Authors Electric

  The hard part, at last, was over: the years spent researching and writing the book; revising and editing; concocting a 1-sentence and then a 1-paragraph elevator pitch; and then, Lord help me, coming up with an outline that won a thumbs up from a trusted reader. I was ready to go with a ms. formatted according to industry standards. And I had a plan I liked: to submit my work to three agents before putting the book up on Kindle.  I've written queries in the past and several won me big agents. But times and query styles have changed, along with my circumstances. So here was where I found myself beginning to clear my throat, tempted to justify my book's 60K word length; to apologize for past mistakes; to make a case for my experience and age.  But no, no. The hell with that. When it's showtime, just man up and belt out the blues. If I've only got 300 words, there's no time for lard or blubber. Stick the landing with line one: a razzle dazzle hook that dares an agent...

  AI brings us all to Plan A or Plan B, each of which has its gradations. Plan A, at its extreme, allows the use of AI as an equal or even main partner in the creative process. Hardline Plan A-ers may yield to all of their AI's stylistic suggestions as commands. Along with most of the writers I know,  I find this repulsive. If I want an incomplete sentence or a dangling participle or some dated slang, it's my book and the decision is mine.  Even so, I found myself in a quandary with a completed novel I'd worked on for six years and had had professionally edited. You see, after four traditionally published horror novels, I'd turned to my first love, crime thrillers, and worked in a shorter form--40K words--for more than decade. The short length was a deal breaker for any agent I approached. But I loved working in tight spaces with no padding. So, no tears. My refusal to compromise cost me a traditional career, bringing me to the company of other indie-minded authors. ...

You could exhaust the alphabet, attempting to describe it, Abominable, Boring, Cretinous, Disgusting, Enematic...Those dreadful two words: DIRECT MAIL Why wouldn't we toss it straight into the trash? 1)  Almost none of it is targeted specifically to us,  so our mailboxes are filled with 'blind shots.'  2) Aside from supposed savings--reductions on deliberately overpriced items-- it offers us no reason why. 3) And too much of it is  amateurishly written, Hold on just a second, though. Actually, there is most excellent news: set your pants on fire lessons that can be learned from the junk mail each day. Experiment for  a week or two, swiftly dividing the junk into piles: coupon booklets and store flyers, junk addressed To Occupant-- and the rare pitch or letter that somehow draws you in. Understand why and whatever you're selling will have a fighting chance. In the new wicked Wild West where literary agents receive up to 50...

Jam tomorrow. Yum . Judging by the response, last month’s post urging caution before going all out to ‘find an agent’ struck a chord with a lot of writers. A number of people told me they felt that constantly responding to the advice of others had actually hampered them in their careers. Which is not to say that we don’t need good advice, because we do. The problem lies in judging when the advice is genuinely in the interests of you and your work, and when it’s given in order to make your project fit some other agenda, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the quality of the writing or with your own interests and obsessions. With the benefit of hindsight many people can see how rewriting the same novel countless times or trying to write an imitation of the current best seller on the promise of some hypothetical jam tomorrow has turned out to be a fruitless (or should that be jam-free?) exercise. To be fair, there used to be few other options. We were tied into the submissi...

Rab - looking for an agent? Some years ago, when I was asked to speak to writers and aspiring writers about routes to publication, I would find myself saying that they would probably need to look for an agent.  What a difference a decade makes. I still see threads on Facebook with recommendations about writing query letters, lists of requirements from literary agents, scathing blog posts about ‘what not to do’. These are variable enough to undermine the confidence of the most talented individual. There will also be the occasional delighted post from somebody who has ‘got an agent’ at last, immediately followed by a string of congratulations, as though the person in question had won some kind of literary lottery. I’m not in the business of raining on parades, so I sit on my hands and say nothing. If you are reading this and you have a wonderful agent, one who has secured a string of excellent deals for you, who always acknowledges emails within a day or two, who speak...