I cannot believe it’s December, but somehow it is. Folio’s almost a year old. First we were going to have a big party in spring, once we got our NY digs; then we were going to have a party in the fall, to celebrate a 9-month anniversary; then we were going to have it around the holidays. Now we ARE going to have it some time in January, to celebrate Folio’s first birthday, so I guess it’s OK that we’ve been too busy to plan a party til now.

Looks like we’ve sold enough books – creeping upwards on 90 (yes, that’s NINE-OH) to assure that the rent’s paid both in NY and in DC for the next couple of years. So that’s an enormous relief. I almost wish I weren’t having so much fun – I can’t help feeling guilty, like pretty soon the Fun God will realize that we’re all enjoying this whole setup way too much, but I’m just going to keep knocking on wood and praying that everything continues to move along on track.

I’m just coming back from the NY debut of a couple of authors of mine, Jane Jenkins and Janet Hirschenson of The Casting Company. Their book, A Star is Found: Our Adventures Casting Some of Hollywood’s Biggest Movies (Harcourt), went on sale a couple of weeks ago and is selling briskly. Jane and Janet are casting directors – possibly the most preeminent casting directors in the country – and truly nice people, to boot.

One of their comments struck a cord with me, probably because they were talking about rejection and I knew I was going to have to write about it later that night. They told the audience about how Meg Ryan came in for an audition; they liked her but she didn’t get the part; then she came in for a second audition for a different film; they still liked her but she didn’t get the part; and then finally, with When Harry Met Sally, she came in and they knew she was perfect, she was right. What struck me, though, was how Jane and Janet talked about the two roles she didn’t get: “She wasn’t exactly what we were looking for,” they said. It was completely non-judgmental, dispassionate, friendly, calm – they were keeping their eyes on the ball (i.e., casting films 1 and 2), and Meg Ryan didn’t exactly fit what they had in mind, so they moved on.

Somehow I thought this was exactly what most agents do, in the literary side of the business: we look at the letters that hit our desk, we approach them more-or-less non-judgmentally, dispassionately, friendly, hopeful that maybe this letter is going to be exactly what we’re looking for (even though we couldn’t tell you, before we open the envelope, what we were looking for). And then, in most cases, it isn’t; it’s not quite what we have in mind; and we move on. Form reject. Next. Onward.

In my posting last month, I tried to explain some of the thinking behind the “not exactly what I was looking for” mentality; this month I want to focus on how to decipher the rejection letters.

Jeff’s Step-By-Step Guide for Deciphering Rejection Letters.


Basic clichés that we may as well just get out of the way.

1. Rejection’s not personal. Unless you’ve done something really offensive in your coverletter, or somehow offended/alienated the agent, this is actually true. The agent doesn’t know you; it really isn’t personal.
2. Nobody’s here to provide feedback. Agents and editors don’t make a living providing feedback to unsolicited materials. If we ask for the materials, we might do so; but it’s very very rarely part of our job description, this early in the process. We’ll provide feedback once we sign you up; until then, our time might be better served working with the writers we’re already committed to.
3. Form rejection letters are the standard. They’re quick, easy, and economical. They’re the way this business works, so get used to it.
4. Rejection may come for a perfectly good reason, and it may come for no reason at all. Sometimes the agent’s having a very busy day; sometimes they’re having a rotten week, dealing with illness or stress or getting ready to go away on vacation.

Formulate your submission plan.

1. Start by writing the best book you can write, of course.
2. Do your homework: target your agents.
i. Put together a list of your “Top 20” agents.
ii. Then put together your list of “Next 20.”
iii. Finally list your “Bottom 20.” Now you have a list of about 60 agents.
iv. You’ve done your research, so you know: that these agents handle your kind of material; how they prefer to be contacted (snailmail, email, carrier pigeon, etc.); that they’re not totally opposed to working with new or different authors; that they’re reputable.
3. Draft your query letter (and don’t forget to include your self-addressed stamped envelope if you’re sending hardcopies; and be sure that you’ve included all the ways you can be reached).
4. You’re going to start out by contacting 10 agents at a time. (You’ll note, savvy mathematician that you are, that I’ve left room here for 6 rounds of submission.) Take 3 from each category (Top 20, Next 20, Bottom 20), and add 1 more from one of those categories, so you have 10 letters going out.
5. Contact your agents via the methods described in Step #2 above.
6. Sit back and wait. Start your next book, gnaw your toenails, get a massage, go see the latest movie (which hopefully Jane and Janet have cast). Take your mind off the waiting.
7. Eventually one of about six things is going to happen:
i. After about 3 or 4 months, you’ve heard absolutely nothing at all.
ii. You receive a “form rejection” response (this is a form letter, usually addressed “Dear Author,” and citing the various all-true reasons why the project isn’t right for the agent).
iii. You receive a minimal but personalized response – either scrawled on the bottom of your cover letter or scribbled on the form rejection letter.
iv. You receive a really personalized response – addressed to you, thoughtfully written, with comments about why the agent didn’t ask to read more, or suggestions about what you could do to improve the manuscript.
v. You receive a phonecall/email, asking for additional material.
vi. You receive a phonecall/email, asking if the agent can represent you.
8. Create a table with the following headings:

No Response--Form Reject--Minimal Response--Personalized Response--Request for More--Request for Representation

Then mark what happens in the appropriate box for each agent.

Agent #1
Agent #2
Agent #3
Agent #4
Agent #5
Agent #6
Agent #7
Agent #8
Agent #9
Agent #10

I always find that making charts like this one will make it far easier for you to actually be objective, and actually make constructive use of your time. As you hear from your agents, put a big fat X in whatever column is appropriate.

III. Decipher Your Chart.

1. 1 or more X’s in the “Request for Representation” Column: assess the agent, send out more query letters, if you’re not satisfied, but keep doing what you’re doing, because you’re doing it right.

2. 1 or more X’s in the “Request for More” Column: send out your material. You’re doing something right. But if, after 4 or 5 X’s in this column, you still haven’t moved forward in the publishing game, keep reading, because I think you’ve been bumped down to the next category.

3. 1 X in the “Personalized Response” Column: If you receive even one glowing rejection letter, send out to another 10 agents (again, your mix of Top, Middle, and Bottom). If you get the same sorts of responses from those 10, keep reading.

4. 3 or 4 X’s in the “Minimal Response” Column: If you receive 3 or 4 or more of these responses, send out to another 10 agents. If you get the same sorts of responses from those 10, keep reading.

5. 9 or 10 X’s in either the “No Response” or “Form Reject” Column: this is the heart of things, and here’s what you need to do. STOP. DO NOT SEND OUT MORE QUERY LETTERS. You need to fix something.

Something is not right in your approach.

Go back and read last month’s column, on why I usually reject manuscripts – somewhere in that list, I suspect, your manuscript will fall. It may be that it’s simply not well-written enough. It may be too small. You may not have a big enough platform, or the right kind of platform, to make your book work for a trade audience. Point is: something in your approach didn’t work. You don’t make the agents stop and say, “Wow, I’ve got to take a look at this!” So don’t keep sending out more queries, thinking it’s everybody else’s fault – it may be everybody else’s fault, I grant you, but in most cases it’s also that you didn’t quite explain yourself well enough, or write the book well enough, or succinctly sum up your project in a really compelling way.

Savvy you, you’ve already realized the punchline to my comments today: you’ll see that the agents and editors, despite themselves, have indeed provided valuable and useful feedback. So use it. Don’t just beat your head against the wall. Figure out what isn’t working in your approach (I already gave you a list last month on stuff to think about) and fix it.

Good luck!

So I’ve been thinking a lot about rejection – it sure is the staple of this business. The more I thought about it, the more I kept realizing that I reject about 99% of the queries that cross my desk for pretty similar, pretty familiar reasons. I’m just one guy, of course – I know for example that Paige, who does a lot more commercial fiction than I do, uses slightly different standards – so take these comments with a grain of salt and know that they simply might not apply to your type of work. But they may help, as you struggle to navigate the dark waters of literary agents and publishers.

Jeff’s Rules of Rejection

Part 1: Reasons for Rejection

The following are some general coordinates on why I step aside instead of asking to represent a book project.

Category 1: The “Easy No’s.”

1. Not an area I represent. The easiest reject of all – the one that requires absolutely no thought on my part – is the letter that hits my desk asking me to represent stuff that I’ve never represented, never had an interest in representing, and have no interest in representing in the future. I know that writers may have a tough time figuring out what kind of material falls into this category, but spend a few minutes and research whether the agent’s listed somewhere what s/he simply doesn’t want to represent.

These kinds of easy-no’s fall into two categories: a “no” because it’s outside the publishing area the agent represents; and a “no” because it deals with subject matter the agent doesn’t want to represent.

(a) In the publishing area, all agents have certain strengths and weaknesses – stuff they know how to sell, and stuff they simply have no clue about. I know that I, personally, have no clue about children’s books, for example. Never have, probably never will. (I did sell Chip Shields’ YA biography of Harper Lee, I confess – but that’s because I represented his adult biography, Mockingbird. It’s not a genre otherwise that I’ll ever have much to do with.) Ditto romances – I’ve never read one, and am not going to start now. Murder mysteries make me run the other direction. Westerns don’t resonate. I just don’t read these kinds of books, don’t know what’s current on the shelves, don’t know the editors who do these of things, don’t know the criteria for what a good one would like. In short, I don’t want to represent them.

(b) The second kind of project that I know that I don’t want to represent can be defined more by its subject matter. Some types of projects which otherwise might be up my alley are, for other reasons, projects that I wouldn’t want to take on. Some agents may actually tell you this kind of stuff; others don’t – so, again, it may be harder to figure out. I make it really clear on my website, for example, that I don’t do books with children in peril (kidnapped, murdered, victimized, and so forth). It gives me the willies to read about little kids being killed or seriously hurt. I have a young kid myself, and the very idea of having to contemplate that kind of a scenario puts me in an absolute tailspin. Does this mean that books with children in peril are completely unpublishable? Ask Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones (narrated by a dead girl) – the book was a runaway bestseller. Does it mean that I read The Lovely Bones? I confess that I tried – I wanted to see what the fuss was all about – and I got to the point where the killer was going to murder the girl and I literally (I’m not kidding) threw the book out of the window because I didn’t want it in the house with me. It’s a gorgeously written book, but the subject matter is not the kind of subject matter that I’m comfortable handling. Period. Despite my clear instructions in every place where people ask me what I do and don’t represent, I’m still flabbergasted when I get letters along the lines of: “Dear Jeff, I wrote a book in which a young girl was raped, and I know you don’t handle that kind of thing, but I wanted to write you anyway because it’s a great book” – and all I can think of is yuck, and how quickly can I pass on this one.

2. Signs of a problem author. The next category that’s an easy No is the author who has already indicated, in his first contact with me, that he’s going to be more trouble than it’s worth dealing with. Agents can often sense this group a mile away. “Dear Agent,” these letters often begin (and most of them do begin just that – “Dear Agent” – no name, no company name, as if we were all interchangeable widgets), “I have sent my query to 50 agents and none of you have had the decency to respond” – or “Dear Agent, no one will publish my work,” or “Dear Agent, I’m living in a houseboat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean and I only have access to email every third Thursday” – or “Dear Agent, I’m sending this to you via email because I’m broke and can’t afford the cost of paper” – all of these are indications that it’s going to be difficult to work with the author. Sometimes authors are such fabulous writers, or have such an amazing story that we take the chance; but very many other times we just steer clear because it doesn’t seem worth the effort. So do yourself a favor – no matter how many times you’ve been rejected (we’ll get to that below), don’t come across as belligerent, or clueless, or desperate. Sound confident and comfortable – quickly and succinctly tell me about you and your work, and when you’ve done that, stop.

3. Projects that defy conventions. Sometimes books just can’t be categorized easily. The book itself may be amazing, but I just wouldn’t know how to sell it. I recently saw a wonderfully written memoir that needed, for a variety of very valid reasons, a great many gorgeous color photographs in each chapter to illustrate the author’s points. Is this a photo book? A memoir? Both? I didn’t know, and didn’t know what publishers would work on something like that, so there was no question that I’d have to step aside on it. If your book is that kind of a project, do yourself a favor and go to your local bookstore and try to find a book on the shelf like yours – if you can’t, if there’s nothing that comes close, you may be barking up the wrong tree to be talking to literary agents and standard commercial presses: we just don’t know how to publish and market your kind of book. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other specialty or regional presses available to you, though – it just may take some digging to figure out what those presses are..

Category 2: The “Easy No’s” That Are Harder To Explain Why They’re “Easy No’s.”

Often I take one look at a project and think, “Nope, not for me,” but if I were asked to explain why, it may be a bit tougher. So bear with me if what I’m saying now makes less sense.

4. Writing not strong enough. Hands down, this is the most common reason I don’t take the project on. The writing is, or may be, serviceable and solid – but it just may not dazzle me enough. Stilted dialogue, too much backstory, wooden and unbelievable characters – all that kind of stuff – is usually the reason I don’t take the project on. Does this mean that you’re a terrible writer? Maybe, but maybe you’ve just sent the project out a little too early – it’s just not ready to go, yet. You still have to build up those writer muscles – develop that ear for dialogue, say, or learn the delicate balance in trying to tell a forward-moving story while still giving the reader enough background to orient himself. I’ll talk a bit more about this below, in Part 2, so don’t think you’re done hearing me whine about the writing.

5. Premise not compelling enough. This is a fairly tricky one, I confess, and so much of it depends on your (the writer’s) own salesmanship. I know the kind of books that I represent all tend to have a couple of things in common – when I (briefly) tell someone (an editor, another agent, a friend, whoever) about the project, I usually elicit a “wow” from them, or an intrigued look, and many interested follow-up questions. That “wow” factor can’t be manufactured, and to me it’s a very good indication that it’s the kind of project I represent. If I read a coverletter someone sends in, or hear someone tell me about their project at a writer’s conference, and I don’t feel that kind of a “wow” response, that’s one indication that the book isn’t quite up my alley. Of course what’s “wow” to one person is “ho-hum” to another – but do yourself a favor and learn to talk about your project, or write a project, that engenders that kind of a response, especially if you’re writing fiction.

6. Grammatical errors. I might not pass on your book just because of a misplaced comma or two, but it is certainly something I notice immediately – and several grammatical or punctuation errors – especially in your cover letter – might be easily be enough to tip the balance away from wanting to read more. So be careful that your commas, apostrophes, and semi-colons are properly used, for example.

7. How I’m contacted. Although the contact method itself may not completely turn me off, I do know that it’s a reason that many of my colleagues reject a manuscript, so it’s worth discussing this in some detail.

a. Wrong method. Some agents only accept email submissions; some only want a hardcopy; others prefer the contact to come via donkeyback, or stork, or with balloons and chocolate attached. Spend a few minutes and figure out how best to approach the agent – it’s not impossible to figure out. We’re pretty good at spelling this kind of thing out clearly. If we prefer to see a hardcopy with 50 pages and a synopsis, send, via snailmail, a hardcopy with 50 pages and a synopsis and a SASE for your reply. If we prefer to see an email with no attachments, don’t attach your manuscript. Just follow the instructions. Why is this so important? Well, for me it’s a little like #2, above – signs of a problem author. If we’re dealing with someone who can’t follow direction, what will happen when I turn her loose to deal with a publishing house? The editor says please respond by X time, or the publicist says please do the following interview in the following way – and what if I’m dealing with an iconoclast who will make the publishing house miserable, so they all start calling and yelling at me? Moral of the story: submit the material in the manner that the agent’s already outlined. If the agent doesn’t have any clear guidelines, then a simple letter, SASE, and the first handful of pages of your manuscript might suffice.

b. How I’m addressed. I don’t know where you went to high school, but where I went, my teacher drummed into me that the proper way of opening business correspondence is: “Dear [Title] [Last Name]:”. So, in my case, it’d be, “Dear Mr. Kleinman:”. Not “Dear Jeff Kleinman” or “Dear Jeff” or “Good morning Mr. Kleinman!” or “Sirs:” or “Dear Sir or Madam”. That same high school teacher also taught me that it’s proper to use a colon (:) at the end of the line, rather than a comma (,), because commas are used for personal rather than business correspondence, but I understand that rule has relaxed in the past few years, so I’m trying to overlook the commas. In any case, the point is – get the agent’s name right; spell it right; address it to someone personally, and make it appear that you actually wanted to write to that agent, and not just to a name you got out of a book (or copied off the bathroom wall).


Category 3: The Pause & Think Abouts.

This category has a lot of overlap with Category 2, so no yelling at me if I seem to repeat myself.

8. Genre tough to break into. Certain genres, for me, are hard to publish into – self-help editors, for example, seems to be looking for an author with a really enormous national platform, since the new author may be going head-to-head with Dr. Phil, for example. Prescriptive travel editors (like Fodor’s) seem to already have their publishing program planned out, and books assigned. Dating and relationship books also look for the megaplatform author who also has a new/surprising/different concept – which sure ain’t easy to come up with, although people do, from time to time (a la He’s Just Not That Into You). It may be quite difficult for you to figure out if your book fits into that niche, so spend a few moments perusing the shelves of your local bookstore – if you’re a first-time author, for example, see if the shelf has other first-time authors sitting there, and try to determine what those authors’ credentials are.

9. Genre unclear. Sometimes I’m not sure, when I’ve done reading the author’s cover letter, where the book will fit on the shelf. Example: the memoir / photography book I mentioned above. Sometimes novels are paranormal / suspense / mystery / historical / religious. Sometimes they’re business / New Age. Go back to your bookstore and make sure there’s a clear, identifiable place on the shelf for your book, and be sure, in the coverletter, to tell me what it is. You may have a book that fits in a genre but it’s a genre that’s tough to break into – a western masquerading as a mystery, for example. Sometimes it is hard to tell, I grant you that; but try to realistically assess where your book fits. It won’t work to try to trick an agent into thinking it’s a mystery, only to get to page 30 and discover it’s a western – the book needs to be true to what it is; but whether what it is is saleable is an entirely different matter.

10. Smallness versus bigness. This category is much the same as the “not compelling premise” I talked about a second ago. Sometimes I read a book and like it a lot, but I don’t feel that a publisher will be able to sell enough copies to really be able to make a splash. Something about that project reads “small” – and I don’t know any other way of putting it than that. It’s a book that I could imagine getting lost on the shelf because not enough people will be talking about it, reviewing it, reading it, to get it off the shelf and into people’s lives. This, though, is a complete judgment call, so there’s little you can do – except write a gorgeously written book with an “oh wow” premise, of course.

11. Grabbability. I’ve talked about this in previous months, so I won’t belabor the point here, but many books just don’t grab me the way I wanted them to. They may be OK, but they didn’t keep me perched on the edge of my seat, or staying up all night devouring them. Obviously this, too, is a judgment call, but it’s certainly one of the most common reasons that I don’t take on a new project.


Phew. Enough harping on misery. So you’ve gotten the rejects, or maybe you’re just going out with your project and want to emotionally prepare yourself for them – the question is, what to do about ‘em? What can the rejection letters tell you? I’ll tell you next month!

So it’s mid September, and Folio has officially been in business for nine – count ‘em – NINE months now. The baby is BORN. We calculated that we’ve sold somewhere around seventy (yes, count ‘em, SEVENTY, that’s 7 – 0) books by now. I’m feeling a little like I’m taking a triceratops for a walk – the beast is a benign herbivore, surely, but also a living tank that’s trundling along whether I want it to or not. Quite cool. One of the things we need to do, of course, is start listing those deals on www.publishersmarketplace.com – but we all seem to be running around too much to list all of ‘em. More important – at least to me – is that the bookshelves in the office are finally up, and look fabulous. Books are already stacked two-deep, which strikes me as only right and proper in a literary agency.

Natalie asked me to talk this month about Scam Agents – how to tell a “real” agent from an agent who isn’t (i.e., someone who’s made out of plastic, cement, or – if they’re the good ones – cubic zirconium). So here’s my two-cents’ worth.


A Primer On Literary Agents.

The first thing you need to understand is what a literary agent is. We are not, contrary to popular belief, real estate agents or sports agents or cleaning agents (although, at times, we feel like a combination of all three). Literary agents license the intellectual property rights to your written (in most cases) intellectual property to a variety of licensors – or, in common speech, we find people to “buy” the rights to your book. Once we sell the rights to the book, we can sell a variety of subsidiary rights – audio rights, for example; or foreign rights, or television rights, or musical rights (Golly, that sounds pretty boring. It’s actually pretty fun [which goes to show how little you can trust the written word these days].).

When we sell rights to your project, the licensor (i.e., the publisher, or studio, or production company, etc.) pays you, in care of us – we put the money in an escrow account, take out an agreed-upon percentage (usually 15% for starters, but it really depends on the rights), and write you a check for the rest. That’s how we get paid – we don’t make a dime until you do.

All this sounds very impressive, but keep in mind that the most important criterion for becoming a literary agent is the wannabe-agent’s ability to spell. Yes, that’s right – spell. In order to become a literary agent, the wannabe needs to be able to write the following letters in order: A-G-E-N-T. If the person can sequence these letters, the person can be, by definition, a literary agent. (A bit scary, yes?) There’s no test or certification course to pass; you don’t have to study for seven years and do a residency and internship, and you’re not called before the thesis review board to be asked such questions as, “What is a Narrative Arc?” and “Define a standard hardcover royalty structure, with escalators.”

Before I go on, I absolutely must defend myself and my colleagues. Most of this industry – the people on this side of the desk, who reject your manuscript in a variety of pleasant-sounding form-letter flavors – are incredibly nice, amazingly hardworking, and truly dedicated people. We do this job because we love it: because we love to read; because we love – and believe in – writers and writer’s careers; because we want to be a part of the creative process, and because we know there’s nothing quite the like the feeling of making that call to a first-time author to tell her that a publisher wants to publish the novel she’s labored over for the past ten years. This is a completely heart job – we do it because we want to do it. It might be more lucrative to be a real estate agent, or a shoe salesman, or a corporate attorney, but we (misguided souls that we are) take a different path – reading through piles of unsolicited manuscripts, rejecting authors and being rejected in turn by publishers. The only way to do this job is to love it.

That said, there are a lot of people who are doing their job for what I’d like to think of as the wrong reason – bilking writers out of money, pride, dreams. Imagine, dear reader, an unregulated industry paired with the complete and total desperation of many first-time writers, and you can imagine the scams that can ooze from the Ersatz Literary Agency’s miasma.

Welcome To The Ersatz Literary Agency.

So what is a scam agency? They come in a variety of flavors and colors – and unfortunately I probably don’t know even half the forms they take (my job, as I said, is selling books – I don’t police the literary agency world). But I suspect that most of them have similar bills of fare.

Understand this: The Ersatz Literary Agency is not interested in selling your book to a reputable publisher. They often make their money in other ways – charging certain fees, or referring you to different services (editing, book-doctoring, etc.) within their organization (and you may not be aware that it is within their organization). They eat up your money, your time, and your dreams, and when all’s said and done you’re not any closer to getting your book published by a reputable publishing house than when you signed up with them.

Recognizing a Scammer.

So the question becomes: how do you distinguish between a Genuine Literary Agent and a Genuine Fake one? Here are a few thoughts.

1. AAR. Many reputable literary agents belong to the Association of Authors Representatives (www.aar-online.org). Not all of ‘em do – a lot of fabulous agents don’t – but many are members. The AAR has a solid application process – the applicant has to get recommendations from other agents and editors; has to sell a certain amount of books; and has to agree to abide by a cannon of ethics, for example. If the agent you’re considering doesn’t belong to the AAR, don’t panic, but do ask them why they don’t belong, and if they abide by the AAR’s canon of ethics (you can get a copy of these on the AAR’s website).

2. Location. There’s a myth that all reputable literary agents have to be in New York. Let me repeat here: this is a complete and ridiculous myth – agents lurk in most states. However, an agent doing business today definitely needs access to a telephone and regular mail services, so if your prospective agent resides deep in the African bush with only intermittent access to a telephone and no email access at all, that may be a warning sign that something’s amiss. If the agent isn’t in New York, find out if they go there regularly – how they maintain contact with editors and so forth. Under no condition, though, should you let geography be the deciding factor in your decision on whether to go with a particular agent. I’m thinking of a couple of agents who are absolutely and completely fabulous, who regularly do very big and very nice deals for their clients – one’s in Denver and the other’s in Austin. To get either of them to represent you would be a godsend. But they make regular trips to New York, and have very close ties with the publishing community. The Ersatz Literary Agency doesn’t have those ties. So, you ask, how do you find out if your prospective agency has these ties? Ask them. Ask them how regularly they go to New York, whether they attend any of the other major bookfairs (London, Frankfurt, BEA, etc.)

3. Fee Charging. As I said above, the Ersatz Agency doesn’t make money from selling your books, so they have to make it up in other ways. They may charge a variety of fees – “marketing fees,” or “editing fees,” or other such creative terms. These are the guys to avoid, period. That said, though, many literary agents ask to be reimbursed for their out-of-pocket expenses – courier fees, or mailing fees, or long distance phone calls, or copying costs. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as they make it clear up front that you’ll be responsible for those charges. If they do ask you to reimburse you for their expenses, make sure that those expenses are billed after the agent has incurred the cost – they can send you an itemized list of expenses, or the actual receipts, or whatever you two work out: the point is that you’re reimbursing them for money they’ve spent on your behalf, and the money’s not just going into their pocket to make them rich. Keep in mind that the agent earns money when you do.

4. Lack of Client Lists. Agents that post their services online will often talk a good game, and sound pretty impressive, but they don’t list what books they’ve sold, and to whom they’ve sold them. That in itself is fine; many agents – especially agents who’ve been around since the Dark Ages (i.e., since before the Internet) feel that the spotlight should remain on the author, not on the agent. But if the agent doesn’t list his clients, ask him to send you a list of a few of them, privately. Ask him if he’ll put you in touch with a couple of them as referrals. If he won’t provide this information (“Sorry, all of this is confidential.”), run – don’t walk – to the nearest exit. It’s true, though, that there are a lot of well-intentioned young agents starting out who simply might not have a client list – all I can say is that those folk are definitely out there, and may be fabulous to work for, but do your best to ascertain that they’re reputable, credible, well-intentioned people. And assure yourself (as in #2, above) that they have real access to the publishing community.

5. Lack of Positive Internet Coverage. Let’s face it, you writers are a chatty bunch. You’re always talking about us poor beleaguered agents. So go online and search us out – there will almost always be mention of us, bad or good. A few good sites include: Preditors & Editors, http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/ , Writer Beware: http://www.sfwa.org/beware/, and Absolute Write Water Cooler: http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/.

The Quasi-Ersatz Agency.

Keep in mind that some agencies may not rise to the level of true Ersatz Agencies – but they may more harmful than helpful to your career. They might, for example, not send your material out as promised; or may send it out in a less-than-stellar condition. Or they might be the kind of agent that editors prefer not to do business with. It’s very difficult to assess this from your position, I know; but there are three quick assessments you can perform that may help weed out this group.

1. Client List. Again, look at that client list. Have they represented similar books to yours? (if you’re writing a mystery novel, have they sold other mysteries? If you’re writing serious nonfiction, have they sold this kind of thing?) Do a vast percentage of their books seem to go to the same publishing house – which may be a publishing house you’ve never heard of, or one which pays very low advances and has a poor or nonexistent marketing, PR, and/or sales force? (if you don’t know this, search ‘em out on the internet.) If you’ve answered “yes” to any of these questions, ask the agency to refer you to a couple of clients and get their opinions.

2. www.publishersmarketplace.com. It’s worth subscribing to this new bible of the publishing industry – you can do it on a month-by-month basis. Among its other many worthwhile services, it has a section on the site that lists publishing deals. It’s completely easy to search the database and see if your agent has listed any deals there – and if so, to whom did they sell the book, and how much did they sell it for. Keep in mind, though, that publisher’s marketplace isn’t infallible: a lot of agents don’t post all of their deals on-line (I know that I don’t), so it’s not an infallible source by any means. Cross-check your findings against www.publishersweekly.com – this is the other bible of the publishing industry, and just as useful. Another really fabulous site is Bill Martin’s www.agentresearch.net. I’m sure there are a million other great sites, including Natalie’s, of course, but I really don’t follow this stuff all that closely.

3. Literary Agents Guides. Your library will certainly possess a few of the published literary agent guides now available. Check to see if your agent is listed there; they do try to provide current, accurate information. Some of the best include Literary Marketplace, Writer’s Digest Guide to Literary Agents, and Jeff Herman’s Guide to Literary Agents.

Well, that should keep you busy for a while, I guess. So I’ll call it quits for this month, with just one caveat – if there’s a particular topic that you’d really like to see me cover, shoot me a quick email (jkleinman (at) foliolit (dot) com), and maybe it’ll be fodder for a future rant.

It’s August already – Ferragosto in Italy; everything’s closed down but here people are working like maniacs. The agency’s new website is up – www.foliolit.com – still many updates to come, but things are slowly taking shape. Many cool marketing and PR plans starting to coalesce. If only there were more hours in the day. I’m thinking that I need a vacation – just one day off, please (don’t forget we agents are stuck reading manuscripts on the weekend – which is fun, but it’s still work, y’know?). I actually have a day off at the end of the month – flying off to a writer’s conference, and I get there the day before the conference starts, so I get to bum around and hang out and relax (or at least try to / pretend to relax, which is more or less the same thing) until 5 PM, so it almost counts as a full day off. The problem is that it usually takes me four or five days to get into the groove of vacation – I spend the first few days incessantly checking email and voicemail, and dealing with whatever crisis has come up; and then, once the sand and the surf really get into my blood, I become completely comatose for the rest of the trip. My wife has to pry me out of the hammock with a stick…

Anyway, no use thinking about vacations, because work is all-consuming at the moment. Natalie’s asked me to talk about agent guidelines today, and I think that’s a great subject because all of us are so different, and the criteria are such weird things.

Jeff’s Guide to Agent Guidelines

Step #1. Understand the context. The first thing to understand is that when you send in your query letter, you’ve actively begun the publishing process (Just so we’re clear on the terms, right off the bat: “Query Letter” is the cover letter that asks the agent if s/he wants to take a look at your stuff. I’m not going to talk about query letters here; I’ve written about them elsewhere, and there are a million other websites and books written by people far smarter than I am who can give you the skinny on these. Briefly, though, a query letter is a single page that succinctly and compellingly discusses your book, and asks the agent if s/he wants to take a look at it). That letter is the first, and may be the only, contact you’ll have with the agent or editor. So it makes sense to do it right – to go in with the right attitude and include the right kind of materials. Here are some thoughts on how to formulate all of these.

Step #2. Come up with a List of Agents Worth Approaching. Hundreds of agents are out there, desperate for the Next Great Manuscript – the question, dear writer, is how you find ‘em. Some suggestions, in order that I think are the most effective (if not the most practical – hey, I’m a literary agent, remember? My dad wanted me to be a corporate lawyer; if you’re not happy, complain to him). One quick suggestion, when hunting for an agent: do not type “literary agent” into your search engine and be done with it – there are far more effective ways of proceeding. Here are a few:

- Referrals. Befriend bestselling authors, and ask them if they’ll recommend you to their agent. We agents don’t want to offend our bestselling clients, so that’s a surefire way of making sure that we read your submission asap. It’s also ideal, of course, if the agent represents the kind of genre you write in (I’m not getting into genre here, by the way), so your bestselling author friend doesn’t feel foolish recommending your fabulous spirituality memoir to their agent who only handles literary fiction.

- Conferences. Writer’s Conferences (see my previous posting, above) are one way of meeting an agent and making a personal connection.

- Acknowledgments. Go out to your local bookstore or library and find books that you feel really are similar to yours. Don’t go with brand-name authors; find first-time authors (if you’re trying, for example, to publish your first novel) or authors that have credentials similar to yours (regular appearances on local TV or radio, a national or local or regional speaking gig, and so forth), or books with a voice similar to yours, or a message similar to yours, or subject matter similar to yours, and check in the Acknowledgments section of the book. Well-bred authors thank their agents for their help on the project, so that’s a great way of getting the agent’s name.

- Writer’s Guides. Lots of ‘em out there, especially on the Net. Of course check out the AAR’s website , Bill Martin’s very thorough www.agentresearch.com, or www.publishersmarketplace.com; but there are literally hundreds of other places, including Natalie’s own agent pages. Another possibility that’s worth dealing with is just going to one of the great writer’s community websites – my favorite, of course, is Backspace but www.writers.net is also a goodie. These places will all have listings of agents, and may say something useful about them.

A few key things to keep in mind as you research the agent:

- Genre. Make sure the agent handles the genre you’re writing in. If you don’t know the genre of your book, go to your local large chain bookstore and figure it out. Where would your book go on the shelf? Find the one shelf that would best house it. Books that cross genres often get misshelved, and lost in the store, and disappear prematurely.

- Acceptance of new clients. Make sure the agent is accepting new clients. Many aren’t, or will only accept clients from referrals.

- Beware of scammers. All agents aren’t created equal. In order to be able to qualify for the vast and heady experience of being a literary agent, the prospective agent needs to be able to type “A-G-E-N-T”. You’ll be surprised how many people can do that, frankly. One easy warning sign is to find agents who charge fees – reading fees, marketing fees, etc. They may be perfectly qualified, fabulous agents, but generally the industry frowns upon this kind of fee-charging, since the A-G-E-N-T may be making his/her money from the fees, rather from selling your books.

- Determine exclusivity. Some agents will only read your book if they have it “exclusively” – which means it’s not sitting on the desks of other agents at the same time. Many agents do this, and it’s not a problem (unless they sit on your manuscript for months at a time), as long as you’re aware of this, and are willing to abide by it.

Step #3. Figure Out The Agents’ Submission Guidelines.
Step #3A. Figure Out How The Agent Likes To Be Approached. All agents like to be approached differently. Some (like me) are happy to be emailed; others abhor email. Some refuse to read faxes; some stand, salivating, at the fax machine, waiting for the next submission to arrive (well, that might be a slight exaggeration). For some agents, it’s a fact of life that how you approach them is as important, or maybe even more important, than what you approach them with.

Here’s why: the job of being a writer often means taking directions. You, as the publishing house’s next bestselling author, are a player in a big corporate machine – you’re a big player, maybe; you’re the public face, the lead singer of the band; but you’re still just a player. An editor needs to be comfortable thinking that, if they make some suggested edits, you’ll address those edits (you might not have to actually make the changes, but you’ll at least think carefully through the editor’s comments and respond clearly and effectively). Copyeditors need to be sure you’re going through the proof pages and reacting appropriately. Publicists need to be sure that you’ll say the right kind of thing at the right kind of time. A bookseller needs to know that you’ll be appearing where you say you’ll be, when you say you’ll be there. Those are a few examples.

It’s my job, as an agent, to assure the publisher that you will be able to do these kinds of things. Sure, we get it wrong; sure, not every author’s easy to work with. But it’s easy to screen out the people who clearly can’t follow simple instructions, folks whom we know (or at least think we know) will be a problem later.

Moral of the story? Go research the agent and find out how they like to receive materials. They’ll tell you.

Email or Snail Mail? Such a question. All will depend on the agent. I, for one, prefer email (it saves trees and time). Other agents like to have the paper to haul around with them. Agents will tell you in their submission guidelines. If they don’t tell you, play it safe and go the hardcopy route.

- If Email:
o Never include attachments without checking with the agent first.
o Don’t expect the agent to just click on your website – we rarely do it. You can include a link to your site, if you like; if you’ve intrigued us, we might check it out, but don’t count on us to check it out.
o Don’t send repeated follow-ups.
o Don’t bcc a million agents at once – target each agent individually.
o If you don’t hear back from the agent within eight weeks or so, move on.
- If Snail Mail:
o Include a SASE.
o If you don’t hear from an agent within eight weeks or so, move on.

Step #3B. Figure Out What To Send The Agent.

You’ve put your list together of agents you’re wanting to contact, gone through their submission guidelines, figured out how they want to be contacted. Last question is what to send ‘em. Agents will generally want to see some, or all, of the following (What specifically the agent wants to see will depend on the agent):

- Query letter (or cover letter), asking the agent if they’re interested in seeing more.
- Sample pages of the materials.
o If a novel, agents will always want to see the first pages (if your first pages aren’t your best pages, don’t send anything out til those first pages are your best pages). They may want to see a page, ten pages, fifty pages, three chapters, or the entire novel – this will depend on the agent.
o If nonfiction, agents may want to see a proposal, a selection from a sample chapter, and so forth.
- Synopsis. A synopsis is a fairly brief abstract of the project – fiction or nonfiction. It may be anywhere from one to four or more pages – I never know what the Rule is for this, but my suggestion is, as with almost everything in this business: keep it short. A single page, singlespaced with 1.5” margins, might be fine; two pages, doublespaced, may also be fine. (Note to purists: I know that everything’s supposed to be doublespaced, but a synopsis is the one place I think you can make an exception – if there’s a lot of white space, to make the page look inviting.) I, for one, hate reading synopses of novels – I hate to know what happens ahead of time – but sometimes I like to have ‘em, just to be sure that the author can finish the book and end the book in an interesting way.
- Outline.
o If a novel, this is a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the entire novel. Each chapter is somewhere between a couple of sentences and a couple of paragraphs long.
o If nonfiction, this is a crucial portion of the book proposal; I wouldn’t think you’d send it without the rest of the proposal.
- Clips & Other Supporting Documentation. Sometimes other book reviews (if glowing), clips from articles you’ve written (especially if you’ve written for national or very prestigious publications), or even endorsements from bestselling authors can all help make the case that you are an author to pay attention to.
Again, what you send an agent depends on what they want to see. I know that, after a few rejections, first-time authors will panic and think that if they do one thing wrong, they’re doomed to Never-To-Be-Published Hell. I don’t think that’s quite true, but I can see why this would be a concern.
Here, though, is the reality: agents who are looking for great projects will pretty much ignore protocol, if this is a very very cool project that they’re very very excited about. As long as it’s written in English, they might leap on the project if it’s something that really has a great author attached to a fabulous concept. But for most others – that is, the 99.95% of other projects out there – it’s always a good idea to try to follow the rules.

#4. Exceptions & Contradictions To Everything I Wrote Above. As you may be able to tell by now, if you’ve slogged through what I’ve been writing every month, I’m not one who’s really in love with Authority and Rules. So I think you should feel absolutely free to break all the rules – as long as you know what they are to begin with, and as long as you’re convinced that breaking the rules is the way to go. So if what I’ve said above doesn’t work for you, ignore it.
Some stuff that I suggest you do in any case:
- Include the first page of your manuscript. Some agents will say that they only want to see the cover letter; others will ask for the first chapter, or the first three chapters, or the first 50 pages. That said, we all understand that finances may not allow a beginning writer to send the first 50 pages to 50 agents. So, at a bare minimum, include a variation of the following sentence in your cover letter: “I know you like to see the first 50 pages, but I thought I’d include the first page of the manuscript, just to give you an idea of my writing style.” [Note: for nonfiction, it’s fine to send the first page of your sample chapter – since a “sample” chapter might not be the first chapter.]
- Let the author know if the submission is exclusive or nonexclusive. At this first initial contact, the agent’s not obligated to respond to you in a timely manner – although it’s only polite, of course. But if you make it absolutely clear that you’ve targeted the agent for All The Right Reasons (see above), it’s a little more likely that the agent will respond more promptly, and maybe more positively.
- Write as if you were writing to a friend. Not too personal (always use business address conventions), but friendly and open.

Good luck!

I’m flabbergasted that yet another month has gone by and it’s time to post my monthly update. First of all, the really key important news: a bunch of personnel changes at Folio:

• We've hired Laney K. Becker, who will wear two hats. She'll set up and oversee our newly established Marketing and Publicity Department, and she'll be agenting for Folio, too. More on her will be posted on the www.foliolit.com website in the next couple of weeks, once we get our new website (thank GOODNESS) up and running.

• We’ve also brought on board the fabulous Celeste Fine, late of David Vigliano & Associates, formerly with Trident. We’re so excited to have her – she’s incredibly nice, incredibly cool, and has wonderful taste in books. She’ll be doing a lot of nonfiction in areas other than those that the rest of us concentrate in, so that’ll be great, too.

• Sadly, we’ve come to a parting of the ways with Jenny Rappaport, but hopefully all will go dazzlingly well with her in the future.

Other than that, the new offices continue to take shape – hopefully all of the bookshelves will be hung in the next week or so (we couldn’t decide what shelving we liked, so we decided to sit in the space for a month and get used to it before we made the decision)(FLAK shelving from IKEA, in case you’re interested), and at that point we’ll really have the offices FINISHED. Then hopefully a housewarming party to celebrate. And then back to work.

Natalie asked me to write something here about how to approach agents at writers’ conferences, so I figured I’d jabber on about that for a while, since it certainly is something that writers could use some help with. I used to do a lot more conferences than I do now – now I do maybe 6 or so a year. This summer I’m just going to PNWA in Seattle, Backspace’s conference in New York, and the Maui conference over Labor Day weekend; and then a couple in the fall. A lot of us at Folio go to these, though; we’re at a conference nearly every weekend, which is kind of daunting if you think about it too much.

Anyway, these writers’ conferences – as you probably know – are events that have several published writers dispensing advice, plus a few handfuls of editors and agents thrown into the mix, dispensing whatever it is that editors and agents dispense. These events can be a lot of fun – great ways of networking, a super method to make new connections and find out different perspectives to hone a writer’s craft. I understand that they can also be a bit daunting and stressful, since many of the conferences have various scripted ways of meeting editors and agents, and there’s a feeling that the agent (or editor) will “discover” you at this kind of event, wave a magic wand, and make all (or most) of your dreams come true. I’m afraid that I have to dispel this myth, and several others.

So, with no further fanfare, here are the Jeff Kleinman Guidelines to Good Conference Attendeeness.


Step #1. TALK to fellow participants. A couple of months ago I whined about how tough it was to get a project that was really ready to go – a project with a great voice, great writing, great concept. Do you realize what a huge boon you have at these conferences, literally tripping over published authors and – possibly even more intriguing – other wannabe writers who could be an enormous asset to you – reading drafts of your manuscript, offering a different perspective on your work? I always feel that authors are so focused on the editor-agent thing that they forget about the people sitting right next to them, the other writers who could actually be of huge assistance to them. I honestly think that it’s not at all a bad idea to ignore the editors and agents prancing around and just sit down in the hotel lobby with a couple of other writers, trying to create a community, a sounding-board – trying to make a connection to someone whose insights could really prove valuable. If you go to a writer’s conference, just try this (no matter how painful and terrible it is – and believe me I’d hate to do it myself, so I feel for you). Turn to the person sitting one seat down from you (because you always sit with empty seats on either side if you can help it) and say, “Hello, my name is [fill in your name – not mine] and I’m working on a book about [one-sentence description of your book]. What are you working on?” See if you have some kind of common ground. You might not, of course – the person sitting one seat down from you could be an absolute dragon with terrible breath and appalling clothes – but then again, you might make a worthwhile connection. If for no other reason, writer’s conferences are great places to (hem) meet other writers, so meet them, for goodness sake.

Step #2. Take Conferences With More Than One Grain of Salt. It’s true that, as billed, conferences are one of those rare occasions when you have a chance to meet people on the other side of the mailbox – editors, agents, PR and marketing professionals, and so forth. We’re generally called in to do a bunch of different tasks at these events – lectures, workshops, manuscript evaluations, one-on-one meetings, etc. Often we choose sexy and compelling titles for our talks – stuff like “Write A Bestselling Novel in 5 Minutes A Day and Lose 30 Pounds in the Process,” or “Become Independently Wealthy and Emotionally Fulfilled Through Freelance Writing.” Point being: we have a lot of information that we can impart, and certainly knowing the business side of things can be really helpful, but don’t get too sucked into these kinds of talks. Your business is writing, so make a connection with the writers. Use whatever information you find useful from these editors and agents, and throw out the rest. Whatever you do, don’t panic, hearing the kind of stuff we talk about. Sometimes people get all upset, going to a talk about, say, “Trends in Nonfiction” – someone on the panel will say that memoirs are dead, and all the memoirists in the audience will gasp and turn blue; and the reality is that no trend is dead – it just hasn’t had the next breakout book to hit yet. Let’s face it, Marley & Me is just a memoir about a guy and a dog, and there are millions of those stories out there – so who will want to buy another book like that? Millions of people, apparently. So don’t take what we have too say too seriously.

Step #3. Use Proper Etiquette When Talking To Publishing Folk. OK, if I haven’t lost you yet, then you’ve hung on for the real reason I was writing all this today. Conferences are opportunities to meet and speak with (either in a structured one-on-one setting, or informally over lunch or a beer) editors and agents – who, for the purpose of this discussion, shall henceforth be termed PF, for “Publishing Folk”. There’s a possibility to talk to these folk about your project, get their feedback – who could resist such an opportunity? Before you go and talk to them, though, here are a few handy-dandy rules to print out (with the proper copyright notice, please: © Jeff Kleinman 2006) and carry with you everywhere. They’re listed in order of importance, of course (but from most to least important, or least to most, I’ll let you decide).

1. Never hand your manuscript to PF without being asked to do so. That means don’t push it under the bathroom stall, shove it under the hotel room door, leave it for them at the front desk, staple it to their windshield wipers, etc. That’s considered “unsolicited,” and you don’t want to do that. If PF ask you for your material, that’s a whole different thing, of course.

2. Be prepared. Have a proposal (if NF) or the first 50 pages (if F) available, in case PF ask to see it after all. It should be nicely formatted and all that kind of nonsense.

3. Know Your Log Line. A typical conversation with PF goes as follows:
You: I wrote a book.
PF: You did? Huh. What’s it about?
You: Many many longwinded sentences about your book.
PF: Huh.
Be able to boil your book down to a single sentence – and make it a single sentence that generates the following response from the PF: “Oh, wow, that sounds terrific – can I read it?” That “wow” is a very difficult thing to achieve, so it’s worth really thinking about what makes your book, and/or you, special/interesting/different/remarkable. If you can’t do it yet, that’s OK – then probably the project isn’t ready for PF after all. Use the single sentence as a test for yourself: if you can’t sum up the book succinctly and in a way that engenders immediate interest, keep rewriting the book until you can.

4. Research The PFs Ahead of Time. All PFs are not created equal. Some PFs, like yours truly, do not represent romance novels. Other PFs, like yours truly’s partner Paige Wheeler, do. It would be a mistake to ask yours truly about your paranormal romance, because I wouldn’t know a paranormal romance from a three-toed black sloth – in fact I’d certainly know a three-toed black sloth much better. You can find out about PFs from a variety of websites (including Natalie’s fabulous one). Just because you research the PF ahead of time, though, doesn’t mean that you should necessarily contact the PF and try to set up a meeting – that can be confusing and difficult to manage, since the PF is often at the mercy of the conference’s schedule.

5. Don’t Ask Overly Specific Questions at the Q&A. Q&As are times for general questions, not opportunities for you to discuss your project with a room full of strangers.

6. Relax. On several occasions at conferences, someone sits down across from me, we introduce ourselves, and then the writer on the other side of the table bursts into tears. It’s a truly weird and horrible feeling to be sitting there watching a grown woman, carefully made up, sobbing into a wad of typescript. Remember: these PFs are generally nice people. They’re generally interested in what you have to say. They’re not mean, or cruel, or vicious – and if they are, you certainly don’t have to take it; just get up and walk away. But I’d say pretty much everybody who does these conferences is a pretty nice person, most of the time – so just talk. Know what your book is about, be able to discuss it concisely and passionately. And then be ready to listen, to hear the questions the PF asks, be ready to respond concisely and passionately.

7. Know that It’s All in the Writing. Let’s repeat that: It’s All In The Writing. Conferences can be fine things, and being able to talk about your project concisely and passionately is a fine thing, too; but in the end it boils down to the words that are laserprinted on that page. PF may ask to see your material; PF may jump for joy after hearing your description; but bottom line is that PF must read your material. So although it’s always good to have the bells and whistles in place, it’s even better to have a gorgeously written manuscript. The writing is everything.

And there you have it. If you go to a conference, have a great time (and buy me a beer, if I’m there).

Til next month …

On May 1 we officially moved into our new digs on 8th Avenue. I had no idea how important space can be – for the last couple of months, Folio had more-or-less been functioning out of Paige’s less-than-palatial digs: which worked well in the short-term, but less well in the long-term. There wasn’t really space (ah, New York real estate!) for everyone at Folio to gather and talk and plot and scheme; and everything felt really makeshift. And try, I beg of you, to spend a couple of months dealing with real estate brokers and landlords. They were all very nice, but seemed drink glue or cement every morning for breakfast, making everything take far longer, and far more glacially, than we could have ever imagined: so a space that we thought we’d get into in March, at the latest, took til May. Ah, the joy of having your own business, I guess.

So anyway that fabulous May Day the space was finally ours. It’s not palatial by any means – reception area, four offices, central conference room – but it looks terrific and it’s ours. Paige, a former decorator, chose everything in burgundy and cream, with very cool art-deco-ish light fixtures. The first time I opened the door into the office I thought “wow, no way they’ll let me in here” – and then I remembered that this was my office, and “they” was “me.” It was an odd moment, but don’t tell anyone – they still think I belong, for some unknown reason. There’s still quite a bit of decorating to do, yet – we haven’t put up the shelves for our books, or hung pictures – but the desks are there, and chairs, and a gorgeous cherry conference table (thank you, Scott); and, most important, our phones and printers. Hopefully next month we’ll have everything done; then we’ll have an office-warming party – and you’re invited, of course.

Appearance and process, as you can gather, are much on my mind these days; which segues me, only a little clumsily, into the appearance – and formatting – of a manuscript. When it comes to the appearance of a manuscript, everybody’s an expert. You should bind it, you should leave it loose, you should wrap it in plastic, you should never wrap it in plastic, you should use courier as your font, you should never use courier, you should underline, you should use italics, you should never underline or use italics – and that’s only for starters. Makes my head want to explode, thinking about it.

The key thing to remember is that you want your manuscript to be – oh, surprise, surprise – readable. That’s absolutely key. Whether or not you’ll admit it, you want people to read the pages you sent. So definitely avoid all those cool and cutesy fonts that the Microsoft gurus included with your wordprocessing program – stick to one of the basics: Times Roman, Arial, or Courier (or a minor variation of one of them – I’m always partial to Palatino). Between you and me, I’d avoid Courier, too. Years ago, back in the dawn of the world, somebody (I think it was actually my gods, Strunk & White) decreed that all manuscripts should be printed in Courier since it was most like a typewriter font. Of course nowadays there are specially constructed places of torture (outside the U.S. territories, of course) for people who type (or, even more horrifically, actually write out, longhand) their manuscript – but you wouldn’t want anybody to even think that you’d type the sucker, would you? So I ask you: what’s the point of Courier? It’s fat, the letters take up more room on each line; which means of course that you can have less words on the page, which means that you’re using up more paper, killing more trees, and making some poor unsuspecting agent or editor have to haul around a couple of extra pounds of paper. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Courier should simply be banned as an option. I’m joking, of course – I’m sure there are people out there, people who are perfectly nice in many other ways, who actually like Courier; who hunger for Courier; who scorn Times Roman or Arial as being too banal, too zesty, or too sacred to be used on something as tawdry as a manuscript page – but I, for one, will steer clear of Courier if I’m given a chance. I’m not kidding: if I have two manuscript sitting in front of me, and one’s in Times Roman and the other’s in Courier, I don’t even have to think about which one I’ll pick up. The Courier will always sift to the bottom of the “to be read” pile.

Another thing to discuss, since we’re on the subject: whitespace. Ya know how when you’re typing you put an extra space between paragraphs? My advice is: don’t. Having a lot of whitespace between paragraphs can slow down your reader’s reading. “No way,” you yell, “if there are less words on the page, then my reader will have to turn the page more quickly! That’ll make my book more of a page-turner, not less!” I humbly disagree. I think that extra white space indicates a temporal or spatial gap – a break in the narrative that you’re indicating on the page as well as through indicators in the text itself. If that extra space occurs between each paragraph, my brain, at least, makes the teensiest little pause – and that slows the reading down.

On, now, to margins. Stick with 1” or 1.5” margins, no secrets there. I’m always flabbergasted when people send manuscripts with 2” margins – there’s barely any room for the text, what with all that luxurious white margin everywhere. (See above, where we discuss the fatness of your manuscript: if you have hugely wide margins, your manuscript will, of necessity, be fatter; making it a more daunting prospect for that innocent young agent or editor.)

Finally, and here’s a biggie: headers and footers. (If you don’t know what a header or footer is, I cannot help you.) It’s a given that you should put the page number on each page of the manuscript, but do yourself a favor and put your name and the manuscript title on every page, as well, right near the page number. Manuscripts have the extraordinary ability to merge with one another – especially when they’re stacked next to the bed and the dog jumps on them and spreads them all over the floor and you’re late for work and you gather them all up together and then you spend hours on the train trying to sort them all out. I’m constantly amazed at how sneaky and demanding those single sheets from a manuscript can be – constantly blowing away, or sliding off the pile, or sticking to the envelope they came in, or to somebody else’s envelope that happened to wander near them. If you put your name and the book’s title on each page, along with the page number, everyone’s life is just so much better.

As for binding your manuscript, or not binding it or plasticwrap or no plasticwrap: my honest feeling is – who cares. I sure don’t.

Well, that’s it for me, this week. On to BEA (Book Expo of America – one of the big book conventions of the year) and then, oh joy, to hanging those bookshelves.

I’ve been sadly remiss in writing last month, I’m afraid. Things have been busy, which is good – and even better, all of the Folio team has been selling, selling, selling. Several auctions, several preempts, and so forth – which is really a great way of starting out a new business. Our new digs should hopefully be up and running in another couple of weeks – our move-in date is “early May,” the landlords say; so I’m trying to be optimistic and ignore my gut, which says that the English translation of a landlord’s “early May” is “some time before Christmas, maybe.” Oh, well.

In the meantime I’ve been reading my butt off, hunting for a great novel to sell. Haven’t quite found anything. Fiction is so hard to sell, and it’s so often disheartening to even try to sell, but I’ve had some nice sales of late, and I’m eternally optimistic that I’ll find the Next One soon. I have a couple that are almost there, I hope – I’m trying not to bug the authors more than twice a week, asking how things are going – but keep waiting for another really wonderful novel to hit my inbox.

Every time I go to writers’ conferences I hear, “It’s so hard to get an agent” – but I think that most first-time novelists don’t quite realize is that it’s probably even harder for us agents to get a novel that’s really Ready To Go. People talk about how “selective” (what a word!) agents are; that they reject 99% of everything they see – but think, dear reader, about my side of the mailbox: plowing through several thousand letters and not finding anything that really makes me sit up and think, “Yes, I absolutely must work on this book!”. A friend of mine – an editor – used to go into her boss’s office when she’d find a novel she really loved, and tell him that, if he didn’t let her buy the book, she’d jump out the nearest window. That’s what I keep longing for – the next novel of defenestration, I guess you could call it. The next novel that makes me absolutely take the leap.

So what does it take, you ask? Who knows. If I knew I could duplicate it. But I have some suggestions:

- Great voice. A way of writing which sounds somehow familiar but somehow unique. Something that we haven’t quite seen before, but something that we can immediately identify with.

- Compelling characters. People that I want to spend several hours – or days – or weeks – with, brooding about, having conversations with. Not cardboard cutouts who are obediently going about, doing the author’s bidding to get the plot going – but characters whose own unique internal motivations move the story along because it has to move along that way. Not because the author wanted it to, or because some writing teacher wanted it to, but because the characters themselves – special, unique, richly envisioned – absolutely have to have things happen. I once went to a talk that that wonderful novelist and truly nice person Diane Chamberlain gave, called “How to Create Characters So Real You’ll Be Tempted To Claim Them As Dependents On Your Tax Return” – those are the kinds of characters I hunger for, and so rarely find.

- Compelling premise. That famous one- or two-sentence log-line which effectively, beautifully, and compellingly sums up the entire book. Having that kind of a sentence is wonderful – it helps the agent sell the book to the editor, helps the editor to sell the book to her colleagues, and helps the publishing house sell the book to the booksellers and eventually the public. We’re a 30-second sound-byte nation; if you don’t like it, move to Canada or some other civilized country. But more to the point, for me: I find that, if an author can really sum up the book in a great tag-line, the author has really succeeded in digesting the novel – in really working through all the issues and concerns, to create the best possible novel that she can. A great tag-line is an indication, for me, that the novel is Ready To Go.

- Solid writing. This is feels like the absolute basic building-block upon which all else is based, and it’s also the thing that I find is most lacking in about 80% of the stuff that hits my desk. Writers don’t spend enough time, methinks, memorizing their Strunk & White’s Elements of Style (a great and cheap and short book – and it’s free online now, so I don’t know what the excuse for not having memorized it could possibly be). All that basic stuff that they taught us in 9th Grade English – how to use sentences properly, how to punctuate effectively. Even how to address letters. Didn’t anybody else learn that it’s proper business etiquette to address the recipient by their title and last name, a la “Dear Mr. Kleinman”? I keep getting letters addressed to “Dear Mr. Jeff Kleinman,” or “Dear Jeff Kleinman” – neither of which is quite proper, or at least I was taught it wasn’t. I realize that I’m being particularly irritating and picky about this, and let’s face it – if the concept is great and the story compelling I couldn’t care less if I got a letter addressed “Dear Moron” (which is probably well-deserved, anyway). But still. Just having those basic writing skills – ability to write effective dialogue, describe events, and so forth – is just not there in almost everything I see these days. If only I could sic my 9th Grade English teacher on the entire planet. (Another pet peeve, since I’m feeling peevish – people who send me their “fictional novel”. As opposed to what?)(OK, one more pet peeve and I’m through, I promise – Foreword if you’re talking about introductory material; Forward if you’re talking about speed or momentum.)

So there you have it. Now I’ve given you the blueprint to go out and write the Next Great American Novel.

One final bit of info before I close for the month. Novels are incredibly subjective, there’s absolutely no question about it. I know for me, when I’m reading, I look for two things (thank you, Pat LoBrutto, for these marvelous criteria) for the novel of defenestration:

1. Do I miss my subway stop reading it? (translation: is there something so page-turning about the novel that it just keeps me reading? – it has nothing to do with being a thriller or a mystery; but the novel does have a certain urgency, a certain need to get things told, and quickly) and
2. Do I gush about it to any poor slob who will listen? (translation: books are still sold via word of mouth – “You’ve got to read the book I’ve been reading – it’s absolutely amazing!” is still the best recommendation of all, no matter what the book reviewers say about the book.)

It’s so very hard to find a book that does these things. But being the optimist, I just keep hunting – because they’re out there; of that I’m certain.

Til next month …