Bloggy bits: March 2008 Archives

Via Gawker, I read an interesting article in the Sunday New York Times about those books which can turn you off a prospective partner.

Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed -- or misguided -- literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante's Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date's taste in books is "actually a pretty good way -- as a sort of first pass -- of getting a sense of someone."

Now, of course the Times has to make it all highbrow and literary, but I think there's something we can take out of this, even if we don't already have strong feelings about Ayn Rand, Samuel Beckett, and Nabokov.

Namely, a question -- how do your prospective partners feel about all that kidlit you've got hanging around? How do you have a serious relationship with the shadows of Harry Potter, Meg Cabot, or Scott Westerfeld lurking about?

I've managed, in Rexroth Implausible, to find someone who enjoys children's books as much as I, and even if he hadn't read a book I raved about, was cool enough to pick up Tithe when I recommended it and fall in love (with me). Plus, we have little Trixie Implausible to read to, so there's copies of all the Pigeon books, and Bossy Bear, and many other great children's books all around the house.

On the flipside, what are YOUR date-book dealbreakers?

The term "fiction novel" ought never to appear in them if you want to be taken seriously as a writer. Ever.

I'm all about different editions of a book showcasing different looks -- I have, after all, over a dozen different copies of the Princess Bride -- most of which are differently-styled English language editions. But I thought this article was a fantastic explanation both of why certain covers exist, and why they eventually change.

The hero or heroine of a typical YA novel is trying to make sense of the world and his or her own place within it, but the physical book is a clearly defined object unto itself. Indeed, it's an accessory, explains Marc Aronson, author of Race and a longtime YA writer and editor. "It has to sit comfortably next to all the other objects in the reader's world, their magazines and clothes and music. It's all about a sense of coolness and intelligence. It's a style -- it's saying, 'We are exactly who you are. This is the world you'll feel comfortable with. Nothing about this book is going to make you feel awkward to carry it and wear it. It's as sleek and cool and as with-it as you are.'"

Spent much of the day running around to various meetings and errands to get stuff done before I temporarily close up the Colorado office and return to the New York office. I'll be back in the Big Apple from Thursday, March 27th through Monday, April 7th. And after that? A week off we like to refer to around here as "gettin' married!"

But before I go off and do all that, I've been thinking about my time AFK -- Away From Keyboard, for those of you not up on your l33tspeak. Now granted, with one computer down here in my office, and another one upstairs in Rexroth's office, it's not too often that I'm all that far away from a keyboard. But occasionally, yes, it happens.

And when it does, I depend on my little silver Motorola Q. You can keep your blackberries, blueberries, and palms. I like my Q. First of all -- its name reminds me of the guy from the Bond movies who makes all the nifty gadgets for 007. Phone + camera + internet browser + music player? Yes, please! If only it also served martinis. What it does let me do, though, is check my email while I'm waiting in line. Browse news feeds while sitting in the passenger seat of the Implausible-mobile. And hear about exciting awards being given to my clients (details when I can release them).

And when I'm running off to lunch with an editor next week in New York, it lets me map the restaurant where we're meeting and find the closest subway.

Genius, I tell you, genius.

Besides your computer, what other high-tech devices help you keep your life in order? What do you swoon for, and what can't you live without?

May asks

I recently wanted to return to one of your older blog posts...only to find that it was no longer on the the blog page. Furthermore, I could not find any links to a blog archive. Is this something you plan to set up in the future?

First of all, May, I'm thrilled you wanted to go back and read one of my posts again. I'm enough of a n00bie professional blogger to love that people are reading and enjoying my posts enough to want to go back and read them again. And speaking of being a n00b -- yes, you're right, there isn't a link to the archive on the main Ask Daphne page.

However, every post has its own individual page, and if you click on any one of the posts on the main page (down at the bottom of each post, on the date/time stamp), it will take you to a permanent link for that post. And on the sidebar of THAT page, you'll find links to the previous post, as well as to the archives. As well, at the bottom of the post, you'll find links to other posts that use the same tags and categories.

It's not the most perfect system, but it's what we have right now. I'll see if Rexroth and I can put some work into making a more obvious link to the archives on the main page.

Being a writer searching for an agent is hard; believe me, I know. You put your manuscript out there and have to wait... and wait... and wait for someone to respond. And even then, you don't know -- will it be loved? Rejected? Critiqued? It's a tough game to play, but I wanted to do my little part to help explain the waiting.

Basically, it's a numbers game; as in: every agent sees a huge number of submissions.

How huge? I'll use myself as an example:

kt literary has been open since February 1st, so that's... thirty-four total business days at the time of this writing. In that time, I have received over one thousand emailed queries -- roughly thirty per day. I'm the only one reading them, so that means I personally need to read those one thousand emails, most of which include a few sample pages -- I suggest three on my website, but assume an average of two page emails. That's two-thousand pages, approximately. (And doesn't include all the emails that come in that aren't queries: contract negotiations, client correspondence and other publisher conversations, for example.)

If I like the look of a query, I'll request five sample chapters, which will average about 40 pages. I currently have over thirty sets of sample chapters in queue to be read -- so let's say 1,200 more pages.

Finally, I have five or more full manuscripts in my Inbox, averaging 250 pages each. Another 1,250 pages.

That's a lot of pages to read! (And every day, there's 30 new submissions added to the list.)

Even if I had someone else to share the initial query reading with (I don't, and never have ¹), if something were spectacular, I'd still need to look at it myself.

So sometimes I -- or any agent -- may take a little longer to look at something than promised. Hopefully, all those numbers will help you understand why, even if that doesn't make the wait much easier.

So thanks to all the writers out there for thinking of me, and thanks for your patience while you play the waiting game.

Now, I'm heading back to my reading chair to make a few more of those numbers shrink.

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¹ - At kt literary, everything gets seen by me, personally. You're not going to get a rejection because an anonymous assistant disliked your letter, or was having a bad day. I'm not saying that's what happens in other agent's offices -- I'm simply promising you that that definitely won't happen here.

There's a pretty interesting blog over on Publishers Weekly about SciFi and Fantasy authors being marketed as teen fiction, and vice versa. The blogger makes a pretty good point that in this regard, buying books on the internet has a clear advantage, as you can search for "YA fiction," or "SciFi", or the author's name, and find everything they write, not just what's shelved in one spot in a bricks and mortar bookstore.

What was interesting to me in this post was her focus on authors who've already specialized. That is -- someone like Charles De Lint who has written a number of fantasy novels for adults, and with Little (Grrl) Lost and his latest, Dingo, was published specifically as YA. Or take Meg Cabot, who made her huge name in YA fiction, and also writes adult novels. Her books always manage to find her readers. (Her fantastic blog certainly helps!)

But what about the author who only has one book? Look at The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. This is the truest cross-over, which was published in multiple editions here and in the UK to appeal to readers of all age ranges. I'm sure tons of authors would LOVE this kind of exposure, but it doesn't happen often. For the rest, they have to be happy with a single edition, and do the best they can in concert with their publicity and marketing team to get the book into the hands of readers of all ages.

What other books can you think of that have benefited from multiple editions for different age ranges (not counting film tie-ins), and which ones do you think should get this treatment? Go at it in the comments!

Care of The Onion:

So let's have some fun, readers. What's the best (i.e. the worst and/or funniest) reasons you've heard or heard about for a book being rejected? Feel free to make up answers!

My inbox seems to be behaving today -- i.e. not too many messages coming in stamped "URGENT!" -- so I've decided to take the rest of the day as a reading day. I had lunch the other day with an editor who works from home a few days a week, who thought that she'd be able to be home for her kids, read, and work, all at the same time, without the commute.

Not so much.

It is possible to get reading done though, but like all good things, requires a bit of sacrifice. She had to tell her publishing colleagues that she was unavailable for calls on her work-at-home days, and suddenly she was able to get a lot more done. My sacrifice? No trolling the internet, catching up on blogs, constantly refreshing my Google reader for more publishing news. No instant messaging. Yes, I'll reply to emails, and I'll answer my phone, but I won't be sitting in my inbox, checking each new message the moment it comes in.

Hopefully, I can get caught up on my partials, respond to some queries, and find some new clients! For those of your who have sent material, who've checked your email against the calendar and realized I've had your chapters or novel for more than my promised month, thanks for your patience.

I have a special place in my heart for superheroes (which goes part of the way towards explaining a forthcoming book coming out by kt literary client Matthew Cody) and so I was eager to read Michael Chabon's recent New Yorker article. Go read for yourself. I'm only on page one so far, but I had to stop and post this:

Superman invented and exhausted his genre in a single bound. All the tropes, all the clichés and conventions, all the possibilities, all the longings and wishes and neuroses that have driven and fed and burdened the superhero comic during the past seventy years were implied by and contained within that little red rocket ship hurtling toward Earth.

The article loses me a little as it gets into a discussion of costumes, but what I want to talk about here is this question of genre.

Writers so often ask about trends, and the question of what's hot and how to write to that, but Chabon intuits another way around that question. If the syllogism is that Superman created the genre, but there are other superheroes, how else can we write that sentence, and what can we learn from it?

Does "Buffy created the genre, but there are other vampire slayers" work? How about "The Lord of the Rings created the genre, but there are other fantasy epics"? What else? After Buffy and LOTR, do other examples of their genre only come off as cliché? Discuss!

While my office isn't quite this bad, even though I was on email all day for the last few days, it still feels like there's a bit of a pile-up now that I'm back. Certainly in terms of the cardboard boxes around here, which now that I've almost completely unpacked, all need to go out and be recycled. Of course there's always more, but we wouldn't have it any other way, would we?

Stay tuned for some exciting news about another kt literary author. In the meantime, I'll just say that some of the piles on my desk are contracts. Whee!