And There, Hanging from the Car Door, Was a Bloody, Severed.... Rhyme Scheme

I just found your website, and find it to be very helpful. However, I haven’t been able to find the answer to one particular question I have: exactly how does one format the manuscript for a RHYMING picture book - that is, one with stanzas. Do I format it like a poem (single spaced within a stanza, and double spaced between stanzas), or double spaced with 4 spaces between stanzas. Your answer would be GREATLY appreciated.

It doesn't matter. Leaving a break where you anticipate page breaks might be a good idea, and would make sure you've considered how the manuscript will page out in a standard picture book length.

I would suggest you don't format it in running text, like that's going to make the rhyme scheme more subtle or something. Remember that many editors are very sensitive and skittish around rhymed text, so it's not a good idea to present them with something that doesn't look like it's going to rhyme but surprise! it does. To many editors, it's like finding a spider in a candy box. Shock and horror? Not the response you're going for.

Yes, some editors like spiders. But even so, be sure there's a good reason for the manuscript to be in rhyme. "I like it that way" is not good enough.

Succinct Advice

I have written five self-published books, primarily because I know the poetry and short story collcetions are difficult to get 'published' by an unknown and I simply enjoy having them inprint for myself and friends and because the relisioug/spiritual books are too controvercial for most Christian publishers and who else is interested in publishing them. But I have a novel coming up and I want to make it available to lulu pre-publishing for those currently interested in it (and keep the rights) and also query it to publishers. Will they see my previous self-publishing and pre-publishing of this novel as a bad thing?

It will depend on the editor/publisher. If the manuscript is excellent, some may be willing to overlook your self-publishing.

They will not overlook run-on sentences and typos, however.

How can I become a children's book editor?

I've been getting this question a lot recently.

1. You'd better be seriously interested in children's books. Not "I could be interested if I got a job in children's books". Interested NOW.

2. And that would mean that you're reading a lot of children's books --brand new ones-- NOW.

Wait, wait, you say. Isn't there on-the-job training? Why do I have to familiarize myself with children's books before I even know if I can have a career in them?

Because in spite of the low pay and long hours, we still have a lot of highly qualified people interested in being editors. And the highest qualification is the kind of book-industry knowledge that takes reading hundreds of books to acquire. Good sense about books is not something we can teach. Either you have it or you don't, and it will be much more apparent that you have it if you can speak intelligently about the books that are our current competition.

The times I have hired people, it's been pretty easy to cherry-pick the good ones. After tossing the badly-written cover letters, I ask the rest of them what they've been reading. People who are a good fit for the job have been reading a lot of children's books (and a lot of different kinds of children's books), and have a lot to say about them.

3. You'd better not have any fantasies about office work.

If you can't stand a lot of tedious paperwork, you don't want to work in publishing. We give our interns plenty of mind-numbing paper shuffling and form filling out to do, because if they make it to Editorial Assistant, it's only going to get worse. Eventually, it will get better... a little... and years later. In the meantime, you'd better be able to cope. I still have plenty of that sort of thing to do, and I do it as cheerfully and efficiently as I can so that I can get to editing and reviewing new manuscripts sooner.

4. Internships are a good way to get your foot in the door.

So have a look in your area for a publisher you could intern with. No, you can't be an editor remotely. If there are no publishers in your area, you'll have to move to where they are. Consider moving to New York. We're almost entirely here.

5. So is the Columbia Publishing course or other similar courses.


Good luck.

Writer's Block Is a Problem of Butts

I am a 26-year-old woman and work as a Feature Writer / Reporter for the Daily Star in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I have always been passionate about writing, but lately I feel as if I am going through this block which is simply lasting for too long. Not many writing workshops take place here. What can I do to improve my writing skills (reading skills as well)?

No doubt my readers can suggest writing exercises and even some online workshops. And I'm sure there are online comparative literature courses.

But what will improve your reading skills? Reading. Read the types of things you want to be writing.

What will improve your writing skills? Writing. As Jane Yolen says, "Butt. In. Chair." If you're experiencing writer's block, it may be that you can't write what you want to write yet, but it's perfect malarkey to think that you can't write. Sit down and start writing, whatever it is that comes out.

There's Good News and There's Good News. Which Do You Want First?

EA, can you talk about reviews? How important are they to the success of a children's book? Do all the "big ones" (Horn Book, Kirkus, SLJ, Booklist?) count the same, or are some more influential than others? How about bloggers like Fuse #8? And does it matter how well the review is written? I've been a little shocked by the low quality of reviews written by many teachers and librarians--misused words, poor grammar, incorrect details, and a general miasma of vagueness and confusion.

So You've Gotten a Good Review. The Good News Is:
The "big ones" (Horn Book, Kirkus, SLJ, Booklist, NYT, PW, BCCB) do make a difference.
People read good reviews and tend to remember them. In the constant storm tide of new books, we're all looking for the ones that we should flag mentally as standing out.

Some review sources are read more by a certain demographic than others (more booksellers read PW; more teachers and librarians read SLJ). But it's hard to say that one is more influential than another. Any good review from the top reviewers gives the publisher's Sales and Marketing people a chance to go back to accounts (like B&N, eg) and say, "Hey, did you see this review? Are you sure you don't want to stock some more?" Good reviews can boost sales. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't but at the very least it's an opportunity.

Of course, we've all seen some books get terrific reviews and sell a paltry few thousand copies, which is hard and frustrating. But if the book added to the publisher's name and image with good reviews, that's some salve to the hurt of not earning out.


So You've Gotten a Bad Review. The Good News Is:
Nobody cares.

No, really. You're the only one.

It's all kinds of hard for authors to believe, but your editor sees a bad review and shrugs. No, not because she has other books that she now understands are more worthy of her love. Because every one of us has seen reviewers in pissy moods skewer a book that we know doesn't deserve it-- and most importantly because we know that bad reviews don't hurt sales.

This is because people read bad reviews and tend to forget all about them. In the constant storm tide of new books, we're all looking for the ones that we should flag mentally as standing out-- and we simply don't have the RAM to remember the ones that are not supposed to be stand-outs. What this has meant to more than one book is crappy reviews followed by a stint on the NYT bestseller list. Because the book turned out to appeal to a lot of people, and none of them could remember that they weren't supposed to like it.

Bad reviews don't matter.

Art for Art's Sake...Is Fine if You Don't Want to Be Paid

Adam Rex's Frankenstein books are also broadly categorizable [as a picture story book]. A little further afield is everyone's favorite genre-buster The Invention of Hugo Cabret which had already spent time on the NY Times bestseller list before it won the Caldecott.

All of which is my way of saying that it makes me a little nutty to hear all this talk of categories as if these things were as fixed as the elements on the periodic table. They're not. Terms change; requirements are absolutely inflexible... until they flex.

I understand that bookstores and libraries have to shelve populations, not individuals. But figuring out how to do that is their job, not mine.

The most interesting and creative work being done in our field right now is by people who aren't lining up with established formats: Brian Selznick, Shaun Tan, Adam Rex... even Kevin Henkes, who's a master of the 32-page picture book, has been doing all kinds of interesting things with smaller page counts.

Writing strictly to specification is a way to get ad copy, not art.

I agree. But I would like to expand just a bit on a couple points:

It gets tricky when any writer compares him/herself to bestsellers and award-winners.
For one thing, you cannot predict what will be a bestseller or an award winner.

And for another thing, you shouldn't compare yourself to anyone who is doing something brilliantly unless you understand all the things they are doing brilliantly in it. Not sure you do? Look up the reviews / commentary on the book in question and ask yourself if you noticed the things that critics call out for praise when you were reading the book. If you didn't, you're not in the same league.

That's not to say that you might not be at the top of some other league-- but it does say that you shouldn't be comparing your work to those people's.

And in terms of the statement "I understand that bookstores and libraries have to shelve populations, not individuals. But figuring out how to do that is their job, not mine." -- I agree again.

Figuring out how to do that is their job, not yours, not mine. But it is your job and mine to be at least aware of how booksellers decide to shelve books, and what that means or doesn't mean to the books we work on. Because whether we like it or not, sometimes it has a meaningful impact on books we love.

I meet a fair number of authors who find the prospect of understanding the workings of bookstores, the intricacies of the industry, and the subtle differences in age groups and reading levels of children too daunting to even think about. And I sympathize... a little.

I'm not making assumptions about this writer. But for writers in general: Some people take the attitude that they're in the business of creating art, not understanding their audience. Some people take the attitude that they're in the business of speaking to children, not understanding bookselling.

To them I say: those aren't businesses.

A very scant percentage of writers does manage to create art that speaks to children and sells without understanding their audience or the market. But they are taking shots in the dark.

Thinking you can be a good children's author or illustrator without knowing your audience and the market is like thinking you can be a good archer without knowing where the targets are, let alone hitting them.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meaningless Terminology

Is a submission labeled as a "picture book" or "picture story book" that comes in at 2,000+ words dead on arrival? How important is this categorization? I feel like the word count is justified, and still leaves creative space for illustrations. I just want to make sure it gets a fair read. If it wasn't good enough, writing-wise, I could deal with that.

Know where I hear the term "picture story book" all the time? Authors.
Know where I don't? Publishers.

"Picture story book", in authors' minds at least, indicates a longer illustrated text. How much longer seems to vary per source, so it's very vague as publishing terms go. It's also kind of meaningless: do shorter picture books not have stories? Why couldn't you call Tuesday a picture story book, since the story is told in pictures? Is Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (890 words) a picture story book? Is Ivanhoe (6,022 words)?

After countless conferences, critiques, and pitch sessions, the impression I've developed (without making any assumptions about your work) is that "picture book" is a format, and "picture story book" is an excuse for not caring who's going to buy your book.


No matter what kind of book you're writing, you should always be thinking about your audience and your competition.

1. Audience
Let's just say for the purposes of this discussion (and leaving aside my own personal antipathy for the term) that by "picture story book" we mean a text in which not all of the plot points can be illustrated.

That means to me that this is a question of how old your audience is and thus how much patience and reading skill the audience brings to the reading.

The children who need a fairly high illustration-to-plot ratio are either (a) impatient listeners / pre-readers or (b) low-to-moderate fluency readers.

The children who don't need a fairly high illustration-to-plot ratio are either (c) listeners / pre-readers who have had a high exposure to read-alouds and have developed the patience and attention span for them or (d) high fluency (independent) readers.

Now here's the rub: there are fewer children in category (c) these days than there used to be, and the kids in category (d) tend to feel picture book formats are "for babies". So while I wouldn't say that longer-text picture books are "dead on arrival", they have to be extremely well targeted and thoughtfully written.

2. Competition
Which books published in the last five years have a format, word count, audience age, and author recognition level* like your book?

If you can find some published at reputable houses, great!

If you can't, that should mean something to you.


*Never use books by celebrities as competition! Never!

___________________________________________

Am I right to suspect that writers with no publishing credits have a very, very small chance of landing an agent?

Yes.

Thus it would be smarter to submit to editors/presses first?

No. The chances of landing a publisher from the slush pile are just as low.

If a contract were offered from a publisher, is there sufficient time to query and attract an agent?

If by "sufficient time" you mean a week, then yes. I would expect a response from any author I'd made an offer to in that time.

Self-Publishing and Self-Editing

I'm currently working on my first MG manuscript and I plan on cleaning it up and querying it once it's finished. In addition to this novel (and past projects that I've set aside), I participate in National Novel Writing Month every year. The results are usually self-indulgent fun little novellas that I write primarily to entertain my friends who also participate. They're not things I would ever consider selling. One of the "prizes" for completely NaNoWriMo is a free proof copy of your novel at Lulu (this year it's through Amazon's CreateSpace). I usually order the free proof and then publish the book through Lulu so that my close friends can also order a copy of my book and I can order a copy of theirs.

My question is this: will these little forays into self-publishing have an effect on eventually querying/potentially publishing my MG novel or any other future projects? The NaNo novellas are not children's books and haven't been marketed aside from an e-mail to my NaNo writing group announcing that they're up and available. I wouldn't, of course, mention them in my query, but Google has the ability to pull up all sorts of things these days.

This is the sort of explanation for self-publishing that makes perfect sense to publishing professionals. It says you have a realistic idea of the range of your work (some of it is just for fun; some of it is professional enough to send to publishers) and a realistic idea of what self-publishing is for (mostly just personal use).

As self-publishing gets easier, cheaper, and more wide-spread, even editors with a congenital prejudice against it are going to have to accept that it doesn't necessarily mean the author is a nitwit.

What editors are justified in worrying about is if your badly-edited and crappily-illustrated self-publishing efforts are on Amazon or some other easily-accessed place. Then they could be seen as negative publicity-- readers who might truly enjoy the book you published with Holt (eg) could be turned off by the book you published at Lulu, if they see both books in the same place.

You're building a name for yourself, remember-- and you want the qualities associated with that name to be consistent, whether it's "fun / character-driven", "literary / romantic", "suspenseful / humorous", etc. You don't want to confuse people with "fun / ugly", "literary / boring", or "suspenseful / like a bad acid trip".

And you know who's particularly good at quality-controlling an author's work? It's usually not the author.

Nowadays Love Is a Matter of Chance, Matrimony a Matter of Money, and Divorce a Matter of Course

A while back a publisher offered $500K+ for a deal. They had treated me like the scum of the earth when they published my first book, so I was not wildly keen. Everyone told me, yes, but the reason they treated you like the scum of the earth is that you had no agent. If you have an agent it won't be like that, they will have nice manners, you will get paid, it will be completely different. I hired an agent.

What happened was, the agent and agency staff immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started treating me like the scum of the earth. The agent did haul ass into negotiations, yes, but neither the agent nor anyone else at the agency would do anything I actually asked them to do, and meanwhile, bizarrely, my editor seemed to think that having a power lunch with my agent constituted being nice to me. He could still stand me up for meetings we had arranged, because he had been nice to my agent.

At the time I hadn't spent much time online, knew nothing about nice deals, very nice deals, major deals, whatever. I had assumed that the deal must just be a crap deal. $500K+ seemed like a lot of money to me, but that was just my ignorance. The reason everyone was treating me like a piece of shit was that, by publishing standards, a deal for upwards of half a million dollars was crap. Much later, obviously, I found Publshers Marketplace and discovered that, um, K? Not only was this not a crap deal, this was, by publishing standards, the top deal for which they bother to have a category.

So what I wonder, obviously, is what a writer has to do not to be treated like a piece of shit. If a major deal is not enough, what does it take? Does an agent want a million-dollar deal to treat the client with professional courtesy? Two million? Three million? It would be nice to know.

I'm sorry you've had this experience. It's not the experience everyone has, but it's not a total anomaly, either.

The bottom line is: first, get an agent who will treat you the way you want to be treated. This is accomplished by (a) talking to the agent enough to get a sense of what kind of person the agent is and (b) asking for present clients of that agent who would be willing to talk to you about how they've been treated.

Bear in mind that the agent you have described is no doubt a terrific fit for some authors. What counts as "treating me like shit" to you is not the same for other people. Likewise, the agent who would be the right fit for you would be a bad fit for other authors. So when you talk to a prospective agent's other authors, ask specific questions that will give you a sense of how the agent will respond to the situations / issues that mean the most to you.

Once you have a good agent who is on the same page with you, that agent will be able to match you not only with publishing houses which will appreciate your work, but with specific editors who will treat you nicely.

It should be said that you may not be able to find an editor who (1) loves your work (2) treats you nicely and (3) can pay you that much money. Two out of three is as much as you can reasonably hope for.

If you get three out of three, keep your mouth shut about it; you'll only make other authors hate your guts.

They're Just Not That Into You(r Manuscript)

I've written a children's book. About a year ago, I submitted my polished draft to publishing houses and agents. The book truly captures the child narrator's voice and experience, but it deals with difficult subject matter and I knew it might not be the most marketable thing ever. Still, I felt like every response, every rejection was a badge of honor.
I received a wide range of responses. Scrawled notes along the top of my manuscript copy, form letters, and even a real letter with a personal "I'm sorry, good luck." The ones that responded with personal acknowledgement thrilled me, as I felt like they were validating that the book was good, even if it wasn't for them.
Then, one day, the phone rang. I had been having a very bad week at work, so was a bit cranky at the unknown caller who mispronounced my name. My grouchiness dissipated when they told me that their small publishing house liked my story and thought it fit in with their other works. They were interested in my book! They didn't know exactly when they might be able to put out a new book, but they wanted me to know. Can I say it again? They were interested in my book!
I hung up the phone and did lots of happy dancing.
That was our only contact. No agreements were ever reached and I know it was just a preliminary call. But at what point can I send the book out again to a new round of publishing houses? Would it make sense to contact this publisher again and remind them that, at one point, they were interested in my book? Can I ask them if they still might be? Keep in mind, this was months ago. Perhaps I should have already contacted them for followup?
I was thrilled to hear of their interest, but would like to find someone who is interested enough to actually publish it, not just someone who will call me once and then leave me waiting indefinitely for some additional news or plans. I can get enough of that sort of thing in the dating world!

You can send it out to other publishing houses NOW. You're absolutely right to feel that this is not the most promising way to begin with a publishing house, so while it may yet work itself out at that small house, don't stop submitting.

You could remind this publisher of their interest, but months of silence tell another story. And what was that about not knowing exactly when they might be able to put out a new book? What, are they waiting for stock space to free up in their garage?

Submit, submit, submit.

__________________________________________

I submitted a book proposal to a publisher in June. They loved it and sent me a contract immediately, but then they decided they were not a large enough house to exploit the project as it should be. They suggested a larger house and a specific editor, and I sent the proposal package on to him with a cover letter telling him that the editor at the previous house had suggested sending it to him personally. That was in July 2008. I have heard nothing, even though the second publisher's web site says they respond in three months. Would it be rude/pushy to write to him and inquire? Would it be rude to submit it to other publishers? I don't know if they are actively considering it or it's sitting at the bottom of a slush pile.

It would not be rude or pushy to write and inquire. But you shouldn't necessarily expect an answer to your letter from the people who aren't responding to your submission.

It would also not be rude to KEEP SUBMITTING. Keep submitting.

What a Yahoo You Are Not (maybe)

I wanted to say a little something about yahoos, while we're on the subject. I know a lot of authors, and I know quite a few of them well enough to have a window into who they are personally, and the quirks of their creative processes.

And in their little ways, they're all yahoos. There's the one who believes her house is haunted by the ghost of a jazz musician, who only shows himself in the occasional scent of cigarettes in one room. There's the one whose writing room walls are covered in plastic insects. There's the one who always wants to argue with me about serial commas.

I recognize and embrace the fact that people are not homogeneous. We all have our oddities and weirdnesses, and creative people generally are more likely to see the value in their own quirks.

So if you've been looking at my injunction to prove "what a yahoo you are not" and thinking, "Crap, I think maybe I am a bit of a yahoo," that's OK.

It's not that I don't expect authors to be weird. Only to be high-functioning enough to recognize gradations of weird (eg that their collection of images of people sticking their tongues out is less "weird" than the collection of pickled roadkill in their basement), and socially-adjusted enough to know at what point in a relationship to reveal each weirdness.

Cover letters are not the place to bring across your oddities, but once I love your writing and have the sense that you wouldn't be a complete embarrassment at a cocktail party, you can start showing me some of the less-for-the-public aspects of your life if you like. Though, since clarity is never a bad thing, I still don't want to see pictures of the way you "dress up" for your husband. Ever.

The Autobiographical Portion of Our Program

When submission guidelines ask for a bio of the author to be included in the submission packet, what are editors looking for in general? I have no previous publications to list in the bio, I'm still trying to get that first publication.

1. Don't be cute. At this stage, the bio is about information, not personality. (The bio that eventually goes on your book's backflap might have some touches of personality, but that's later.) So don't tell me you're a "former kid" or that while you're not an expert on a subject, you have "a lot of theories" about it.

2. Don't be weird. Discretion is the better part of valor. You're making a good first impression, so don't over-share. If you're a mother, it's ok to say you're a mom and leave it at that. If you're a mother of seventeen children (twenty-two if you count your husband's other wife's kids), then it's ok to say you're a mom and leave it at that.

3. Try not to veer off topic. I really don't care how many pets you have. Or their names. Or their recent surgeries.

4. Tell me if you are a teacher (not a homeschooler), a librarian, a bookseller, or if you work in publishing. I do not care if you are a nanny, professional clown, swim coach, or ventriloquist. I don't care if you're a fricking play structure-- it's not about how many children you come in contact with, it's about how many children's books you come in contact with.

5. Tell me if there's anything that will help you market the book-- a blog, a lot of experience giving entertaining presentations, whatever. Keep this to the things that will look good on paper-- if you happen to have a cousin with a van/loudspeaker setup, you're going to have to talk us through how driving through the city streets broadcasting "Come And Sit On My Lap and Other Stories! A Magical Trip to the Funny Spot!" is going to help, and that's a conversation for later, possibly with our lawyers.

6. If you are writing nonfiction, tell me if you're a specialist in the nonfiction topic you're writing about. Do not tell me you're in insurance if your manuscript is about caterpillars or teddybears. And if your manuscript is about insurance, well, your manuscript had better not be about insurance.

7. Tell me about your previous books published at houses that paid you for your work. If there aren't any, say "I am not previously published."

8. If you can't say anything else, tell me what inspired you to write about this subject, while strictly adhering to rules (1) and (2). Do not tell me that writing about unicorns is your "dream vision." Do not joke that the idea for your novel about mail bombs came to you after a particularly vexing experience with a publisher's submission process. Do not tell me you're writing about china dolls because you have a collection of 379 of them from around the world and they line the walls of your writing room and with them watching you, you "never have to feel alone."


As I have said before, every query, every cover letter, every submission, is really just trying to get across two big things: (1) How great your manuscript is. (2) What a yahoo you are not.

If you can get those two things across, you don't really have to worry about anything else.

Peeps (or Snarks) From Readers

I'm very surprised we haven't heard an EA peep (or snark) about the Newbery / Caldecott / Printz et al from you. I thoroughly suspect that you are the editor of some of the top winnas. (or are miffed that your books *aren't* some of the top winnas). C'mon---let's hear something of your thoughts....

Ahem. As you have guessed, I have many thoughts about the books that won-- as indeed I do every year. As you've also guessed, I can't share some of those thoughts and stay anonymous. So I thought I had better not share any of them on this blog. But if anyone else has thoughts to share, please do.

In Which I Wave the Magic Clue-by-Four

I'm working to become a children's book illustrator and would like to know how to set up meetings with art directors/publishers. I'm planning a trip to New York and Boston but don't know how to go about contacting publishers in these cities.

I'm glad you asked this question! The answer is no.

It would be a wonderful world if we had time to meet with every hopeful writer or illustrator who wanted to visit our offices and talk to us in person. It would also be a world in which there were about 15 more hours in every single day. And a world in which we were a hell of a lot less scared of stalkers.

We get regular phone calls from people who just happen to be in town! and thought they'd call us up! and see if they could drop in to show us their work!

Most of these people are simply not a great fit for our publishing list, and so are a waste of our time. And a few of them are CRAZY.

I've sent out a bunch of postcard samples of my work.

That is a good idea.

Generally the publishers websites and the book "Children's Writers and illustrators Market" advise against calling the publishers.

Reading publishers' websites and CWIM is another good idea! You're on the right track. Now all you need to do is believe what you've read.

I'm also wondering, should I bring printed copies of each of my self published children's books with me or incorporate the best images from each book into one portfolio? Thanks for any advice you can offer.

You should do none of those things. You should not visit publishers. You should not introduce yourself as a self-publisher.

Instead, you should (a) mail samples to publishers and (b) create a web portfolio. If CWIM or any of the other fine resources out there have other advice, take it.

In Which I Wave the Magic Query Wand

I recently created an 30 page early reader children's book and have begun the process of looking for an agent.

There's the first problem. Don't talk about number of pages. Talk about number of words.

1a.) Is a hard copy of a query letter recommended over an email? Can you clarify what is preferred?

There's your second problem: I don't know the answer to this, because I don't know who you're querying. Everyone is different. Some agents prefer hardcopy; others prefer email. You should find out what the agents you want to query would like from you.

1b.) I work in the internet industry and was wondering if I could create a very simple website with a flip through of the book that would show all copy and images. Within an email query, I could paste a URL that the agent could click on to take them to the site to review the work. It seems like a very simple way to show the agent the book and what I'm all about and save time on both sides as the review would take five minutes instead of the mail it in, wait in the pile, usual procedure.

Take it from me, you are not the first person to think of this. But if you'll take my advice, you may in fact be the very first person to think better of it. I promise-- cross my heart and hope to die!-- that the method of querying that each agent requests (whether hardcopy, email, or hot air balloon) is what is easiest for them.

If you can think of a method that seems like it would be easier than the requested method, what that really means is that you think it would be easier for you in that position. But they know what is easiest for them.

Show them you can play ball. Show them you can read instructions, and did a modicum of research before querying. Show them you want to work with them. What many a querier shows agents is, instead, that he only wants to work with himself.

Wish granted!

You Don't Want to Read This (you can tell from the title)

How much weight does a title hold in a query?
I ask this because I find that even though I LOVE my manuscript I have yet to name it (and I feel that maybe I'll know my title by the time I hit the turning point so I'm being patient). In order to find it easier in Word I gave it a really basic name that I am totally unmarried to. But when I select a name that I totally love, I realize it may be a 50/50 shot of still being the title by the time it hits the shelves (maybe the odds are even less). Plus something I may think sounds FANTASTIC may be really nauseating to the agent.

I see a hell of a lot of bad titles. And that's ok! In the realm of 'things we can fix' this is an easy one.

But occasionally I see a title at the top of a manuscript that's so ill-conceived and promising of all the skin-crawling wackiness that the slush can offer that... I'm done reading.

My readers-- who are very imaginative-- could not come up with any title more awful than what I see in slush. As clever as they are, they have the handicap of sanity.

But if anyone would like to attempt to come up with a truly slush-worthy title, have at those comments!

Slush and Punishment: Illustrated by My Child!

Except no, it wasn't.

It's a story about the emotional lives of a moose's antlers.
With badly-copied illustrations from If You Give a Moose a Muffin. The child seems to have "illustrated" the happy faces on the antlers.

Next up, a nice story about a naughty pencil named "Plagiarism".

Slush and Punishment: Shnookiedoodlepoo

Talk about being stopped dead by the title of a manuscript.

Of course now I wish I'd read a bit more so I could tell you what it was about, but at the time I was attempting to fling this manuscript as far away from me as possible. Only to find that the next manuscripts were "Shnookiedoodlepoo in the Sandbox" and "Shnookiedoodlepoo in Hot Water."

Parent Ex Machina

Some of you will be familiar with the term deus ex machina. But for those of you who aren't, the OED says:

"A power, event, person, or thing that comes in the nick of time to solve a difficulty; providential interposition, esp. in a novel or play."

It's not a good thing. It's cheating.

The term comes from the time in performing arts when, if the plot had gotten hopelessly away from the main characters and the playwright had utterly written himself into a corner, suddenly GOD INTERVENES. In the form of a figure lowered into the scene in a basket. Yeah, seriously.

So the hero is suddenly face-to-face with the dragon, and oh whoops, that's right, he lost his sword to that boggy tart in act 2, crap, I didn't think of that. So all he has now is a salad fork... well, shit. Oh! I know! GOD INTERVENES and turns his fork into a bazooka! Ta-dah! That's some good plot writing, huh?

No. It's some crap plot writing, and the reason is that the only satisfactory way for a conflict to be resolved is for THE PROTAGONIST TO INTERVENE. That's what your damn protagonist is for!

Now, in children's books, this is a particular problem. It's especially tempting, because children experience outside powers that providentially interpose themselves all the time-- they're called parents. Parents swoop in to solve kids' problems, give them things they couldn't have gotten by themselves, and save them from danger. That's real life.

But it's not real storytelling. So the next time you're tempted to lower a parent or other powerful adult into your plot to make things easier, DON'T.

To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton,
We don't tell children stories to teach them that there are dragons. Children know there are dragons; they meet them every day. We tell children stories to teach them that dragons can be slain.

Current Events in Me

This just in: I'm rude.

"...That said, maybe she called Editorial Anonymous next. Then she'd get some rude, and it would be delicious. Ooooooh, boy!"

And grouchy.

"...but then I'd sound really old and possibly as grouchy as Editorial Anonymous."

Well, my response TK! Sometime when I'm not finding this damn amusing.
In the meantime, feel free to tell me what else I am.

Current Events in Slush

Squirrels: So 2007.
Geese? Over.
Timmy: Subsiding.

Currently: Chihuahuas. With photos.

Honestly, how many times do I have to tell people? Your dog is mind-bogglingly adorable to you. To everyone else, it's just a photo of some dog. If asked to use an adjective, I would go with "short". And possibly "brown".

Though a couple could easily have been asking for "vacant-looking", "lopsided", and "about to bite someone".

Don't. Write. Stories. About. Your. Pets.

QueryFAIL!

Following up on the QueryFail brouhaha, my fine colleague Erin Murphy (an agent) comes in with an example of someone who roundly deserves any finger pointing that comes his way.

She writes:

I have been queried via email by a man writing as [redacted], whose email ID says [redacted]--so I'm not really sure who he actually is. He has queried me at least once a month since November for an adult historical novel--the same novel in every query.

In November and December I sent him form rejections, which state clearly that I only represent children's books and outline my submission policy. After that, I just deleted his inquiries.

I just got another, and this time I sent him a firm reply asking him to remove me from his email list and stating how many times I'd heard from him already.

This is what I got back:

"I know you would like to be left alone. But you are a literary agent, and I have a job to do. And I do apologize for any future queries that you must receive.

"But until [my novel] is published, you will be queried."

I've withheld his name(s), but be assured that industry professionals are sharing it freely, so that no one accidentally ends up working with this [redacted].

All the Ways You Can't Make People Behave

The internet allows such free communication. It gives us the opportunity to open our minds to countless others, and it gives us the unfiltered thoughts of all the wide world.

The problem, of course, is that a bunch of the world has intellectual cooties.

As proven by QueryFail and the subsequent rancor over at Nathan's place.

If you didn't follow the twitter event last week, it was a few agents twittering in real time as they read queries and rejected them.

Some people felt it was educational and hilarious.
Some people felt it was unprofessional and an outrage.

But here's the thing: then some of them tried to talk to each other.

Honestly, people. When (a) two diametrically opposed factions meet and (b) at least one of them is really angry and (c) neither of them has weapons, you're really only going to end up with (d) name-calling.

You're all poopy-heads.

Wonderful Bookclub Books! Cheap, Badly Bound, Wonderful Bookclub Books!

In your recent posts you have alluded to the costs per book and how small the profit margin can be in children's book publishing. In light of this, i am curious about how book publishers work out deals with the scholastic book club. Does scholastic simply license the titles and make their own printings?

Scholastic's Book Club division is a whole separate arm of the company. Sometimes it will buy bookclub rights from a publisher (even another arm of Scholastic) and print its own bookclub edition of the book. Sometimes it will take existing stock from the publisher.

Book club prices are substantially less than what one might pay in a bookstore, how are such prices possible? When i order picture books via these bookclubs I never know whether I will receive a "normal" paperback picture book or one of the "stapled in the middle not glued" picture books which fall apart quite quickly in my classroom library. I assume this type of binding is done to keep prices down, does it really make so much of a cost difference?

Oh yes. Especially when you also use cheaper paper.

The idea of the Scholastic Book Clubs is to make children's books available at prices that children could conceivably afford. In poorer areas, this is a blessing, and studies have shown the important psychological difference that owning a book makes to children. (Which is not to say that learning to borrow books and use libraries aren't damned important skills.)

Do the authors/illustrators make the same money per book sold via these bookclubs as they do through the regular market place?

No, not usually. But it's good exposure for the book, and the SBC editions only sell in the bookclubs. For those of you unfamiliar with this, bookstores cannot order bookclub editions. The Series of Unfortunate Events books, for instance, were available in paperback through the bookclubs a long, long time before they became available in paperback editions to bookstores.

Last question: Is there any listing or way of knowing which publishing companies have "deals" with scholastic to sell their titles through the bookclubs?

Pretty much all of them.

I often hold off on purchasing new titles if I know they will be available more cheaply (or free with points). This works fine for books published by scholastic itself (ex. I held off purchasing Hunger Games, until it appeared in a bookclub flier), but how do I know what titles from other publishers will be available?

You don't! Ha-ha!
No, really, Scholastic decides which books it takes, and you find out when you get their catalog. Sorry.

Definitions for the Perplexed: Sell-In and Sell-Through

Many would-be authors are under the quaint misapprehension that all you have to do to get even the most niche-audience books on bookstore shelves is to publish it.

We know better, don't we. Bookstores have limited space, and that means two important things:
1. They aren't going to keep anything in stock if it isn't selling.
2. They aren't going to even try to stock something they're sure they can't sell. (Yes, it's possible they're wrong about that. Quel dommage.)

"You mean... bookstores refuse to stock a book?" you say. "Isn't that... censorship??"

No, it's business. And bookstores are supposed to know their clientele, and what will make an impression on them and what won't. (Also what will get them so het up they'll stop patronizing the store.)

Sell-in refers to how well the publisher has been able to get books into stores. Good sell-in means retailers have shown enthusiasm for the book and have ordered it in approximately the quantities we had hoped--or better.

Good sell-in is a promising sign of how the book will do in bookstores (because bookstores are pretty good at knowing what their clientele will like), but it's not a sure sign. In a returnable industry, all publishers have had the experience of getting terrific sell-in only to receive most of the books back in returns, because they did not sell through.

Sell-through refers to how well the stores have been able to get books into the hands of consumers. Sell-through (which is difficult to track, except through unreliable Bookscan) means those books have really sold, and are not coming back. We can go to the bank with that money, instead of waiting around with it in our hands, to see if the bookstore is going to demand it back.

It's a tough, tough business, and it's only tougher these days. Do everyone a favor and go buy a book, ok?

Definitions for the Perplexed: Bookscan

Is wrong information better than no information?

For many publishers, the answer is yes.

Bookscan is a service that started in 2001, and gathers information from bookstores about what books are sold every week. Not all bookstores report to Bookscan. They have about 13,000 retailers reporting to them from across the country, and then they use the figures from each one to extrapolate about the retailers in each area from whom they don't have sales numbers.

So the sales numbers Bookscan reports are a guess. But on top of that, Bookscan is also only recording the sales of books in bookstores... which does not include any sales direct from the publisher, through school or library accounts, through bookclubs, etc etc etc.

A particular book's Bookscan sales number can often be half what the book's true sales numbers are-- and are sometimes more like a third or even a sixth! Bookscan is not terribly reliable.

Publishers know this, but at the same time, they have no other way to find out how the books at other publishers have sold. So in this case, incomplete information (and who knows how incomplete) is better than no information, at least to a publisher's mind.


"Wow, that's... boring," you say. "What exactly does this have to do with me?"

Well, I'll tell you. When an editor is getting ready to make an offer to you, she'll look up your past published books' Bookscan numbers, and she'll base that offer on those numbers. Modest numbers = modest offer.

Unless. Unless you've included in your past publishing information the real numbers from your royalty statements. Your publisher's numbers are always going to be higher than Bookscan numbers.

So keep track of your sales, huh? And let the acquiring editor know how your books have really done, because she'd rather raise confidence at the publisher with your past sales, and she'd rather pay you more if she can justify it.

And agents? I'm talking to you, too.

Thank You for Your Patience

No, I haven't forgotten about the evil first pages clinic.
There's a new one up now; I'll get to everybody in the queue eventually.

Please note, however, that with the queue currently at 85 first pages, and me getting to them at a rate of maybe two or three per week, I have enough to last me the next seven months.

I'm not complaining. That's just going to call for Patience-with-a-capital-P from the later submitters, so be warned.

Definitions for the Perplexed: Strippable

Ooo, that sounds dirty. Will there be pole-dancing involved?

No. We're still on the topic of returns. Sexy, sexy returns. Yes, I'm being ironic.

Now, I do not offer the following explanation in an effort to further undermine authors' delicate self-esteems. What you're about to read is just another fact of the industry, and should not be taken as a judgment of your books.

Some paperback books are quality (or trade) paperbacks, and some are strippable.

How can you tell? It's simple. Is there a barcode on the inside front cover of your paperback? Does it have a little triangle with an "S"? Then it's strippable.


"Strippable" means that the publisher values this physical book very little. (This is not a reflection of how the publisher values the contents of the book, or the author.)

If a bookstore wants to return a strippable book, the publisher's attitude is essentially, "Oh, just throw it away."

To get credit for the return, and to be sure the book is not re-sold, the bookseller is asked to tear the front cover off the book and return just the front cover to the publisher. The bookseller will simply throw away the rest of the book.

Several of you have uttered screams of anguish and run off to check your own paperbacks for this designation. But it's really not a matter of high drama. The barcode above, for instance? Comes from this book.

The thing is, the chances of being able to refurb a damaged paperback are veryveryvery small. And if the publisher is printing a gazillion copies of the paperback whenever they go to press with it, those individual copies represent essentially pennies to the publisher... which is far, far less money than the cost of having the warehouse staff process a returned book. It's cheaper to just trash the thing.

Sad but true. But if it's good enough for Madeleine L'Engle, then it's good enough for you.

Definitions for the Perplexed: Damages, Hurts, and Refurbs

Alas, dreaded returns. Someone in an inventory office or bookstore backroom somewhere has decided to return your book to the publisher.

Maybe this is because it didn't sell. Or maybe because it got damaged in shipping, or on the shelves, or in the mouth of a busy toddler. Maybe someone on a ladder dropped it from a height of some feet onto one of its corners. Maybe the diecut in the jacket ripped. Maybe it's dirty.

One way or another, it's back in the publisher's warehouse.

If it's in perfectly salable condition, then it's put back into warehouse inventory and sold again.
But maybe... maybe it's damaged.

Damaged means there's something about it that's not salable. Damaged books go to a separate section of the warehouse, awaiting sorting into hurts and refurbs.

Refurbished books are ones that have a fixable problem. The most common type of refurbishment is putting a new jacket on the book. Publishers routinely print a few hundred extra jackets for this purpose. The Hachette warehouse, for instance, refurbishes about 4 million books a year.

Hurts are not fixable. They are a loss, and go to the pulper.

When a publisher talks of having books pulped, they don't mean the books are reduced to paper pulp. (At least, not yet.) In warehouse terms, being pulped means the books are shredded in an industrial shredder and the shredded material is packed into bales and sent to a recycling mill.

It's a little dismaying to consider that the cardboard boxes your books are shipped in may have been made out of dead books.

Quiz Time!

We all know about the big publishers (many of which don't even take submissions), but do you know of any good small publishers that put out reputable children's books?

Readers?

Definitions for the Perplexed: CMYK

"Four-color printing?!" you say. "I don't want four-color printing! My book has more than four colors in it!"

No, actually it doesn't.
CMYK stands for cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow, and black. Those of you who remember your preschool color-mixing will recall that you can create all the other colors (or, technically, a hell of a lot of them) with blue, red, yellow, and black.

These are the four colors meant when we talk about four-color printing. CMYK printing is the norm.

That's not to say that I haven't worked on books that were not printed in CMYK.
Sometimes a book will call for a special color-- for instance metallic ink on the jacket-- or, as in the case of Chris Barton's book on the brothers who created day-glo colors, the book requires specific colors that you cannot achieve with CMYK.
Nickelodeon's orange? That's a special color. Gap's blue? Special color. Starbucks' green, Barbie's pink... these special colors are usually achieved with Pantone colors. They cost a bit extra.

Here's a color game: Kitten's First Full Moon was expensive to print. Have you wondered how they achieved such a rich black and white look? How many unique colors do you think went into the printing?Answer: seven!

Definitions for the Perplexed: Advances

The publisher has been through its rounds of proofs, and has given the printer the go-ahead to print the entire run of books.



.....................
Now we take a symbolic pause, to represent the three months or so the printer will take for this.
(No, printing even a gigantic run of books is the work of days, not months. But it goes in a queue behind hundreds of other books.)
.....................





Finally! The books are coming off the presses, all bound and whole and new! Real books!

Most of them are loaded onto giant pallets and sent down to the sea, to be put on a ship across the Pacific. This, the main shipment, will reach the publisher's warehouse in about a month, and then the warehouse will start filling orders to bookstores.

But a couple hundred copies are sent air-freight to the publisher, and these are advances, because they come in advance of the main shipment. They are for marketing. As with ARCs, they represent an extra cost to the publisher (because books are heavy, air-freighting them is not cheap). So, again, please do not make any assumptions about how marketing's advance copies should be shared with the outside world. They have many clamoring sales people who need a copy, and of course reviewers and magazines and places like that to send the advances.

Your editor may get a couple advances to send to the author and illustrator. But the gratis copies mandated in your contract will not come out of the advance shipment. You will have to wait till the main shipment is in the warehouse, and then you may need to remind the publisher to send them (if you want it to happen promptly).
________________________________

Now, advance copies are not to be confused with copies advanced, which, I recognize, is asking a lot of the uninitiated.

Copies advanced refers to the sales of the book in its first three months. This is a bit of a thermometer for how the book is being received in the marketplace, but how that thermometer is read varies a great deal from house to house, so I won't get into any speculation here. If you have a conversation with your editor and this term comes up, ask her what practical significance those sales numbers have at her house.

Definitions for the Perplexed: F&Gs

Now, if we're talking about a novel, very likely the marketing department has nabbed galleys with which to make an ARC.

If we're talking about a picture book, though, that does not happen. Galleys are not representative enough of the final book to make good marketing materials.

In many cases, a picture book will simply be put on an early enough production schedule so that marketing can use advances. But sometimes, they'll have the printer send over a bunch of F&Gs.

F&G stands for folded and gathered.
F&Gs are the same sheets the printer is sending the publisher as proofs, but instead of sending the printed sheets straight off the press, the printer has begun (but not finished) the process of putting the book together.

When putting a book together, after the printer has printed the sheets of paper that will go into the book, those sheets are folded where the paper will butt up against the binding, gathered into signatures, and bound.

The most expensive part of any hardcover book, though, is the binding, so for the purposes of marketing materials, they skip that last step.

What you end up with looks like this:

This is an F&G.

Definitions for the Perplexed: ISBNs

ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number.

Up until a couple of years ago, all ISBNs were 10-digit.
Let's take the ISBN for How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight:
0-5903-1681-8

The first digit tells you what language the book was published in. A zero or a one means English. (The ISBN for Bonne Nuit Petit Dinosaure is 2-0705-5568-2. The first digit, a two, means it's in French.)

The next four digits tell you the publisher. 5903 is one of the codes for Scholastic.

The next four digits are a random series of numbers, unique to the book.

The last digit is a check digit. In any computer set up for ISBNs, the computer can run through a mathematical calculation using the check digit to be sure there isn't an error in the previous series of numbers.

(If you're curious, you multiply the first digit by ten, the second by nine, the third by eight, the fourth by seven, the fifth by six, the sixth by five, the seventh by four, the eighth by three, the ninth by two. Then add all those products together. In the case of 0-5903-1681-8, you'd end up with 190. Then you ask yourself how much you would have to add to 190 to make it a multiple of eleven. The answer, and thus the check digit, is eight.)

(If the answer were ten, then the check digit would be the letter X.)

A couple of years ago, it started to look like we might run out of unique ISBNs, so the whole world switched to 13-digit ISBNs, which was accomplished by keeping all the 10-digit ISBNs, but adding 978 at the beginning. (Of course this necessitated a different check digit.)

The barcode shown here has two parts. The big barcode will tell a scanner the ISBN, which you'll see printed in its 10-digit form and 13-digit form above the barcode, and in its 13-digit form again under the barcode.
The little barcode will tell a scanner the price. You'll see the price printed twice above the little barcode: once with a $ in front of it, and once with a 5 in front of it. (5 is code for US dollars.)

Definitions for the Perplexed: PPB

PPB stands for paper, printing, and binding. It is a dollar amount. It is also called the unit cost.

PPB is the cost only of the physical book: how much money (per book) we will have to spend on the paper, the printing, and the binding process.

A PPB for an average-sized, 32-page picture book, printing in four-color, and with a print run of more than 10,000 copies will often be about $1. As soon as you want spot UV or deboss or a funny size or the page count starts running up, you're adding on to that cost. If you want pop-ups or a sound chip or some hoo-ha like that, those will really cost you.

Things not included in the PPB:
The cost of shipping the books from China to the US.
The cost of shipping the books from the dock to the publisher's warehouse.
The cost of shipping the books from the publisher's warehouse to stores.
The cost of running a publisher's office.
The editor's salary.
The designer's salary.
The production manager's salary.
The marketer's salary.
The publicist's salary.
The many sales staff's salaries.
The costs incurred in the process of editing (eg, a fact-checker, a proof-reader, a copyeditor)
The costs incurred in the process of design (eg, buying new fonts).
The costs incurred in the process of marketing and publicity (eg, making displays, paying for advertisements).
The cost of free books to send to reviewers, etc.

...And several other things I've forgotten. Wondering where all the money between your PPB and your retail price goes? It's not into the publisher's pockets.

Authors and illustrators don't make a lot of profit on books, but neither do publishers.

There are some industries where a 50% profit margin is expected. Ha-ha! In publishing, we're aiming for around 10%.

Definitions for the Perplexed: Proofs

So once the galleys have been around and around enough to have worked out all the kinks, the designer will create a version of galleys that incorporates the guidelines the printer (which is usually in China) will need in order to know where to cut the pages (etc). This last set of galleys are called mechs, short for mechanicals. These are sent to the printer, and the next thing the publisher will see is proofs.

Proofs are an example of the book, printed on the big professional printing presses (but not bound), and this is our chance to make sure the alignment of the printing, the page trimming, and the color is correct. It is not the time to decide you like the word "harassed" better than "irritated" on page 42. Changes to the text will require your publisher to send a whole new digital file to the printer, add another round to the proofs, and the printer will charge the publisher more money. Like, hundreds of dollars, potentially.

When To Suggest Changes in the Bookmaking Process:

One sincerely hopes that you've made any big, plot-type changes in the draft/revision process with your editor. Which comes before galleys.

Once you're in galleys, the important thing to remember is that every change to entire blocks of text has to be made, checked, and finessed by design and CE (copyedit) to be sure there are no widows (a lonely line at the top of a page), orphans (a lonely line at the bottom of a page), lines that are too loose or tight (ie, in the spacing between words), and no text accidentally left out or duplicated. It's a lot of work, and for people who already have a lot of work to do. The designer and copyeditor will feel like killing someone, and since the author is not nearby, they'll focus on the editor.

1st galleys:
Fixes to the spelling/punctuation? Lay it on! Let's get everything right.
Stuff accidentally left out, etc? Great, that's what first galleys are for.
Fiddling with word choice? Sure thing. Just not too much of that, ok?

2nd galleys:
Fixes to spelling/punctuation? Oops, we missed that. Thanks for noticing.
Other issues? Try to minimize this, huh? That's what 1sts were for.

3rd galleys/Final Corrections:
See the term "final corrections"? Yeah, this had better be the last little bits.
Ideally, this is not a chance to make changes, but simply to be sure the changes from 2nd galleys were made as intended.

Mechs
Leave it alone! (Though text changes in mechs are still better than text changes we have to make in proofs.)

1st proofs
Color corrections? Great! That's what proofs are for.
Text changes? These had better just be correctness changes (in the event we missed a typo in galleys), not stylistic ones.

2nd proofs
Color corrections? This had better be important.
Text changes? No.

3rd proofs
Changes of any kind: What are you, fucking nuts?

Definitions for the Perplexed: ARCs

The marketing team will send the advance reading copy (ARC) to reviewers and booksellers so that everyone has a chance to see what they think of the book before it's officially released. I can recall reading the first Harry Potter in ARC form.

Because marketing grabbed the first galleys in order to make the ARC, ARCs are sometimes called bound galleys, or galleys for short.

This gets a little bit confusing, because often if a bookseller or marketer speaks of a galley, they mean an ARC. But if an editor or designer speaks of a galley, they mean the print-outs routing around the offices.

The author and illustrator will be exposed to both kinds of galley, and will need to keep them straight.

Another thing to remember about ARCs is that they're expensive. Now, if you've ever seen one, you'll have a hard time believing this. They're paperback. They're on cheap paper. There are no special effects like shiny foil or embossing or whathaveyou. The binding is the crappiest kind of glue, which will fall apart after two or three readings.

But the reason they're expensive is that the publisher prints so few of them. A normal hardcover book gets a print run in the thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of units, and has a PPB of between $1 and $2. An ARC (however crappily-made) has a print run in the hundreds, and has a PPB of three or four times that.

So galleys are not like buckshot loaded into a shotgun, meant to be fired in the general direction of marketing opportunities. They are sent to the people who will very likely make a difference in the sales numbers. Try to remember this before you suggest that your publisher send you a couple hundred to pass out to your friends.

Definitions for the Perplexed: Galleys

Once upon a time, printers used printing presses that really pressed a sheet of paper against rows of inked type. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, google it.) The individually-cast letters of the alphabet, made out of lead, were carefully set in rows to make the words and sentences and paragraphs that would be printed.

These rows of loose type were arranged in a wide, shallow, wooden box called a galley, after the wide, flat sailing vessels.

It is from this antique way of printing that we inherit several terms, galley among them. (Also leading, the space between lines of type, and kerning, the space between letters.)

Nowadays when we say galley we mean the first earnest effort (ie, not the cast-off) of the designer to lay out the text and illustration of a book.

Galleys are printed out for routing among the publisher's staff on the designers' office printer. The color is not great. There are typos. The designer has forgotten to add the author's bio on the back flap. The copyeditor hasn't gotten her hands on it yet. Etc.

Now we reach a crossroads.

The editorial, design, and production team will continue on with three or four rounds of galleys to gradually fix all the errors, omissions, and disagreements before sending the book to the printer.

The marketing team, though, will grab the very first layouts --if it is a novel-- and whisk it off to a printer to produce ARCs (advance reading copies).

Definitions for the Perplexed: Cast-off

Let us begin at the beginning.
Well, actually, let us begin somewhere in the middle.

When the designer has the text and the art for a book (or just the text, if there will be no important art presence), she goes into her fancy design software and lays out the text and the illustration together in approximately the way it will appear in the book.

I say "approximately" because she isn't going to spend a bunch of time finessing the details--this is just the cast-off (or prelim layouts). In a longer book, she won't do more than a few pages.

Then she'll show this to the editor, so that they can make some decisions together: what typeface will suit the book's mood and function best? How are the illustrations or chapter heads going to be treated? Do they like this little ornament on the page edge, or would this one be better? etc. Different book, different questions.

Authors and illustrators often won't see a cast-off, and in some books' cases, a cast-off doesn't happen. In those cases, the designer goes straight to galleys.

The Joy of Layoffs

Know how editors have too much work and too little time?

Well, if your editor is at a house that laid off some of her colleagues, that house might have canceled some projects.

But more likely, the house just gave the remaining editors even more titles to look after.

So if you're not hearing from your editor even more than usual, it's because she's paralyzed by workload panic and hiding under her desk.

FYI.

Definitions for the Perplexed

Pubrants recently blogged about co-op, which is a fine publishing tradition that bugs the hell out of everyone except B&N and Borders.

It would not have occurred to me to blog about co-op. But the comments found the topic fascinating! Which makes me wonder what other publishing terms you guys would find interesting. PPB? P&L? Advance sales? Sell-in? Earn-out? Bookscan? Refurbs?

The mind boggles. Can you really be interested in this stuff?

Agents and "Agents"

Do publishing houses that require submissions to come through agents read all agented submissions, even from agents who are new in the business and who may not be known to the editor? Or do editors see a package that claims to be from an "agent," check it against some actual or mental list, and discard it if they do not recognize the name? I imagine, of course, that some agents command more attention than others, but do all agents, even unknown ones, at least get their client's foot in the door?

Yes and no.

I do sometimes check agents against the list called Preditors and Editors, if the agent is sending me unapologetic dreck of genres my house doesn't even publish. (Major red flag.) That is bullshit agenting, whether the agent is legit or scamming.

Likewise when we get something through the front desk beginning, "Dear Editor." Agents are supposed to be doing their damn homework and knowing who to send a manuscript to at a particular house. "Dear [Publishing House]" means that the agent knows zipola about the industry, and even less about being a good agent.

And simply claiming to be an agent is not enough. We've seen enough jackass authors pretend to be their own agents that we're well wise to that trick. Also if you're pretending your lawyer is your agent. (No, he's not.)

But in general we try to reply courteously to agented submissions, even if we haven't heard of the agent. The unknown ones are certainly low-priority, though.

Living Is Optimism

Hi! I have a question, and I'm not trying to be funny, I swear. I've noticed that editors often use words like "tomorrow" and "by Friday" and "next week" (in reference to when I should expect an offer, or a production schedule, or a set of proofs, or whatever). It virtually never does come tomorrow or Friday or next week, and generally, these promises are followed by months of radio silence.
I know editors are insanely busy, but what puzzles me is, if things always take a great deal longer than expected, why do they keep on specifying "tomorrow" or "by Friday" or "next week"? Why don't they say "sometime in the next three months" if that's what's most likely?

I know all about this, having been guilty of it myself. And I look at my coworkers, and see a lot of myself in them. So in the spirit of self-awareness, I'm going to share something really true about editors:

1. Editors are almost always smart people who know how they want the world to be.
2. There's a little OCD running around in the make-up of many editors, and plenty of over-achiever-ship.
3. Editors are constantly saved and undermined by their optimistic natures.

So we know clearly what we think we ought to be able to promise people (point 1), and we very much want to promise it to them (point 2), and we will promise it to them (point 3).

And to be fair, we come through on a lot of our promises-- but we come through most on the promises to the projects that are not only signed up but whose late schedules/emergencies are screaming like hungry children.

The promises we do not come through on nag at us and make us feel guilty. I understand your plea for realism in projected dates, but realistically? If I told someone I would get back to them in three months, my brain/workstyle would categorize that task as too far in the future to keep track of, and forget about it entirely. If I told someone I would do something in three months, it would not happen.

And I suppose that when I think hard about how long everything takes--and how fast it all goes by for me (it's February?! Where did January go? Where, for that matter, did November and December go?! It still feels like fricking October to me!), the truth is that I'm a little terrified that if I started being honestly realistic with myself, I would realise that this is an impossible job; a treadmill that will always go a bit faster than I can run; a black hole in my life that is sucking everything-- including eating and sleep, not just hobbies and any kind of outside life-- into itself.

So I'm not going to. I'm at work this morning, and I'm glad to be. I have a challenging, creative job in children's books--doing something that matters to me. I'm going to follow through on at least one promise today. And deal with at least three emergencies. And try like hell to get back to several agents.

And if my best is never, not once in my whole career, quite enough, I will at least know that I did my best, all the time, and that is enough.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Norrell

In your experience which is better: two shorter fantasies that follow a similar time line, each complete in themselves (a sci-fi example would be Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow), or a great fat novel that included all the story lines at once?

I've read that publishers want to know they'll have more than one book out of an author, but from the stuff I see on the shelf lately it seems big books are quite popular too. (I ask, of course, because I'm working on a project that has reached the point when I have to choose which way I'm going).

I think that preference is going to vary per editor and house. More likely, the editor will prefer two books (more revenue), but in terms of what you write, you shouldn't base this decision on what a hypothetical editor wants. Do what will serve the story and your audience best.

Goddamned Poets. Always Thinking They're So Artistic and Poetical... Why, In My Day...

I was wondering if I could pick your big brain about novels in verse...Specifically YA novels in verse. I have only just discovered them and have read some knockouts. (I Heart You, You Haunt Me, Far From You, and What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know).

What are your feelings about novels in verse? Is there a market for them right now?

They're cool, but can be harder to sell. A wide segment of the population is vaguely (or even pointedly) suspicious of poetry. This makes little sense to me personally; I think poetry is wonderful. But you can't discount it.

Some people look at poetry and see that it can serve a more focused approach toward language; it can be fun; it can be beautiful; it can be moving; and as it takes up more space than it does time, it can be very accessible to kids who don't want to sit through a whole novel.

But other people don't know what to think about poetry. Why doesn't it just speak and/or format itself like normal writing? (Is it because the author is pretentious and thinks she's better than me?) Why is there all this damn white space on the pages? (Is it because the author is lazy and didn't want to write a whole novel?) Why is some of this stuff so oblique, forcing me to think about it or even guess at what it means? (The only reason an author would want to say something in a way that the reader can't follow is if the author doesn't like the reader, right?)

So many people end up suspecting (or even feeling quite sure) that writers of poetry are pretentious, lazy jerks who dislike the people who read their poetry. These people need a gentle welcome to the idea of a novel in verse.

How edgy can they be?

YA is getting edgier and edgier. As long as it's not edgy for the sake of edgy, I say go for it.

Should they be in first person?

Who cares?

What is the general word count?

Ask Amazon.

How do I format the thing when Word wants capitals and proper punctuation?

Good question. Do your best.

As Ursula Nordstrom Said, "No, I Don't Have Any Children. But I Was a Child, and I Haven't Forgotten a Thing."

In Fear and Loathing in Children's Books you made a comment about writing for the group you identify most with, and the need to recognize where that is as quickly as possible. Could you expand on that? And what about people who write for more than one age (especially as their children pass through those ages they're writing for)? Is that an example of reading producing like? (Assuming here the writer is reading to his/her children.)

Some authors seem to have a fairly specific internal age; very likely it's the age they remember best from their own childhoods. When they write for this age, it sounds right; it feels right. Their characters' thoughts and speech and action feel inimitably their own, which comes both from the author's deep empathetic connection to the characters, and from the respect that empathy engenders.

There are other authors who seem to have vivid memories of a great deal of their childhoods, and can write empathetically and respectfully for a wide range of ages.

And then there are authors who, no matter how much they love their own children, cannot truly remember what it was like to be a child at all, and so should not be writing for children. This state leads to the earnest, kind, well-intentioned, and utterly disrespectful talking at children rather than to them.


People who remember childhood well not only remember how they thought and felt at a particular age; they know that in a profound way, children and adults are equals.

Because we are all equally human.