Two Axioms about Writing Bestsellers

When interviewed, successful novelists often say that the best thing beginning writers can do to enhance their craft is to read the classics, other good literature, and the genre for which the aspiring author wants to write.

         It’s only by doing the latter that a writer knows how that genre is being written today and what appeals to modern-day readers.

         Many nineteenth-century writings are now considered classics. But when contemporary readers try to read the long descriptions and philosophical musings in these novels, they close the books—unread. Today, many busy readers have neither the time nor the patience for that type of writing.

George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), author of Middlemarsh,

which some critics consider the finest novel in the English language.

         So many aspiring writers read more contemporary novels to find out how to be successful today. For example, the prolific James Patterson, a best-selling author of thrillers, writes in short chapters. A number of successful novelists now emulate him in their writing style.

         I’ve read that readers today want shorter books and shorter chapters because they often have time to read only a few pages before having to do some other task. So Patterson and other writers who want to copy his success insist that aspiring mystery authors keep their chapters short, shift from scene to scene, and keep the action moving relentlessly.

James Patterson who’s written innumerable bestselling novels since the 1970s.

 Some readers have the notion that all published novelists become wealthy. These readers peruse articles that mention the advance a novelist got and the number of books a writer sells and believe that they, too, can become a multimillionaire by writing a bestseller. And that’s true. They can.

 But writing that bestseller, finding an agent, and getting a contract isn’t easy. And the truth is that few novels win the interest of enough readers to become bestsellers. Bestselling is always iffy.

Frustrated, these aspiring novelists do more homework and discover what type of fiction is being written today and is most often bought by readers. Their axiom becomes: Write what’s bringing in the big bucks! According to an article in the ProActive Writer Blog,

. . . of the people who buy at least one book at year, 8 out of 10 buy a fiction book . . . [but] out of the same group of people, 8 out of 10 will also buy a non-fiction book . . . Of the people buying at least one fiction book a year, just under half (48%) buy what is classed as Mystery, Thriller and Crime. . . . The second most popular book genre was Science Fiction with 26% of readers buying Sci Fi books, ‘Literature’ was close on its heels with 24% and Romance is worthy of a mention with 21% of the market.

         Now why am I writing about this today? I’d like to share with you my own first attempts at writing and getting published. When I became a freelance editor and curriculum developer in 1984, I spent the first hour of each day writing. At that time, romances were among the biggest sellers.

Nora Roberts' career began with romances.

After becoming a bestselling novelist,

she has gone on to writing women’s fiction and mysteries.

         For ten years, while in a deep depression, I’d read Harlequin romances because they ended happily with no concerns about the social issues that so worried me. These romances put me to sleep at night. In a way they kept me from throwing in the towel on life.

         So when I finally yielded to my lifelong desire to write, I bought into the axiom to write what’s bringing in the money: I picked romances as my genre. I thought I could establish a reputation with romances and then move on to historical fiction.

         I wrote two manuscripts; sent them, one by one, to Harlequin; and received two rejection letters. And why wouldn’t those stories be rejected?  I was forty-eight years old, had seldom dated, had never been in love (although I loved many people), and what I knew about sex could be etched on the edge of the left wingtip of an unemployed bee.  

         I’d read romances, but I knew nothing about the subject matter. In my craving to be published, I’d picked a popular genre to which I could bring no life experience. I finally did get published, but only when Dulcy, the cat with whom I lived for seventeen and a half years gave me our story. The one we had lived together.

         So for me another axiom proved true: Write what you know, not what’s popular. I’ll share more about all this with you in future postings.

Peace.

PS: The article quoted above is quite short and worth reading for all of you who have some interest in writers and what they write.

The three photographs/drawings of novelists are from Wikipedia.

The Ongoing Saga of the Palestine Novel

Two weeks ago I shared with you my disappointment that I’d not heard back from the four agents to whom I’d sent an e-query about my polished manuscript on first-century Palestine. I’ve since received two form rejection letters. One put this whole process in perspective with the following words:

Our agency receives over 700 submissions per month and we only take on a few new clients per year. With the publishing industry being extremely competitive we need to feel a strong conviction when representing your work. While it is not for us another agent may well feel differently.

Just think, 700 submissions per month. That’s 8,400 a year. I’m finding agent names in the book 2013 Guide to Literary Agents, which gives “updated and submission information for more than 1,000 literary agents seeking new clients.”

If, and that’s a big if, all these agents receive 8,400 submissions per year—and some must receive more, some less—then that’s 8,400,000 e-mails sent out yearly by writers like myself. I picture millions of e-query sent to all these agents. Sent with hope and expectation, anxiety and eagerness, heartwishes and visualizations. Those e-queries just swirl through the Ethernet to computers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere! Can’t you see the flurry of speed?!?!? It’s a marvel.

And just think of all the writers sitting at their computers typing novels and exposés, memoirs and cookbooks, humor and how-to books! It boggles the mind.

Now for the “late, breaking news.” The historical novelist Judy Koll Healey—who has been a good friend for many years—has offered to read The Reluctant Spy. 

In an earlier posting on this manuscript, I mentioned the help she gave me in 2002. Since then, she herself has had two highly successful historical novels published by HarperCollins Publishers: The Canterbury Papers in 2005 and The Rebel Princess in 2010. Both take place in twelfth century England and Europe.

In return, I’ll read an early draft of the final manuscript of her Canterbury trilogy, which she’s working on now. The truth is that determining the problems with someone else’s manuscript is often much easier than realizing what’s amiss with one’s own. As the weeks pass I’ll share with you Judy’s “take” on what I’ve written.

When someone reads our work, we hope for honest criticism. And we hope also that we will listen to that person’s critique with an open mind while separating the wheat from the chaff. That’s the hard point for any writer—recognizing the suggestions that work while resisting those that don’t.

Sometimes a reader makes suggestions that don’t work because they miss the expectation we have for a scene. But even those suggestions can prove helpful for they bring to light something that’s not working in our story. As given, the suggestion won’t work for our plot, but if we look at it from several different angles we get a new perspective on what might work in the manuscript.

This is what happened for me during the first two weeks of January when another fellow writer and friend read the manuscript and made suggestions as to how I might strengthen the tension and create a less lengthy book. She found whole scenes that could be deleted and others that could be cut considerably. She also suggested a change in emphasis in one chapter. I used her suggestions to delete 9,000 words from the manuscript and to polish much of the prose. Her reading was invaluable to me.

Now Judy is reading and I’m hoping that she, too, will find ways I can improve the story. Meanwhile I’m working on the first book of a Bronze-Age- Greece trilogy. I hope to tell you more about that soon.

PS: Many agencies have more than one agent, so perhaps there are only about 600 agencies, each receiving 700 queries a month. That would skew my math. But that’s still a lot of queries a year—and a lot of writers!

“Autumn Leaves,” attributed to Tina Phillips is from freedigitalphotographs.com

The Word Today Is Alleluia!

Today Christians around the world celebrate Easter, a word derived from aurora, the Latin word for “dawn,” and from an Old English word for “east,” from which the dawn arises. Easter celebrates a new way of wrapping our lives in hope. It is the dawn of hope.

         Christians celebrate Easter at the same time all of us celebrate the return of spring, when darkness folds into light. Within the dark earth, hopeful seeds break forth from their dry husks and stretch upward, willy-nilly, to light. To a new way of being.

         For those in the Southern Hemisphere, the season that begins on March 21 reaffirms that the waning of light and the entrance into darkness is part of each human’s journey to wholeness.

         This past spring week, Jews observed their Passover, which commemorates the passing over of the Hebrew people from the prison of slavery in Egypt to the possibilities of new life beyond that land of desert and drought. For Christians, Easter commemorates Jesus’ Passover from one way of being to another.

         Passover and Easter are inextricably linked. According to the Christian scriptures, Yeshua—Jesus’ Hebrew name—ate a final meal with his disciples. A Passover meal. He died on the day before the Sabbath. In his death he discovered the Fullness of Life—Oneness. God graced him with that new life on the first day of the Jewish week. A day of new beginnings.

         Woven through all these seasons, traditions, and feasts is the idea of newness. The idea that we can pass from hatred of our human condition—with its loss and death, flaws and foibles, despair and sorrow—to a newness of spirit in which we embrace who we are.

         And what do we embrace? Our messiness. The very thing that so many of us resist. Yet Easter proclaims that we can hope in the possibilities of ourselves. My 77^th birthday is tomorrow. And still I’m in the trenches with the messiness of myself. I still have a hard time believing I am lovable. And yet out of that messiness comes, for me, an ability to show others how lovable they are. That messiness is me living with hope that one day I will embrace this loving and lovable me. And in that embrace will come the gift of peace. I will then be the Alleluia that Oneness proclaims.

         What else do we embrace when we accept this gift of Easter? Passover? Spring? The answer is clear: we embrace our Oneness with every person who has ever lived. With Yeshua and with the serial killer and the homeless woman with her shopping cart, and the child with his Easter basket, and the widow with her grief.  

         All of us are “in” life together. We are united in our flawed humanity. By embracing the darkness and doubt within ourselves, we become the cherished human we long to be. And we begin to treasure the being of others.

         Today then, I wish all of you growth in the human spirit whether as Christian or Jew or Muslim or as a nonbeliever whose belief lies in the hope of spring. I wish you wholeness as you strive to become fully human.

         For myself, I believe that Yeshua was a human being who fully realized humanity within himself. He embraced the darkness and death that lies within each of us and passed over to an acceptance of the possibilities within himself. He donned Life.

         Yeshua became compassion. He became graciousness. He became hope. He became life-giving. He became the poet of possibility. He became the one who saw Oneness every where, every time, every now, every here.

         And that is what this season offers all of us.

         So on this day of spring, this Easter for my Christian friends, this first day of the week for my Jewish brethren, this Sunday for you who celebrate each new dawning, I pray that life will spring forth within you and that you, filled with hope, will enter the Mystery that is the Holy Oneness of All Creation of which you and I and the cats who lie here on my computer desk are a part. Peace.

All the photographs are from Wikipedia.

The Long Road to Getting Published

In the past three weeks, I’ve sent an e-query on The Reluctant Spy to four agents, but received no responses. Along with three of those e-queries I sent several manuscript pages. The not hearing means, of course, that my query or those pages didn’t kindle any agent’s interest.

A Gutenberg letter press from the 15^th century—one way of getting published! (Wikipedia)

            In tailoring the four e-queries I’ve sent, I scrutinized each agent’s web site to discover two things: Does the agency represent any authors I especially enjoy reading and what topics are of special interest to the individual agents? What I’ve read about queries is that being able to mention something about those two things in the query letter may capture an agent’s attention.

            Here’s the generic e-query I’m sending out, minus the tailoring, which I always put in an opening paragraph:

Within the fast-paced, yet character-driven pages of the historical novel The Reluctant Spy, Ephraim must save an old enemy . . . or betray him. There’s no doubt this first-century scribe can destroy his archrival. After all, just a few months ago his spying led to the beheading of another man—and all because of that Bethany woman.                              

Who knew his chance encounter with her would end in blackmail? Who knew that this man who dearly loves his wife and child and will do anything to relieve their ills would be forced to accept such disreputable work?                                                                                                        

One man holds the key that can unlock the prison Ephraim’s made of his life. But that one man is his sworn enemy.  Caught in web of dishonor, Ephraim stumbles. Will he despair or will he discover a way to help his family and redeem his good name?                                                                                                                                                                       

Blackmail, adultery, intrigue, and a crisis of faith—these four themes of The Reluctant Spy remain as relevant today as they were two thousand years ago. Moreover, the manuscript fits into a perennially popular niche: books based on Gospel characters. One example of this mushrooming trend is The Testament of Mary, which The New York Times picked as one of the 100 notable books of 2012.                                                               

Just as it portrays the mother of Jesus in a new way, so the characterization of the Nazarene and the Pharisee in The Reluctant Spy differs from the usual Christian understanding of them. In truth, its portrayal of the two main characters may both intrigue and enlighten readers.                                                                                                         

As to my publishing history: Crown published A Cat’s Life: Dulcy’s Story in 1992. It sold 14,000 hardcover copies and was then published in China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Germany. Wayman Publishing published A Cat’s Legacy: Dulcy’s Story in 2012, and in between, Capstone Press published twenty children’s books I’ve written.

The Reluctant Spy is a completed manuscript of 122,000 words. I’d be happy to send you a sample or the entire manuscript if this e-mail’s pitch has piqued your interest. Thank you for your consideration.

That’s the generic query I’ve tailored, tweaked, and sent out to agents who represent historical novels. However, I’m looking for agents who also represent at least two of the following genres: fantasy, memoir, and picture books. Why? Because I’m working on or have completed at least one example of each of these genres.                   

In the Writer’s Digest book 2013 Guide to Literary Agents, I’ve found seventeen agencies that represent a combination of these genres. I’ve now queried four with no results. So in the upcoming weeks, I’ll query the remaining thirteen. Any thoughts?

The traditional way of erasing and adding material to a manuscript. (Wikipedia)

            My own final thought concerns the manuscript itself. In the writing of it, I’ve often thought that its beginning limps. Numerous times I’ve crafted a new first chapter, but a suspenseful scene eludes me. Given that a writer must grab a reader’s interest in the first sentence or paragraph, I wonder if the beginning chapters I paste into the e-query may 

simply be B-O-R-I-N-G!

                                                                                                                                       

E-Queries to Literary Agents

Hello All. I seem to be moving back and forth between The Reluctant Spy and Three Roads Diverged. Two weeks ago I posted the pitch of the former; last week I wrote about research and background for the latter. 

So this week it’s time to return to that reluctant first-century spy and talk about the process of introducing him to literary agents in the hope of capturing the interest of at least one of them.

Much goes into any agent’s decision to represent someone’s writing. Here are four questions, among many, that she might ask herself when reading a query letter and sample pages of a manuscript:

1.   Does this author’s voice and writing style capture a reader’s attention?

2.   Can the characters and the plotting hold onto that attention for the length of a novel?

3.   Is the market place interested in this particular genre?

4.   Among all the novels for this genre, how does this manuscript differ? That is, does it have anything new to offer?

A table laden with novels in a German bookstore. (Wikipedia)

Finally, the agent has to rack her brain to determine if she knows an editor or several editors who are looking for a new approach to the genre, an outstanding protagonist who differs from others in that genre, or a theme that is relevant to today’s readers.

Back in November I sent e-query letters for The Reluctant Spy to twenty-four agents. In today’s world, most agents simply ignore a query that holds no interest for them. However, a few, even though they don’t want to represent the work, will reply.  Because of that, authors treasure those rejection letters. Early last December, four agents responded to my e-query.

One said, “The story line isn’t fully resonating with me.”

Another, to whom I’d sent ten pages as well as the query, was more expansive: “Though I did enjoy reading the first bit of your novel, unfortunately I was not in love with it. Because I won’t be able to give your novel the support and enthusiasm it deserves, I don’t feel that I am the best agent to represent you at this time.”

The third agent sent what I think was a form letter: “We have evaluated your materials and regrettably, your project is not a right fit for our agency. We currently have a very full clientele and must be highly selective about the new projects we pursue.”

The final e-response was also a form letter—one that tried not to douse the hopes of a writer: “Thanks for your query.  Unfortunately, I do not feel that I could be the best advocate for your work.  Please keep in mind that mine is a subjective business, and an idea or story to which one agent does not respond may well be met with great enthusiasm by another, and I encourage you to continue writing to agents.  Hopefully you will find someone who will get behind you and your work with the conviction necessary in the current market.”

A three-story bookstore in Los Angeles, California. (Wikipedia)

Three months have passed since I received those responses. In the interim, I’ve polished the manuscript, deleting 9,000 words. With your help, I’ve developed a pitch to use in the first three or four paragraphs of the e-query. Now I must begin the task of finding agents who represent historical novels.

In my next posting, I hope to share with you how I’m going about that. I will also post the generic query I’ve devised from your comments on my posting of February 17. Of course, I’ll tailor the generic information to fit each agent I query. I hope to explain “tailoring” also. Peace.