Fall on the Blog

October 12, 2011 in Site Stuff | 17 comments

Hey readers! Sorry to skimp on the craft or industry post today, but I wanted to reach out and do some housekeeping. Thanks so much for all your comments and reads and questions and giveaway entries, as usual. I am so proud and happy to have such a loyal readership!

This fall, I’m embarking upon a bit of an adventure: in two weeks, I will be in Japan, and a little more than a week after that, Hong Kong. This trip is made possible by the amazing SCBWI organization and their international chapters, which are bringing me overseas to talk to their members. Holly, Mio, and the rest of the SCBWI: thank you so much for the opportunity of a lifetime!

Since it’s not every day that you’re invited to speak in such amazing places, I am making the most of my trip and taking about sixteen days to travel and explore. I’ll schedule blog posts for the entire trip — no worries there, it’s like I never left my apartment — but I won’t be able to moderate comments with any regularity.

You’ll still get Twitter and Facebook updates about new posts and featured content from the archives, but I won’t be able to check in via social networking much because I’ll be making the most of my travels and spending as little time online as possible. Email questions will also, as you can guess, go on the back burner.

That said, I should have some great articles for you in the pipeline, including an interview with a rogue author/innovative book marketer/dear friend. Stay tuned for that and more! And be nice…it’ll take me a few days to get back into the swing of things when I return in the first half of November.

Some of my more astute readers have probably also noticed that I’ve let my other two blogs, Chowlit and Kidlit Apps, grow weeds and gather dust. NO MORE! It turns out that juggling three blogs and blogging every day across all of them is something I’m terrible at. The more I try to shove myself into a hectic schedule like that, the more I start to resent blogging, and I never want that to happen.

So instead, I’m implementing the following (much more merciful) schedule:

Monday: Kidlit
Every even Tuesday: Kidlit Apps
Every oddTuesday: Chowlit
Wednesday: Kidlit

Now that’s something I can stick to! And let this be a lesson to all you blogging writers…consistency is better, even if your posts are spaced further apart, than flipping out and ditching your blogs altogether and leaving people to wonder if you’ve dropped off the face of the planet. The former looks classy — like you’re taking your time to come up with really good stuff — and the latter looks spazzy. See? Not even I’m immune to blogging blunders.

Finally, there’s a super secret, super awesome development afoot for most of the winter and into the spring. Cue the mysterious music and dramatic lighting. All shall be revealed in time! Dun dun DUN…

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Queries In Voice

October 10, 2011 in Advice, Queries | 11 comments

First off, a caveat to say that this is my opinion, not necessary The End All and Be All, though I’ve heard other agents who share my thoughts.

I am not impressed by queries that come to me with too much voice. Of course you want your query to have some voice, in the same way that good advertising copy has a personality. But one type of query I often see and that tries way too hard is the query written “by” the protagonist that “introduces” me to the protagonist’s author. It goes something like this:

Hiya! I’m 12 and my name’s Mackenzie. I’m in a story about all these crazy adventures that my friends and I go on. Even though everyone says I run the show, the gal taking it all down on paper is Jane Doe, a schoolteacher from Philadelphia who has a B.A. in Child Psychology. Whatever that means, teehee! If you want to read my story…

Etc.

Point is, a query is a cover letter for your writing. It’s your foot forward and your first contact with an agent. It’s also a business letter. I know I’d never apply for a job by submitting an overly playful resume that’s covered in hologram stickers unless I wanted to work at a clown college (and I’m sure that even clown colleges respect a degree of professionalism). That’s gimmicky. While gimmicks sometimes pay off, more often than not, they become the stories agents tell when they’re hanging out after hours at conferences: “Did you hear the one about the guy who showed up to the pitch slam dressed as a giant baby?” (That’s a fictional example I pulled off the top of my head but, actually, I’m sure it has really happened.)

This reminds me of that episode of Arrested Development in the third season where Tobias, a struggling actor, enlists Maeby, his daughter, who has been cutting school because she’s secretly a prominent film executive, to help him make goodie bag packages for casting directors. He stuffs them full of headshots, candy, vaguely threatening notes, and packets of glitter…all in the hope of catching their attention.

Maeby, by this point way jaded by the film biz, says, “Casting directors hate this!” Then the scene cuts to a casting director opening one of the packets, getting a shot of glitter to the face, and yelling into the phone, “The glitter queen struck again. Never hire Tobias Fünke!”

Just as I discussed in my post about social networking abuse last week, there are good ways to get attention, and there are bad ways. Glitter-filled packets? Bad. Queries that bend themselves into pretzels trying to be clever and “voicey”? Not my cuppa.

The #1 surefire super-secret can’t-fail way to impress a literary agent? Your manuscript!

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Craft Book Giveaway Winner

October 5, 2011 in Etc. | 1 comment

The winner of K.L. Going’s WRITING AND SELLING THE YA NOVEL is Sam S.! Thanks for playing, everyone! Now go out and buy this book if you didn’t end up winning it, it’s a great resource.

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Social Networking Abuse

October 5, 2011 in Advice | 21 comments

We all know that the Internet is a great way to “get out there.” Get known. Put yourself in people’s sightlines in a new way. This can be intimidating, but it’s also inspiring. Shy people become less so online. Connections and friendships and business relationships are forged. More people know about you than ever before. But the kind of “shoot for the moon” attitude that social networking sometimes inspires also has a bad side. Sometimes people do things to get noticed that they wouldn’t ordinarily do, all because the Internet makes them feel bolder.

Here are some things that I absolutely hate when people do to me on social networking sites*. Just because I accept a friend request on my public agent profile (I have two Facebooks, one for Agent Me, the other for people I actually know from high school, etc.), just because it’s easy to find me and add me, that doesn’t mean you now have an open channel to do whatever. My colleagues at ABLA or other agencies may feel differently, but here are the social networking moves that I consider a faux pas:

Queries via Facebook and Twitter

Don’t do it. Just don’t do it. Don’t ever do it. Don’t ask me if I want to read your work via a Facebook or Twitter ping, either. Follow submission guidelines and get your work to an agent or editor the way everyone else does.

Obnoxious Wall Posting

I welcome posts to my profile thanking me for the add or talking about a conference where you just saw me speak or about a book I’ve represented or whatever, but leave it at that. Don’t post things to my wall about your book. The thinking is probably this: “Lots of people visit this person’s wall, so I can generate some extra traffic to my blog/ebook/whatever. It also looks like this person is endorsing my thing. That’s great!” I pick the things I endorse, whether for my Resources for Writers page or things I mention via social networking very carefully. I’ll either review something or retweet it. In fact, earlier this year, I retweeted a contest and it turns out the company running the contest was claiming rights ownership for things submitted, so I deleted my Tweet and didn’t recommend the contest anymore. I take whatever I mention seriously.

Don’t use an agent or editor’s page as a billboard for your stuff. Not only is it annoying, but I guarantee that any such posts to my page will get deleted, which takes time, which will only make it even more annoying. And forget about those quizzes or game invitations — we may be “friends” on Facebook but we’re not that kind of friends, and my real life friends know better than to waste their time (and mine) with that nonsense.

Invitations

There are a few blunders in the invitation arena, too. Don’t invite me to Events unless I actually know you. No book signings if I’m not a real friend of yours, no virtual launch parties, no poetry slams or what have you.

No group invitations, either. There was this one writing group that I was invited to a few months ago. My name was added to this group without my knowledge or permission. Members of the group started posting their writing samples. I’m guessing a lot of agents and editors were added to this group because the leader thought it would be a great and creative way to get some work noticed. Since I don’t join groups, I had no idea that my mail settings for Facebook sent me an email every time someone posted. The day some random person added me to this writing group, I got over 200 emails from people posting. All for a group I didn’t want to be in. I was traveling that day, and couldn’t figure out how to leave the group from the Facebook app, so I had all this spam in my inbox and I was ready to kill someone.

The new thing people are doing is adding me as a co-worker. They click that they work as “Writer” or “In publishing” or whatever, and they mark us as working together. Then I have to go to my profile and say to ignore this work information. Please stop doing that. It started happening like two weeks ago, for some reason, and it’s maddening. I work alone at home and I know, for a fact, who my co-workers are. These people adding me as a peer on Facebook are not them.

Mailing Lists

Another abuse of the Internet is adding my email address to mailing lists and newsletters. I’ve had authors do this. They will add me to either their newsletter or add my email to another social networking site where they want to connect with me, and I get deluged in emails that I didn’t ask for. Do not sign anyone up for anything without their permission by using their email address. This should be common sense but you’d be surprised at how often it happens.

The bottom line is: there’s a right way and a wrong way to get attention. There’s also a right way and a wrong way to get your work noticed. Don’t try and catch my eye through tricks or overstepping your bounds on the Internet. Catch my attention with the strength of your work and through official channels. All of the scenarios I mention above annoy me. And when I’m grumpy, I focus my frustration on the source of the social networking error: you. You may be trying to expose me to the coolest event, newsletter, query, game of Angry Birds ever, but I am never going to notice it because I’m too busy thinking you’re rude. If you really have something wonderful to show me, just show me like a normal person, don’t resort to Internet gimmicks.

* I make it sound like this stuff is the bane of my existence but, really, it’s pretty low on the totem pole. I don’t sit around all day crying about people abusing my profile. There are bigger fish to fry. But I do want to get my point across here, so I invoke emotion a lot.

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Writing Book Giveaway: WRITING AND SELLING THE YA NOVEL by K.L. Going

October 3, 2011 in Site Stuff | 116 comments

I had so many responses on my post about giving away a copy of the 2012 CHILDREN’S WRITER’S AND ILLUSTRATOR’S MARKET edited by Chuck Sambuchino (I know only one of you won it…the rest should go out and buy it immediately, read it, love it, then leave glowing Amazon and Goodreads reviews), that I wanted to give away another craft book on the blog that I’ve recently read and really enjoyed. Clearly, you guys are craving some craft books!

This one is WRITING AND SELLING THE YA NOVEL by novelist K.L. Going, out from Writer’s Digest Books, but it’s also great for writers of middle grade. One of my favorite small things in this book is a list of fantastic considerations when writing historical — it’s a checklist of all those small things you don’t necessarily think about immediately when world-building. She also does a great job of putting you in the head of teen readers and including feedback from real teens on the books they like, the characters they bond with, etc. It’s a great resource by a very talented fiction writer.

It’s the usual drill for book giveaways. Leave a comment on this entry to win. No international shipping, so if you live outside the US, enlist a buddy who can receive the book on your behalf. Don’t worry about an email address, just enter it in the comment field that asks for it and know that it will be for my eyes only…it won’t be published on the site. Deadline for entries is October 5th at midnight, Eastern time. I’ll announce a winner on October 6th!

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A Balance of Action and Information

September 28, 2011 in Writing | 19 comments

This is something that I’ve started saying at each conference I attend. For those of you who’ve heard it in person or during a critique, I apologize for being redundant. But listen to it anyway because it’s important:

I believe that all writing is a balance of action and information.

Imagine scales in your head. On one end is action: what keeps plot driving forward and teaches us about character as our fictional people advance through the present moments of the story. On the other end is information: what gives us context about the fictional world and also fleshes out the characters we’ve created with need-to-know tidbits that exist outside the present moment.

Both are necessary. Both need to be in balance so that a story can continue. The biggest place where this matters is in a novel’s beginning. Imagine you are trying to read a dystopian that’s in a completely other world–you open the book and it’s strange, you don’t know much about it. Worse, your main character has been whacked in the head before the start of the story and is just groggily waking up. She doesn’t remember who she is or where she is. When she does come to, she realizes she’s in an underground maze, being chased by…something. Whatever it is, it has sharp teeth, it reeks of death, and it’s after her. She doesn’t have anything to defend herself with, so she must start running.

We open immediately to action. It’s great. There’s danger, the stakes are high, her life hangs in the balance. But is this a compelling beginning for fiction? I’d argue that it isn’t, really. Because we have action, but that’s all we have. We don’t know anything about this world in which people get clubbed on the head and maze monsters seem to be just a regular part of life. We don’t know anything about this character because she’s recently suffered a head injury and doesn’t know enough to tell us herself. The stakes here are high, yes, but generic “life and death” versus specific. Since we don’t know the world or the character, we don’t know exactly what’s at risk (other than some random broad’s life) or why we should care. This beginning has too much action and not enough information so it fails to ground the reader and provide a foothold for us to access the story.

On the other end of the scale is information. It’s great to have because, once we know stuff (and, ideally, we pick it up through showing, not telling), we care. It’s not enough to know that there are millions of children starving in the world. Those charity commercials tug at our heartstrings because they show us one child, tell us one story, and they make the problem concrete enough and specific enough that we start to care. But you can go overboard on information, too. Let’s say I open another book. It’s a character who is sitting in their room the night before the first day of school, thinking about his crappy life. He has no friends, his parents are too strict (and definitely uncool) and his sister is a brat. He looks over at his closet, where he’s hidden his skateboard — it causes him even more pain that he hurt his knee over the summer and hasn’t been able to get to the skate park, further alienating himself. He looks around at his clothes, hoping they’re cool enough, and at the rock posters on the walls, grumbling that his favorite bands never come through to tour in his small, miserable town. He thinks for a while about how much he loves his dog, and maybe about the girl that he has a crush on that he’s never spoken to.

What’s wrong with this picture? Let me ask you, instead: What has happened so far? Nothing. A kid is sitting and thinking. It’s a completely static beginning with no action. Sure, we learn a lot about his life, but it is all telling, no showing. We care less about the girl he loves because we’ve never seen her reject him in scene. We know he is upset about skateboarding but we are not emotionally invested until we see him limp out of the half-pipe after a failed trick. And do we really need to know about the family pet or the sister right now? I’m guessing not.

You have all this great information in your head about your character or your world, but you can never dump it all on your reader (an “info-dump”) at once, especially at the beginning. Information must emerge organically, usually in the context of action. When we meet the dream girl, it’s okay to have him think about how long he’s been in love with her. That’s information. But then, Home Skillet must march on over there and get his heart crushed. That’s action. Like this, the two work very well together. Too much of either one, and your pacing gets all off, characterization starts to feel flat, and your reader’s emotional investment in the story starts to drag.

This doesn’t just happen in the beginning of your work, either. The balance of action and information is something you must always be vigilant about. I love this additional way of thinking about the fiction craft and I hope you do, too.

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Simultaneous Submissions

September 26, 2011 in Advice, Agent, Queries | 12 comments

I was at the Northern Ohio SCBWI conference this weekend in Cleveland, and I got several questions about simultaneous submissions. Just as I was thinking of crafting a post about it to remind writers that it’s not only okay but recommended to query multiple agents at a time, I found the following excellent post from Chuck Sambuchino on Writer Unboxed. There must be something in the air!

Chuck’s points are all valid. He encourages writers to submit to batches of 6-8 agents at a time. If you get no requests at all, there’s something wrong with your query or your writing sample. If you get no good feedback or full requests after sending out writing samples or partials, your work isn’t quite there yet. Critique helps here, so will your writing partners. The one thing I’d add to this post is that exclusive submissions do have a place…but only in one or two instances.

One is if you’ve been working with an agent on a manuscript and they’ve given you several rounds of revision notes or if you’ve corresponded a lot. If an agent has invested serious time in you and your work and you feel it’s the right and professional thing to do, you can grant them an exclusive to consider the latest version of your manuscript. But do limit the exclusive — two weeks to a month is fair — so as not to leave it open-ended. The other scenario is if the agent requested the exclusive and you’ve agreed to grant it.

Agents like exclusives. They let us consider things on our own sweet time. But this is a competitive business. If you have a hot manuscript, it doesn’t behoove you to have just one person sitting on it. Honor agent relationships that you’ve already nurtured and exclusives you’ve already granted, but, beyond that, you can and should submit your queries and writing samples to well-chosen batches of multiple agents. Simultaneous submissions are just a part of the game, and anything else could be unfair to you and waste your time.

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CWIM Winner!

September 21, 2011 in Etc. | 3 comments

We have a winner for the 2012 edition of CHILDREN’S WRITER’S AND ILLUSTRATOR’S MARKET, edited by Chuck Sambuchino and out from Writer’s Digest Books: Gail Terp!

Sorry I don’t have more copies to give away, but those who got all excited about reading this year’s CWIM should go out and buy it anyway. It’s a really great resource.

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Weighing in on Prologues

September 21, 2011 in Advice, Writing | 24 comments

It’s so nice to realize that, after all these years together, I still have new and surprising things to blog about! The issue of prologues isn’t new, by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve always avoided weighing in on it. Why? Because people love their prologues and, as you can probably guess, I usually don’t, and so I really don’t want to open a can of worms like I did when discussing sex and swearing in YA

As much as I love conflict in my fiction, I don’t much enjoy it on the blog. But people keep asking me about prologues so, therefore, here we go. Here’s the basic gist of the question. This one came in through my MG and YA webinar that I did for Writer’s Digest last Thursday, but this is pretty much the idea behind every prologue question I get, so the wording isn’t especially important:

What are your thoughts on prefaces/prologues? Do they ever work for you? Many people have told me that everyone HATES prefaces/prologues so I cut it. However, my beta readers LOVED the preface. It made them want to keep reading to see what really happens in that moment. What to do? Do prefaces/prologues ever work? Will you pass on a MS because they include a preface/prologue?

Yep, this is the point of a prologue. It usually teases the reader with a high-tension moment from later in the book and it starts the manuscript off with a bang — because, as a writer, you know to do that. Tensions are high. Things are really exciting. This is great!

Then the real first chapter starts. And the ol’ Prologue Deflation kicks in because the writer is usually dragging the reader into an ordinary beginning which is, let’s face it, kinda boring. Sure, there’s always that tension that you’ll go back to the exciting prologue stuff later. And that’s what the writer is counting on. But most of the time, this kind of prologue tension feels like a lazy cheat to me, to tell you the truth. A lot of writers lean on prologues because they don’t know how to otherwise make their beginnings exciting.

A prologue isn’t an automatic rejection for me but they almost always leave me underwhelmed because the beginning after the prologue is usually a failure of imagination. Most likely the writer didn’t know how to really start, so they throw a fake-out on the fire and hope that it’s enough to carry you through to the good stuff that’s buried later. It’s the equivalent of a writer saying, “Well, I really want to send you the first 50 pages because it doesn’t really get going until Chapter Four.” Why hide the goods? Why resort to tricks and manipulation? Why toy with the reader and cover up your own plot insecurities? I’d rather have a well-crafted, gimmick-free, honest-to-goodness beginning to a novel almost every time.

Sure, prologues start with tension and they’re popular, but they set my expectations low in terms of the writer’s overall craft level, to be perfectly honest. There are definitely exceptions to the rule and some prologues work. Regardless, lots are published. But just know that we’ve seen the prologue bait and switch too many times to really have high hopes in most cases.

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Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market on Sale Today!

September 19, 2011 in Etc. | 150 comments

Today is the official publication day for the 2012 edition of the CHILDREN’S WRITER’S AND ILLUSTRATOR’S MARKET, out from Writer’s Digest Books and edited by Chuck Sambuchino.

Inside this handy volume, you will find articles on craft, writing, submitting, and landing an agent, interviews with kidlit glitterati like M.T. Anderson and Meg Cabot, and updated listings for agents, publishers, and magazines that take work from children’s writers and illustrators. If you want to land an agent or find a market for your work this year, this is the book for you.

I highly recommend it. In fact, you will see a familiar face featured on the back cover, and an official blurb from me that reads:

Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market is the most complete, trusted, definitive, and inspiring source of publishing opportunities for children’s writers and illustrators working today.

It’s true. Not only did I lend my mug and stamp of approval to the book, but I have two articles featured inside. One is about writer’s conferences and how to make the best of your investment in them (whether it’s your first or your fiftieth), and the other covers my three favorite craft issues: Voice, Character, and Authority, with lots of juicy annotated examples from my favorite MG and YA books on shelves.

So if you want to read about and see examples of Voice that works — an especially tricky topic that lots of writers struggle with — pick up a copy today! This elegant guide is crammed full of useful information and updated agency, publisher, and magazine listings to make your quest toward publication a no-brainer. Let 2012 be the year you really MARKET your writing!

Because I’m so proud of this year’s book, I am giving away one free copy of the 2012 CHILDREN’S WRITER’S AND ILLUSTRATOR’S MARKET to a writer randomly selected from the comments. Leave a comment below (make sure to include your email address in the comment form, though know that only I will be able to see it and it won’t be published on the site). Deadline for entries is midnight, Tuesday, September 20th. The winner will be announced in Wednesday the 21st’s blog, and then I will ship your copy to you next week. (US residents only, please.)

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