What Do Agents Owe You?

Last week, a number of agents weighed in on whether "no response means no" is a good policy. I have some ideas for making the whole rejection process easier on everyone, but ultimately I think it doesn't matter. Querying is hard. Rejection sucks. And agents can do whatever they like; I'm still going to query them all.*

* Well, maybe not the snail-mail-only agents. That's really difficult from out here.

I agree with all three agents linked above. Rachelle says not responding allows her to get through more queries (agreed). Janet says setting up an auto-responder and a simple form reject is not that hard and is better business practice (agreed). Nathan says agents don't owe authors a response (big agreed).

That last one is today's topic. Because while the agents involved have been very nice and logical and wise, a number of writers have commented with something along the lines of, "How dare you not respond to every query. That's just common decency! It's rude to treat your customers this way."

I once talked about the sense of entitlement readers have towards authors. This is kind of the same thing.

Here's the thing: Unless you have a contract with somebody, that somebody owes you nothing.

A contract, in this case, can mean many things. And we, the unrepresented, do have a contract with the agents we query, but it's not what you think. Even the AAR canon of ethics -- the closest thing there is to a moral standard for agents -- barely mentions "potential clients," saying only that agents shouldn't charge them for anything.

We are not their customers. We are not even their clients. We are, to all purposes, applying for a job.

It's just like sending out a resume, or giving a girl (or guy) your phone number. If they're not interested, they may or may not call. It's up to us to move on.

Most agents state clearly on their websites what to expect. For example, "We accept unsolicited queries, but unfortunately we can only respond it we're interested."

There's your contract. By sending an unsolicited query to an agent (the first half), we implicitly agree to no response unless they're interested (the second half). It's not legally binding, no, but if they say they don't respond, what right do we have to get mad about it?

If you don't like it, don't query them.

But what about common decency? Well, I would argue that common decency demands we look at it from their point of view and not make a big stink about it. Just accept the no response and move on. It's not like our chances of getting published are dependent on whether or not we get that form rejection from everyone.

Janet Reid points out that writers are also readers, and that it's better for business to be as polite as possible at all times. I agree, and you know what? Agents are readers too. When writers publicly complain about how agents are snobbish and arrogant and have poor taste, that's equally bad business. Probably worse.

What do you think about "no response means no"? Do agents owe us anything?

A Letter to my Son

Dear Isaac,

I would like to apologize for your DNA.

Not that you aren't awesome. You totally are. But, well...it's because you're part of me that you get upset when you don't excel at something the first time. I will spend my whole life trying to teach you what I learned only a few years ago: that you can do anything if you work hard at it. But it won't make you feel any better when you fail, and I'm sorry for that.

It's my fault you can't sit still. I know, I know. Daddy is the most inert, quiet, non-silly man you know. But as a boy, I was exactly like you. When you get in trouble for it as much as I have, you'll learn to keep it inside too.

And it's my fault you feel everything must be in perfect order. That's why you have to put your Go Fish cards back into pairs before you can count them. That's why each piece of your orange peel must touch none of the other pieces. In the future, you will straighten stacks of cards every time you take a turn, and your friends will mock you by knocking things out of place (see #4).

It's okay. They still love you. And I'll help you fix it.

Keep in mind that for all our faults, you are still an incredibly handsome genius. Most of the credit for that goes to your mom, of course, but at least I didn't screw it up.

Though if you grow to hate your widow's peak, well, I apologize for that too.

Love you, buddy.

Dad

Books I Read: White Cat

Title: White Cat
Author: Holly Black
Genre: YA Urban Fantasy
Published: 2010
My Content Rating: PG-13 for violence and sexy situations

Cassel comes from a family of curse workers--people with the power to change your emotions, your memories, your luck, with a mere touch. Curse work is illegal, of course, so they're criminals. Except for Cassel: he hasn't got the touch. He discovers his brothers are keeping secrets from him and suspects he's part of a huge con. He has to unravel his past and his memories to outcon the conmen.

I loved this (and thank you, dear readers, for recommending it). I loved the powers, LOVED the cons, and thought the characters were great. If any of that sounds even remotely interesting to you, read this book.

There were only two things that kept the book from being perfect for me. The first was a possible-but-minor plot hole near the end. (If you've read it: when did Barron have time to read his notebooks?)

The second was the cover. It's a very cool cover, but when I read descriptive hints like this, I had to take a second look:

"Your grandfather told me that someone in your family was descended from a runaway slave," she says.... People are always coming up to me on trains and talking to me in different languages, like it's obvious I'll understand them.

Maybe it's just me, but the guy in this cover doesn't look ambiguous in his racial ancestry at all. He looks white--Italian, maybe--but not like somebody who obviously speaks a foreign language. It didn't ruin the book for me, but it surprised me that someone thought this guy fit the descriptions.

If you've read it, what do you think? About the story, I mean, though we can talk cover in the comments too.

Converting from MS Word to Plain Text

Nearly every agent out there wants sample pages--sometimes multiple chapters--pasted in the body of an e-mail. Unfortunately, not all e-mail programs handle fancy text the same. What looks beautiful in your Word doc, and even in your e-mail draft, may come out unreadable on an agent's screen.

The answer is plain text, but converting to it is not always as simple as copy/paste. You can try telling your e-mail program to use only Plain Text, or you can copy from Word and paste into a txt file, but you still might get text with no paragraph breaks or questions marks where there should be quotation marks.

Hopefully this post will help you get past that.

Before you follow any of these steps, go into your Word doc and select "Save As...". These steps will make your beautiful Word doc plain, and you still want the pretty version to send when agents ask for your full MS.

Plus, we're working with global find/replace, which is easy to screw up.

Also, keep in mind I have Word 2010. I'm fairly certain all features mentioned here exist in older versions of Word, but they might not be where I say they are. If yours works differently, please say so in the comments.


PARAGRAPH BREAKS
If you let Word do your paragraph indents (which you should, it's easier), then converting straight to plain text will not only remove the indents but leave you with one giant block of text. You need paragraph breaks. Here's how:

1. Find/Replace (Ctrl-H).
2. Click "More >>" and look for Special or Special Characters.
3. Put the cursor in the Find box, and choose the Paragraph Mark special character. It should enter "^p" into the Find box.
4. In the Replace box, put two Paragraph Marks: ^p^p.
5. Click Replace All.

Now you should have an extra line between every single paragraph. When you paste it into plain text, the automatic line indent should go away (if it doesn't, it means you're manually spacing/tabbing your paragraphs; see the next section). You should be left with text that looks like every blog you've ever read.

You might want to skim through it to make sure there aren't too many line breaks anywhere. For example, I had to remove some of the extra lines around my chapter headings, because it was just too much.


TABS
Some folks manually space their paragraphs. That's okay, but it might not paste the way you want it to. Tabs and spaces aren't the same width in every font. In some cases, tab is treated as a single space, making your manual indents all but disappear.

To fix that, follow the Find/Replace procedure for paragraph breaks above, but instead of a paragraph mark, choose the Tab Character (^t) and leave the Replace box empty.


REMOVING ITALICS (OR OTHER SPECIAL FORMATTING)
This is tricky. Special formatting usually disappears in a straight conversion. Sometimes that's okay (your chapter titles don't need to be in bold), but sometimes that italicized emphasis can change the entire meaning of a sentence (i.e. "You did?" vs "You did?").

The official way to represent emphasis in plain text is with the underscore (e.g. "_You_ did?"), though you can tweak these steps to suit your needs:

1. Find/Replace (Ctrl-H).
2. With the cursor still in the Find box, click Format-->Font.... Under Font Style choose Italic (or whichever style you are searching for), then click OK.
3. Put the cursor in the Replace box, and select the Special Character "Find What Text". It should enter "^&" in the Replace box.
4. Put underscores on either side of that character: _^&_.
5. If you also want to remove the italics (pasting to plain text will do that for you, but there may be other reasons to do this in the Word doc), then with the cursor still in the Replace box, click Format-->Font.... Under Font Style choose Regular, and click OK.
6. Click Replace All.

Now all italicized words and phrases should have underscores around them. But if there's a sentence where the spaces weren't in italics (you can't see it, but Word knows), it could change from: "I hate you!" to "_I_ _hate_ _you_!" To fix this, do another Find/Replace:

1. In the Find box, type: "_ _" (underscore space underscore).
2. Click "No Formatting", since you're not looking for italics anymore.
3. In the Replace box, type a single space.
4. Click Replace All.

FANCY QUOTES, EM-DASHES, AND ELLIPSES
By default, Word converts a lot of otherwise normal characters to special ones. The special ones look pretty, but they don't always work when pasted into plain text.

• Quotation marks are converted into fancy quotes (“ ”, also called smart quotes or curly quotes) which in plain text sometimes come out as boxes, question marks, or other things. Apostrophes and single quotes are converted the same way.
• A double-hyphen (--) is converted into an em-dash (—) or an en-dash (–). In plain text, this sometimes is converted back into a single hyphen.
• Three periods in a row (...) are converted to a single ellipsis character (…). In plain text, this can come out as boxes or question marks, or as a very compressed ellipsis character (…).

I recommend you stop Word from doing all of these. To do that:

1. Go to AutoCorrect Options (in 2010, File-->Options-->Proofing; in older versions, it's in the Tools menu).
2. Go to the "AutoFormat As You Type" tab.
3. Uncheck the options you want it to stop (e.g. "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes", Hyphens with dash, etc).
4. For the ellipsis, you may have to go to the AutoCorrect tab. Under "Replace text as you type," remove the entry for the ellipsis.

If you already have these special characters in your MS, you can use Find/Replace to get rid of them. Copy/paste one of the fancy characters into the Find box, then Replace it with the regular one.


Phew! Did I miss anything? Get anything wrong? Let me know in the comments.

What If You Don't Fit Neatly Into One Genre?

If you're not sure what genre your novel is, read this post by agent Jennifer Laughran. It's a fantastic breakdown of the (current) standard genres agents are looking for when they read your query.

So what if you don't fit neatly into one?

(An aside: The post on name pronunciation has been updated with the correct answer. Not surprisingly, most of you got it wrong. Don't worry, I still like you.)

Not fitting neatly is kind of my problem. Not just with Air Pirates, but with most things I write. I like to straddle the line between sci-fi and fantasy (apparently). Everything I've written so far--and most of my future story ideas--take place in the real world, but different. Sometimes there are time machines and immortal beings that can travel outside time. Sometimes there are steam-powered airships and stones that tell the future. Sometimes there are Burmese refugees that start fires with their minds. Sometimes there are mechs and dragons.

I generally fall back on fantasy, but that's potentially misleading. There isn't always magic, and what "magic" there is usually has some sort of science behind it (even if I don't always explain it). And only one of my stories has mythical creatures. (Although Beneath Ceaseless Skies is a fantasy magazine, so I guess Air Pirates counts).

They're not science-fiction because they're not strictly about technology or a "what if." In fact, most of them feel like fantasy (what with the dragons and overall low technology).

They're not dystopian because, although many of the worlds are in the future, it's a future that's not terribly bleak. (Though I guess the lack of food and the oppressive dictator would put Travelers in that category).

I would call them science fantasy, but that's not on the list and nobody really knows what that is.

I call most of them steampunk (for the mixture of technology in a low-tech society), but they're way out on the edge of that subgenre. There's nothing Victorian about these worlds, and I never use the word "corset."

Technically, it's all speculative fiction, but I've always found that term too broad and boring.

But I certainly can't say it doesn't fit into any genre, or it's a genre all it's own, because that's pretentious (and wrong).

People are more interested if you can give them a precise genre. I read Perdido Street Station because I heard it was steampunk, but it's a little bit of everything. I'd rather pick a genre that's close enough than have an agent skip it because they don't know what it is.

Have you ever had a problem categorizing what you write?

Pop Quiz: Name Pronunciation

[UPDATE (9/12/11): Believe it or not, my name's pronounced Hyna (like Heineken, the beer). Remember that when I'm famous and you do a vlog or podcast about me. (Also if you call me Hiney in public, I may use your own mispronunciation stories against you. I'm looking at you Matt MacNish!).]

A silly poll for the weekend. These are the five most frequent pronunciations of my last name, but only one of them is correct. Note that if you know me in real life, you are TOTALLY ALLOWED to vote. I'll update this post with the correct answer on Monday.

How do you pronounce my last name?

• Heinz (like the ketchup)
• Hine (rhymes with brine)
• Hane (like the underwear)
• Hyna (like Heineken, the beer)
• Hiney (like the word for butt)

Created on Sep 9, 2011

View Results

poll by twiigs.com

So, I had this speech class my sophomore year in high school. I hate speeches. Before HS, I sometimes intentionally took a zero just so I wouldn't have to give a speech. The teacher was a good guy. He was funny, but he had no inhibitions when it came to student humiliation (as befits a speech teacher, I guess).

Because the class was a general requirement, the students were a cross-section: nerds, jocks, actors, cheerleaders, popular kids, everything. I only had one friend in the class and was in constant fear of what the others thought of me or when they would laugh.

So the worst moment comes; the teacher calls me up for my turn. "Adam..." He squints at the role sheet. "Hiney?" Then he laughs and says, "A damn hiney?"

I laughed it off, but really I wanted to crawl into a corner and die. What's your worst name pronunciation story?

First Draft

I want to make my first draft perfect, but that's impossible.

So I try to make it decent, so it will be easy to fix later or for beta readers to find the flaws. But that's impossible too. I don't know what "decent" is.

So I try to write something interesting, so beta readers will like it and (hopefully) put more effort into making it better. But every beta reader likes different things.

Anyway, that's just a different kind of perfect.

So I try to write the best first draft that I can write at this moment. But I don't know what that is. I always doubt if what I wrote is my best, then I delete it and have to start over.

So I settle for just writing a first draft. I can worry about all that other stuff later.


(Honestly, I usually get stuck on paragraph 2. How do you approach first drafts?)