Is Good Subjective?

(Remixed from a post I did a couple of years ago).

The Lost Symbol is formulaic. Twilight is simplistic, both in plot and writing. Eragon is ridden with cliches (Warning: TV Tropes link). The Shack reads like it was self-published (oh, wait).

And yet every one of these books sold millions of copies.

Millions.

For those of us who have devoted a significant portion of our lives to the written word, this can drive us nuts. It's unfair, we say. If people knew anything about quality literature, they wouldn't buy this cotton candy nonsense.

But that's just it. People don't know about quality literature. They don't know you're not supposed to start a novel with the weather. They don't know that the farm-boy-as-chosen-one plot is old. They don't know that adverbs are a Bad Thing.

But people know what they like. They know these books are thrilling, engrossing, uplifting. "But they're not!" we cry. "They don't even follow the rules!"

Okay, so here's the thing. I know this is going to be hard to hear, but...all those rules that agents and editors and critique partners keep telling us we should follow? None of them make a story good.

For those of us trying to break into the business, it's easy to convince ourselves that "good" is objective -- that all we have to do is figure out the rules and follow them. While the rules certainly increase our chances, nothing in this business is a sure thing. Nothing.

So how do you break in? Well, not having broken in myself yet, I'm going to go with the stock answer: Write lots. Write well. Get lucky.

Usually in that order.

Breaking the Rules

If you've been learning the craft for a while, you've heard the rules. Don't start with a character waking up. Don't start with dialog or the weather. Don't use a mirror as a device to describe the narrator. Et cetera.

Lies.

There's a book you might have heard about called THE HUNGER GAMES. You know what it starts with? Katniss waking up.

You may have heard of Natalie Whipple, whose X-Men-meets-Godfather debut comes out next Summer. (If you haven't, you're welcome). About her novel, she tweets, "TRANSPARENT opens with a flashback, then moves on to a mirror scene while she is getting ready for school."

I love that. You may argue that means Transparent isn't good, but then you haven't read Natalie's stuff and you would be dead wrong. I can't wait to read Transparent, and I love that it breaks the rules.

My own novel AIR PIRATES starts with dialog. While it hasn't gotten me an agent yet, it has generated a lot of requests which, if nothing else, tells me the beginning doesn't totally suck.

Listen, the rules are good things. You should know them. But don't be afraid of breaking them. Just know why you're doing it. Are you breaking the rule because you couldn't think of anything better, or is it because that's the best way to do what you want to do?

If it's the latter, I say go for it! What do you think?

(Hm. I just realized Post-Apoc Ninjas starts with the weather. Maybe I have authority issues?)

So You Think You're Ready to Query...

When I wrote my first novel, I just wanted to prove to myself that I could finish a whole novel. After 4.5 years, I did, and when my one of my two beta readers said, "I can't believe you wrote a novel! And it's good!" I thought maybe I could actually publish it.

It took me 8 months, 52 queries, and 0 requests to realize I wasn't ready. This is the post I wish I had read back then (though I probably would've ignored it and queried anyway).

HOW MUCH HAVE YOU REVISED?
Is the story basically the same as it was in the first draft? I don't mean prose and grammar. I mean big things: motivations, characters that need to be cut or added, scenes that need to be rearranged. Have you deleted/rewritten entire scenes and chapters? I barely scraped the sentence structure with my first novel, and it showed in my rejections.

Of course, it's possible you wrote something good enough the first time, but it's unlikely. I'm the most obsessive planner I know, but even I have yet to write something where I didn't delete whole scenes and rewrite entire chapters.

WHAT DO YOUR BETA READERS SAY?
Do they love it yet? If not, it's possible they might be wrong, but chances are they're not. Revise it until most of them can't put it down.

And who are your betas? Are they friends and family, or are they writers who are trying themselves to get published? Friends make fine betas, but nobody knows the business like those who have already gotten their butts kicked by it. Network. Swap critiques with people who aren't predisposed to like your work.

DO YOU KNOW YOUR MARKET?
I thought I did. I'd read books like Left Behind and Randy Ingermanson's Trangression and Oxygen and thought, "Hey! Christian sci-fi is a thing!" I was wrong.

That doesn't mean you can't write what you love, but know what you're getting into. If Christian SF was my one true love, I would've focused my attention on that market and figured out how to become the exception. But I'm easy. I shifted my focus to secular SF/F and ultimately to YA. I'm still writing what I love, but my chances have greatly improved.

HOW'S YOUR QUERY LETTER?
This is assuming you're going the traditional publishing route (although a lot of book bloggers require query letters too -- can't escape, can you?). Have you written one? Have you revised it a bazillion times? Have you read hundreds of examples, both good and bad, and then revised yours again?

Have you had any of your stuff (query, opening pages, etc.) critiqued online by anonymous strangers? It's scary, and you're likely to get conflicting advice and people that don't get it. But this is a good way to see how agents or the general public might respond to your stuff.


If I could do it all over again, I'd join an online critique group and milk it for all it's worth, critiquing and getting critiqued until every beta said, "I can't see anything wrong with this! I love it!" I'd spend hours at Query Shark, Evil Editor, Matt MacNish and JJ Debenedictis' sites reading queries and submitting my own until people were saying, "This looks good! I'd request this!" I'd do it right.

Ah, who am I kidding? I'd do it exactly the way I did. I was so excited. I couldn't help it! I just hope one of you will learn from my mistakes without making them yourself.

Veteran writers, what would you have done differently the first time around? (Assuming you got rejected. If your first novel got published, I'm not sure I want to hear it!)

Sketch: Rock, Paper, Scissors

 Cross-posted from Anthdrawlogy.

Helpful Tip: Ninja always wins.

Web Design Tips for the Cheap, Lazy, or HTML-Challenged

Everyone says you need a professional-looking website, but a professional setup and design can cost hundreds of dollars and a monthly hosting fee. If your website is making you money (for example, by selling books), that can be worth it. Otherwise, you want something that's both Free and Good Enough.

Whenever I tweak things on this site, I have four goals, many of them conflicting: (1) Make my blog nice to read/look at, (2) Differentiate it from every other blog out there, (3) Rarely mess with the template (HTML, CSS, and other scary acronyms), and (4) Spend little or no money. If that sounds good to you, read on.

STEP #1: GET A FREE BLOG.
Blogger is my favorite. It's relatively reliable and gives me a decent amount of control (though those qualifiers are important). You could also go with Wordpress.com, LiveJournal, or many others.

None of them give you total control, of course. For that, you'd have to buy your own webhost and deal with your own technical setup and issues, which defies goals (3) and (4).

STEP #2: CUSTOMIZE YOUR TEMPLATE.
As far as free templates go, Blogger has only 27 (at the moment). Wordpress.com is better with 148. But since there are a few more than 175 blogs out there, your blog will very likely look exactly like someone else's. That's why you customize the crap out of it:

1. Get a custom background. Especially if you're good with a camera/live somewhere pretty.
2. Make a custom header. Free fonts and your local Paint program can surprise you. Photoshop and a little design sense is even better.
3. Tweak the heck out of it. Blogger, for example, lets you change the format, fonts, sizes, and colors of almost every little thing. Take advantage of it.

STEP #2A: MAKE EVERYTHING READABLE.
Fancy fonts and wacky colors will definitely make your blog unique, but don't go crazy. Everyone's screen and color resolution is different (some folks are even reading you on their phones!). The text needs to be big enough and plain enough to be readable. And the text color should contrast as strongly as possible with the background.

Here's where I tell you to use dark text on a light background. I know people disagree with this, but white-on-black burns my retinas like those creepy Jesus illusions. I won't say don't do it, but at least think twice before you do.

STEP #3: ORGANIZE YOUR INFO.
People come to your blog for two reasons: (1) to read your latest update or (2) to find specific information about you/your blog. Every blog makes the former easy -- it's right there in the middle. It's your job to make the latter easy to find.

Static pages are a good place to put professional stuff. The kind of stuff agents come looking for. Pages put that info right at the top (usually), give you space to write as much info as you need/want, and keep that stuff (which is usually old news to your regular readers) from cluttering your sidebar.

The sidebar is the second place for it. People like to throw everything they can think of in their sidebars, and that's okay, but know this: Visitors will not scroll down past the first screen unless they are looking for something specific. (I will entertain arguments on this only if you've read my blog footer or clicked on the Carpe Editio flag down there. I'll bet money none of you have (until now, of course -- now you're curious...).)

Think about what you want readers to see, and put that on top.

(OPTIONAL) STEP #4: REMOVE REFERENCES TO YOUR FREE HOST.
Free hosts insert their brand everywhere. Search bars on the top, mandatory attributions in the footer, and of course the domain name. You can usually get rid of this stuff, but it requires either messing with the template or paying money.

But often, it's not hard either. Removing the Blogger search bar is a single line of CSS, for example, and a custom domain name costs only $10-15 per year. It's up to you whether that's worth it.


Many of you already have beautiful blogs (I know, I've seen them). So tell me what decisions have gone into your blog? What other tips would you offer?

What the Agent-Author Relationship Actually Is

I have to follow-up Wednesday's post for a sec, because Natalie Whipple clarified a critical point that I had trouble getting in my head until now. From her post:

It seems the vast majority of querying writers are of the opinion that the "no response" policy is rude. There have been comparisons to agents being employees, and that writers have the power even if it may not look like it at times. There have also been comparisons to "customer service," and the fact that it's just bad business not to respond to a customer.

I think writers are kind of missing the point.

Because the agent/writer relationship is NOT an employer/employee relationship. The agent/writer relationship is a partnership.

Natalie does a great job laying out what that means in her post, and I'll try not to repeat her (though repeating her makes me sound so smart, so I might a little).

A business partnership is fundamentally different from the producer/consumer or employer/employee relationships we are used to. It is symbiotic and -- here's the most important thing -- EQUAL.

Not equal as in both sides have equivalent abilities; that would be pointless. Equal in terms of power. Each side wants something the other has and is willing to give something up to get it.

The agent gives up their unpaid time and the writer gives up a percentage of their profits. That sounds like one is paying the other, but there's a subtle and significant difference. In a partnership, neither can tell the other how to do their job. And if either one fails in their job, neither gets paid.

Writers query specific agents because they believe they would make a good partner. The agent has expertise and connections you want, and you like the way they work. If "no response means no" means you don't like the way they work, then (as I've said many times before) don't request their partnership.

Agents take on writers because they believe they would make a good partner. The writer has skills and stories the agent can sell, and they like the way the writer works.

This is why there's "a call" when an agent offers representation. It's not about the book (they've read that already). It's about the person and whether or not both of them feel they can work well together.

Business partnerships don't work well if one partner believes they are better than the other. They can (it's still business, after all), but eventually one believes -- rightly or not -- that they don't need the other and they part ways. Sometimes badly. Sometimes so badly that other agents hear of it, and the writer finds that nobody wants to work with him at all anymore.

Don't laugh. It happens.

So this sense of entitlement I keep railing against just closes doors unnecessarily. It reduces your chances of finding a partner who will work with you. You probably wouldn't want an agent who treats his authors like sweatshop workers. Guess what makes most agents not want to work with you?

Okay, I'm done now, I swear.

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?