Revision Jitters

JAlpha said:

Though I can hardly complain about the interest my query letter has generated so far, for me it’s NOT about my query letter; it’s the accumulation of the rejections to the requests for partials and or the full manuscript that troubles me.

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It's never really about thr query letter, the letter is just the foot in the door. It's one of those things were a bad query can kill a good novel as nobody will ever see it, but a good query can't save a less then stellar novel.

To me at least it sounds like you're trying to be too many things with this WIP, which in turn may lead to the pacing problems. It's hard to move forward if you don't know where you're going.

Sounds like this is a good time to step and back and ask yourself, "what can I tighten..." No need for "jitters", we all have to edit and edit and edit.

Of course this is coming from a guy who's last novel was a humorous, pulp, SF, mystery, holiday story novel, so I'm certainly not the expert on focusing....

Good luck. If it was easy everybody would do it.

Good luck on that. The hardest three months of my life, writing-wise, were when I did my huge overhaul of a revisions.

It was also the best thing I ever did.

But exhausting! I'm glad you are heading in with a good outlook!

Maprilynne

Good luck!!

But the rejections numbers aren't bad at all--you have a third of queries leading to requests for partials/fulls. So it may just be a matter of continuing to plug away.

What's a little surprising is the lack of comments with all but 1 of those 23 rejections from agents/editors who asked to see more of your work. Not even a hint?

Workshop sounds like a great idea! Hard to know how seriously to take the "pacing" comment if you'd heard it from just one person.

Keep us posted!

Susan

Just had to ask if they made mention of why the pacing was off. What it too jarring, with snap transitions? Too slow and ponderous? Or was it all over the place?

Tri

Good for you JA...I hope everything goes well for you!

I can empathize with your concerns. I just finished a major overhaul of my novel and despite thinking that these revisions somehow "fixed" whatever is wrong with my work, I ended up with two form rejections on the full MS. So I'm back to square one.

It's great that you got feedback to help you figure out what might not be working with your novel. Embrace the input, shake off those jitters, and do your best to make your novel just "right" for someone. Good luck.

I know what you're going through. I did massive re-writes of mine right the way through the MS, and it's had a lot of positive responses to the partial, but no requests for the whole thing. Agents are mentioning not commercial enough, which I actually don't agree with. And that the character doesn't seem likeable, which I do agree with, but was intentional in the first few chapters. I wanted to get a kind of Catcher in the Rye character arc into it, where the character is immature and opinionated at the beginning, then grows up a lot at the end.

Now I don't know what to do with it because it's no use having that kind of character arc if an agent will only look at the first few pages and conclude the character isn't likeable so it's not worth reading on. But softening the character up so she's lovable in the first few chapters will kill the story.

I'm at the same stage really, that I've completely exhausted my objectivity with it and am now doing things that I don't know whether they're making it better or worse. I've sent it off to a manuscript assessment agency in the fond hope that they'll have some ideas, or at the very worst tell me the whole thing doesn't work, and to move onto something else.

Rejections

JAlpha said:

Thanks for the support guys. Reps to you all

Triceretops, here's the excerpt from the second paragraph (first and third paragraphs were generic) of the rejection letter . . .

You have a strong voice and the premise of the story is indeed unique, I am afraid, however, that I am going to still pass on this project. Again while I thought the premise to be unique, I felt that the pacing of the story was a bit to inaccessible. Unique yes, but not what I am looking for.

To be perfectly honest, I don't have a clear understanding of what this agent meant by "inaccessible" pacing The same material (first three chapters) won second place in ByLine's Novel Beginning contest. I would think pacing would have been a huge criteria for the judging, and there were 260 entries.

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With this many rejections, and with the second place in the Byline contest, I'm not sure I'd take one comment about inaccessible pacing seriously. When pace is the problem, most agents comment on the same thing, and, really, you can't take anything a single agent say too seriously.

I doubt quality of writing is the issue, either, or you probably wouldn't have placed second with Byline.

This sounds more like a marketability problem, especially when so many agents have passed without comment. From what you said about the novel, and from so many agents passing without real comment, it sounds like you have a novel agents do not know what to do with, that can't easily be placed in a category, and nothing is harder to sell, even when well written.

I hate that not commercial enough thing

What I really hate (alhtough I love it at the same time) is comments like your writing is fresh, original and witty, however, after a vast soul searching excercise... (implied rather than stated) ...we unfortunately do not feel it is commercial enough... What exactly is commercial about a book if it's not the writing, its freshness etc? I mean, what are they looking for?

FergieC said:

. What exactly is commercial about a book if it's not the writing, its freshness etc? I mean, what are they looking for?

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Read every book on the top bestseller lists for the last three or four years. That's what they're looking for. The saying is, "Publishers want something just like everything else, only different."

Take the bestseller list, give that kind of story anything like a new angle, and you're probably in, as long as that new angle is also a good angle.

It's about story and characters readers will like, not about the writing or the freshness. Good writing is gravy, and no matter how well-written something is, the right kind of story and character can be missing. Fresh/original can also be good or bad. Just because something is fresh/original does not mean it's any good, or that it has the story and characters readers want.

I have to disagree, to an extent. By all mean, read bestsellers to see what makes a bestseller. But the last thing publishers and agents want are more copycat books. They are inundated with books about wizards and religious conspiracies. The plain fact is that the next bestseller will come out of left-field, as all other ones have. No one can judge what will be the next big thing. Both Harry Potter and the 1st Ladies Detective Agency were turned down by masses of agents and publishers as not commercial before becoming international bestsellers.

If there was an easy way to judge what the next big seller would be, agents would be delighted, and rich. As it is, the ones that are successful are the ones that have a good feeling for what might be popular, but even they are wrong a lot of the time. It's a lottery. But looking at previous bestsellers and trying to ape them is a losers game for writers. You have to write what you want to write and what you're good at, and hope some agent or publisher somewhere eventually decides they like it.

I do agree story and characters are the most vital thing though: the writing is a long way behind that.

FergieC said:

I have to disagree, to an extent. By all mean, read bestsellers to see what makes a bestseller. But the last thing publishers and agents want are more copycat books. They are inundated with books about wizards and religious conspiracies. The plain fact is that the next bestseller will come out of left-field, as all other ones have. No one can judge what will be the next big thing. Both Harry Potter and the 1st Ladies Detective Agency were turned down by masses of agents and publishers as not commercial before becoming international bestsellers.

If there was an easy way to judge what the next big seller would be, agents would be delighted, and rich. As it is, the ones that are successful are the ones that have a good feeling for what might be popular, but even they are wrong a lot of the time. It's a lottery. But looking at previous bestsellers and trying to ape them is a losers game for writers. You have to write what you want to write and what you're good at, and hope some agent or publisher somewhere eventually decides they like it.

I do agree story and characters are the most vital thing though: the writing is a long way behind that.

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Harry Potter WAS a copycat book. The same essential story had been written and published at least twice. There's really nothing at all new in the Harry Potter books, nothing that hasn't been done before. She just did it better.

The plain fact is that the way to learn what to write is to read the bestseller list. And, no, the nest bestseller won't come out of left field. It's already out. The next bestseller comes out almost every week, in fact, and if you look at the top ten bestselling novel right now, you'll see that nine of them, probably ten, and the same sort of novels that were on the bestselling list last month, last year, and the year before.

Publishers do not want copycat books, but they absolutely do want books, as many as possible, like the ones on the bestseller lists. They just ask you to write them better, which is what J. K. Rowling did.

Really, take a look at the current bestseller list and tell me just how many of them came from left field. Then look at last month's list and tell me how many of those came from left field. Then look at every month from last year and tell me how many of those came from left field. The answer will be about one in fifty. And it'll be the same next month and next year.

There's not much new under the sun. New usually means nothing. Better means everything. I know exactly what I look for in a slush pile, and I know what a number of other editors look for. Things much like what the public has shown it wanted in the past, but done better.

The bestselling list isn't there by accident, and even if your were right, you;d still need to read it to know what left field really is. But few bestsellers come from left field. They come right down the middle, and a cursory glance at any current bestseller list proves this beyond doubt.

Distilled JAR: If it sells a lot, it's good. If it doesn't, it's not good. If it doesn't sell at all, it's crap.

Did I miss anything?

caw

I know exactly what I look for in a slush pile, and I know what a number of other editors look for. Things much like what the public has shown it wanted in the past, but done better.

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If it was easy to determine which book would be the next best seller, no one would have to query more than a couple of agents or publishers before their obviously bestselling book was picked up. In reality, McCall Smith was told African stories would never sell because no one wants to read them by everyone (and eventually published by a very small publisher). He's still in the British top ten. Similarly, Harry Potter - currently holding positions 1 and 2 in the UK - was turned down by loads of publishers and agents.

It's guesswork, when it comes right down to it. And for a new writer, to try and do, say, what Stephen King is doing but better is just daft. You have to forge your own style and do it well, not just try and copy-cat someone who is probably on the best-sellers list because they're doing what they're doing better than anyone else at the time.