the query letter

The Query Letter

When you query a publisher you may get a faster response as opposed to a full proposal or manuscript but not necessarily a favorable one.

There is such a thing a giving too much information, but query letters tend to provide too little information…you want to include enough to get the editor’s attention – The query should not be too broad ranging or brief. The sort of thing, “I grew up in the former Yugoslavia and I’ve written a book about it…” is not going to pass muster. You need something more solid than this.

As an editor, you’re looking for a writer who is authoritative, has the personal experience if this is a personal story, has a style, which will even show in the letter, and a story that has a real hook. It should be one of the more fascinating letters you read in your life, not just another “I want to write a book about Boston because it’s great…” or some such, but a letter that has some potential at the other end of the line…. overall, there are too many query letters, I think, and most of them are bad. It has become a lazy way out with people writing a one page letter that is milque toast bland.

Your author should, if they are smart, provide a good bio of themselves (third person) with their credentials, a few sample pages perhaps, a rough outline or table of contents doesn't hurt, and the letter itself is a writing sample, so pay attention to how that is written as well, because if the author did not, then that's important too.

how to edit |

Can you really improve upon the sentence or paragraph; can you really make the book better? Keep these simple, basic rules in mind while working and use them when you edit during class (and afterward in your career).

What we want to see are how well you apply what you have learned ... that is the objective of this assignment.

Remember the following:

Do no harm – do not try to change the author’s meaning of voice – (whatever voice means these days) keep it in character and tone. Do not be a butcher, but a surgeon if you are to edit. Think of your hands as such… these are your instruments; these and your red pencil or pen. Treat them well.

Economy of Language – no where is this more important in prose or prose-poetry. You do not want a manuscript that repeats a word over and over again, that’s important. I had one that used the word “moon” constantly, but the writer didn’t notice it – writer-blind – I had to edit out many moons.

Change as Little as Possible - Do not rewrite sentences – that’s cheating – but instead try to find the author’s original intent and meaning and stick to this. You should never change the author’s intent. If the author intended to make a character unscrupulous, then don’t try to make the character someone with scruples. It simply follows… And with smaller details query also if you don’t think something makes sense, but in Following Claire several people queried was it possible for the sick narrator to get to the basement to lift the boxes of Claire’s notes – good question; to query that did not change the author’s intent, but helped clarify only what his character creation was capable of doing. So fair enough. To change a character – unless this is biography and truth – then no. You should not try to do that.

Overediting – this is something that young editors and even experienced editors do - ; you need to be careful of this, there’s a fine line. You want to query your author but you don’t want to change the story either or the intent of the author’s story, as I said, you want to change as little as possible but get to the gem of the story or the heart. That said, some pieces DO require a lot of editing – so there is or will be some contradiction here. You may find this in some exercises

Don’t change an author’s style – don’t change an author’s voice. This is their style and trademark. IT would be like changing Jack Kerouac or Marguerite Duras or Shakespeare or Lewis Carroll all of whom who had a particular style of writing, like most writers… or take Annie Proulx whose characters all tend to have unusual names – it would be like changing their names to names that were more ordinary because you felt they didn’t make sense. Think of writing then as music in a way – would you change the composition of a piece of music – rearrange the notes in such a way that the song was totally a different piece?

You may change a piece or a song let’s say – a partita so that it flowed better – take a note out here or there or transpose something or query the author “did you intend this note – it doesn’t seem to fit with the style of the piece because it’s a g. flat in a g. major piece then that would make more sense – and would be a good query. But to take out the actual meaning of the piece would be wrong.

For example, and there are some good ones I can think of; Marguerite Duras’s book The Lover is about a young girl who is not of age and is only fourteen and yet is the lover of an older Chinese man. We may call this statutory rape, and it may be, and we may not like it, but it’s one of the best selling and most famous books or well-known books. If we changed the title to “Statutory” it would put a whole different spin on a highly erotic book – one that the author intended to be a highly erotic book.

The same would be true of any number of books, and I’m sure you can think of a few yourselves. Think, for example of a famous one, such as The Da Vinci Code; what if it were called, The Da Vinci Mystery – wouldn’t that put a whole different spin on it and classify as a whole different genre, and yet there have been editor’s who have done this and changed whole titles of books – so you don’t want to do this.

TACT – As an editor, you will use all of your diplomatic skills, which goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the semester when we spoke about author/ editor relations.

Remember, this is someone’s ‘baby’ and although this may be a book that was assigned to you, or maybe even one you acquired, it’s something they’ve been working on for years and now, something you and the author are going to spend the next several years working on together, so you’ll want to get along during this process….

Queries – clear, concise, respectful nonjudgmental. Before you zero in on the negative, try to find something positive to say; Use your common sense, and I think most of you already know this, or all of you actually, but instead of just “cut” say “maybe cut” – so you’re phrasing is everything and this is where your tact and diplomacy come into play. Essentially, all of your editing skills are an amalgam, but it’s important to cover them all…

Keep your queries simple, neat and in the margin and don’t expect the author to agree with everything you say – at the end of the day, it is his or her name, not your name that goes on the book. You have to respect that.

When you query, don’t just query, but be prepared to offer an alternative or option – so what would YOU do in the situation – you’re the editor, so what would your edit then be?

Keep within tone: if something sounds off of tone, then don’t be afraid to say so, For example, a sentence like, And then it occurred to him as he pondered the matter deeply that he really ought to cut the crap… The last part of the sentence is obviously out of character with the first part, so that’s the sort of thing you would query your author on but you don’t want to be obnoxious, so how would you query this?

(This seems out of character for him here… is this correct? STET? or change? Doesn’t seem to fit with the rest).

You'll get a better sense as you go along, but just stick with it and follow simple guidelines and you'll get there.

It's confusing at first especially, but in due course, you will find it easier to edit if you keep in mind a simple checklist - a mental checklist - of what to do and what not to do. What is your goal? This is the real question.

finding your niche | how to establish yourself

Language, love of language and a feel and a natural skill, a writer or a poet’s eye – a rare thing – all of these things come into play when you look for a job and not just the first time, but I think every time. You have to ask yourself whether or not this job can offer you that love of words that you’re looking for or the love of the printed page if that’s what you want – but you have to sometimes compromise this to get to the next step in your career;

Here, the author says that your skills are transferable, but transferring yourself can be another matter and that publishing tends to pigeonhole people early in their careers.

I think this is true to some extent. You need to establish who you are – what you are going to BE with that big capital B. It’s scary because you don’t know until you’ve really tried and I’ve known many editors who have changed careers or moved to different areas, including myself…

I’ve worked in trade publishing- which means the books you see in Barnes and Noble or even now on Amazon or any number of stores or read about in PW for most of my career. This led me a long way, but I started out in fashion –because it was a foot in the door, but boy, those months I was in the Vogue Features department, working for Amy Gross and typing between those non-repro blue lines on an old IBM Selectric, even at fifteen, as nerve-wracking as it was (the pressure of no computer then, to not make a mistake, to type exactly between the lines – for I was essentially the proofreader and typesetter and reader of slush), but the pressure was great to get it Right, just as it would be anywhere only now, the technology is easier so it’s less of a deal if you make a typo because spell-check will likely catch it whereas we had to rely on our own eyes and the eye, in a way, visually corrects what is wrong – we skip over typos, we skip over errors and we ‘fix’ them in our mind so that they do not exist, hence, they do not exist for us, particularly if we ourselves wrote the piece or are editing the piece.

The salient factor here is that since then, it’s true that I’ve worked most of my life in Trade Publishing – both books and well-known magazines- because that’s where I started and got an established reputation.

Despite that, I have written entire web-sites for e-commerce sites, and books to go along with the product that they made. I have written to Mass General Hospital’s Neurology Department, and biggest of all, I was asked by Harvard University Publishing to write several main sections of www.intelihealth.com which was owned by Harvard and is now owned by Aetna, so that’s a huge client even though it does not really jibe with the bulk of my writing or what i really do and wish to do, as a writer or editor, you can or may take on jobs to learn, to pay the bills (because jobs like this tend to pay more than traditional publishing jobs, and more, it is more editing experience. Period.)

I’ve also done a lot of legal writing for Hill & Barlow, now part of Palmer and Dodge – which has had a literary agency for years. I freelanced for Hill and Barlow for ten years and for each of those ten years, and this is while I was working in publishing at Godine and then Lumen fulltime, so this was my ‘free time’ job, I would average just from the Hill Barlow work alone about 60-90 K on any average year and it was work that any of you could do already in this class, I strongly feel, using the skills from your InDesign class and your editing skills from here – you could do this because it is like a whole book, just in-depth.
It’s book-editing lite in a sense and for that, you don’t need a full-class (and we’re halfway through), so you’re already in a position to go after such work.

How do you get this work when you don’t have experience? Friends. Friends at law firms, other publishers, people you know, professors, speakers, anyone you can think of, tap into your resources – people sometimes think this sounds Machiavellian, but I’ve said this before, I think you can apply Machiavelli to bad or good and it’s all in how you go about it. I’m not saying slit the throat of the person in front of you to get what you want, but if you have to glad-hand a bit so get where you want to get, then you should not hesitate, unless it is really hurting someone else or their career. But to further advance your own career through hard work and through determination.... nobody can fault you for this. Drive is good.

* * *

You can sneak in the back way, as I said above – start reviewing books in the niche you want to publish. Start copyediting. I know publishers and at least one agency that are always looking for good, cheap, labor. I’m not insulting you here. You need a way in: this is a way in. You get in the door, you prove yourself, and then you can raise your rate when the time comes.

For now, if you want to edit encyclopedias or reference works let’s say, my advice would be to contact the editor who handles this at a press that prints a fair amount of reference works like Blackwell Scientific or Continuum, which is a trade house but has done several TRADE encyclopedias which is a good cross-over market and doesn’t limit you – contact the head editor there or get to know the EA. Be persistent, and get yourself a copy editing job.

Now, after all that effort to get the job, once you get it, you’re not going to be able to turn down the job for what they want to pay you – which may or may not be fair… it will probably be fair enough, though if they suck, slightly less because they’re testing you for the first time.

Book reviews: so many places are dumped on with books that you can easily find a place to review books for if you are a good writer and have some clips and a good education, which I think you have. Also, you’ve had this class and I’ll write a letter of recommendation for those of you who need it for the right job or reviewing position.

To get into medical writing, I reviewed all of the technical and medical books for the Boston Globe Sunday Arts Section that nobody else wanted to review. I did the same thing for Publisher’s Weekly with the same tactic in mind which was that if a writing job opened up in biotech, or editing job – that I would take it and would be able to say I know something of the market.

It was not just that I had experience reading and reviewing med. tech. books. It’s that I also had experience at Harvard and Trade publishing and had done a few freelance jobs here and there for the money. As such, I became a sort of "expert" and began getting more work from more places as word spread - excellent income, even though it is or was not what I want to do in the final account.

You can establish yourself as an 'expert or known in the field.' This, again, is where you want to look at the editing that is being done at agents today, not at publishing houses ~ so you're better off being an editor, at least initially, at an agency.

letter to an unpublished writer by Jonathan Farrar - what we can learn | March 20th notes, class no 7

Never hand-deliver a manuscript unless there is some compelling reason to do so, which had better be pretty compelling, but rather, mail it or have it messengered or sent by your agent or these days, most or many manuscripts are sent electronically via email to editors at large houses, particularly the larger houses who print out a few pages and if intrigued, print more or the whole thing. Some may read a few pages on screen if the title doesn’t grab them or the subject matter, but that’s it. These are the ways you communicate with an editor today. Simple, neat, clean. It is an unwritten, unspoken rule of publishing.

And this rule works in reverse. What Farrar has done here in this long letter is prove his point by writing a long-winded letter to an author who has done everything wrong;

1. she has made it personal
2. she has made personal telephone calls
3. she has shown up at the office and made appointments much to the dismay of his secretary who is now becoming upset (you never want to upset the Editor’s EA because he or she is the turn-key to the Editor; the gate-keeper.

One rule of publishing (there are many, but to stick to one), just as in Publicity that you very quickly learn if you are savvy is that to get to the Editor, you must become friends with the secretary or admin or editorial assistant.

The friendlier you are, the more likely you are to get in the door, get read, get seen, esp. in the case of publicity as I told you the story of me and Chip Mc Grath at the New York Times Book Review at the time and his admin and how I was able to get in. This isn't bribery, this is doing your job and getting to know people so that they get to like you and are willing to and gosh, maybe even want to help you in your endeavor to see your books reviewed. This works and you can do it at a very grass-roots level. For those of you interested in non-profit, then you understand how much can come of a grass-roots effort, i would think, or anyone who has been at a start-up.

Keep your rejection, acceptance letters simple, to the point, and never offer editorial or other advice. It's in your and the writer's best interest that you do not.

Exercise on this topic in next week's class - note this is a graded exercise.

small publishing & piecework reading for next week , march 29th

"Small Publishing - Is It Beautiful" by Bessie pg. 106-end
&
"Piecework" by Lenn Fulton & Ellen Ferber p. 163 - end

From the Art of Literary Publishing

example of an edited page

An example of an edited manuscript. This is particularly messy, and has clearly gone through several hands and likely several drafts, but it gives you some idea of the work that goes into real line-editing.

Your work, of course, is expected to be readable, neat, clean, but again, don't be afraid to not only query the author, but make changes where they need to be made. However, do not make changes simply for the sake of making changes. If a manuscript is fine as it is, then let it STET. This is but one example. I'll post a cleaner example as well.

more on the Galassi | the yin & yang of publishing in the literary house

• Galassi reading, The Double Agent: The Role of the Literary Editor in the Commercial Publishing House. P. 79 The Art of Literary Publishing.
  
  1. An effective editor, according to Galassi, is someone who has all the good virtues of;
  Humor, tact, courage etc , what he says, “the primary requirement seems to me to be an eductated and well-defined taste.”
• 
  2. An editor should always have ideas of his own –
  shining light where none has shone before like Verba Mundi,
  and should know about his own culture, but about other cultures as well.
  
  3. What Galassi tells us, and I agree, is that often working for a big conglomerate and publishing trade literature (that is books that are often perceived as Editor’s Books, no necessarily immediate ‘sure things’) is like infiltrating for a purpose – almost a David and Goliath struggle between the Publishing House and the Editor who wants to publish his or her own books.
  
  4. The truth is, you will have to publish other books to support your literary trade books.
  
  a. You’ll have to publish books that, as he says, “pass” for literature –
  b. but when you find a book you TRULY believe in, be prepared to act – we spoke about this before –
  c. Having to fight for your book – at Ed. Board meetings, with the Publisher and so on. You’ll have to prove that the book is worth at least a chance and in doing this, you’ll have to ask yourself seriously how much of your own reputation are you willing to stake on this.