Category Archives: advice

January 20, 2011   Michael   advice, conferences, etiquette, Michael  
31

Making the most of a conference

I had the pleasure of attending SCBWI Florida’s Wizarding World of Writing conference this past weekend.  It was a good event, and I met some talented writers and great people.  But I noticed something worth pointing out: for every person who came up and talked to me, there were at least five who smiled and nodded but didn’t actually speak with me.  Now, I’m making an assumption here, but I think those smiling and nodding folks probably wanted to talk to me.  I’m assuming that because they were at the conference.  And, if you’re going to get your money’s worth, you should be talking to the faculty!  I’m sure it’s easier for writers to talk to the featured authors; they can convey their appreciation for the author’s work and have a conversation between peers, at least of sorts.  I understand why  authors might find agents and editors  scary, but have you seen my picture?  I’m not exactly intimidating.  In fact, I think I’m pretty darn friendly!  I also love to talk to new authors, and I attend conferences not just to scout new talent, but to help people improve their craft.  Without interaction, it’s difficult to do that.  This doesn’t mean that you should be pitching indiscriminately, or interrupting someone’s workout, meal, drink or conversation.  You should still be polite.  But conferences usually offer ample networking time, and if you don’t take advantage of it, someone else will!

As anyone who works with me knows, I love to assign homework.  So for you dear blog readers, I have an assignment: the next time you attend a conference, introduce yourself to at least one agent or editor.  And if you’ve had a good experience speaking with an agent at a conference, let us know in the comments!

January 19, 2011   Stacey   advice, fun, publishers, Q&A, Stacey  
3

Editor Q&A: Nichole Argyres of St. Martin’s Press

I know that our blog readers are always looking for good insider advice about how to get published. So I had the idea to ask an editor friend to answer some questions about what she likes, doesn’t like, and to talk a bit about the kinds of books she’s worked on to get a sense of her taste and interests. To share some background on my relationship with Nichole, I haven’t known her very long, but I connected with her right away. Our first meeting, over coffee last spring, started with me asking her what kinds of things she was looking for. She answered by telling me that she was very interested in mental health and that she’d love to find a memoir written by a young person suffering from bipolar disorder. It just so happened that on that very day I was planning to send out a proposal written by a mother and daughter about the daughter’s battle with bipolar. True story! And the best part is that she bought the book just a couple of weeks later. Perfect Chaos by Cinda and Linea Johnson will be published in 2012.

How long have you been an editor?

I’ve worked in publishing for almost twelve years.

Can you share with us a few titles you’ve worked on, both fiction and nonfiction?

Some recent fiction titles I’ve worked on are: the Denver Post bestseller Hester by Paula Reed (the story of Hester Prynne that The Scarlet Letter left out); The Pursuit of Other Interests by Jim Kokoris (the story of a man who loses his job but can’t tell his wife and son, and how he finds his way back to his family), India Edghill’s marvelous biblical historical, Delilah, and Marshall Karp’s funny an crackerjack mysteries Flipping Out and Cut, Paste, Kill starring Lomax and Biggs. Finding Jack by Gareth Crocker is coming out in February, and it is the amazing story of a soldier, his dog, and a friendship.

Recent nonfiction titles include: Goldsworthy’s memoir Piano Lessons (for anybody who has ever loved a teacher), the reissue of Paul Loeb’s classic handbook for social activism, Soul of a Citizen, Eleni Gage’s memoir of Greece and family, North of Ithaka, and both of Brigitte Gabriel’s New York Times bestsellers. Stacey Edgar’s memoir Global Girlfriends: How One Mom Made it Her Business to Help Women in Poverty Worldwide will be out in April.

What kinds of books interest you personally?

For pleasure I love memoirs of all kinds, fiction that sweeps me away to another time or place, mysteries with great characters, fairy tales, cookbooks, and medical narratives.

What kinds of books interest you professionally?

Personal stories that take the particular and make it universal; narrative science of all kinds, especially neuroscience and mental health; upmarket women’s fiction; smart nonfiction for women—parenting, mental health, current events.

Can you give our readers an idea of what draws you to a nonfiction project?

For memoir, I need a clear, strong voice telling a story with which I can identify. For science and other topic-driven nonfiction, I need a clear strong voice, a good platform, and an identifiable market to go after.

Can you give our readers an idea of what draws you to a fiction project?

I am an old-fashioned reader, so I like a strong narrative voice in the driver’s seat. I need a protagonist I can identify with and like. I have a weakness for large families and limited locations (neighborhoods, villages, islands). I like dark around the edges but not edgy. I am drawn to historical and international fiction.

Is there anything you really like and/or don’t like to see in a submission for nonfiction?

I like to see that the author has a strong sense of his or her project and has thought about the market, especially reasonable and current comparable titles. I don’t like to see unreasonable or older comp titles (The Secret, Angela’s Ashes). Memoir that relates—without perspective—a difficult childhood, horrendous divorce, fatal illness, or loss of a child is not my favorite. I think readers come to memoir for similar reasons they come to fiction—for an escape, a glimpse or an unfamiliar life, and an experience that he or she can take with them back to their own life. Memoir without perspective is just a therapy session. And other people’s therapy sessions aren’t that interesting.

Is there anything you really like and/or don’t like to see in a submission for fiction?

Plot, plot, plot. And strong characters with convincing relationships moving through the convincing plot. And plot. Did I mention plot?

What books have you read recently that you loved?

I am in the middle of Adam Gopnik’s Through the Children’s Gate and I find his mix of the everyday and our internal terrors and wonderings incredibly satisfying and smartly done. I recently finished Glenn Kurtz’s Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music, which is a marvelous wonderful tribute to music, and an honest investigation into desire, ambition, and love. The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz I found to be life changing. Louise Penny’s latest mystery Bury Your Dead, is amazing, she is a favorite. And Old Filth by Jane Gardam reminded me why I love literary fiction.

Thanks to Nichole for her time and candid answers to my questions. I look forward to hearing what our readers think about this kind of editor exchange, and if it’s popular, we can try to do it again soon. If you have any questions, let me know and I will do my best to answer them.

January 18, 2011   John   advice, conferences, feedback, fun, John  
2

Conference advice

Short post today, because I’m off in a couple of hours to New Jersey for an SCBWI-NJ first pages session. And I have to confess, I’m a little nervous—even though this should be a very low-key event, I haven’t done a writer’s conference in several years. As a junior editor, I attended my share of conferences and I was lucky enough to have a few writers and illustrators come out of them. But between a full roster of authors, a growing family, and a decline in invitations, I pretty much dropped off the speaking circuit.

However, now that I’m building a new client roster, I’m back on the conference train, and I’d love to get some feedback on how things are going these days. Have things changed much in the last few years? Has ebook publishing had any effect? What do you look for in a conference speaker? Do you have different expectations from agents vs. editors? Whatever your experiences, I’d love to hear—I’ve got SCBWI Metro in two weeks!

January 13, 2011   Jessica   about us, advice, Jessica, opinion, what we're looking for  
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Back to blogging

Happy 2011. It’s terrific to return from maternity leave to this lovely new online home. By way of catching up, I am pleased to report that the newest addition to my family, baby John Gabriel, is settling in nicely.  That his four-and-a-half-year-old brother has only once inquired whether we’ll be returning him to the hospital strikes me as a good sign.

As I rejoin the agenting fray, I look forward to additions of a different sort–these to my list, and not my household. I’m looking for a few good projects, so keep the material coming. I’m especially interested in the following: literary fiction with a strong storyline, narrative nonfiction in history, business and science, including projects that incorporate a personal voice. Annie Murphy Paul’s ORIGINS: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives is a good recent example of a blend of science and personal narrative, but I am open to themes unrelated to babies.

I’m also interested in historical fiction. While on leave, and before my newborn evinced the first noisy signs of colic that would then occupy my evenings between 9:30pm. and midnight, I read Hilary Mantel’s superb Wolf Hall. Monumental in scope, dazzling in detail, and animated with a protagonist as believable and well-drawn as any contemporary narrator, Wolf Hall reminded me that good historical fiction accomplished a feat no less wondrous than time travel. (Post-colic, I reread Harvey Karp’s The Happiest Baby on the Block, which was as effective with colicky baby number two as it was with colicky baby number one).

It’s probably worth noting that I am not in the market for inspirational books, Christian or otherwise. I get several queries a day regarding works of Christian inspiration, so I suspect that a website somewhere lists it as an interest, nor do I do much in the way of straight genre fiction, science fiction, fantasy or mystery. Some quirks; I rarely fall for experimental fiction, hallucinatory prose, or even, weirdly, comic novels. I read Gary Schteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, and while I admired how smart it was and his flair for satire, I didn’t love the book. I enjoy working with academics who are interested in (and able) to write for a broader audience, so if you’re a professor convinced that your area of expertise can be the next Freakonomics, drop me a line; I’m feeling leery of memoir, so much that I’m tempted to say that I won’t be taking any on (though I’d love to be proved wrong). In any case, I look forward to hearing from you, and working with you in 2011.

January 10, 2011   Michael   advice, conferences, feedback, Michael, opinion, social networking  
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Miami this weekend!

I’m really looking forward to my first conference of the year, the Wizarding World of Writing conference held by SCBWI Florida (which you should know I’m attending because it’s on our nifty new calendar over yonder).  I’ll be doing some manuscript critiques, a fantastic “Psst! Wanna Know a Secret” agent panel with fabulous agents Erin Murphy and Sarah Davies, and a workshop on social networking.  I’ll also be spending time with the amazing faculty, which includes editors and authors I very much respect and admire.  What can I say?  I love publishing!

But I’m really here to ask for your help.  As I mentioned, I’m doing a workshop on social networking, officially titled “I’m Mad as Hell, and I’m Not Going to Tweet It Anymore!”  I have a good presentation put together about my perspective, but I’m wondering if our amazing blog readers have any questions they’d like answered or wisdom they’d like to share.  I want to make sure I’m addressing what writers are thinking (and worrying) about, not just what’s on my mind.  I have a lot of opinions, as you know!

Send me your thoughts in our new comments when you have a chance.  Doesn’t the redesigned site look great?

January 10, 2011   DG&B   about us, advice, calendar, changes at DGLM, conferences, DGLM Recommends, Facebook, feedback, fun, Jane, Jessica, Jim, John, Lauren, Michael, Miriam, opinion, our blog, our clients, our website, Rachel S., Stacey, Stephanie, technical help, Twitter, what we're looking for, What's New at DGLM  
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Welcome to the new DGLM blog and website!

Welcome to our shiny new home, blog readers!  For the new year, we bring you a new DGLM site, a merger of our website and blog.  Thanks to everyone who made suggestions a couple months ago on features and tech questions—where possible we’ve incorporated your feedback, and other things we’re keeping in mind in case we can implement them in future.

We’ll be blogging as usual over here at www.dystel.com now instead of at Blogger, and there are also some other things for you to explore over to the right (unless you’re not currently reading this on the site itself, in which case you might want to just poke your head in and take a look!).  You might be interested in learning more about us and our clients.  If you’re an author looking for representation, perhaps you’ll want to peruse our FAQ, Submission Requirements, Who We Are and What We’re Looking For, and Nonfiction Proposal Guidelines.  Need something new to read?  Check out our Staff Recommendations, Recent and Forthcoming Titles, and What We’re Reading in the column on the right. Maybe you want to know where we’ll be?  We’ve got a calendar with our upcoming conferences and events in that sidebar as well!  Of course, if you’d like, please feel free to use the links over there to Subscribe, Follow, or Like us and share our site with others!  The new blog should start feeding into our Twitter and Facebook accounts today, so if you’re already following us there, you don’t need to do anything.  If you’re reading us in a blog reader, please subscribe to the new RSS feed.

Make yourselves at home!

As always, we want to hear from you!  What do you think of the new digs?  Any suggestions for improvement?  Glitches we may not have caught?  (We hope not, but let us know if so!)  New features that you’d like us to consider?  We can’t always implement everything recommended to us, but we’re always open to hearing your ideas.

December 21, 2010   DG&B   advice, fun, holidays, queries, Stephanie  
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As these age things go….

by Stephanie

What can I say? With four days left until Christmas, my brain is admittedly floating somewhere near the ledge of the ninth floor window next to my desk. However! Before I escape to the land of fried desserts and chocolates more commonly known as my home, I wanted to pass along this great interview with Kody Keplinger. Her debut novel The Duff, is a contemporary young adult work that has received strong reviews since its release in September. But what is more notable about Keplinger’s career is that The Duff came out when she was only eighteen, an accomplishment that admittedly doesn’t happen too often. I guess the first thing that came to mind as I read this was the influence something like age can have on one’s writing. Certainly, being eighteen puts Keplinger in a unique position to write about common issues surrounding high school students. Which led me to wonder about the ways in which a person’s writing evolves over the years. Could you imagine yourselves being published, or completing a full novel for that matter, at age eighteen? Do you think your current work-in-progress would have the same feel had you written it during your teen years? Certainly I’m inclined to say no to the latter question, but I’m curious as to the nuances and evolutions you have found in your own writing styles and methods as time has passed. What do you feel is the same, different, etc?

So my parting gift to you this Christmas is the renewed mantra to continue writing, revising, and querying. It’s all an ongoing process that takes practice and dedication…but you already knew that. Wishing everyone a relaxing and productive holiday break, and I look forward to seeing your material in the New Year!

December 20, 2010   DG&B   advice, fun, Lauren, queries, what we're looking for  
4

Three tiny kids and a guy

by Lauren

Looking up some contact information in our database, I was reminded of my very favorite thing about it: small notes, devoid of context, that give a strange glimpse into our conversations with editors.  The stand out stars of the “notes” section of our contacts are surely that one editor has “three tiny kids” and another (whose name is not one you’d come across often) “is a GUY!”  I like to imagine the shock and surprise of the assistant who’d picked up the phone to discover a deep, masculine voice attached to a name he or she had previously assumed belonged to a woman.  (I also am not entirely certain that one wasn’t me, back when I was Jane’s assistant an alarmingly high number of years ago.)  I also imagine the kindly editor who sat across from one of my colleagues at a lunch meeting and showed off pictures of her miniature children, perhaps posed next to objects of regular stature for comparison purposes.  That note has been in there long enough that the tiny kids are probably not so tiny any more.

Most of the notes, though, are actually quite useful—such and such a person is obsessed with dogs or used to be a ballet dancer or absolutely cannot stand misery memoirs. When we submit our projects, we’re working not only on the parameters of a publisher’s and editor’s list and our personal interactions with them, but with the company’s collective knowledge of what makes them tick and gets them excited. Excitement is the huge intangible of the publishing process. And when we just happen to have a book about dogs or dance or misery, we know where to go—or where not to.

For authors looking for agents, I suspect the best resources out there are the blogs and websites and Twitter feeds and what have you of the agents themselves.  We do suffer sometimes from too many queries quoting our own bios back to us, sending us things that are far off base because they might have a common keyword.  I think all the agents who’ve been here a while have at one point or another edited a reference out of our descriptions of ourselves or our lists, because we found it led too many people down the wrong path.  But more often than not, these little factoids about us and our interests point people the right way.  While we do share queries amongst ourselves and know each other’s taste well, it’s always nice to look at a batch of newly arrived queries and see that several of them are on a subject that we’re already really enthusiastic about—it doesn’t guarantee success, of course, but a book on a subject that usually bores us has to be that much more amazing to even catch our eye.  Much as agents train themselves to see the difference between “I like this” and “this is good” (and “I don’t like this” and “this is bad”), we’re still human, and with all the reading at night or on the weekends, it’s a real pleasure to come across the projects that we’d happily buy off the shelves if they had nothing to do with us.

So when you’re querying us, if it’s because an off-hand reference in one of our blog entries made you realize we just might be the right advocate for your book, please do let us know!  It always helps us to know why you wanted us to read your work.

December 15, 2010   DG&B   advice, editing, fun, reading, Stacey, writing  
3

Writers dish about editors

I enjoyed reading this piece from The Awl written by five published authors who write candidly (sometimes very candidly—check out Emily Gould’s piece) about their experiences with their editors. There’s so much great behind-the-scenes information in here about the publishing process—how agents work, how editors acquire books (or sometimes lose out to others), and how different each individual experience is. Even though it’s written from different points of view, this piece speaks to how unpredictable the publishing process can be. Each author makes some wise observations about what you can expect, what you might actually get, and how frustrating and/or refreshing that can be depending on where you fall on that curve! The idea that editors are overworked and that your book isn’t the only one on their list is something that authors and agents alike sometimes forget to take into consideration, so it’s a good point. It also illustrates to me how important perspective is, both in your publishing career and in anything else you do in life.

In this piece, you’re getting the scoop from those who have been through it. I hope you all find some good takeaway, or at the least an entertaining read, and ultimately see this a positive take on the publishing process. For me, even as an insider (or maybe because I’m an insider and know many of the players), there’s a lot of juicy stuff in here!

December 13, 2010   DG&B   advice, Jane, nonfiction, writing  
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That intimidating book proposal

by Jane

For the last several months, many of us here at DGLM have talked about the necessity of preparing solid book proposals. A strong proposal is so important because it not only helps the editor and publisher to know what you are doing, it actually helps you, the author, to focus on your subject and the market you are trying to reach.

Many feel that doing this work is an “unnatural” act, and I admit that it can be very difficult. Once it is done right, however, it can be a very effective tool for everyone.

We work very hard with our clients to help them create their proposals. We send them basic instructions, sample proposals and then we review and comment on each draft until we feel the material is ready to be submitted.

Because we think this part of the publishing process is so very important, I thought I would share our basic formula for putting together a non-fiction proposal.

The proposal is broken down into several parts:

The first is the Overview. This begins with a brief dramatic anecdote which is meant to get the reader, in this case the editor at the publishing company, into the material. Immediately after this anecdote, you should describe in two or three sentences—no more—what the book will be about. This is followed by another brief paragraph on why it is being written and then another on why you are qualified to write it.

After this, you need to describe the different groups of readers who will buy your book—both demographically and statistically. The more numbers you have here the better.

The final element of the overview is a comparative section where you compare your book to others that would be found in the same place in the bookstore. In each case, book by book you must provide the author, the title, the publisher and the year of initial publication and, book by book, you need to tell us how your proposed book will be as successful or more so.

The next element of the proposal is the Annotated Table of Contents. This consists of chapter heads and no more than a couple of sentences on what each chapter will contain.

Then we need at least One Sample Chapter that matches a chapter described in your annotated table of contents. (I always suggest an early chapter, but the contents cannot repeat anything that has previously appeared in the overview of the proposal.) The sample chapter is meant to do two things: show off the writing and tell us things we don’t already know.

Finally, there should be a more formal narrative Bio of the author.

This is followed by links that serve as Support Material—reviews of previous books, recent articles by and about you from national publications, a schedule of speaking appearance, any national media appearances, etc.

So there you have it—my holiday present to you. I know this isn’t easy, but as I said, once this is done right, it is incredibly helpful in not only selling the proposed book but also in writing it.

Naturally, as always, I am open to answering your questions.

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