Back from vacation—a week spent in Cape Cod, where the beach is near, the light is crisp and a stomach bug cut a swathe through my extended family. A virus or possibly food poisoning felled us, one by wretched, wretching, one. But when not by the seaside or the sickbed, I did sneak in a bit of pleasure reading, including:
The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon, a debut historical novel on the relationship between Aristotle and his equally celebrated pupil, Alexander The Great. Lyon restores Aristotle, granddaddy of dead white guys, to startling life, and I’ve had a soft spot for A. T.G. since I stood in the spot where he consulted the Oracle of Amun in Egypt’s remote Siwa Oasis. He asked the Oracle whether he was meant to be Pharaoh. I asked if I should accept the recent marriage proposal of my future husband. Happily, the Oracle gave the greenlight to both endeavors.
I also read Jennifer Egan’s AVisit From The Goon Squad, which was—as critics and colleagues promised—terrific, but reading it on my Kindle was a mistake. However convenient the Kindle can be, in a book in which the chapters tell a Rashomon style story, I found myself wanting to go back, reread certain chapters in the light of later revelations, and otherwise have the ability to flip through the book. This is not easily accomplished on a Kindle. Have you had similar experiences with books ill suited for digital reading?
But by far the best thing I read was the happy news that my client, the prodigiously talented Valerie Trueblood, was short listed for the Frank O’Connor prize for short stories. In the words of the Seattle Times, her collection, Marry or Burn, “probes the idea and range of marriage…forming a dangerous, sharp-edged mosaic.” These provocative, profound stories are a far cry from your typical boy meets girl, girl consults oracle tales, and like all great fiction, are quietly, glowingly, wrenchingly true.
Further to Jane’s post discussing the selling process, I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at pitch letters: first, a writer’s successful query letter, one that prompted to me to request the material and sign journalist Jason Ryan as a client; next, my pitch letter to the editors to whom I submitted his proposal; and finally, the jacket copy that the publishing house drafted to pitch the book (ultimately titled Jackpot: High Times, High Seas, and the Sting That Launched the War on Drugs) to readers. All three are a bit different, and each is calibrated to its recipient.
1) Query Letter:
Ms. Papin,
This is Jason Ryan, a journalist in South Carolina and former reporter for The State newspaper- the state’s largest daily and capital city paper. I’m seeking representation for my first book, ‘Jackpot,’ and was impressed by your representation of Arab authors and your ‘hands-on’ work ethic. I think your eclectic tastes might facilitate an interest in my unique journalistic endeavor, a narrative concerning smugglers whose sole connection to the Arab world was their fondness for Turkish hash. My nonfiction narrative, ‘Jackpot,’ details the rise and fall of fraternity brothers who, in a decade, smuggled more than $1 billion of marijuana and hashish into the United States aboard sailboats. ‘Jackpot’ also spotlights an age of innocence in drug trafficking, when violence was not ubiquitous.
‘Jackpot’ is the country’s greatest untold marijuana tale, and its twists and turns rival the slickest Hollywood screenplay. Two disaffected men from South Carolina rose to the top of the East Coast drug smuggling underworld with the help of their band of “gentlemen smugglers”- a now extinct breed of drug running rogues defined by their college educations, nonviolent business methods and love for the sea. The smugglers’ adventures involved jailbreaks, transatlantic smuggling flotillas, and dangerous overlaps with international armed conflicts. It all came to an end when the government unleashed a task force known as Operation Jackpot.
While the smugglers themselves have an amazing tale, so do the government agents involved in Operation Jackpot. Their task force fought a pioneering battle in President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs, using new civil seizure laws and financial evidence to help take down South Carolina’s elusive gentlemen smugglers, men whose nicknames included “Rolex,” “Flash” and “Bob the Boss.”
“Jackpot” is the tale of two groups of men, both cunning and fearless, yet diametrically opposed. On one side was a set of seafaring smugglers with a slipping grip on America’s fast-fading hippie culture. On the other side was a band of investigators empowered by Reagan conservatism that sidestepped bureaucratic hurdles, expanded prosecutorial power and chased drug kingpins to the corners of the earth, sometimes going undercover. Their clash commenced as America underwent a sea change in its attitude toward recreational drug use, severely criminalizing substances long tolerated.
I’ve spent the last year researching Operation Jackpot and interviewing those involved on both sides of the law. I am currently contacting a select group of literary agencies regarding my book. I’m happy to provide a more detailed proposal if you’re interested.
Sincerely,
Jason Ryan
In Jason’s letter above, what leapt out at me was the original research he’d done—a year’s worth of legwork. True crime, as this book might be loosely categorized, is not a genre in which I often work, nor do I count the debate surrounding the legalization of marijuana as one near to my heart, but his query seemed to contain the elements of a great story, one that had a colorful regional focus but national implications, and an author who, as it turned out, had both the access and the ability to capture it
2) My pitch letter:
Dear Editor,
I am pleased to send you Jackpot; the true story of the rise and fall of a ring of “gentlemen smugglers,” a colorful and incorrigible cadre of good ol’ boys, bon vivants, and drug traffickers who made a fortune, lived a fantasy and became the targets of one of the most extensive and ambitious anti-drug operations ever launched in the United States. Operation Jackpot was the opening volley in newly-elected President Reagan’s War on Drugs; its fascinating story captures a watershed moment in American political and popular culture, when hippies gave way to preppies, kids learned to “just say no,” and a group of seafaring sybarites became Public Enemy Number One.
In the late seventies and early eighties, the gentleman smugglers sailed a veritable flotilla of drug-laden luxury sailboats across the Caribbean, through the Mediterranean, and across the Atlantic, ultimately unloading almost a billion dollars worth of marijuana and hashish along the South Carolina coast, relying on the same sleepy islands and labyrinthine waterways favored by the rum runners and privateers who preceded them.
The ringleaders were native sons of the Palmetto State, and depending on who was asked, Les Riley, Barry Foy and their comrades were local boys made good—or promising young men gone irretrievably bad. The college-educated scions of middle-class and well-to-do families, they traded in conventional careers for a lifestyle flush with adventure, high times, and cash. Lots and lots of cash. Yet lucrative as it was, they steered clear of the burgeoning cocaine trade and the culture of brutality that surrounded it; these men eschewed violence as much as they loved pleasure, and in an instance of life imitating art (or perhaps art imitating life), endeavored to live the lyrics to a Jimmy Buffet song. Their idyll would not, however, last forever: greed, lust, hurricanes, and the occasional disaster at sea caught up with them—and eventually, so did the law. Led by an exceptionally ambitious US Attorney named Henry Dargan McMaster, what ensued was a cat-and-mouse game played out against a backdrop of tropical islands and quiet bayous, crumbling plantations, as well as a vicious civil war (Lebanon) and a US invasion (Grenada).
Author Jason Ryan is a journalist who lives in South Carolina; long fascinated by the Jackpot case, he has gained unprecedented access to both the smugglers and the law enforcement agents who brought them to justice. I hope you find the story as compelling as I did, and will want to add it to your list.
With all good wishes,
Jessica Papin
In my letter, I tried to stress the “bigger” story, and tie the specific misdeeds and exploits of the drug smugglers to the cultural and political moment in American history. As a kid during the both the Carter and Reagan administrations, I noted the vast political shift, as Carter’s “malaise” gave way to Reagan’s sunnier (and arguably less accurate) vision of the USA. Nancy Reagan’s ubiquitous Just Say No Campaign was, at least for me, an essential part of the zeitgeist. I also try to layout the bones of the basic conflict: smugglers versus US attorney McMaster, who brought a whole new raft of tools to bear on the “kingpins.” Speaking as a former editor who pitched projects to my colleagues, I remember the utility of a pitch letter that helped to position a project, and could sometimes even be cribbed down the line for catalog or jacket copy, so I always try and write the sort of letter I liked to get.
3) Jacket Copy:
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a cadre of freewheeling, Southern pot smugglers lived at the crossroads of Miami Vice and a Jimmy Buffett song. In less than a decade, these irrepressible adventurers unloaded nearly a billion dollars worth of marijuana and hashish through the eastern seaboard’s marshes. Then came their undoing: Operation Jackpot, one of the largest drug investigations ever launched and an opening volley in Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs.
In Jackpot, author Jason Ryan takes us back to the heady days before drug smuggling was synonymous with deadly gunplay. During this golden age of marijuana trafficking, the country’s most prominent kingpins were a group of wayward and fun-loving Southern gentlemen who forsook college educations to sail drug-laden luxury sailboats across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. Les Riley, Barry Foy, and their comrades eschewed violence as much as they loved pleasure, and it was greed, lust, and disaster at sea that ultimately caught up with them, along with the law.
In a cat-and-mouse game played out in exotic locations across the globe, the smugglers sailed through hurricanes, broke out of jail and survived encounters with armed militants in Colombia, Grenada and Lebanon. Based on years of research and interviews with imprisoned and recently released smugglers and the law enforcement agents who tracked them down, Jackpot does for marijuana smuggling what Blow and Snowblind did for the cocaine trade.
The actual jacket copy is shorter, punchier, and more profligate in its pop culture references. Odd as it sounds, the combination of Jimmy Buffet and Miami Vice positions the book pretty accurately. Here, the emphasis is on the big story, but also the colorful adventures of the smugglers themselves, and the text is juicier, studded with interesting details. In addition, the flap copy draws an oblique contrast between the content of most contemporary drug trafficking stories—the bloody, brutal, and horrific reports from warring cartels in Mexico—and the nonviolent approach that these smugglers took. In all three letters, however, the first task of the writer is to be interesting—all three of us are hoping to attract a reader. You can judge for yourselves whether you think we succeed.
Yesterday I was doing some research on an author whose scholarly works I find interesting, and my online search landed me on the acknowledgments page of her book, where she thanked her husband, whom she described as her first and most careful reader.
I’m not a writer per se, but this line of work calls for a good deal of writing–pitch letters, edit memos, correspondence that attempts to strike that fine balance between “authoritative and rude” (see Jim’s very funny post)–and if I can prevail upon him, my husband is my go-to reader, and vice versa. This is not always the case. In fact, I know plenty of writers who believe that romantic partners, married or otherwise, ought not be part of the process. That talking shop, evaluating drafts, and giving candid feedback is best done by a person with whom there exists some emotional distance.
How about you? Who is your first reader? If you have a significant other or a family member who reads your work in progress, is her role as a booster or a critique partner? There’s no shame in the former. Frankly, I think all writers could use at least one of each.
In the spirit of Miriam’s post on literary influences, there’s a piece about literary mentors in The Millions, http://www.themillions.com/2011/06/lighting-the-way-on-mentoring-and-being-mentored.html and I‘m curious to learn more about your experience, either with (or as) a mentor. So often we think of writing as a solitary pursuit, but such literary relationships do exist. My sense is that outside of MFA programs, they can be hard to establish and perhaps hard to navigate. A few years ago Free Press published Mentors, Muses and Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. You can read Joyce Carol Oates essay, “In the Absence of Mentors, Monsters” in the (always superb) Narrative Magazine. http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2009/absence-mentorsmonsters
The New Yorker summer fiction issue arrived this week, and since it’s been a busy few days, my husband got to it before I did. He then warned me not to read Aleksander Hemon’s essay “The Aquarium: A Tale of two Daughters.” I should have listened. And ultimately I did. I found Hemon’s account (which, fiction issue aside, is nonfiction) of losing his nine-month-old baby to a fast-growing malignant brain tumor impossible to finish. I started skimming rather than reading, then just allowing my eyes to take a kind of snapshot of the page, and finally had to put the magazine aside. Since becoming a parent a little more than five years ago I have zero ability to handle stories like this. Having baby number two last fall in no way helped. This reaction is a little embarrassing, but it’s so primal, so non-negotiable, that I suspect this is some Darwinian adaptation at work here. That in the interests of remaining sane, and for the furtherance of our species, parents (mothers?) simply cannot dwell too long in thoughts of tragedy, calamity and terrifying loss. This way madness lies. Or maybe it’s just me. In the on-line magazine The Millions, a pregnant Edan Lepucki describes reading any number of books that she’d been warned to avoid. www.themillions.com/2011/05/the-perils-of-reading-pregnant.html.
Before I was a mother, I represented a pediatric emergency room doctor whose stories of the ER were as powerful as they were beautifully written. I could not, however, sell his collection. I’ve since come to understand why. I doubt I could read them myself now. It doesn’t help (and maybe even makes me something of a hypocrite) that I’m the sort of person who believes we ought not shy away from subjects that are “just too hard,” on the grounds that the compassion or awareness we awaken when we read about the awful stuff that happens in this world can sometimes motivate us to ameliorate it, but here’s a place where my logic is overruled by my gut. Am I alone in this? I’ve heard wonderful things about Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir, but I don’t know if I can hack it.
Noreen Malone’s piece in Slate decrying the overuse of the em dash made me smile mostly because I am a flagrant offender. I can also be profligate with commas, semicolons and parenthesis, despite the fact I do know better. Cognizant that I live in a glass house when it comes to correct punctuation, I am nevertheless weirdly annoyed by the ellipse used in any fashion beside the standard one, namely, as an indicator of text deliberately omitted or an unfinished thought. Back when I was an editor, I worked with an author who used to write me letters that looked like this:
Jessica…I got your edit memo…I am responding to your queries…I should be finished by week’s end…Yours…M…
I always wondered what M was leaving out, what those little dots concealed. Perhaps the real, unexpurgated note read this way:
Jessica, you thankless taskmistress, I got your edit memo and was, frankly, astounded. I am responding to your queries, which are so numerous and onerous that I am nearly speechless with outrage. Assuming that I work round the clock, exhaust myself utterly and type ‘til my fingers bleed, I should be finished by week’s end. Yours are the most impossible edits that I have ever encountered. Mad as Hell.
Heading home from BEA with an armload of catalogs representing an embarrassment of riches–each page bristling with promise and laudatory prose–I spotted this article in Publishing Perspectives from novelist Lisa Tucker on the arc of a novelist’s career.
While it’s true that many of the readers of this blog are looking to break into publishing, veteran authors like Tucker know that getting even a long sought-after deal is not, in most cases, the happily-ever-after ending that it can appear when trying to place a book or find an agent. BEA is a particularly poignant time to reflect on this, because it is a show built around great expectations, only some of which can be realized. In the author signing center, vast bullpens full of writers autograph galleys, making way every half an hour or so for or a new group of aspiring future bestsellers to come in. Articles and blog posts speculate on the fair’s “big books,” amplifying and in some cases creating the buzz on which they report. BEA exists, in part, to write a self-fulfilling prophecy. Namely: these books are exciting and worthy, these books will sell. (BEA may also exist as an experiment in seeing how much people will pay for a mediocre sandwich, but that’s fodder for another post.) But we all know that even those books with great expectations, those selected by their publishers to receive what Tucker calls “the Big Love” don’t always succeed, and if an author plans to have a second and third and fourth act—as most of you probably do—it’s worthwhile to think of publishing as an endurance run, and gird yourselves accordingly.
Tucker writes:
I’ve learned that keeping a career going as a writer requires flexibility and a willingness to keep trying whatever I can to get my book in the hands of readers. And so my advice to any new writer is simply this: get in the game. Make friends with your coworkers at the publishers’ office and out in the field. Go to your local bookstores and offer to come for a reading, or even offer to run a writing group. Buy a book or two from the stores you want to sell your books. Read as much as you write, if not more…
For those of you out there with one or more books to your credit, what are your strategies for staying in the race?
This week, I am grateful to frequent DGLM blog commenter Wanda B. Ontheshelves, who wondered if I might comment on Laura Miller’s essay in Salon on MFA programs and the debates they inspire. As it happens, I’m all for MFA programs. Are they the only route toward publishing literary fiction? No. Are they useful? You bet. Like Miller, I’ll support anything that supports writers, and MFA programs surely do this. Not only do they allow aspiring writers time and space to work, the faculty positions keep many a published author financially afloat.
In any case, the alleged problem of “cookie cutter fiction” issuing forth from MFA programs strikes me as less lamentable than the ever-growing tide of celebrity books. Last week I happened to catch WNYC’s Leonard Lopate interviewing actor Rob Lowe about his recently published memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends. With apologies to fans of The West Wing and St. Elmo’s Fire, I was underwhelmed. Maybe it was the traffic, but just for a moment, I wanted to beat my head–ever so gently–against the steering wheel. Not so much because Rob Lowe is so especially abhorrent. His tone was self-congratulatory, but affably so. And in fairness I must add that not only have I not read his book, the reviews I’ve seen have been positive, even glowing. All take pains to note that Lowe penned the book himself, without help. Indeed, the degree to which Lopate and assorted others have marveled at his not working with a ghost-writer was just a teensy bit insulting.
So what’s my problem? Celebrity authors are nothing new (here’s Lauren’s take, a few months back) and as far as publishing houses are concerned, finding an author who has a name is certainly easier and less of a gamble than making one, but I feel like the VIP Lounge here in bookworld grows increasingly and uncomfortably crowded. As all of you will have surely noted, the film and television stars of decades past have gone onto second careers as authors, and if there is something somewhat cookie cutter-ish about their stories of transgression/redemption, the price of fame and the struggle for authenticity, it’s not because they enrolled in MFA programs.
What do you think? Am I just being cranky? Or does it seem to you that the celebrity driven nonfiction is an ever-growing slice of the publishing pie?
I wonder if this is actually true. Perhaps this week I’ll try and find out and report back.
Yesterday, while leafing through my new May issue of the Atlantic (which I found worryingly slender) I spotted an unusual letter to the editor in response to Sandra Tsing Loh’s altogether entertaining essay “Sympathy for the Tiger Moms.”
Mike Shatz of Brookline, MA writes, “I do have a perspective on Ms. Loh’s writing that I suspect few of your readers share, since I first encountered it in grading her homework and exam papers when she was taking sophomore physics. It has improved tremendously since then. Surely that is in part because of her practice of her craft. But I have no doubt that much of the improvement comes from writing about what interests her rather than trying to please her father.”
I thought this letter was interesting even for those who have not been following (or could care less about) the tiger parent brouhaha. Although most writers I know write for themselves, or an interested but unspecific reader, it’s also true—and fun to imagine—that an authors’ work may well end up in the hands of her high school physics teacher, or any of a host of the people “who knew you when…”
So in light of Miriam’s recent post about the importance of teaching writing, my own suspicion that my posts are a far cry from the well-ordered essays my sophomore-year English teacher taught me to construct, and the humbling gaffe I made using “stationary” for “stationery” last week, I’d like to solicit tales of teachers. I’d love to hear about your early writing mentors—people who encouraged your love of words—or alternately, teachers who might be surprised, even shocked, to note that you are a now a writer. No need to use whole names here, indeed, probably best if you don’t.
Whenever I meet with writers, I inevitably field a few questions about query letter missteps—a subject that this blog has covered before. But inspired by a letter from a writer who requested my help to introduce her book to “the masses,” I thought I’d offer up a fresh crop of ten faux pas that are easy enough to avoid.
1) Beware grandiosity. Calling your novel a “surefire hit” or a “modern classic” is probably better left to your eventual reviewers (or exuberant jacket copywriters). Also probably a good idea not to identify your readership as “the masses.”
2) Conversely, avoid sounding overly humble, untalented, or self-abnegating. Too much modesty can be convincing. This from a recent query: “I have no real background or training in writing. I have never taken a writing class, and I’m not even sure that I’m any good.” Here discretion would have been the better part of valor.
3) If the book you are pitching is nonfiction, avoid discussing how publication of the proposed project will help build your platform as tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. The platform and the book is not a chicken-and-egg argument. As far as houses are concerned, platform comes first, book second.
4) Avoid making the book seem like a little something you sat down to do one afternoon because you figured you could write something at least as good as “what’s out there.” This may be the gospel truth, but it’s just not polite to say so.
5) Don’t insult an agent’s taste, impugn her professional ethics, imply she is a “tool,” or otherwise dare her to read your mind-blowing novel/memoir/political expose.
6) Do point out if English is not your first language. Fair enough.
7) Don’t use fancy “stationery” backgrounds for your query letter. They usually muddle formatting.
8) Don’t ask for advice on how to get published. The expectation is that you have done your due diligence.
9) Don’t send an attachment without a query in the body of an e-mail; most agents won’t open it for fear of picking up something nasty.
10) And of course, all the familiar old saws. Be cordial, professional, show a sense of humor and avoid calling your book a “fiction novel,” (this last is a nitpicky, small-minded pet peeve of mine; novels are, by definition, works of fiction.) It might, however, be worth noting if your memoir is nonfiction. Once this too would have been considered redundant, but in the post James Frey, Greg Mortenson world, perhaps it’s a handy distinction.
July 15, 2011 
Jessica 