A Manuscript Checkup: Are You Really Ready to Query?

I sometimes hear of querying authors lamenting the decline of “editorial” agents. In truth, all agents are editors of their projects. It just depends on where along a manuscript’s evolution do they want to jump in. What these authors aren’t realizing is that they might be looking for representation too early in their writing process. Most agents look for a project in its later stages or last stage of development. And the reason is simple and practical. The sooner an agent can get a project in front of editors, the sooner (hopefully) he can see a paycheck. If he’s very lucky, he might find a project that only needs one round of editing, but most likely, that one round of editing will uncover the need to do more.

I’ve been working on a client’s book project for over the last month. This is my third time going through the manuscript for this editing round. I’m fairly sure this is either my fifth or sixth time reading the novel. One thing is certain, though. I loved this story the first time I read it, and I love it more now. It’s true that with each edit and revision, the manuscript improves. But it’s more than that. While I could see issues when I first read the story, I could also clearly see solutions. And now that the changes are on the page, the story is better than I first imagined it could be.  

Often I'll get submissions that are so early in their development that I cannot even begin to unravel their issues, much less envision solutions. Those novels, while "completed," are not "market-ready.” Occasionally, time permitting, I’m able to send feedback. When I do, I am struck by how often the same recommendations come up.

Even after countless rejections, some authors may still find it easier to keep querying and keep submitting rather than go back into their novels to fix what is not working. Often it’s because they’re too close to the work and can no longer see problems in it. Some do see or sense there are issues but are unable to pinpoint them or don’t know how to solve them, or where to start.

I have put together some questions that you can use as a checklist to see if you should start or keep querying, or use them to jumpstart your next revision:

1. Are the stakes clearly defined within the first few paragraphs, or at least within the first chapter?
2. Are the scenes grounded with specific and unique details that make them tangible and immersive?
3. Do the main characters have inner lives with complex thoughts, reflections, memories, etc.? Even if they do not reveal their fears, faults and vulnerabilities to the outside world, do they let us in to see them?
4. Do we have context to the main character(s) emotional journey? Is there a personal journey at all?
5. Can we clearly envision distinct physical features of the characters that also reveal their unique personalities (or do we only see their hair and eyes)?

If you have answered “no” to any of the above questions, then this could be why you are receiving rejections or no responses at all.

Keep going through your manuscript, asking the next questions:

1. Is there an over-reliance or repetition of facial movement or expressions to portray emotions, such as “sighing,” “grimacing,” “groaning,” and “cringing”?
2. Are there large blocks of dialogue where nothing else is happening in the scene, or it is unclear what the characters are physically doing during the conversation?
3. Is there a lot of expository information (explanation of background, characters,  ground situation, etc.) revealed through dialogue?
4. Are there words, phrases, gestures, physical sensations that are used commonly or repetitively (such as “heart pounding” or “pulse racing”)?
5. Is there filtering language? (for example, a character sees something happening rather it just happens on the page, or rather than saying the thought, the character’s “sees it through his mind’s eye”)

If you have answered "yes" to any of these last questions, it appears, you have some work ahead of you.

Hopefully by going through these questions, you'll have a better perspective on your manuscript, and be in a better place to decide whether or not you should keep querying or look at revising. These questions also aim to provoke ideas on ways to tell your story better, so that the next time you query, there’ll be an agent or editor who not only falls in love with it, she’ll love it more each time she reads it.

Curb Your Insecurity: Tips on Good Submission Etiquette

There are plenty of querying and publishing “how-to’s” that provide authors with great information about how to find, query and submit to an agent. What is not always so clear is what you should do after your manuscript has been submitted to prospective literary agents. Waiting is often the hardest part of the submission process. That is the time when insecurity can rear its ugly head, and authors may suddenly feel that they must do something, but what they do is actually worse than not doing anything.

First, I’d like to clear up a misperception about literary agents. It is often said literary agents are in the business not for the money but because they love what they are doing. That is certainly true. While some agents are lucky enough to work at an agency that provides a salary, quite a number of us only see a paycheck after we’ve sold a book. And while we love what we are doing, this should not be construed as we are working or willing to work for free.

Consider the concept, time = money. The time we spend on book projects – whether it is combing through slush piles, reading submissions, providing edits to a client, or any number of activities we must undertake to sell a book – is considered our “capital” investment in our business.  And let’s face it, publishing, which includes agenting, is a business. Many authors, especially debut authors, write their novels while maintaining a job that pays the bills. Their writing activity may be viewed as a “hobby,” since they are not compensated for it, which in turn, makes it easy to mistake an agent’s job for his or her “hobby” as well. After all, it looks like we’re doing it for free. But since time is our investment, it is a very precious, limited commodity for agents. We have to be selective on what to invest our time on. So as an author looking for representation, you should be mindful of an agent’s time. If not, you risk putting your foot in your mouth, or worse, shooting yourself in the foot.

To help you avoid doing either, I’ve put together the following ten tips for good submission etiquette:

1. Don’t “shotgun” your submission. In other words, don’t simply send out your submission to a large number of random agents, hoping to ensure some positive responses. This wastes both your and the agents’ time.  You’ll have more success and make a more favorable impression by doing your research to make sure the agents you are approaching are appropriate for your project.  
   
   
   
   
   
2. Really follow submission guidelines and how the agent wants to be contacted. And if an agent isn’t accepting unsolicited submissions, don’t discount or ignore this by querying anyway. It shows disrespect and, at the very least, that you can’t follow directions, which is a red flag. It hints at a potential difficulty you might have in taking editing directions.
   
   
3. Don’t “nudge” or follow up on your submission too soon. I once received a follow up from an author after only 2 weeks. Don’t be surprised if you don’t get an answer. You might even get a response shortly after, passing on your book. Why? It could be that the agent happened to get to your submission, and it was just a coincidence. Or it could be that the agent decided it was better to let it go, since you seemed to need an answer so quickly. Or it could mean that alarm bells went off, and the agent wondered if you are impatient now, what happens once he takes on your project? 
   
   
   
   
   
4. Wait at least 3-4 months before your follow-up on your query or submission. Please believe me when I say it takes a lot of time to go through submissions. At Kimberley Cameron & Associates, we look at every submission. It may be as little as 10 pages or as many as 50, but our agency policy is to give each of them thoughtful consideration. And our agents are required to answer every one of them, whether in a form letter or a personal note, which adds even more time.
   
   
5. Don’t make demands either in your query or follow-up, whether it’s for a specific time frame to respond or confirmation that your submission was received. It raises a big red flag and shows a  lack of respect for the agent’s time. Consider how many submissions an agent receives in a day or a week. For some, it may be a dozen, while others, it’s several hundred. If you think they’re slow to respond now, imagine how much longer it would be if agents had to also confirm receipt of submissions to authors.
   
   
   
   
   
6. Don’t burn bridges by responding to an agent who passed on your project with a defensive retort or ask for editorial suggestions. If suggestions are provided, consider yourself among the fortunate. It means that the agent was willing to spend some her capital to help you out, so take those suggestions to heart. If you respond defensively, it not only makes you look unprofessional, it pretty much ends any potential for future contact, which you may regret after you’ve done a major revision or written another book.
   
   
7. If general comments, or reasons why your project was passed on, are offered, don’t respond requesting detailed editorial recommendations, or worse, request a copy of your manuscript back with the agent’s notes.
   
   
   
   
   
8. Notify agents only when you have been offered representation. There is no need to let us now that you’ve submitted to other agents (this is pretty much assumed) or when other agents request full manuscripts.  
   
   
9. Be honest about your intentions. When you are offered representation, it is perfectly acceptable to ask for time to notify other agents, just be honest about it and your intentions for doing so. One author I offered representation to told me that she had every intention of signing with me, only to find out she’d been using my offer to leverage offers from other agents. She kept me hanging on until she secured her “dream” agent.





10. Be professional on social media and don’t solicit or pitch agents by commenting on posts or tweeting at them unless it’s part of an organized contest, pitch party or other social media event. Along those same lines, don’t post a comment or tweet to an agent to nudge, request confirmation your submission was received, or ask when to expect a response on your submission. 

While practicing good submission etiquette will not guarantee you'll get an offer, it might help your submission hang in there a little longer. For agents, it is often easier to avoid a potential problem simply by passing. At the same time, by demonstrating professionalism and respect for an agent's time and efforts, you'll make it that much easier for an agent to take your submission to the next step.

One Literary Agent’s Perspective on Twitter Pitch Parties

I must seem like a glutton for punishment. I participated in the last three Twitter pitch parties (#kidpit, #pitmad and #sffpit) and I’m gearing up for the one (#writepit) coming up this Friday. As a newer agent, you might wonder why I’ve chosen this route to find authors rather than being open to unsolicited submissions. Part of my reasoning comes from being a slush pile reader. In the year and a half I waded through hundreds, if not thousands, of submissions, I can count on one hand how many book projects I recommended to agents. In the last two months, after participating in the last three pitch parties, I have already found a couple of talented authors with interesting book projects I want to represent.

Twitter pitch parties have proven more effective, because they help match up an agent’s taste to an author’s book. I’m more likely favorite a tweet if the pitch resonates with me. They are also a better way of targeting the kinds of projects what we’d like to represent. For example. while several agents at Kimberley Cameron & Associates represent science fiction/fantasy, our individual preferences within that genre vary widely. One of my colleagues might be looking for a high fantasy or a space opera, while another might prefer an urban fantasy or a cyberpunk adventure.

There are excellent articles online about how to pitch on Twitter pitch parties. One of them from our own Relentless Writer, Janet Wren. My intent is not to rehash that information but instead offer suggestions from an agent’s perspective. And I fully admit these suggestions are influenced by my personal preferences:

• Your pitch needs to have a strong hook. It should pull us in and make us interested in reading more. It should not, however, be a summary of the story or the plot. It should contain tantalizing details that reveal story or plot, but that’s not the focus. The focus is to make us stop scrolling and take notice.
• Show the main character’s personal stakes. Personal stakes help create that emotional connection with your story. 
• Include the external conflict without eclipsing the personal stakes. It should, in fact, heighten the personal stakes.

I favorited James Matlack Raney's Twitter pitches, because they employ these three ideas very effectively:

When an army of wolves descends upon the GrayWoods, a lame runt must rise above his place and lead his siblings to sanctuary #MG #Kidpit 

Wolves. Magic. An army bent on revenge. A lame runt and his family must risk everything to survive. The Lord of the Wolves. #Pitmad #MG 

--James Matlack Raney (@JMRaneyWriter)

• Avoid being vague or abstract. The principles of craft still apply, even in pitches, and specificity is always more effective. Like James Matlack Raney’s pitches, limit the amount of detail and use targeted detail that raises questions. 
• Be careful not to use overused phrases, clichés or generalizations. For example, a pitch that reads: “She had to face the darkness in her soul” won’t entice me to request a submission. It also makes me suspect that’s this is the kind of writing I’d find in the novel, which I wouldn’t be interested in reading.
• Just like in your stories, be careful with using questions to create artificial suspense. Pitches like, “What do you do if your marriage was a lie?” are much less effective than using short declarative sentences with tantalizing details.
• Differ your pitches in more ways than just switching around a word or two. Vary the two tweets allowed per hour to reveal more about the story, although each must stand on its own. I can't speak for other agents or editors, but I’ll check the author’s feed to read all of his or her pitches. For example, the reason why I requested a submission from Michelle Barry isn’t because of just one of her tweets. It was actually the culmination of her tweets that made me favorite one:

Flowers have been extinct on the moon since the Old World collapsed, until Myra reawakens their magic #KidPit MG Secret Garden Retelling

When Myra unlocks a lab full of forbidden flowers she also releases a secret magic within her. #KidPit MG SF/F The Secret Garden retelling

--Michelle Barry (@MichelleABarry)

• This brings me to my next suggestion, which some authors may not agree with: Don’t retweet so much during the pitch period. I understand you want to support your fellow authors, and there is nothing wrong about tweeting your friends’ pitches or pitches that you find interesting. But when you flood your feed with retweets of others’ pitches, you can actually end up obscuring your own pitches from agents who might be checking out your feed for the other pitches you tweeted.
• Make sure you tweet more than once or twice during the 12-hour pitch party. Most authors have no problem taking advantage of two pitches per hour, but a small number only tweet one or two pitches the entire day. These pitches are often missed because they're sandwiched between thousands of repeating tweets (#Pitmad had almost 50,000 tweets!). 

Lastly, my last two suggestions are more requests:

• Unless you are pitching a picture book, do not include illustrations, pictures, gifs, video, etc. of what you envision for the book cover, characters, world, etc. Better to leave that to our imagination. Your words have a more powerful impact. (Also, my eyes are looking for words not pictures, and since spam tweets usually include some image or graphic, I'll scroll past without thinking, much less reading.)
• Do not pitch or promote your self-published book. First of all, it's fruitless to pitch, because agents and editors simply won't consider the book. Second, such tweets clogs up the feed and obscure the pitches by unpublished authors who are seriously looking for representation.

As you work and rework your pitches, keep these suggestions in mind. Your work will not go unnoticed and eventually you'll start getting stars from more agents and editors. If not at first, just keep at it; keep honing your pitches. All your efforts, no matter how big or small, will bring you even closer to finding a home for your book.