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Rebel Yell: A Short Guide To Fiction Writing
22. Packing Heat: Prepping Your Manuscript & Finding a Publisher
You've read deeply in your genre, kept your antennae tuned to the world around you, and thrown every sort of creative detritus into your garbage disposal imagination. You've psyched, you've brainstormed, you've got an idea that you think amounts to a solid narrative building, and you've broken figurative ground. You've played with form and point of view, experimenting with how best to tell your tale. You've taken chances. And you've filled out your piece with significant detail, resonant setting, interesting characters in conflict, and language that can knock you down with the cusp of a single chewed fingernail—all while avoiding that tricky trap of heavy muddle.
Finally you've put your short story or novel on a high shelf and given it a long vacation, then drafted and redrafted it, making sure that every scene has been muscled up while every gram of narrative cellulite has been lipposuctioned clear.
You've thought and rethought every sentence to the point where it hurts and you know that if you look at one again, even for a second, you might just go mad.
Plus you're feeling pretty darn happy with it all.
That means you're done . . . and that means it's time to start looking for a publisher if you feel you're ready.
Of course, you may not feel ready. You may feel proud of your labors to this point—and deservedly so—but also that your craft still needs several more years of development before it's fully seasoned and ready to go public.
Or you may simply be uninterested in publishing: the act of writing—of processing your emotions and your universe through a breathtaking aesthetic lens—may be more than sufficient.
You should never push here. Be honest with yourself about your motives and your level of accomplishment.
There's no sense sending out a piece that doesn't feel ready to you, since chances are it won't feel ready to any editor, either. And there's no sense going through the emotional tempest of the submission process if you're just not that interested in the idea.
On the other hand, if you are being honest with yourself, and you do feel like now's the time, whatever you do, don't stall. Don't hesitate. Don't toe the dirt. Go for it. You have nothing to lose, if you stop to think about it, except for the price of a couple of stamps and envelopes and the possibility of a little piece of paper called a rejection slip . . . and, as most professional writers who have struggled long and hard on a piece of fiction will tell you, there are few finer feelings in the cosmos than seeing your own work presented flawlessly between two gorgeous covers, your sentences marching down the page like a troop of literary soldiers on their way to your contributor's note.
"On the day the young writer corrects his first proof sheet," Baudelaire observed more than a hundred years ago, "he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just gotten his first dose of the pox."
So what do you do now?
How do you go about finding a publisher?
The answer's going to be slightly different for short stories than it is for novels, especially if you're contemplating teaming up with an agent.
Agents seldom handle short story collections, even more rarely individual short stories, unless your name is Stephen King, and they tend to conceptualize poetry as a financial accident waiting to happen.
If you have a novel manuscript, however, you should probably think seriously about whether an agent might be right for you. Agents basically are the ambassadors in the United Nations of publishing. Often based in New York, where most of the major houses are also located, agents have their feet in countless editorial doors. They spend decades developing working relationships with the key players at the key venues. Furthermore, they've become over the last ten or fifteen years the first line of defense for major publishers, providing a net to catch and throw back writers they feel aren't ready yet for a bite of the Big Apple. Ask many writers, particularly young ones, and you'll hear that landing an agent today is as difficult (if not more so) as landing a publisher was back in, oh, 1973.
Needless to say, then, there are many benefits to having one. Procure an agent, and you've already leapt the first hurdle on the often unpleasant race track called publishing. Find one who loves your work, and you have a fairly powerful advocate in major publishing circles. Agents know who's buying what kind of fiction where, and thus where best to try to place your novel. They also know the contractual ropes, and so can work on your behalf to secure the strongest deal possible. They know about things like royalties and movies rights, foreign rights and paperback rights, and can labor on your behalf to secure you a healthy economic apportion . . . and one perhaps a smidgen higher than you might be able to secure on your own.
There are many potential problems with having an agent as well. Unless you write fiction that is potentially salable to major mainstream New York publishing houses, chances are you're out of luck before you even pass GO. Agents, when all is said and done, are first business people, second lit lovers. (The first thing my first agent said to me wasn't "I love your novel," or, "What a terrific piece of fiction," but "How do you see marketing it?" and "What's your target audience?") Most agents deal with young writers who by definition haven't had time to establish any sort of track record in a less-than-enthusiastic way, taking one on for a short time, sending out some perfunctory feelers, and losing interest within three or six months if no deal manifests. Most ask for about fifteen percent of the deal they cut, to be paid after the author's advance arrives, and many can assert more control over a writer's career than that writer is fully comfortable with.
Some less-than-reputable ones will ask for several hundred dollars to "edit" and "shop" your work, and pocket the money whether or not they make a sale. Never, ever deal with this sort. They're nothing more than a bunch of ugly bottom feeders who can do more damage than good, actually preventing a writer from obtaining success.
If, having weighed the pros and cons, you think an agent is for you, then your next step looks much like the one you'd take to secure a publisher for your novel. First, do your research. Most reputable agents belong to the Association of Authors' Representatives, a group which subscribes to a list of ethical guidelines. Look in most agents listings at the back of such publications as Writer's Market, and you'll discover that information quickly. Stick with the members of A. A. R.
Once you've located someone who looks good to you (and a lot of looking good has to do with a mixture of intuition on your part plus the nature of the other clients on the agent's list, which you should ask to see), you need to put a package together that contains a cover letter (more on this soon), a synopsis of your book, and a partial. Written in present tense, each turning point or crisis should get its own short paragraph in your synopsis, and the whole—seldom more than five or eight pages—should introduce your main characters and summarize your novel in straightforward, pared-down language, while very briefly placing it in the context of one or two novels like it to give the potential publisher a sense of what you're up to and how much you know about the market. Your partial consists of the first fifty pages or three chapters of your manuscript (whichever's shorter).
If the agent likes what he or she reads, he or she will ask for more. If he or she likes the aggregate, he or she will write you a letter that will serve as your contract, stating, in essence, that you've agreed to work together and, should that change, you both need to agree in writing that you're going to go your separate ways. If you have a strong publishing record, or if you appear fantastically promising, then an agent may submit your work simultaneously to a number of publishers. In all likelihood, however, if you're just starting out, your agent will send your manuscript to one publisher at a time, each of which will take two or three months to respond. In other words, publishers read agented material just slightly faster than they do agentless material, but they do read it with more interest than what they find in their slush pile—that dusty dark corner where unsolicited manuscripts build up. Novels in New York slush piles almost never find their way between two hard covers. If they do, it's cause for news.
It's important to remember that just because you can't find an agent doesn't mean you won't be able to place your novel outside New York. I was lucky enough, after much blind groping, to secure an agent for my first publishable (and more conventional) novel. After nearly three years of hard work, that agent was lucky enough to place my novel with a New York publisher. But when I sent her the manuscript for my second and less-conventional novel, she tried the same publisher, who had first-reading rights (i.e., he was entitled by contract to have first dibs on whatever I produced next), and was told it was "too stylistically flashy and psychologically dark." My agent then dropped it and me like we were bombs covered in burning gasoline.
So I began to peddle the book myself while writing a third novel, which I finished in two years and which I also began peddling myself. The third novel found its home first with a wonderful small press (small presses are almost always more caring and concerned about their writers, ready to listen to them, take advice from them, and collaborate with them in the production of an aesthetic object, whereas New York houses tend to think of writers the same way Henry Ford did Model-T's), sold many more copies than my New York novel did, and ultimately became a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. A month later I had a contract for my second novel, which had yet to find shelter. Soon thereafter I completed my fourth novel, which ended up at the same small house that brought out my third.
It's a complicated scenario, but not in any way an unusual one. Many writers can and do find homes for their manuscripts after agents haven given up hope on them, and many writers will work with agents for some parts of their careers and not work with them for others.
And, again, realize agents probably won't be very useful if you're looking to place a short story . . . especially an innovative or alternative one.
That calls for some arachnidan leg work on your own.
The first step is go to the library and hunt down the latest edition of The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses. There you will encounter a great resource that lists thousands of zines and journals alphabetically and by genre. Go to the genre section first, and work back from there. Each entry will give you the editor's name, address, and phone number, as well as the date the zine or journal was founded (usually the longer a zine or journal has been in business, the longer it will remain that way) and a quote by the editor about exactly what he or she is looking for . . . and, equally helpful, not looking for. Sometimes you will also be able to learn the names of several authors who have published there, which can give you a sense whether your fiction will fit in or not. Too, you will discover the publication's circulation, cost of individual copies, length, format, payment method (normally one or two contributor's copies, sometimes a small sum up to $100, very seldom more), copyright information (most publications copyright for the author), and reporting time (customarily editors will tell you it'll take four to six weeks for them to make a decision on your manuscript, though the truth will be closer to four to six months).
Make sure you read all the fine print. Some places only read manuscripts at certain times of year, while others will let you know whether they accept simultaneous and/or electronic submissions.
Make sure, too, that you find an editor's name and then address your cover letter to him or her. This demonstrates you've done your homework.
When you've gotten a list of six or twelve possible venues, go to the library or write away to the publications themselves for sample copies. Look at the layout, check out several stories, get a feel for what the zine or journal is all about in terms of politics, aesthetic taste, and hardcopy or electronic organization. There's no reason to send your work to a place that won't be interested in the sort of fiction you write. And don't think you'll be the one in a million to sway a particular editor to like a particular kind of fiction he or she has heretofore shown no love for.
Next you need to deal with the ethical dilemma of simultaneous submissions—i.e., sending out the same manuscript to many publishers at once. Obviously if an editor says in his or her entry in The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses that he or she doesn't want them, don't send them, and if an editor says he or she will consider them, then do. More and more the latter is turning out to be the case.
But not infrequently editors are plain silent on the subject, and assume you won't submit simultaneously, or, if you do, that you'll let them know in your cover letter. Those who don't advocate simultaneous submissions argue that all they do is clog up multiple publishing pipelines, slow down an already long editorial process, and lead to embarrassing show-downs among editors or between editors and writers . . . if not even to black-listing of those writers who get caught. Those who do advocate them argue that the publishing pipelines are already clogged up, that it isn't fair to a writer to have to wait up to half a year per submission, that the statistical probability of two places accepting the same piece on the same day is almost zilch, and that editors don't remember writers' names long enough to create black lists (think of how many submissions they receive every day, and multiply that by the years they've been in business), let alone hold grudges.
Either way you decide to play it, my simple advice here is to be up front about what you're doing. Always announce that you're simultaneously submitting, if you go that direction. If you happen to be lucky enough to have your simultaneously submitted piece accepted somewhere, immediately let the other zines and journals you've submitted that piece to know. Never simultaneously submit with the intent to play one zine or journal off another for the most money or highest profile.
Once you've narrowed down your search to a couple of possible venues, it's time to pack up your story or partial and send it. Here cleanliness really is next to godliness. Editors despise sloppy presentations, which they rightly see as indicative of unprofessional behavior and even writerly disinterest, neither of which will ever endear you to them. Make sure you've run a spell check, make sure you print out your story or partial neatly on fresh medium-weight paper using a letter-quality or laser printer, and make sure you use paper clips instead of staples for stories, nothing at all for novel manuscripts except the boxes you're shipping them in. Double-space, and use at least one-inch margins, preferably one-and-a-half. If you're sending a novel, use a title page which, in the center, includes the title of your book and your name, address, phone number, and e-mail. If you're sending a short story, you should forego the title page, but make sure that the title of your fiction and your name appear centered about a fourth of the way down the first page of your piece, and that your address, phone number, and e-mail appear in the upper righthand or lefthand corner. You really don't need to indicate your story's word-count, though a few writers do and a few editors prefer things that way, and you definitely shouldn't type in the copyright symbol or some phrase about copyright, both of which do little more than flag amateurism.
A cover letter should accompany your submssion (and you should only submit one story or partial per package), and it should be short, sweet, and to the point. It should include your name, address, phone number, and e-mail in standard letter format, and it should include at most three short paragraphs, none of which is more than three very short sentences long. The first should give the title of your story, its type in terms of genre, and give a sense of its tone and plot while not giving away too much or sounding too Hollywood. The second paragraph should give the highlights of your publication record—that you've published stories here, here and here, that you've won this or that award, that you have a novel appearing next year, perhaps that you attended such-and-such M.F.A. program. If you don't have a publication record, don't fake one; it simply doesn't serve any purpose. In that case, admit you're just starting out, or drop the second paragraph altogether. The last paragraph should consist of a quick, pleasant, non-unctuous sign off. Never try to bully or convince an editor, and never rave about your story's worth. It should be able to do all the raving it needs to by itself.
If you're planning on sending a long partial or even full novel manuscript to an editor, it's always a good idea to send a query letter first. That letter should traverse much the same ground as a cover letter, but should also dwell another paragraph or two on the subject and shape of your project. You might even want to enclose a synopsis with it. The letter, though, shouldn't be longer than a page, and, though it should be tight and energetic, it shouldn't be shrill, clever, or a deliberate jump-up-and-down attention-getting mechanism. If you have any important qualifications for writing about the subject you're writing about, make sure you mention them.
Whenever approaching an editor or publisher for the first time or during followups, include a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope, or S.A.S.E. Bring that and the one everything's going to go into to the post office. The people there will do the weighing and pricing. If you don't enclose an S.A.S.E., you'll probably never hear from an editor or publisher, nor see your manuscript again.
For short stories, use a manila envelope the size of the manuscript. For novels, use a shipping box you can find at your local copy center or business supply store.
What I've just described is the conventional approach to publication. It represents the way things have been done for most of the twentieth century. With the advent of the World Wide Web, however, all that's changing . . . and changing in some pretty fascinating directions.
Remember that there are vast numbers of electronic zines and journals cropping up throughout the digital ether, all of which are looking for good material. A simple Web search will turn up thousands. You can design and construct your own Web site where you can make available your own fiction, or you can create your own cyberspatial zine or journal for much less than it would cost to do the same in the hardcopy world. If you already edit a hardcopy zine or journal, you can put up excerpts. Moreover, the Web offers an exciting zone in which to experiment with form and content. It lends itself to hypertext and mixed-media productions, and it still exists as a fairly uncensored and inexpensive option.
You should also be aware, though, of some real problems with publishing on the Web. Many people feel there's no such thing as real quality control in cyberspace. Anyone can publish there, they say, so it's extremely difficult to sort the aesthetic wheat from the boring banal chaff. Hence stories that appear on the Web are sometimes valued less than those which appear in hardcopy format, or hardcopy format first.
This strikes me as a fairly myopic bias. After all, hardcopy publication certainly doesn't assure quality any more than electronic publication does, and a quick search of the Web will reveal that more and more serious writers—Richard Kadrey, Bruce Sterling, Kathy Acker, Shelley Jackson, and Brian Evenson among them—are allowing their work to find a virtual room there. As more people disregard the technophobic anti-Web hype in the world and take a surf for themselves, such a bias will gradually diappear.
A greater problem is the question of copyright. Once your work is up in cyberspace, anyone can download it, change your name to theirs, and upload it as their own or submit it to a hardcopy zine or journal. The postmodern idea of appropriation is thus enacted in a very tangible form everyday. Currently there's no real way to stop this, if stop it we should (there are good arguments on both sides of the question), let alone discover it.
And, it goes without saying, publishing on the Web so far means publishing without payment . . . much like publishing in many real-world hardcopy outlets.
It also means, though, unlimited freedom in terms of what you publish. And it mean tremendous public access. Publish a story in cyberspace, and your potential audience instantaneously increases from a few hundred to millions.
Plus all the middle-people—from agents to printers to bookstore owners—are eliminated. At least theoretically, then, you're dealing with a mode of creativity that travels directly from writer to reader. So even at it's most expensive, the Web will reduce production costs drastically and, in some cases, do away with them altogether.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that the Web (or at least those corners still uncolonized by commerce) will continue to offer a larger and larger space for non-mainstream fiction.
We're standing at a tremendously exciting cybercultural intersection.
The lights have changed.
It's time to cross over.
Now Read This
Editors of Coda: Poets & Writers Newsletter. The Writing Business (1985). About the practicalities of being a writer, with very good sections on "The Writer As Business Person" and "Adventures in Publishing."
Fulton, Len, editor. The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Press (Updated yearly). Correctly called the Bible of small press publication, this lists thousands of alternative publishing possibilities.
Gee, Robin, editor. Novel and Short Story Writer's Market (Updated yearly). A guide to some of the more commercial publication venues, as well as to writers' conferences and workshops, retreats and colonies, organizations and resources, and publications of interest to writers. For a list of agents, see Writer's Market, also published by Writer's Digest Books.
Hewitt, John. Writer's Resource Center. Good guide to writers' organizations and more plus a writer-friendly search engine: www.azstarnet.com/~poewar/writer/writer.html
Literary Agents of North America (Updated regularly). A good place to start agent-searching. A companion to this book is the one published by Poets & Writers, Inc.: Literary Agents: A Writer's Guide.
Writer's Market (Updated yearly). A listing of some of the more commercial publishing venues and a strong agent listing.
Stretching & Flexing
1. Visit your campus or local library, and begin to acquaint yourself with both the above publishing references and several issues of some of the zines and journals that sound like they might offer you a berth for your story.
2. Run Web searches to discover electronic publication outlets, and begin to familiarize yourself with some of those that might look appetizing and their submission guidelines.
3. Follow the instructions outlined above, take a deep breath, and, if you feel ready, send out your first story.
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