kt literary

I had to take a few days off last week to take care of Beau, who was home from daycare feeling poorly, as well as entertaining my sister who was in town to help celebrate his first birthday. But the good news for my authors kept pouring in! Like this email for Lili Wilkinson:

We are pleased to announce that the Amelia Bloomer Project selected Pink as one of the titles to be honored this year on the Amelia Bloomer List. Each year the Amelia Bloomer List selects the best books with significant feminist content that will appeal to young readers from birth to 18 years old, published in the previous 18 months.

The Amelia Bloomer Project is part of the American Library Association, Social Responsibilities Round Table’s (SRRT) Feminist Task Force (FTF). You can find out more about the Amelia Bloomer Project at http://ameliabloomer.wordpress.com/ and view the complete list of recommended titles at http://ameliabloomer.wordpress.com/2012-bloomer-list/.

Thank you for writing Pink. We found it to be a story of evolving self-awareness and personal transformation.

Pink was also selected for the 2012 Rainbow List, selected by a joint task force of the Social Responsibilities Round Table and the Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Queer Round Table of the American Library Association.

Hooray for Lili, and for Pink!

It’s a week of huzzahs around here! YALSA announced some further lists today, including their 2012 Best Fiction for Young Adults list (plus Top Ten), Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Readers, and Popular Paperbacks for Young Readers. Congrats to kt literary clients Maureen Johnson, Stephanie Perkins, Ransom Riggs, Carrie Harris, and Lili Wilkinson (again) for making the lists!

A belated, but VERY happy congratulations to Lili Wilkinson, whose novel Pink won a Stonewall Honor at yesterday’s Youth Media Awards given out by the American Library Association! I was in the audience when it was announced, and I will not lie, I did my happy dance.

The Stonewall Award is “given annually to English-language children’s and young adult books of exceptional merit relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender experience”, and we’re thrilled that they included Pink on the Honor list. For the complete list of winners, check out the ALA’s press release.

In other news, congrats to Maureen Johnson, whose The Name of the Star was nominated for an Edgar Award for Young Adult. Woot!

And finally, Matthew Cody picked a winner for the signed copy of The Dead Gentleman I’m giving away. And the winner is… @theoriginaledi! Edi, send me an email with your mailing address, and I’ll get Matt to sign a copy for you! Add a comment below if you’d like any specific personalized message.

Congrats to ALL the winners!

I’m a day late, but I wanted to devote an entire day to celebrate the release of Julia Karr’s second novel Truth, the sequel to XVI. And tonight is, after all, her official launch party in Bloomington, IN.

Julia’s colleague on the League of Extraordinary Writers and author of Ashfall, Mike Mullin writes:

Julia’s accomplished the nigh-impossible—writing a sequel that’s even better than her excellent debut. [...] Julia achieves this feat by deepening and complicating Nina’s story. In XVI, sex is a threat that looms with Nina’s sixteenth birthday—when her dystopian society will literally brand her a sex-teen. In Truth, sex is something to be both feared and enjoyed, making Nina’s inner struggle more complex and relatable. Similarly, the world-building deepens in Truth—we learn how the Governing Council formed—and as a consequence the book feels even more plausible than XVI.

I couldn’t agree more!

If you can’t make it to Bloomington tonight, you can check out Julia’s virtual online launch, complete with question and answer session!

I look forward to hearing more good news about Truth soon!

Let me be perfectly clear: in a query, you have ONE PAGE to hook my attention. One page to tell me enough about your book that I want to scan down to the end of your letter to read the three pages from your novel that I’ve requested you attach. Three pages that I will never even look at it if your query doesn’t intrigue me. And if I don’t love those three pages, I’ll never ask for the first five chapters, let alone the whole manuscript.

But it all comes down to one page.

I’m reminding you all of this (though my readers are the least likely folks to actually need this reminder) because of a trend I came across in some recent queries: letters with a very rough, almost generic description of the book being queried, possibly a paragraph on the theme, and a couple more sentence or paragraphs on the writer, and why they had to tell this story, or why their experience makes them the “best possible” author for this book. You know what’s missing? Anything that would intrigue me about the story.

In all seriousness, I read a query for a novel with an intriguing premise, but the letter itself told me absolutely nothing about the characters — no names, no descriptions, nothing. Manuscripts that sell aren’t just about settings — The Hunger Games isn’t an international bestseller and soon-to-be-bluckbuster movie because people are intrigued by Panem. No, they love Katniss, and have divided themselves up into Team Peeta or Team Gale. Without them, it’s just a country. It’s just an arena — empty and void of any reason to tune in, to turn the page.

You may introduce the next Jay Gatsby on page one of your manuscript, but if you don’t give me a reason to scan down, I’ll never meet him. And while that may be my loss, it’s also yours, because I know I’m not the only agent who feels like this.

Hook ‘em (us) with a filler one-page query, and we’ll beg to read more.

Matthew Cody’s The Dead Gentleman continues to earn some fantastic reviews since its initial publication just before the holidays, like this one, from the February 1st issue of Booklist:

Two young New Yorkers from different eras unite to save the world from an invasion of zombies led by an elegant, corpse-wearing darkling. Shuttling among worlds, times, and points of view, Cody chronicles the recruitment of Tommy, a street urchin from 1901, into a wormhole-traveling Explorer’s Society menaced by the powerful and mysterious Dead Gentleman. Guided by a device that can peer through time, Tommy contacts 12-year-old Jezebel a century into his future and tasks her with protecting an enigmatic clockwork bird that holds the key to the Gentleman’s ability to conquer our planet. Despite all the quick changes and fortuitous coincidences, readers will enjoy watching the two quarreling protagonists take on zombies and other creepy-crawlies on the way to a fiery, if inconclusive, air battle over the Hudson River. Chucking in elements of steampunk, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs along with vampires, three-armed aliens, inscrutable monks, closet monsters, and even dinosaurs, Cody pays tribute to classic adventure authors and genres here as he dishes up an exciting time-travel tale.

I’d love to share a personally autographed copy of The Dead Gentleman with one of you. For a chance to win, just leave a comment below with a brief description of where you would go if you could travel anywhere in time (past, present, or future) or space (alternate worlds, ahoy!). I’ll pick one winner on Monday after I return from ALA Midwinter.

EDITED TO ADD: As per his comment below, Matt’s upped the stakes and offered to sign the winner’s copy!

Last week was awesome. I reopened to queries, and every day, I carved out a little time in the afternoon to go through that day’s batch of email. It was fantastic! I was so on top of things! And then…

One day, I didn’t have any time in the afternoon, so I told myself I’d get to the queries the next day. But the next day there were more. And then it was the weekend, and even more came in. And suddenly, there’s a growing pile waiting to be read.

So readers, learn from my mistake. Don’t let it all get away from you. Don’t let the little things build up and build up until they become an avalanche of a to-do list.

If you’re a writer who’s done NaNoWriMo, you know how this works — do a little bit each day and you’ll finish the month with a novel. No one expects you to write 50,000 words on November 30th. Just as no one expects the Great American Novel or a New York Times bestseller from you the first time you put pen to paper.

It takes time, and constant pecking away at the To-Do list. Constant revision and rewriting and editing, and sometimes, throwing it all out and starting again. But it’s still progress.

And you can do it, one step at a time.

I got pinged on Twitter this morning by @ErraticArtist who asked:

Is there any time you would recommend an author using a pseudonym? I ask because my own name is quite clunky.

And I thought — what a great subject for a blog post! (Mostly because I was in the middle of an early lunch and reading a partial, but also because it was worthy of a more than 140-character answer.)

To my mind, having a weird, unusual, or “clunky” name are the wrong reasons to use a pseudonym. In fact, having an unusual or weird name can totally work in your favor! The more your name stands out, the more unique it is, the less likely a reader or fan is going to confuse you with another author. If it’s clunky, you may have to spend some time teaching readers and fans how to pronounce your name, but you may have to do that with a pen name, too!

In seeking out an image for this post, I came across this article from USA Today, with some authors’ reasons for going with pen names over their own names. For the Brontes, it was about hiding the fact that they were women. For Mark Twain, it was just another joke.

Nowadays, most female authors don’t feel the need to hide their sex behind a masculine mask, but maybe, like Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), you don’t want your fiction impinging on your real life, or your career.

And maybe you’ve already developed a following in one career, or one genre, and don’t wish to confuse matters by using the same name in a vastly different one. E. Lockhart, who writes amazing, award-winning YA novels such as The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, is also the author of a number of picture books, books for young readers, and adult books as Emily Jenkins. I know other authors who use pen names to protect their private life or family, or because they didn’t want their young readers to seek out their bodice rippers. For instance.

If you are going to use a pseudonym, it’s something I recommend you develop early, and be prepared to use far and widely to help build name recognition. If you’ve been blogging for years under one name — or tweeting, or tumblring, or whatever — you already know the amount of work you have to put into building another persona. And trust me, I know what I’m talking about — did you come here to read the blog of Kate Testerman, or Daphne Unfeasible? I’ve actually been Daphne LONGER than I’ve been Kate Testerman, and I regularly get queries addressed to Daphne, not Kate.

When you’re ready to build a second audience, or are just developing your first online persona, make sure you research your possible pen name before you settle on it. Google it, and make sure you’re not already the author of Amazon’s top five erotic romances, or an expert on dog grooming, or a war criminal. (Do you want to spend the rest of your writing career explaining how you’ve never been indicted by the Hague?)

Either way, good luck!

As I’m looking at queries, I’m coming across a lot of details in book descriptions that seem rushed, like so:

“She is helped in her efforts by a brooding vampire with a soul, a lesbian witch, a former vengeance demon, a British librarian, a platinum blonde vampire with a chip in his head, and a teenage little sister who used to be a mystical key.”

Yes, it’s accurate, but it also feels like you’re throwing everything at the reader in one fell swoop. In this case, wouldn’t it be simpler and just as correct to say “She is helped in her efforts by her own personal Scooby Gang”? Ok, maybe not that exact phrase, but look at how many words you save!

In queries, you don’t have a lot of room to detail the entire plot of a book, and you shouldn’t — you should concentrate on the important plot points that would compel a reader to pick up the whole thing. So you wouldn’t go into the full details of Buffy’s seven seasons of efforts to combat the forces of the Hellmouth, you’d sum it up as “One girl in all the world, with the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness.” That gives you more time to spell out her sense of humor, her quips, her keen fashion sense — to tell the reader more about what makes that character unique.

If you’re feeling like you need to use a list like the example above to get everything in you need to say, consider just leaving it all out. After all, the last thing you want is for an agent to get so turned around by a long series of clauses, they just say no.

In preparation for reopening to queries on Monday the 9th, I thought it might be worthwhile to put up a little more detail of what I’m looking for in manuscripts to represent — and just as importantly, what I don’t care to see more of.

In general, I’m open to young adult and middle grade fiction only. Not adult political thrillers, not memoirs, not self-help books, not cozy mysteries, not economic treatises.

However, within MG or YA, I love thrillers, mysteries, romance, science fiction, fantasy — just about anything in terms of genre! What I am tired of seeing, or what would need to be truly, stunningly, absolutely exceptional to catch my eye, is anything with vampires, werewolves, guardian angels, or ghosts. I’ve also talked before about my distaste for books about chosen ones and destiny as the main plot device, and I’ll add to that an unlikeliness to love a traditional high fantasy quest novel — aka, anything I could play out as a D&D campaign. Do your characters all meet up in a tavern on their way to seek a unique item that will help them defeat a big bad? Let me roll up my elven hunter, but please don’t expect me to offer representation. Which is, of course, not to say that great books don’t exist out there that fit those descriptions, but a) they already exist, and b) they’re just not for me at this time.

I don’t want to see queries about absolutely boring or “normal” people that nothing interesting ever happens to, until the one time it does. Make me care about your characters — or hate them — from the first line of your query, but don’t let me be ambivalent.

So what DO I want to see? I remain interested in finding a great YA novel about a teen professional athlete — something like a gymnast or figure skater, not a team player, who has to juggle being a teen with the rigors of their professional life. I’m also intrigued by the idea of book about a teen parent, so try me if you have one of those. But I’m always interested in great characters living interesting lives and doing cool things, written well, so if you have that, send it my way!

I’ve been lucky enough in the past to get some of the books I’ve asked for — like MG boy books, or YA science fiction — so I hope this proves as helpful to you in directing your queries as it may prove beneficial to us at some point in the future!