Thursday, publishing events

Apologies for the delay—my brain and then my actual head couldn’t take working on this for a few days, which puts me nearly a week behind.

Publishing roundtable

We began Thursday by listening to an agent and a publisher speak. Jerry asked them to describe a typical day at work.

Peede is the publisher, so he runs the Virginia Quarterly Review, makes sure they have enough money. They acquire their own work. Reading manuscripts in office is doing it wrong. They do it at night, in the weekend. In the office they’re answering phones and stuff. All of them aren’t the most talented people who could be doing their job, but they worked harder.

Waters is the agent. He eats breakfast with the accounting ladies. A lot of his job is networking, reading the journals. The letter he sends to publishers often is basically the query letter that was sent to him. Query letters are very important. He gets more than a 100 emails a day. He says he’s not hugely obsessed with comparing titles (“this is The Great Gatsby meets The Fault in Our Stars”). But when you’re targeting an agent, you want to look up what that agent represents. If you write to an agent, you might want to read books by their clients and then you can talk about them a little, say you have a reason to think these go together. Waters spends his day fielding emails and phone calls. He sometimes does part of the publisher’s job, like getting quotes. Hats an agent can wear: publicist, armchair psychotherapist, financial advisor, lawyer, salesman.

            Jerry’s next question was for them to describe what a person should do when they’ve completed a short story, novel, poem.

            “This is my first really shiny object.” ~Jerry

            It differs by genre. For a poem or short story, you should send it round your writing group first to polish it, and then you send it to a magazine. Peede paused to tell us that one time he got 7,000 pieces for the VQR—with that volume, he said, it’s really not about you. If you move beyond the short story to the novel, you should get the attention of an agent. Small presses, such as Milkweed, don’t require an agent. (Patricia told us later that you can manage in small presses without an agent, but anything larger, it’ll get lost in a stack of unsolicited manuscripts. ) Poetry chapbooks are sold in contests. Both poetry and fiction should be totally done when you approach an agent, or as done as you can make it without a professional editor. Nonfiction, though, unless it’s a collection of essays, you’re pitching before you write. You want to go to Afghanistan and write about daily life there? Pitch it before you lay down the down payment on your flight, because someone else might be already writing that book. The agents will know, even if you don’t. And if someone is, you won’t be able to sell it when you get back. Different agents have different ideas about how involved they want to be in the editorial process.

Query letter: Letters are different depending on the agent. Look up your agent’s guidelines. For some, the letter can only be one page. It’s important to publish any publishing credentials you have in your query letter. If you have none, but you have connections, use those. Great intros, said waters, include: “Ian McEwan suggested I write…” If you have no connections, just tell them who you are (college degree?). Send a snail mail letter, it’ll make you stand out. For a magazine query, just tell them who you are. Say whether you’re querying several agents or particularly want this one—both stand out for different reasons. The agent will jump at the former if the book’s really good—he doesn’t want to lose the job. But the flattery of being hand-picked is also incentive.

“Don’t quit your day job until you’re Mary Higgens Clark.” ~Waters (I think)

They went on to answer questions with shorter answers. Waters talked about having a diverse list of presses that he’ll try to sell a book to, top down. Peede doesn’t have any interest in an author without a favorite nineteenth-century book (the correct answer is Middlemarch). You must be willing to stand up for your own book. You’ll be the one advertising it, after all. When publishing with a magazine, understand your royalties and rights. The summer program at NYU is how a lot of people get into publishing. Cinco Punto Press published a bilingual book one of them mentioned—something I should look into, eh?

Publishing conference

Then, we got a one-on-one meeting with either Peede or Waters. I had the first slot with Peede. He’d mentioned liking Faulkner and having edited Richard Bausch, so I shared my love of As I Lay Dying and being on first-name terms with Richard Bausch’s twin brother (my old English teacher). He told me to say hi to Bob from him next time I saw him. I think I accidentally networked. Then we got down to questions.

I wanted to know how one found these elusive poetry book contests. Answer: the library, the internet, Poets & Writers magazine. Look into who published your favorite poetry. Red Hen Press will do experimental poetry, but rarely anyone who’s never been published. Send single poems to magazines. University presses require you to have been published. He suggested I send a few to his press and look into Poetry Lore in DC. The only thing Google gives me for that is Poet Lore. And make sure they publish the kind of poetry you write!

Next, I asked about publishing my novelette (17,000 words). Call it a long story, he said. It will not get published as a book. In a collection of stories that size, maybe. He suggested I look into the publication One Story and Ploughshares Magazine, which has an e-book contest—and that’ll get me to the attention of an agent. It would need to be 75K words to publish, he said. I doubted that and wrote to an author I’ve corresponded with, who said it depends on the press and you can get published for as little as 45K. He suggested I look into Prizm, Harmony Ink Press, and Queerteen Press. Better news for me, but the novelette is never getting up there—it would ruin the tension to expand it that far. I don’t like the idea of pairing it with other stories, either.

Is it smarter to publish small first, I asked. It’s more realistic, he said. Wee publications, magazines and such, will get you into the public eye. 

I’m gonna stop here and give you the lecture in the next post, because it’s about poetry and it’ll take me some studying to get a post out of it. And I don’t have enough on workshop to spend a whole post on it this time, anyways.