Q: What is the best advice you received from an agent, editor, publisher, writer, or florist? For bonus credit what was the worst?
-from Susan
I’ve gotten some gems – good advice that has influenced my fiction writing career since it began in earnest in 2008. But the very best might sound simplistic: Never submit a manuscript to an agent or an editor unless it is the absolute best you can produce.
It sounds easy or “duh,” but it’s not. Before you have an agent, you have a lot to prove, and it’s so easy for overburdened agents or their interns to find a flaw and use that to stop reading. After all, there are 200 other manuscripts piled up in front of them. Why waste time on a writer who hasn’t resolved a plot problem, or whose writing is flawed in some obvious and correctible way? If the writer is making more work for the possible agent even before she or he has been accepted, it suggests there will be more time and attention required later on, so why take that on?
Of course, my absolute best today may not be the same in six months, but it means being honest with myself, reading the manuscript more than once, digging out the typos and the tense flaws, listening to the dialogue, searching for an overabundance of adjectives and adverbs, being truthful with myself about places where laziness has crept into my writing. It‘s a lot of work.
It was my first agent who told me that right after she signed me. She said that my manuscript was ready to send out to editors, and that it gave her confidence in me as a client.
I hear often about writers who rely on their agents to come back to them with suggestions when they turn in a new book later on, so they don’t worry too much if something hasn’t been worked out quite right. I’m still leery of that. I know more now, I’ve been in an agent’s office and seen the massive stacks of manuscripts, and heard about computer folders that are just as packed. There’s an almost desperate attempt to get things out of the way. The last thing a writer wants is to be tossed on the discard pile - or dropped as a client - with a sigh of relief because the writer gave the reader an excuse.
I have twice been given advice that I don’t like and find difficult to accept. “Editors aren’t buying [fill in the sub-genre] so you shouldn’t spend time on it.” The problem with that, and I see it on bookstore shelves in a year or so, is that what they were buying or not changes. All it takes is for one good book in that unpopular genre to rocket onto the bestseller list and everyone is buying manuscripts like it!
The other is “Choose the publisher that will give you a hard cover first run, because the prestigious print reviewers won’t touch it otherwise.” Well, that ship has sailed! Now that hard cover books cost around $30, it’s hard to sell out a print run of 2500 copies. And I’m happy to see at least some trade paper books getting reviews in places like the NYT Book Review Crime column these days. Now, if they would only publish it every week…
Sorry, the florist thing escapes me. I can’t even remember asking for advice from a florist unless it was about the chances of my getting a parking ticket if I didn’t refill the meter in front of her San Francisco store. Answer: Yes!
New book out this week - currently available in hard cover (ouch) or e-book.
“The quirky village residents make this an appealing series debut… recommended for fans of M.L. Longworth, Martin Walker, and Serena Kent” – Library Journal
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