

2. low stakes

You’ve set up a story, some characters, some situations and obstacles, and everything is going great, except that nobody’s really sure why the MC has to do whatever it is he has to do, or else. Or else what? In a good story, there are stakes clearly outlined in the beginning of the second act, and then, as the action continues, the stakes go up. The screw is turned. Your hero doesn’t have to save the world, but in a way he does. He has to save his world as he knows it or have a fantastic reason to let that world go straight to hell to save someone else’s.

This is a harder fix because if the stakes aren’t there, you’ve got no story. Get it done in your storyboarding/outline stage and save yourself a lot of heartache and liver damage.

3. I hate this guy

A corollary to the one-dimensional hero/villain problem in fiction is the character that is profoundly and thoroughly annoying, so annoying in fact that your annoyance yanks you right out of the story. There’s “Dude, I totally know someone like that,” and “OK, that’s like my old boss, but worse!” and from there you drift uncontrollably into “No! No one is like that, and if anyone were, someone would lock that person in a construction site portable toilet and drop it off a bridge. Into a dry ravine. That’s on fire.”

Go on and write that guy. Get him out of your system. It’s one of the great joys of being a writer: the ability to lambast jerks in print. Then take a few days off and go back and add a little realism, even and especially if you’re working in genre fiction. There is no room in a book worth reading for someone whose sole purpose is to be the human equivalent of a Claymore mine. All your characters need to pull their weight, and none of them should be upstaging the primary movers.

Enjoy the long (so very long) summer days, and when the editor in your head says, “I’m bored! This is boring,” pay attention and do something about it. If you have real live children telling you this, pat them on the head and tell them they’ll make fine literary agents someday.

selling your work

Drinking Muddy Water: Why Your Pitch Isn’t Working

Updated on March 1, 2014March 1, 2014

Recently, for reasons that aren’t important here, I found myself at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco with a gaggle of third-graders (a gaggle is six, if you’re unfamiliar with the imperial system of measurement). One of the most interesting items I saw there was Neil Gaiman’s original pitch to DC for Sandman. And yes, if you’re wondering who goes to the cartoon museum and gets excited about the pages with no drawings on them, that would be me.

Anyway, that made me start thinking about pitches in general and why so many of them are terrible. It’s true, and the simple reason is because authors are so wrapped up in their story, the world they’ve been living in for months or even years, that they can no longer articulate it quickly for anyone else. I think it was in Save the Cat! that the author described pitching screenplay ideas to strangers in line at coffee shops. If their eyes didn’t glaze over after 30 seconds, he knew he had a decent story. This is a great approach if you’re kicking around ideas and haven’t written anything yet.

If you’ve already written your masterpiece and are now trying to get it read by agents, publishers, or anyone other than your mom or your spouse, you need a slightly different approach. It’s fun, it won’t take much effort, and you might discover something about your story that you never knew before. Instead of the standard breathless paragraph embedded in a query letter, try to tell your story in a different format, preferably one with very strict rules.

My personal favorite is the 12-bar blues method, but you can also go with villanelle or sonnet, anything that makes you fit your ideas into a box with a new shape. I like the blues format because the lyrics have a lot of repetition, which can help simplify a complex story, or possibly add nuance to a simple one. Here’s a fine example of the AAB lyric structure, brought to you by the North Mississippi Allstars, who you should be listening to anyway.

[vimeo=http://www.vimeo.com/39640318]

How is this going to make your pitch better? Well, like the coffee-shop method, if you can’t sell yourself your idea using a formal structure, chances are no one else is going to get it either, and that’s usually because there’s a flaw in your story somewhere. You don’t have a solid plot, or you have too many subplots, or you’re not entirely sure who your characters are or what they want. If your story easily flows into a formal poem or song structure, it’s going to translate in any medium. I don’t recommend sending your final pitch to prospective agents in this format, but your ultimate presentation will be stronger for the process, and you may be able to save yourself a lot of revision time with the next project if you create a pitch first.

Give it a try. If you’re feeling noncommittal, by which I mean lazy, use the poetry magnets on your fridge and make a haiku out of your story instead. We all have them. Mine happen to be lolcat magnets, but anything works.

selling your work writing

Under the Gun

Updated on March 1, 2014April 4, 2013

I am taking a break from some writing with a looming deadline (as one does) to write about writing. Fun fact about me: in addition to providing quality editing services to literary and technical professionals, I also pick up some money ghostwriting, mainly chirpy copy for commercial sites. Eh, it pays the bills. OK, so it doesn’t actually pay the bills; it often goes to Trader Joe’s or Etsy, but small treats are important.

I wish making a buck had been covered as part of my MFA curriculum. I’d love to go back to Columbia and teach a course called “What Writers Really Do for Money” (hint: it’s usually not creating brilliant, award-winning masterpieces). Making extra cash is good, but the greatest benefit of taking on this sort of gig is that it makes you a more efficient writer. You no longer have the luxury of crafting the perfect opening line because that sucker is due in two hours, and you haven’t done the research yet. Nothing clears away the blank screen paralysis like deadline-induced panic. Think you can’t run a four-minute mile? Try it with a lion chasing you.

Of course, beating deadlines with minutes to spare provides an endorphin rush, which leads to pushing the next deadline for the mere thrill of it, but that’s a topic for another day. My point, if I can find it, is that routine, mindless, due by close of business day writing not only keeps a person in Belgian chocolate and artisan-crafted lip balm, it limbers up the mind so you can press on through writer’s block, creative ennui, qi blockage, or whatever else is keeping you from starting, continuing, and finishing projects. Many writers and teachers will tell you “Write every day.” I say, make the exercise count for something and write stuff you get paid for every day.

“How on earth do I do that without contacts or experience?” you may be yelling at your screen right now. You get started here, or someplace like it. You’re welcome.