Lauren | Dystel, Goderich & Bourret

November 20, 2009

DG&B

e-books, Lauren, round up

2

Where has the week gone?

by Lauren

It’s been a busy week around these parts, with Sarah Palin’s book hitting the shelves; publishers ignoring potential breakout hits in a neverending search for obvious frontlist; and debate on Harlequin’s branching out into self-publishing territory. We answered questions on fiction credentials and platform building; admitted to guilty pleasure reading; explained publishing; practically wrote your letter to Santa for you; analyzed the reading habits of youth; asked for short story suggestions; and Chasya told you why she’s here in the first place.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog posted a covers contest so challenging that even previous winners Jim and I couldn’t get ‘em all. (Seriously, people, what are #2 and #4? They haven’t posted the answers yet, and it’s driving me a bit nuts.) They also interviewed a seriously awesome 4-year-old on his love of books and monsters. Everyone talked about the eminently deserving Colum McCann’s win of the National Book Award. Eric at Pimp My Novel pointed out that we’re writing a lot of books about people’s daughters lately. Michael Cairns at PersonaNonData analyzed e-book pricing. The author behind Belle de Jour, blog-turned-book-turned-TV-show about a prostitute in London, turned out to be a research scientist. And Nathan Bransford made a pretty compelling argument for the eventual supremacy of e-books because people gravitate toward efficiency (on the one hand, I dream about one day having a home library with rolling ladders to reach the higher shelves; on the other, I’m kind of an efficiency nerd).

And now I’m off to figure out how to efficiently fit a library large enough to require rolling ladders in a New York City apartment.

November 18, 2009

DG&B

audio, fun, Lauren

3

The best holiday present ever?

by Lauren

Just breaking in to your regularly scheduled programming to let you know what to add to your holiday gift wish list: the LA Times Jacket Copy blog reports on an audiobook version of the Bible coming out from Thomas Nelson. Perhaps you have no interest in listening to the Bible or you’re already pretty sure you know how it ends, but can I persuade you with the news that Luke Perry will be reading the part of Judas? Judas always did seem like the Biblical figure most likely to have awesome sideburns.

(via Combreviations)

November 13, 2009

DG&B

advice, Lauren, Michael, queries, submissions

3

Query spam

Recently, Michael encouraged you not to sweat the small stuff in queries and to understand that it’s more important to write a great query than to worry about individual agents’ pet peeves or assume that one false move will get you deleted without being read.

That’s excellent advice, and I fully support it. But I’ve noticed over the last year or so that there’s been an upsurge in the number of queries that seem to come through some company or program, rather than directly from the author. And that these queries tend to be sent to every agent here (and presumably every agent in some large database) and also tend to get filtered out as spam by our junk mail program. When I check my quarantined email, nearly every query in there has formatting that suggests to me they’re coming from the same place. Lately they’ve been emails that begin with a salutation, proceed to a block of text with title/author/logline, and then begin a letter below. At one point they were emails where the logline was in the subject of the email. I’ve discussed this with other agents here and at other agencies, and we’ve all had the same experience.

Will I reject an author on principle if they use such a tactic? No, not really. A great query is a great query, and they’re not always so easy to find. But while I have no problem with authors querying multiple agents, I don’t think this is a good way to do that. For one, if it’s getting trapped in our spam filters, it’s probably getting trapped in many other agents’, and that’s not a good way to get read. Beyond that, if I sense going in that all my colleagues and the entire rest of the publishing world has the same query, I’m already less inclined to get excited about it. But mostly, it suggests to me that the author hasn’t done any research and likely doesn’t understand that certain agents and certain editors and certain publishers work with certain types of books.

I do think it’s important to know where your book fits and to figure out particular agents you feel would be right for your book. I think that part of being a successful author is understanding the market and how it works. Much like when I submit a book to editors I carefully consider to whom I’m going to send based on what they’re looking for, I expect prospective clients to do the same.

I don’t discount the possibility that some of the queries I’ve received in this way were carefully selected for me and not sent to the whole wide world since I don’t actually know how they’re being generated, but if so, why lump yourself in with those people who really are just spamming the publishing industry? As an agent who gets too many queries a day to count, I recommend you send your queries to the agents you’ve carefully selected one by one. (Not that you can’t submit queries simultaneously, because we expect that you will and I don’t know any agents who have a problem with it, but that each query should be sent in a separate email to a particular individual.) Sure it takes more time, but if your writing career is not worth investing time in, then why would you even bother? And, to be honest, why would we?

Or course, as Michael mentions in his post, I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir here! If you’re actively learning about the goings on of the publishing industry, this may well be advice you don’t need. But if you could shed any light on where these queries are actually coming from, I’m all ears!

-Lauren

November 10, 2009

DG&B

about us, advice, Chasya, Chasya's Questions Corner, children's books, Jim, Lauren, Michael, middle grade, queries, Stacey, submissions, what we're looking for, YA

2

Chasya’s Question Corner is live!

Thanks to everyone who sent in their questions! As I mentioned in my post last week, I’ll be choosing one or two of your questions a week and answering them here. There were a lot of really good ones and I hope to answer as many of these as I can, so if you don’t see yours here today it doesn’t mean that we won’t be responding to it later. What I mean to say is, stay tuned!

If you have a question, please send it to news@dystel.com. All questions will remain anonymous:

One of our readers asks:

“I have a novel (debut) that was read by 6 editors 5 years ago (2004).
They praised it but were also consistent in why they didn’t want it.
I have (after have children, etc. etc.) fully revised it, and in
effect it is a completely different narrative, but with the same
characters, setting, tone. The agent who shopped it left the agency
and we parted ways–we had no formal agreement (the deal was, if they
weren’t successful placing my novel we’d have no contract). My
question is, when querying agents now, do I mention the novel’s past
in the query, or wait until the agent has had a chance to read it and
connect to it? I am afraid of turning them off….concerned that they
won’t read the novel with the same eye if they are aware someone else
rejected it, even if it was five years ago and quite different.”

Answer:

A quandary, indeed. How much does one disclose when it’s tough enough getting any attention as a first-time author?

The answer is actually pretty simple: It’s very important that you are completely up front about the history of your project when approaching an agent. The surest way of “turning them off” is by not being honest about the manuscript. And you don’t want an agent to think that you are being dishonest.

If you’re waiting until an agent calls with interest in the project to inform them of the history behind it, they will want to know why this didn’t come up in your initial query. Even if you mean no harm and your intention is to let the work speak for itself, it comes off as underhanded. We’re not just assessing if we’re interested in or in love with a book–we’re reading it to figure out if we feel we can sell it. If it’s been seen before, that’s an important factor. In some cases, it may help to know that a project was strong enough to get an agent once before.

If you are, in fact, letting the work speak for itself, then disclosing this information shouldn’t really matter. We understand that fiction is very subjective, and we know that a manuscript that doesn’t necessarily speak to another person’s taste is not any reason to not give it due consideration. We also understand the business, and can tell you that if your manuscript has been to every fiction editor out there and hasn’t undergone any changes, they most definitely do not want to see it again. Editors are swamped–buried in reading and juggling more hats than ever before. If they’ve turned something down it’s usually for good reason, and they don’t have the luxury of giving something a second read. A prospective agent will have to make a judgment call about whether they think that the number of editors who have seen something (and the kinds of changes) make a difference in whether or not they think they can sell. However, if an agent truly does see your talent, even if they don’t think they can sell that book, they might recommend moving on to another project first, and if that succeeds, going back and trying to shop the original manuscript.

We must rely on our authors to be forthcoming about their work in order to serve them best. Being evasive or holding back really only leads to feelings of mistrust and can put an agent in an awkward position. It’s not a good way to start, so be sure to provide these details from the get-go.

Another reader asks:

“This is probably a no, but does anyone in your organization represent children’s book authors?”

Answer:

In fact, the answer is a yes. Michael Bourret represents young adult and middle grade, along with a very select group of author/illustrators. Jim McCarthy, Lauren Abramo and Stacey Glick all represent YA and middle grade, as well.

-Chasya

November 02, 2009

DG&B

Lauren, our blog

20

The blog it is a-changing

As you may have noticed, the DGLM blog has begun to change just a bit. There’s been more activity around here, and that’s only the beginning.

We’re beginning a gradual process of changing the way we do things. First and foremost, there will be more entries, more regularly, from more agents. And we’ll be paying closer attention to which posts you guys seem most excited about and trying to give you the content you’re looking for. We’re aiming to link more, to post more multimedia, and to start more conversations with you fine folks.

Change will be gradual, but we’re hoping to get feedback from all of you and to incorporate as many of your ideas as we can to build a stronger blog together. We may not be able to take on every suggestion, but we promise to listen and consider what you have to say. And we hope you’ll continue to let us know as we go along as well–and let us know what you think of the changes you see!

So what do you think? What would you like to see from us that we’re not already doing? What should we do more of? Is there anything you see on other blogs, particularly publishing industry blogs, that you’d also like to see here? And which other blogs are you reading? Which subjects do we cover too much and which should we cover more (or at all)? We’re thinking of switching from Blogger to WordPress–yay or nay? Polls and contests would be fun, right?

We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback and finding out how we can make this a more fun, helpful, and rewarding experience for us all! Let us know in the comments!

-Lauren

P.S. If anyone can tell me how to convince blogger to change the link color to what the Fonts and Colors screen tells me the link color is, I’d definitely appreciate it! I even tried poking around in the HTML, pretending to know what I’m looking for, and I don’t see the bright blue and purple of the links and followed links in the settings anywhere. UPDATED: Thanks for the help! It’s fixed now!

October 30, 2009

DG&B

fun, future of publishing, Lauren, reading

7

Shhh! People are reading.

This morning on the subway, I had the pleasure of seeing a diverse world of book reading in action. My Sony Reader and I sat down next to a woman reading a book on her Kindle. Across from Mrs. Kindle was a woman reading The Lost Symbol in hard cover. Standing up next to her, a woman read a trade paperback about our post-something-I-couldn’t-make-out world. When Mrs. Kindle got off to switch trains, a young man sat beside me, reading a book on his iPhone. A woman came on the train and stood just in front of him, reading Chris Marie Green’s Midnight Reign. When Mr. iPhone left, not only did this woman sit down in his seat, but she switched books to Nora Roberts’s Bed of Roses. Throughout the ride my end of the train also held a couple Metro and AM New York readers (because it’s hard to argue with free!) and someone reading a current affairs mag, but there was only a single person I saw who wasn’t reading at all and almost everyone was reading a book, in whatever genre or format best suited them. My only regret is that technology thwarted my subway voyeurism–I am, after all, the sort of person who subtly takes camera phone photos of F train passengers reading DGLM titles. I could see from the way the text was formatted that they were reading actual books, but not which books they were reading.

With all the fighting about how we get our content and how much we pay for it and who’s reading the right things and who’s reading the wrong ones, it’s nice sometimes to have a moment to be happy that at least we’re still reading!

-Lauren

September 23, 2009

DG&B

fun, Lauren

14

DGLM’s been Wordled.

I’d never seen this before, but then DGLM client Leigh Stringer posted a lovely Wordle on the blog on which her book The Green Workplace is based. Wordle is a website that converts text into an image similar to a tag cloud (but prettier!). I suppose it’s obvious that we’d talk about “books” a lot, but I’m pleased to see how often we use the word “think.”

Why not Wordle your own blogs and then give us a link to the results in the comments?

– Lauren

September 10, 2009

DG&B

fun, Lauren

3

Literature by age

Since I can’t resist any nerdery that involves a spreadsheet, I’m particularly tickled by this blog entry from the Guardian on charting literary characters by age and the separate blog this project has spawned. Has anyone ever had a similarly distressing realization that they’d now outpaced a character that they’d always thought of as older than they were?

-Lauren

September 04, 2009

DG&B

fun, Lauren, round up

2

In praise of the internet and in memory of Summer Fridays

It’s the Friday before Labor Day, marking the end of the publishing industry’s grandest tradition–Summer Fridays–until next Memorial Day. (For the uninitiated, Summer Fridays are half-day Fridays in the summer and one of the few things left over from the more civilized bygone days of three-martini lunches.) Let’s all shed a tear and distract ourselves with some of what the wide internet world has to offer:

Shelfari via Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing shows us why we should be jealous of Neil Gaiman’s library.

The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog brings us a few gems: Sivers.org’s explanation of Kurt Vonnegut’s explanation of drama queens–in handy graph form!

And a link to the Telegraph in the UK with their story about books most often left behind in UK Travelodge hotels–#2 is our very own Dreams from My Father! (Second only to what must be the most important book of our time, the latest memoir by the trashtastic Katie Price/Jordan. We just don’t do fake celebrity like they do in the UK!)

And a post in praise of risky covers with which I heartily agree! The cover they feature, for Black Cat’s The Hole We’re In by Gabrielle Zevin is phenomenal.

Some practical (but amusingly communicated) advice from Pimp My Blog, a blog by someone in the sales department at a major trade publisher, on blogging. I’m not sure I can really get behind #10, but I think we could all learn something from this post as well as the rest of the entries.

And to finish up, the Pimp My Novel Friday roundup (written by a “recovering publishing insider”, not the aforementioned sales team member) points to a piece on the Guardian Books Blog about not finishing books. I’m on board, generally, because there are very few books I’ll struggle through if I’m not loving them since I rarely find it worth it in the end, but I’d suggest that skipping out on the second half of Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost is a mistake. I’ll admit I had trouble with parts of it, but because Michael praised it so heavily I kept going and was happy to have done so.

Happy Final Summer Friday everyone, and have a great weekend!

-Lauren