How Did I Not Know This?
Apr. 10th, 2006 12:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousAn agent I admire gave a talk at a meeting of a local science fiction and fantasy society. I don't have a natural talent for stalking people, but from time to time I remember, hey, didn't I intend to stalk that guy? So I drove an hour north, checked out the local organization, and learned a bunch of stuff I'm chagrined at not already having known about agents and their assumptions. I have the odd impression that I'm the only person in the Northern Hemisphere who didn't already know it.
Most of the people I've been going to school on to learn about the publishing industry are editors, and editors will tell you that there is no sin graver than that of simultaneous submissions. Simultaneous submissions merit blacklisting for life--as far as I can tell, editors are unanimous about that. You can query the whole world at once, but the minute somebody has your full manuscript, your job is to start writing some other book, because you are about to spend a year with your foot nailed to the floor while you wait to hear back from the one person who has the ms you just submitted for consideration. It's annoying, but that's what there is.
That's what there is for an unagented writer dealing with editors. Did I mention that I overgeneralize?
It turns out that agents don't assume they have an exclusive claim on consideration of your ms unless they've asked for it explicitly. Even if they've asked for and received the full ms. And if an agent does ask for an exclusive, the writer is expected to grant it for a short period of time, usually a few weeks.
Why did no one tell me? I think it was because A) I didn't know I didn't know, and so didn't ask, and B) I had just enough other clues that I was starting to look like I might know what I was doing. Oops.
Since October, the big book has been somewhere in the process over at the Shiny Young Agent's Shiny Young Agency. I have been laboring under the erroneous assumption that, because I'd sent her the full ms, that meant I couldn't send it anywhere else until I heard back from her. Simultaneous submissions are a hanging offense, after all, if you ask an editor. I don't know what the Shiny Young Agent's assumptions are, but I gather now that agents assume entirely different things. She would be within her rights to assume that I've been shipping the big book around to everyone under the sun. She didn't ask for an exclusive, so she's under no obligation to read it in a timely way. It's nobody's fault but mine that I didn't already know this.
As annoyed as I am at my own ignorance, it's good to have a new plan. Once the current short story is fit to mail out to magazines, I go back to the big book to fix the second half of the ms. No more waiting for feedback that will come whenever it comes. I can probably fix the big defects in two months. It's not likely that anyone really wants to see a 300,000 word first novel, but then, it wasn't likely that the Shiny Young Agent would ask to see it, and that happened. If that unlikely event repeats itself in June, I don't want to have to say--again--that the ms will need several months of revision before I can send it out.
There are now two agents who have said to me, quite explicitly, that they do not rule projects out on the basis of length alone. Even if it's 300K? No, not even then. When I have something query-worthy, there are people to query.
Most of the people I've been going to school on to learn about the publishing industry are editors, and editors will tell you that there is no sin graver than that of simultaneous submissions. Simultaneous submissions merit blacklisting for life--as far as I can tell, editors are unanimous about that. You can query the whole world at once, but the minute somebody has your full manuscript, your job is to start writing some other book, because you are about to spend a year with your foot nailed to the floor while you wait to hear back from the one person who has the ms you just submitted for consideration. It's annoying, but that's what there is.
That's what there is for an unagented writer dealing with editors. Did I mention that I overgeneralize?
It turns out that agents don't assume they have an exclusive claim on consideration of your ms unless they've asked for it explicitly. Even if they've asked for and received the full ms. And if an agent does ask for an exclusive, the writer is expected to grant it for a short period of time, usually a few weeks.
Why did no one tell me? I think it was because A) I didn't know I didn't know, and so didn't ask, and B) I had just enough other clues that I was starting to look like I might know what I was doing. Oops.
Since October, the big book has been somewhere in the process over at the Shiny Young Agent's Shiny Young Agency. I have been laboring under the erroneous assumption that, because I'd sent her the full ms, that meant I couldn't send it anywhere else until I heard back from her. Simultaneous submissions are a hanging offense, after all, if you ask an editor. I don't know what the Shiny Young Agent's assumptions are, but I gather now that agents assume entirely different things. She would be within her rights to assume that I've been shipping the big book around to everyone under the sun. She didn't ask for an exclusive, so she's under no obligation to read it in a timely way. It's nobody's fault but mine that I didn't already know this.
As annoyed as I am at my own ignorance, it's good to have a new plan. Once the current short story is fit to mail out to magazines, I go back to the big book to fix the second half of the ms. No more waiting for feedback that will come whenever it comes. I can probably fix the big defects in two months. It's not likely that anyone really wants to see a 300,000 word first novel, but then, it wasn't likely that the Shiny Young Agent would ask to see it, and that happened. If that unlikely event repeats itself in June, I don't want to have to say--again--that the ms will need several months of revision before I can send it out.
There are now two agents who have said to me, quite explicitly, that they do not rule projects out on the basis of length alone. Even if it's 300K? No, not even then. When I have something query-worthy, there are people to query.
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-10 12:31 am (UTC)Now you can get gleefully printing and shipping out!
no subject
Date: 2006-04-10 08:14 am (UTC)Before the gleeful printing and trepidatious mailing, I'll have to search out--gleefully, of course--all the instances of viewpoint shift left over from the zero draft, when I was still figuring out which characters made the best viewpoints for which scenes.
I'll have to--and I'm not being facetious about the glee when I say I will be gleeful--track down all the references in pt3 and pt4 where I make reference to the battle that wasn't on stage yet when I wrote those chapters, but which is now on stage in pt2. In the early drafts, I was lame and cowardly and kept the battle off-stage, because I hadn't yet gone to school on people who write good battles. Now several of those later references are duplicative, and some of them ought to point to a new and different battle altogether, which may need to be added, if I can get the word count down far enough to make room for it. After all, if the story works better with more sex and violence, I ought to put at least some of that where the reader can see it.
The revisions are going to be a lot of fun. I've been itching to fix these problems for most of a year.
Then, when the draft is smoothed out enough that I would not die of embarrassment if an agent who expected some polish asked to see the whole thing, I'll have to write the query letter. And that won't be a gleeful process at all.
I've been taking comfort in this old post (http://towercoda.blogspot.com/2005/12/dire-unsolicited-query-letter.html) from the blog of a fellow escaped academic from the old Rutgers crowd who's writing screenplays these days. Combat stats in the D20 system for the Dire Unsolicited Query Letter--ah, the glorious geekiness.