Prime Real Estate…

The Boston Book Festival was yesterday, and I must admit I’ve become hooked on Writer’s Idol. This year the panel was much less brutal than last year (I was not the only person to comment on this), but there were two interesting themes in their comments I thought I would share:

• This year, description seemed to be the item that the panel focused on. Not that authors used too much or too little, but rather that most of the descriptions were bland. One of the panelists, Esmond Harmsworth of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth, noted that you don’t want to describe a place the way you see it, but rather as a “68-year-old Croatian refugee” sees it. In short, you want to your descriptions to reflect your character’s personality, which is far more likely to make descriptions interesting.
• One of the entries said the genre was “Paranormal Historical Comedy,” and all the panelists rolled their eyes at that one. I can understand why. As a publisher, I have to assign a set of BISAC codes to every book we publish; these codes tell bookstores where to place the book in stores. If you check the BISAC code list, you’ll notice “paranormal historical comedy” does not have a code (and probably never will). The lesson is that you should not be overly creative in describing the genre of your work in your query – an agent or publisher will be less likely to make it through your query if the question sitting in the back of their head is “Does this cross-genre work really have a market” or “Just where would a bookstore shelve this work?”

I must admit my “I get it” moment about Writer’s Idol came during another session on the future of publishing. A woman asked a question about downloading samples on her Kindle. It occurred to me that this is what most people probably do now; once they’ve “discovered” a book (either through recommendations or by other means), the first thing they are likely to do is download a sample of the book. It used to be that to sample a book required going to the library or bookstore, but now it can be done right from your computer or smart phone. This probably means that more people are sampling books before they buy them than in the past. Thus, in a digital age, the first few pages of your manuscript really are prime real estate – they are the words that will make a person buy your book or move on to the next recommendation. While I consider Writer’s Idol to be entertaining, I also think it serves to remind authors just how important their choice of the first 250 words in their manuscript is.

Biblical Word Counts…

I ask readers this week to bear with me while I share some statistics from the site King James Bible Statistics. I promise this is going someplace:

• Total words in the Bible (KJV): 788,280
• Total words in the Old Testament (KJV): 609,269
• Total words in the New Testament (KJV): 179,011
• Total words in the four Gospels: 82,590

Why am I sharing these numbers? Simple. This week we received an “alternative interpretation” of the history surrounding a famous African leader. Total word count: approximately 551,000 words. That’s right – the manuscript was almost as long as the Old Testament. While there is a part of me that applauds someone for being able to write this many words on a single topic, another part of me is asking what was this author thinking?

I’ve commented before on the fact that there are reasons most publishers have word count guidelines. The first has to do with the cost associated with printing a book. A publisher is less likely to take a chance on a 150,000 word manuscript by a new author than an 80,000 word manuscript by the same author simply because of the cost associated with printing the book. But the other reason is that people have a finite attention span (which is dependent on age) and expect books to be a certain length depending on genre. This is one of the reasons Young Adult books can be as short as 50,000 words, while Science Fiction tends to be upwards of 100,000 words or more – it’s what readers of these genres have come to expect.

So before you submit your 150,000-175,000 word manuscript for review to a publisher, ask yourself a simple question: If the story of Jesus Christ could be told in 82,590 words, does your manuscript really need to be as long as the New Testament…

What’s in a name…

My wife had always loved the name Samantha, in part because “Sami” would be the girl’s nickname – complete with an i at the end. So when our daughter was born we named her Samantha Lynn. We always call her Sami, and always spelled it with an i. When Sami was three she had learned to spell her name – complete with the i at the end. She was so proud she was telling everyone we met. At a restaurant one night she was telling the server, who responded, “Hey, I’m Sammy too. I spell it with a y because I liked to have a squiggle at the end.”

On that night, Samantha decided a squiggle at the end of her name sounded too cool for words, and Sami was no more. She became Sammy, complete with her squiggle, and there was nothing the original authors of her epic tale could do about it.

Character names are very important in novels because they are often the first glimpse a reader gets of a character. First impressions really are everything. A southern belle with a Chinese name or an action heroine named Gertrude will seem out of place unless the author takes the time to explain why the character has an atypical name for the setting. An alien or magical being with a complex name will become a distraction to a reader unless, like Samantha, the character is given a nickname. If a reader finds a character’s name to be a distraction each time they encounter the it, either because they wonder where the name came from or skip over it because they can’t pronounce it, there is a good possibility they will enjoy the book less.

A lot of thought went into selecting the name for our publishing company. I wanted a name that was unique (so it would be remembered) yet sophisticated – Bootlegged Whipped Cream Press would have certainly been unique, but would people have taken it seriously? At the time, I also wanted to focus on publishing social and political commentary. Divertir is French for “to amuse and entertain,” so it was a perfect fit. Even as we moved away from our original plans by publishing new-author fiction, because our goal is still to produce books that amuse, entertain, inform, and maybe even inspire, the name is still a good fit.

This is not to say you can’t have some fun with character names. Sarah can become Sadie as she starts a new adventure in life (or death), and the self-important Jonathan can become irritated when your sympathetic antagonist calls him Johnny as a way of emphasizing the fact that Jonathan has a bit of an ego. But the names of your characters deserve as much thought as the names of your own children, because they are your children and the names you give them will follow them forever – even when they decide to spell them differently.

Bad Ken, No Biscuit…

A few weeks ago I received a letter from a copy editing service. It was obvious from the email that the sender did not speak English as a first language (although they claim to have “college educated Americans” doing their editing). Normally I just delete emails like this one, but something about the complete lack of copy editing in an email selling copy editing services set me off. I decided to respond to the email in the only way I thought appropriate – I edited it and sent it back. Below is the letter (my additions are in red, while my comments are in braces):

Hello there [This is a pretty informal opening for a business letter]. My name is [Name removed], and I am in charge of the american American online proofreading service for online proofreaders known as the [Either “the” is part of the name and needs to be capitalized, or it is not part of the name and should be left out after “as”] [Company name removed]. Every editor we have on staff is college educated and has at least 5 years of experience with copyediting. Try us and you wont won’t regret it. We not only do proofreading, but we can also do complete rewording of articles.

Make your content count with our professional proofreading and editing services [You offer more than one service] and capture the hearts, minds, and money of your readers. We can help you do this by making sure your content is the best. Possibly the first proofreading and content editing service for internet marketers [You’re not sure about being first? Try Google...], [Company name removed] is here to help. Our stuff staff consists of college-educated Americans [I’m assuming your “stuff” is, in fact, neither college educated nor American...] who have a passion for the written word.

[I’m bored – Perhaps your staff of college-educated American proofreaders can help you find the remaining errors.]

You might be wondering why I decided to share this. Is it that I truly am nothing more than a “Tool of the Publishing Elite” who derives pleasure from crushing the dreams of others? Is it that I’m trying to show I have a sense of humor (or completely lack one)? While these would be good guesses, they would not be correct. My reason for sharing the above is that this is often how I’m reading your query letters – I’m editing them in my head as I read (I know, I need to get out more). And just as the above letter tells me a lot about the editing services offered by this company, a poorly written query letter tells me a lot about an author.

In short, the best way to ensure that I actually read your synopsis and sample chapters  is not to send a query letter that makes me want to edit it as my response.

On Memoirs…

In any given week, Divertir Publishing receives 25-40 queries. Lately I’ve noticed that 2-5 of these weekly queries are for memoirs. I suspect this is in part because one of our more successful books, Tears for the Mountain, is the account of an author’s trip to Haiti after the earthquake to deliver medical supplies (the book hit #1 for the Social Policy category on Amazon when it first came out). I also suspect it’s in part because authors are advised to “write what they know,” so more authors have turned to writing memoirs.

Because of the number of memoirs we receive each week, I tend to be very selective regarding what I will forward to others for review. When considering memoirs I look for the following:

• Have I heard the story before? I know that everyone thinks their life story is unique, but the truth is there are a lot of people who overcome addiction (and who don’t), who graduate from college and move back in with their parents because of the economic climate, who see ghosts and UFOs, who think they’re vampires (seriously), and who think a “universal force” has guided them to be where they are in life. If there isn’t something unique about a memoir, chances are I will not make it past reading the synopsis.
• Is the story engaging? I hate to admit this, but I have pretty boring life – there are nights my life makes CSPAN look exciting. If your story makes a reader long to watch parliamentary proceedings, you’ll lose the reader and never get them back; there are too many other forms of entertainment out there. I recently received two memoirs where, because of all the back story at the beginning of the manuscripts, I never made it to what was supposed to be the interesting part – and most readers won’t either.
• Does the author whine? The sad truth is that sometimes people find themselves in less-than-perfect situations. It’s how they react to these situations that says something about who they are. Did the author act as an inspiration to others, or did they pitch a tent in Dewey Square and protest how unfair the world is? In case it’s not obvious, I’m much more likely to publish the manuscript by the person whose words inspire others.
• Is it well written? Because of the large number of people writing memoirs, a manuscript is going to stand out only if it’s very well written and polished.

I recently asked an author I know to review a query for a memoir. While I won’t go into the details of her review, one of her comments was “What makes the author stand out?” It’s a fair question, and unless an authors tells a story I haven’t heard a hundred times before in an engaging way with a well written manuscript, chances are the author won’t stand out. That is, unless they pitch a tent in Dewey Square and protest how unfair Tools of the Publishing Elite can be – in which case they’ll be “unique” for all the wrong reasons.