The Next Circle of Hell

Putputt said:

LadyA - I had no idea Twitter pitching is dying! I've always thought it's been increasing in popularity.

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That's the problem: it's getting so big with writers, it's overwhelming for agents. There have been more and more agents just popping on to say, "So many entries, I can't go through them. If you think I'd like your work, query me!"

A hunk offering me drink is just fine by me.

I'm not convinced muscular hunk would taste very good in a drink! But I'm willing to be proven wrong.

Welcome to the thread, LadyA and GretaK, whose names seem to be pleasantly in accordance with one another!

No update on my meeting yet, which I thought was going to be scheduled for any day now. Sent a note to my agent last night and will probably do so again today if I still haven't heard.

Tomorrow is meant to be the acquisitions meeting of the US editor who gave us the best feedback yet, too! So...I'm in the curious position of very much hoping a lot is about to happen, without any guarantee just yet that anything will!

*waves to LadyA*

Welcome, GretaK! Wow, two books out is impressive. Wishing you patience and good news soon.

I can't remember exactly what's in a spezna, either, but I know it's Russian and strong. Peggy or Lily would know.

Wow, Bryan, so exciting! Fingers crossed for that meeting tomorrow, and the one to come.

Twitter pitching is definitely an art — I like reading the really good ones. So I hope it sticks around, even if the frenzy of popularity dies down.

Slightly off-topic, but Fuchsia, I've seen you and several others change characters into symbols or numbers when mentioning their book titles or publishers. Why is this? I see it a lot on Twitter, too. Is it to prevent posts here showing up if Googled?

Bryan Methods said:

Slightly off-topic, but Fuchsia, I've seen you and several others change characters into symbols or numbers when mentioning their book titles or publishers. Why is this? I see it a lot on Twitter, too. Is it to prevent posts here showing up if Googled?

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Yeah, I think you've answered your own question!

I put my repping agency name as a sig and within 24 hours it was on the front page of Google. Embarrassment was profound.

GretaK said:

Hi THM!

Lovely to meet someone from my neck of the woods. Yes, the market here is very small which is why I was so excited to get a NYC agent.

Now, well, I'm just counting rejections like lots of other writers.

I've never tried short stories - not drawn to writing them, I think.

what do you write and how long have you been in the sub trenches?

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I've been in the trenches nearly 20 years. Sadly, after completing my first novel in 1994, it has taken me this long to get an agent.

shawshank-redemption.gif

We've been out 3 weeks. So I am ~sigh~ hoping it will not take another 20 years.

I write science fiction!

What about you? YA Drovers in Gallipoli? (I jest!)

Bryan Methods said:

Edit: Ohh, some interesting news just now - that UK editor I'm excited about wants to have a meeting! It's not an offer, but as my agent said, there's no reason for a busy editor to spend time meeting a writer unless they're seriously interested. So that's pretty fantastic!

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Best of luck, and congrats to everyone else who is getting good news!

Hi LadyA and GretaK! I'm also unsure of what our bartender is mixing in our drinks, but we're sure enjoying drinking them.

Such exciting news, Bryan!

I'm also still waiting on final revision notes. But, my agent will be on vaca soon, so I don't imagine I'll be on sub for a little while longer.

Bryan Methods said:

No update on my meeting yet, which I thought was going to be scheduled for any day now. Sent a note to my agent last night and will probably do so again today if I still haven't heard.

Tomorrow is meant to be the acquisitions meeting of the US editor who gave us the best feedback yet, too! So...I'm in the curious position of very much hoping a lot is about to happen, without any guarantee just yet that anything will!

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Amazing stuff here. Hoping all the best for you.

LadyA!!!! *tackles* So happy to have you here!

Got notes from agent this week and started them today. Wahoo! Agent hopes this will be the last draft (me too). This is round 4!

Bryan, fingers crossed for good news soon! So exciting.

GretaK, welcome!

Bryan Methods said:

Slightly off-topic, but Fuchsia, I've seen you and several others change characters into symbols or numbers when mentioning their book titles or publishers. Why is this? I see it a lot on Twitter, too. Is it to prevent posts here showing up if Googled?

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Yup, that's it. Basically just to keep Google from bringing up these posts if anyone ever searches for my book/publisher. People also often do it when posting opinions about other authors' books. (Not that I say anything here I wouldn't say in public, since it is public, after all. )

Good luck with your final round, Smiley!

OK, now I really want to know what drovers in Gallipoli are and why people have to write about them. I've seen the movie Gallipoli, but that is not helping.

Haaaaa! Drovers in Gallipoli indeed - that's a good mish-mash of Australian cliches. (Fuschia, drovers are Australian cowboys; Gallipoli is a battle in which Australians were involved in WWI).

Drovers in Gallipoli is a bit like parodying a certain YA genre as 'sexy teens in a dystopian future uncovering government conspiracies to alter everyone's DNA'.

My books are middle grade and YA, and no drovers/outback/war stories/ crocodiles/Tasmanian wilderness in sight.

Good luck everyone and Bryan, very exciting!

*Waves to LadyA and GretaK* Welcome!!

Smiley, good luck on the draft!! And Bryan, all crossables crossed for you!! .

You guys are so sweet. Thanks! Still no news yet, but I have to wait for the day to get rolling over there in the US.

GretaK said:

Haaaaa! Drovers in Gallipoli indeed - that's a good mish-mash of Australian cliches. (Fuschia, drovers are Australian cowboys; Gallipoli is a battle in which Australians were involved in WWI).

Drovers in Gallipoli is a bit like parodying a certain YA genre as 'sexy teens in a dystopian future uncovering government conspiracies to alter everyone's DNA'.

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Hah, I love it! But what about the Mad Max/The Rover-type postapocalyptic outback stories? Post-oil drovers in Gallipoli? Or are those just popular in movies, not fiction?

Good luck, Bryan! And now I return to revising.

Good luck everyone! I got a note from my agent that it'll be a couple weeks before I get my revision notes. Time to work on the wip...

Hi LadyA and GretaK!

Good luck to everyone waiting! May good news come your way fast.

*refills speznas* *buries head back in rewrite*

Fuchsia Groan said:

Hah, I love it! But what about the Mad Max/The Rover-type postapocalyptic outback stories? Post-oil drovers in Gallipoli? Or are those just popular in movies, not fiction?

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I wish they were! As an SF writer I'm kind of hanging in the wind. Maybe with the new Mad Max movie perhaps?

Cowboy/Drover/farm life women's fiction is catastrophically popular in Australia at the moment. They're usually romances - sometimes historical - set in a pastoral environment with the few Australian challenges. Maybe its because 90% of everyone lives in the city!

Treehouseman said:

Cowboy/Drover/farm life women's fiction is catastrophically popular in Australia at the moment. They're usually romances - sometimes historical - set in a pastoral environment with the few Australian challenges. Maybe its because 90% of everyone lives in the city!

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Yikes, that sounds almost like stereotypical Vermont fiction. Only substitute dairy farmers and loggers for drovers. I review books, and if I get one more tale of a "hardscrabble" farming family or memoir by a former city dweller about moving to my state and how quaint and quirky it is, I may do something drastic.

It is pretty quirky, but that gets old, ya know?

Spezna!

I think we decided it was a chocolate liqueur and peppered vodka, didn't we, Lily? It was named in honour of a hunky former Russian spetsnaz ( Russian Special Forces) who had moved to Canada and was working installing hardwood floors, and showed up to do mine. He was bald, handsome, and spoke very little English, but was easy to laugh and very, very charming. He was built like Mr. Universe and kept taking his shirt off whenever he got hot.

Needless to say, I had to run off to fan myself in the AW water cooler from time to time and shared stories of some of the very funny things he was saying and doing.

When I found out he had been a spetsnaz, (I had no idea how to spell it so we stuck with my phonetic spelling on AW) I asked him if he had ever killed anyone and he said: "Me kill? Why kill when you can punch? But anybody hurt you, lady, I kill them." Then he danced on the balls of his feet around my living room, punching and jabbing, half-naked of course: I later found out he'd been a semi-pro boxer.


So we celebrate Slava (who has since become a character in my fourth book, Umbrella Man: he is an intelligence agent sent to Cuba with news of an impending assassination attempt on Raul Castro) by offering speznas . Because, after all, who couldn't use a hot Russian, err, drink?

Hi everyone --

I probably should have started a thread about this, but frankly i didn't want to bring much attention to it and I trust you folks.

As you know I love my agent and she's been beyond supportive -- I truly think she loves my book. We started going out (on submission) about year ago and got kind comments but no offers. I did a major revision and we went out again in September -- again, nice comments but no offers. I wanted to revise again and I finished in February. She wanted to let her new boss (she switched agencies) give it a read.

A couple of days ago she called to talk about where we go next. She said we could just go out again, or I could go over her notes and make those changes or go out again. Or, she said, maybe we should have a freelance editor she knows work with it, because there's clearly something she and I aren't seeing that's getting in the way. The editor has worked for two of the big five and seems to have good reputation in the bidnesss.

Two problems with that. Really three. The first is that God I can't imagine another spec revision, because it feels like I'm chasing my tail at this point. The second is that the editor is out of commission until August, so it means tabling the book for four months. Maybe that's not the worst thing in the world. And the third is the cost.

I trust my agent implicitly, and she said she'd do whatever I wanted to do, but we're missing something about the book and this might be the answer to fining gout exactly what's wrong and fixing it. But if I want to keep it or pass on that, she understands and she'll eagerly submit it around. At the same time, she wouldn't have said anything about the editor if she didn't think that's what we ought to do -- you don't bring up a threesome unless you're up for it.

So i talked to the editor and she was quite nice and enthusiastic, and I sent her some pages and she was enthusiastic and she gave me her proposal. Even more than my agent suggested it would be -- enough so it'll take 2000 or so books sold (assuming it gets published) for me to break even. I'm not broke, but it's enough money that it will be a conversation with my not-so-supportive spouse about not letting go of this "hobby" of mine. And I've always been told that money needs to flow to the author, not away from him. But al as agree that whatever the problem is, I can't fix it. We could go out and get lucky -- or maybe run into someone who doesn't see a problem at all -- but my faith in that is running pretty thin.

I don't want to give anyone the indication hat I doubt the motivations of anyone, because I don't. I just am a little frustrated and worried, and thought I'd toss it out to see what y'all think. Thanks

Whiporee how frustrating. Personally, I wouldn't pay for an editor - not just because I can't afford it, but as you say, it's drilled into us since day one: cash for these services isn't usually the done thing.

I haven't been on submission yet so I'm a noob, but if the submissions don't go as planned with this project, is the usual protocol moving on to the next project and trying again?

Whip, that sounds so frustrating. Man, I am really sorry you're going through this. I know what it's like to pour yourself into a revision repeatedly. I'd have a hard time paying an editor for what would basically be a spec revision, too. Do you have any beta readers you can trust? What's the editor feedback overall? Is there anything you can grab onto there?

Have you considered just letting this manuscript steep for a while so you can come back to it later with fresher eyes?

Whip - First off, sorry you're in such a frustrating situation. I can't tell you what to do because of course it's a very personal decision to make, but a couple of things: Did the editor give you any ideas of what sort of edits she has in mind? Is it possible to ask for a sample edit so you know that if you did choose to go down that route, you'd at least be paying for something you agree with?

Do you have another book in the works? What are the comments that you and your agent have been getting from editors she subbed to? Obviously if the comments are things you can fix, by all means, consider editing. But if it's a market issue, there's not much you can do about it. :-/

I have a friend whose agency paid for a professional editor (a freelancer who used to be an editor for a Big 5 house) after the first round of submissions. However, my friend and her agent ended up hating the editor's suggestions. The cost is absorbed by the agency for now, but as I understand it, it will come off my friend's advance if/when she gets a book deal. Anywho, after that, they decided to trunk the book and move on to a new MS.

I don't know enough about your MS to know what you should do, but for myself, I would move on to a different MS. Which was what I ended up doing. I'll let you know how that works out. I still have hope for my 1st MS, I'm just hoping that my latest MS might sell and that'd be enough for me to get a foot in the door for my 1st MS.

The betas were all solid. The editorial feedback has been nice -- some in depth, a few multiple reads in an office, but not a consistent issue. We've had people in two different agencies read it and have made suggestions, but nothing major.

That's part of her service, or at least it's included in her proposal. In addition to a line edit, she'll do an editorial letter, and she even thought she'd be able to talk to some of those who passed to get feedback. She'd credible -- she told me the books she worked on at the houses before she moved out west, and I found them in the bookstore and she's graciously thanked in the acknowledgements in them.

As for just letting it sit, I could, but I don't know how much good it will do me and I'd want it to wait until the next WIP is finished (which I don't even know what it is right now). And to be honest, I don't think I know the difference between "different" and "better" in regards to this one anymore. But it's certainly a thought.