What Not To Say To An Editor, Part 2

Last week, I wrote Part 1 of this series. This is Part 2.

For the people just coming on board now, I'm an editor. (It's not my only job, but it's a good one) And what I'm detailing here are things you shouldn't say, write or mention in your correspondence with me (or other editors, but I'm speaking mostly from personal experience). The following statements are BIG HUGE RED FLAGS that will often lead you to rejection, suspicion of being creepy, uncomfortable work situations and becoming an example of what not to do.

Take note, good readers.

"I'm not sure you're worth it." This has only been said to me four times, and each time was a new experience in uncomfortable and bad times. If you (prospective client) and I are talking, and you heave a sigh (which is totally visible when you type, if you're curious) and then drop that bomb on me, I used to freak out and then spend inordinate amounts of time justifying why we should be working together.

When I was struggling for work and was way too busy helping other people without actually succeeding, I was always working uphill for paychecks, wondering when I'd be able to have some money in my pocket. And that absence of cash (which admittedly is a good thing to have on hand, say when you want to go out on a date or buy a burrito or purchase a video game), really turned me into a doubt factory. I doubted whether or not I was good enough to do this job, if I should get a "real" job, if I should just give all my time and energy to this relationship so that someone will love me, etc etc. Basically, being poor and thinking that having money equaled success (newsflash: it doesn't, sorry Gordon Gekko) made me think I wasn't worth much of anything -- so I'd always have to prove that I was good "enough" to a person / place / relationship / job / client / ice cream sundae so that I didn't have to walk away in shame and hide myself in a cave or something.

The point is -- that's a shitty attitude to have. And if you or I spend our time forever justifying whether or not we're worth it to other people, we're not going to have the time or the energy to actually do the things we wanted to do in the first place. (Side note - sometimes those people you're trying to be good enough for just aren't worth it. For realsies.)

So, if you say "I'm not sure you're worth it." what you're really saying is "I'm not sure I'm/the work/your potential to change my work is worth the commitment to improving, since I'm really scared about doing this because it might succeed or it might fail and discovering that really makes me uncomfortable since it is not what I am used to."

You're worth it.
Your work is worth it.

"I've been editing on my own for years, what good is your help?" I've been doing a lot of things myself for years. I built the desk I'm writing this on. I just ate some food I made the other night. But you know what's nice? Not having to do that. Letting someone else take care of a task for you is nice, and gives you more time to other things (like bathe and knit and golf). Also, if you come look at this desk I'm writing on, it's not a bad desk, but doesn't even come close to the super-desk in the other part of the office that dates back from Ellis Island and the 1880s. That thing weighs in the hundreds of pounds and was built with more skill than I thought a man could have. I trust that construction and that work far more than I trust my own, and likewise, you should trust people do the job they're good at. Anyone can screw together an IKEA desk and it'll be serviceable, but for really awesome work, go to a professional.

"If you edit my work, it won't be the same. I'll lose the voice/tone/feel/structure/vibe/sound I want." Let me just clear up a misconception about editing. What I do is make YOUR work clearer and stronger. Editing is not me coming into your work and changing it the way I want it, editing is refining your work so that it can be enjoyed by others the way you intended.

What happens when you hand me work is that you and I talk. And we figure out what you're trying to do in the story or the chapter or across several pieces of story or whatever, but basically we map out what's going on, and how you want it to be seen/experienced by the audience. Then I go back to my lair and educe that desired experience from the text. Yes, that means I might chop up sentences, delete whole paragraphs and suggest that entire characters get the boot. So, you're right, it won't be the same. Things will have changed, but that's on purpose - the changes are there to help you get your point across, get your ideas out there and get that voice/tone/feel/etc etc broadcast.

"Can I pay you a little up front and then more when I sign my book deal?" Now if this were fifteen years ago, and book deals still had large sums of cash attached, I'd say yes. But, in today's industry, and with traditional book publishing not being the cashcow it used to be, my answer is NO.You can pay me over time if you absolutely have to, or you can pay me when the job's done like everyone else. I don't want to wait for your ship to come in weeks/months/years from now and you just happen to get around and write me a check. Pay your editors, support us, and help us help you.

"[INSERT TITLE OF BOOK OR NAME OF WEBSITE HERE] says that I should get an agent and then let them handle the editing, so I like, don't need you." Ahh, the agent quandary. Here's where things get a little murky. Not because I don't know an answer to this, but because there are several answers and people don't always like them. Here we go:

a) Not every book needs an agent, it depends on what the author wants to do with it (if you're self-publishing and only need like 40 copies for example, then no, you don't need an agent).
b) Not every agent is (gasp!) a good editor (likewise not every editor is a good agent).
c)Not every book and/or website is going to be useful for you. (Be discriminating. Educate yourself with a variety of sources then make your decisions.)

There's also a fourth element here: That in order for an agent to pick up your manuscript, it should be in the best shape of its life. That means free of glaring errors, formatted correctly, and engaging with the best story and characters possible. Getting an editor to help you make that happen goes a long way to securing the agent and all those other steps down the line.

"My work is perfect, and I don't ever need an editor. I don't change a thing, and I just send it straight to Amazon. You can buy my things here, here and here - (and the rest of the email is basically a sales letter)." I'm very happy for you. Honestly, I'm glad you've distilled down the formerly scary publishing process to a few mouse clicks after you spend a few afternoons writing.

(I should point out that the above quote came paraphrased from an email that also included a sentence "I don't know what's so hard about being prolific, I already have several books published in under XYZ years." - and yes I got permission to tell you this.)

Publishing your work shouldn't be so scary that you're discouraged from doing it, but it shouldn't also be so simple that there's no talent or craft required to do it. And if you do as much reading/trawling/searching through Amazon as I do, you may encounter a lot of self-published authors with a dearth of books....and a matching stack of 1-star reviews, that often include comments about poor story structure, weak writing, bad grammar and being a general waste of money. Hiring an editor can prevent a great deal of this before it happens, the caveat being that in order to avoid ignominy as the one-star-Amazon-author, you have to exercise your brain and talent muscles to produce work and get it edited so that it's in a better than first-draft-shape.

And for the record, no one's work is ever 100% perfect on the first draft. It's just not. Expect it to grow, change and evolve as your tastes, skills and other factors (like a reader or time) influence it.

I hope you've found this helpful.

Happy writing.

By request - Query and Summary Letters

Dee Solberg asked about query letters and summary letters, in terms of their construction and how to navigate the apparently bizarre demands from one publisher to the next.

A word first about those demands - they've never struck me as bizarre. Just like going from one store in the mall to another has never bothered me about where they put the registers or whether or not they wear name tags. Every place is different, and entitled to make up their own methods for accomplishing the same end goal - which in this case is getting your work published.

Now, a tangent: Do you know why those needs are so different? Mostly for two reasons - First, to see if you follow directions (you'd be shocked by the number of people who don't) and second to see if following directions discourages you from going forward. Publishing on the whole, is a test of endurance, (writing is the test of skill) and there are many stages of hurry-up-and-wait as well as stages of I-cannot-believe-I-have-to-rewrite-this that turn publishing into a very intense pursuit. I would also like to point out that you (the author to-be-published) should avoid taking this time to start developing the philosophy that you're competing with other writers. This is not about scarcity or about some game of book-musical-chairs. There are PLENTY of chairs and the music NEVER stops playing.

So what's step one? Where do I begin?

Step one is something that doesn't go down easily, but if you commit to it, life gets exponentially better. Step one is 'make sure the project is complete'. I know, some people reading this are going to grab this magazine or that website over there and point to examples that say flat-out you can query a partially completed 'thing'. Yes, you can. You possess the ability to package pages together and get it sent to a destination. That is an option.

But doing that, moving ahead to acquire all the bells and whistles of publishing (the elements often thought to bring legitimacy: an agent, a publisher, a partridge in a fruit bush) without finishing your work puts you on someone else's schedule. And that new schedule likely is unaware that your children may have sick days, school plays and sports practices. Or that your spouse might decide to rewire the house and leave you powerless on a Saturday afternoon. Or that you have two jobs and a mortgage and the phone bill and the credit card and you want a vacation and what about the grocery shopping.....etc etc.

By finishing your work ON your schedule, you make their schedule INFINITELY easier, no matter who the "their" is.  Take the extra time (which shouldn't be a problem if you've disciplined yourself to a good writing schedule, right?) to make the project the best it can be before it leaves you, and everything thereafter is much simpler.

Okay, I did that, but what's up with queries?

I do a lot of workshops about queries. Here are the basics.

• Start where the action of the story is. I don't mean action like where the first emotion is felt or where the first verb is, I mean start telling me the story at the good parts. The parts that are going to make me want to hear more about it. Practice this - summarize your favorite movie. Now out loud, talk about it. Those scenes and facts you're saying? Those are the things that show where the action/meat of the story is. 
• Find out how many words the whole thing has. Put that number and the title (which you'll put in ALL CAPS) in one of the last two or three sentences at the bottom of the page. 
• You have between 200 and 300 words (I aim for around 225-240 max) to seduce the person into reading the manuscript. That's the job of a query - to entice the reader to go to the manuscript. Not give away the story. Not bore people to tears. Just excite the person into wanting more information.
• Do not give away the ending. If you tell the whole arc of the story, there's no reason to read the manuscript. Remember, you're supposed to be seductive. Telling the reader how this is going to end is not seductive. 
• This query is about your story NOT you. I'm now beating a dead horse, but the query letter is not the place to list all your great publishing or personal successes. (The document for that is called a resume) The query letter is about this story, and its merits, not the struggle you went through to put it together. I'm sure it's a very harrowing tale, but it's completely irrelevant to the quality of the story or a reader's interest in making the jump from query to manuscript. 

That's the basic template. You get those pieces set in your query, whatever other demands come down the road at you are cake. 

And what about story summaries? 

That's a different animal. Here you want to treat the page like a candy bar or a cake - and that having one piece (the summary) makes you want to have other pieces later. Like ten seconds later. Or at midnight. Or for breakfast the next morning. 

You still start where the action is, you still need to know how long the whole manuscript is, but now you have about DOUBLE THE WORD COUNT (400 to 600, I like a cap of 550) to demonstrate in tiny version what happens in the big version. 

Think about movie trailers. That's a small piece of a larger cake. You now get to do that by writing. Look at your outlines, your notecards, your bullet points. Identify the big action beats, the funny beats, whatever beats make you proud of your creation, and find a way to string them together. The magic here lies in how you make use of the words and ideas available to you. 

And in non-fiction?

For the love all that you hold dear, DO NOT drown the document in headings. Not everything needs to be broken out and explained. Do you know how that comes across? Like the sniffly desperate kid in your class who used to eat paste and who just had to keep yapping and explaining. (In my elementary school, his name was Chas or Charlie or Chuck or something)

Likewise don't go the other way and have two or three headings and then big blocks of text underneath them. That looks more like you just don't know what you're doing and you're desperate. 

Instead, try this. 5 headings.

1. About the book (the length, the genre, etc)
2. The Characters
3. The Plot
4. The Author (that's you!)
5. How You Plan To Market This

If you're writing a book that lacks characters or plot (hi cookbook authors!), then change into "Reasons For This Book" and "Recipes". The point is that you don't need a TON of headings. You just need organization. Critical here are items 1, 4, and 5. Especially 5. 

Why is 5 important? Because the more you know about how you're going to get that book into other people's hands, the easier that will happen and the better it will be for everyone involved. If that means you need to educate yourself on how to market or publicize, do it (Here's a starting point, come ask me questions! Email or Twitter). Also, the heady days of disposable income are for the moment gone. So take the initiative and make something happen with your work. 

Any other advice? 

Yes. Two things.

I. There's no one road to this goal of yours. Even if you and I do the same research about the same topic and go to the same people to ask the same questions and query the same book, we're going to get different results. There is no one way to get published. There is no "right" way, there is no "wrong" way. One way is NOT better than another. What matters here is the answer to the binary question - Published? Yes/No. Having said that though, remember that publishing is NOT legitimacy. Getting published does not make you a better person or a superior one or smarter or kinder or more loved or anything like that. It's just something you did, like yesterday when I did laundry. There are lots of ways to accomplish it. 

II. There comes a point where you have to stop asking for help and start doing it. Lots of people and books and websites offer great advice. And you can spend many many days/weeks/months/years searching through them all - but NONE of them have the one magic bullet answer for you. It's the sum total of what they say, what you choose to take with you and choose to leave behind that shapes you. 

Yes it's great to ask for help. But there is such a thing as asking for help about a thing IN PLACE of doing that actual thing. This industry, this craft, this art, is PACKED with people who bloat the lanes and passages with poor habits, wrong intentions, poor writing and unhelpful attitudes and advice. This industry is thick with people who aren't going to ever get past the "talk about writing" phase. 

What separates the successful from the unsuccessful is yes, in part talent. But also the fact that the successful actually wrote. And got edited. And re-wrote. And published. And repeated this whole process. 

If you're doing this to be successful, that's the path.

If you're doing this to prove other people wrong, you're going to be disappointed.

If you're doing this to prove your own self-worth, you're going to be SUPER disappointed.

If you're doing this to be rich, you're going to be doing this a long time.

If you're doing this to be more famous than other people, you're going to be disappointed AND doing this for a long time. 

Dee, I hope this answers your question somewhat.

Happy writing

One cake, many slices - How do you get what's fair?

Good morning everyone. Before you come read the rest of this article, please look at the following:

http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/how-much-do-you-want-to-get-paid-tomorrow/

And at some point, my good friend Chuck will have a post about it, and I'll link there too. But, I'll go first for now.

We're all writers. We all want our books in other people's hands and on their shelves after we get money in exchange. We crave their praise and encouragement, we are fed and nourished by their desires to imagine.

That money thing though, oh man, that's the tricky part.

You want to see a bunch of writers revert to those apes from 2001? Talk about money and royalties and getting paid.

I used to be one of those people who wanted to charge $40 for everything I did. Now I don't do that, and I'm much happier for it, but I do remember my thinking:


1. I'm not sure I'm good enough to be worth more.
2. With so many other writers out there, how is there going to be enough for me to ask for any more than that?

A lot of that was fear, and self-doubt, bubbling up through me like crappy John-isn't-awesome magma to lay waste to my future paradise.

But that's been abolished now, so we shall celebrate by plunging back into the fray to rescue others.

Amazon (and their Kindle) is what made me make the jump to self-publishing. Well, that, and I'm impatient and think new media should be embraced. Amazon most recently began this service called KDP Select. Allow me to give you a nice analogy.


We're all partying. Perhaps there is nut bark. Perhaps we're rocking out. Doesn't matter. But at this party there is cake. Let's call this cake KDP Select's money.


Now, we're all at this party, and this is such a rocking party that the whole house is packed, the line stretches out the door and down the street and into the next town. But....

There's only one cake. And this party is the only way to get this cake. And we can only cut this cake in progressively smaller and smaller slices to accommodate those people at the back of the line. 


Also, if you want a slice of this cake, you can't go to any other parties or throw any parties of your own. 

Now, do you still want the cake? I mean you're welcome to have some, and thanks for coming to the party, but there is a really good chance that you're going to get a very tiny slice, and I'm not sure this one cake is worth trading away your own ability to have parties.  (Note: I'm not sure ANY cake is worth that.)

I was on Twitter this morning (it's Sunday today) and there were some thoughts being tossed back and forth...and I started the conversation not so sure about what I had to say about KDP and their plan to be whatever it is they're turning out to be. By the middle of that conversation, after I read that link at the top of this post, I know what I want to say.

1. I agree with the sentiment that writers should be their own distribution hubs. It's our stuff, it's our hard work, and like the good folks of The Wire taught me, we should hustle to get it out there.

2. I believe now more than ever a writer can learn/be taught how to be their own distribution hub and their own conduit for success.

3. I think $500,000 is a cruel joke when it's split between so many deserving people, forcing a sort of brainy gladiator eat-your-own environment.

4. It doesn't take very much for a rebel to go mainstream, right Amazon? I mean, one minute you're letting people have options in publishing, now you're doing the same thing people went to self-publishing to avoid? Dirty pool.

5. A writer has to understand what they're willing to do, not do, go with, fight against, accept or rebel against, before they can even think of taking a side - education and information still trump ambition.

I don't think KDP is the way to go. It's not a panacea. It's an extension and mutation of the subscription system that breeds into exclusivity, rarity and scarcity. The competition in writing should be the talent, not the earnings.

You deserve cake. A big fat honking slice of cake.