electric mist

writing -- what to submit? and when?

I obviously haven't been doing all that many writing-related posts lately, since the hurricanes riveted my attention to my state, but I received a question via e-mail, and I thought I'd answer it here. The submission process is confusing since so many different things "could" work, and there are a lot of myths out there. I've seen this site referenced on a couple of writer groups as a way of demonstrating that someone "broke the rules," based on the way I submitted and sold / signed a three-book deal, and there's an implicit "so, take that, you rule-makers" feeling... which I don't blame anyone for having, but I wanted to demystify the process a little and give a summary of what happened and why. It's not so simple as "Well, that woman broke the rules, I can too."

The question, as asked by a reader (I.D. info hidden):

I have a question. I am currently working on a novel and have a detailed 20 page section-by-section outline of the plot, setting, characters and themes, with snippets of scenes and dialouge. I have friends in MFA writing programs and they have all told me that if an author has not previously published, then one needs to have a minimum of a partial and a synopsis in order to get an agent and an entire manuscript must be written in order to secure a book deal.

However, recently, I've been hearing of writers that "get book deals" on the basis of just a synopsis. I don't know if that means they are offered the first half of the proposed advance when the manuscript is finished and the second half when the manuscript is edited or if it works in another way. As I work full time and would love to have a little money to take 6 months off to finish this thing, I am of course curious as to your thoughts on how I can make the most of a synopsis (if at all, seeing that I am unpublished).

I'd be much appreciative of any advice!

First, thanks to the reader for asking. (And so nicely!)

Here's my response:

I hope I can be of help. I'll tell you the stats, first, and why they are that way and then why I was the freakish exception. I'll answer the advance question in another post.

To start off, I haven't heard of any writers getting a book deal on "just" a synopsis alone -- unless these are established writers and their talent is already a known factor in the decision-making process. There may have been a tiny number (like four, or five) book deals based on the author's website (as an example) instead of an actual manuscript or sample chapters, and that author may have used a synopsis to show how they were going to turn their source material into a book and the deal was structured off of that synopsis, but this is so rare, you'd be more likely to win two lotteries this year first. Unless, of course, you have a wildly popular website and get thousands of visitors daily. Then, and likely only then, will that work for you. The only other way I've heard of this working is if the publisher is buying an "as told to" account of some event in a person's life (which means there's a ghostwriter doing the actual writing and you can be sure the publisher knows their work ahead of time), or the person is a celebrity (all bets are off for that... most celebs have a ghostwriter or a co-writer, but a small minority write their own books... publishers will make these deals because the popularity of the celebrity is what sells the books, not the quality of writing).

So, then, what's the procedure? How does it work? Why did something else work for me? And what does this mean for you?

Statistic-wise, it's really freakishly rare for someone to get an agent or a publishing contract without having finished the whole book. At a minimum, when you are querying an agent, you need to have about 50(ish) pages to submit -- OR -- three sample chapters (even if that means going over the 50 page guideline). My first three chapters took 83 pages, for example. Other people write really short chapters (like five pages), so that would be too little, and therefore, they'd need to submit more chapters.

Now, here's the gut-check: if an agent likes what they read of the first three chapters, they are going to want to see the whole book. Right then. They're not going to be too thrilled with having to wait until you finish it. Most agents, most of the time, will not even consider taking a partial manuscript out to publishers, *especially* if that author is unpublished. For one thing, writing the whole book is hard, even if you've got the money to do it, and publishers have been burned numerous times by "pro" writers who were supposed to finish a book and then didn't. Or finished it and gave the publisher something so radically different than what was agreed upon, the publisher didn't accept it. If it's that hard for previously published authors to finish something, publishers assume -- unfairly or not -- that an unpublished author would have an even more difficult time because the terrain is so new to them. The publishers are therefore highly unlikely to take a risk, or at least a risk for very much money. Which means it's not very lucrative for an agent to try to sell a partial. As a result, most agents are not willing to waste their time trying. So if you query an agent and you're not finished with the novel, there's a decent chance that many who requested it will be annoyed and won't bother with you later, when you do have it finished. Other possibilities: they will pressure you to finish it "soon" OR you'll end up trying to do so in a shorter span of time than what you normally would have had available and everything can suffer as a result.

(Believe me, I completely empathize with the working full-time and needing to have extra money in order to take time off to write... but it just doesn't usually happen that way.)

Second, a synopsis isn't the detailed type of thing described in the reader's question above (though that's good he's done that -- it'll help in the writing process). A synopsis is a 10 to 15 page (double-spaced) selling tool. It's the telling of the story as if you were sitting down telling it to a friend: you hit the highlights of the emotional track of the story while giving the most important (and only the most important) plot beats / twists, all the way through the end of the story. (I will write more on how to write a synopsis later.) The synopsis is written in third person, present tense, regardless of what you've used for the actual novel. It does not include character lists, character outlines, or an entire beat sheet for the novel.

Never send an agent a bunch of stuff they don't request, by the way. For example, the character stuff the reader mentioned doing above in his question -- good to have, good to use, not good to send.

Please note the NEVER above. When my agent read the query letter, she requested the whole manuscript instead of just the sample chapters. I didn't have the whole manuscript, so I wrote back and asked if it was okay to send the sample chapters and a synopsis. I asked before assuming it would be okay. She said fine, and it worked well for me. But I think she appreciated knowing the truth ahead of time -- that the book wasn't finished.

So why, if all of this can't be done, did I do it? Well, flukes, lots of amazing good luck and a lot of hard work.

First, the hard work: I've been writing and getting published for years. I've sold a lot of non-fiction and edited a magazine (regional), sold a small number of national non-fic articles to big magazines before switching gears into fiction; I also had nearly finished an MFA in Screenwriting, landed a screenwriting agent and had a script optioned. I wasn't new to writing, and the people who ended up helping me knew that. Second, I've finished a lot of full-length works (scripts) and through the years, made a tremendous number of contacts with other writers who read my stuff and vice versa. This is, perhaps, the most important thing I did -- learn how to get feedback, learn how to know what to use of that feedback, learn how to seek out really good writers who were also interested in trading works. I didn't think of this as a "network" and, at the time, I'm pretty sure none of these people were sold / published. This has changed a lot over the years, but the core group are all excellent writers, and I admire their work. Even so, it wasn't about trying to network as much as it was about trying to learn to be a better writer. (This isn't a lecture, by the way -- this is just what worked for me. Lots of other people hate to show their stuff and they end up selling fine. More on how to know when you're ready to submit in another column.)

Anyway, I have a track record with friends. I originally wrote this story as a script for my own use -- I wanted the story outlined so I could write the novel, and since I'd written many scripts, doing a script-as-an-outline was easy for me. It was still a royal pain-in-the-ass to move from script format into prose format in the beginning (a subject for another column.)

So, having written it as a script, I showed it to a friend who was staying here at the time. She loved it (laughing out loud very often from the other room -- which is still, to this day, one of my top ten days as a writer, because that laughter was like gold... it was so shocking and wonderful to hear), and then she asked if she could send it to a friend of hers who would enjoy it. Since she trusted this friend, "E," I figured, "why not?"

I had no clue E would end up doing all that she did.

E read it, loved it, and said if I ever decided to write it as a book, to let her know. I was already doing so, and told her that. Turns out that E -- unbeknownst to me -- was a best-selling author in another genre. She writes under a pen name and my friend here hadn't told me because E liked to protect her privacy. E loved the sample chapters. She gave me notes and I thought they were brilliant and helpful. (Small notes, but extremely enlightening.) She then helped a great deal in teaching me how to do a synopsis well. (That poor woman had the courage to keep reading drafts after a particularly atrocious first attempt. She really deserves a halo.)

After I had revised the chapters and synopsis, E re-read them and asked if she could pitch my book to an editor she knew. She also gave me a referral to an agent. The editor asked to see the project about the same week that the agent read the partial (three chapters and synopsis) and was interested in representing me. (She asked if the book was a stand-alone or a series. I said, "series" -- at which point, she asked if I could put together a synopsis for two more books. I did so over a weekend. Hardest weekend of my writing life.)

The agent gave the editor one week to have the material as an exclusive; after which, St. Martin's Press made a pre-emptive bid for a three-book deal. The rest, as they say, is history.

Would my query into this same agent have worked if I hadn't been referred by E to her? I have no idea. I did have a lot of writing experience to note in my query, and I have run a business for years -- which says a lot about the kind of person I am to a potential agent. (Finishes projects on time, self-starter, etc.) (This is a question I should let my agent answer.)

It's possible that the editor would have read it, too, but then, I never would have known which editor to pick and she's absolutely wonderful, so again, would I have gotten to the right person? I'll never know.

I went around for months after the sale still absolutely gobsmacked over my luck... because it's a helluva lot of luck going on in this story, and I couldn't fathom it. But several of my friends pointed out that I wasn't doing anyone reading this scenario here a true service if I didn't also mention all of the years of hard work that went into that luck. Yes, I had the right project at the right time and place for the right person to see, and that's just damned lucky, no matter how you slice it. But getting that project to that point? Well, lots of hard work. My friends (who have annoyingly good memories) remind me of earlier drafts which sucked, which I knew sucked with the massive suckage of a Grand Cayon sized vacuum, so great was the suckage, and I'd toss it all and start over, until I found the right voice, found the right way to create the world. I have a blessedly short memory where none of that happened. (heh) But, when forced to remember the growing pains of the project I remember too well that earlier drafts just weren't ready to be seen yet, by anyone other than my regular writing friends.

What this means to you:

All the luck in the world isn't going to help if you don't have the right project at the right time. There are a lot of people who are happy to point out the negative odds against writers, but I find that pretty useless. Odds don't mean anything if you're in the right place at the right time, and you've done the work. If I had handed my friend something she'd mildly liked, she probably would have given me some encouragement and notes, but I doubt she would have referred me on to her friend, the published writer. After all, she wouldn't want to burn that relationship by sending E a lot of stuff that E wouldn't love, ya know? So the real question to you is, are you getting people you already know to read it and if they are, are they going nuts over how good it is? Not just nice comments, encouraging words, but full out luuuuuuuuuuuuuuvvvvvvvvvvvve. If they're doing the latter, then by all means, query an agent. There are a lot of agents and you'll get read by at least a couple and you just never know. If, however, you're not getting that sort of reaction, then be honest with yourself and don't push to do this so soon - because you don't want to shoot a good project in the foot by getting it out there too early. Workshop it with friends. Get notes. Don't do all the notes unless they really resonate with you, of course, but learn where your weaknesses are, etc.

I have no idea what will eventually happen with the book. There's a wonderful designer working on the book's site now, and when it's live, I'll post a link back here. I'm not one to post all of the ups and downs and play-by-plays, but I do have a few more ideas as mentioned above that I'd like to write about or occasionally answer a question.

Best of luck...

Posted by toni at October 4, 2005 01:22 PM