Category Archives: Miriam

August 18, 2010   DG&B   fun, Miriam, opinion, reading, titles  
4

If book titles told the truth….

by Miriam

Authors, agents and publishers tend to agonize over book titles. You want something evocative, witty, literary, whimsical, muscular, funny, quirky, different, but not too different, alliterative, lyrical, short…. You basically want the equivalent of the advertising jingle you can’t get out of your head. But, as Dan Wilbur points out, readers are sometimes flummoxed by titles that give them no hint of what the story they’re going to spend hours, days, sometimes months trying to get through is about or that don’t quite prepare them for the experience they’re about to embark upon (good or painful).

Some titles, of course, are exquisitely straightforward (The Old Man and the Sea, for instance, pretty much sums up what you’re up against with the longest short novel ever), but there are plenty that are headscratchers. What are some of the titles you’d like changed for clarity’s sake and what would their replacements be?

August 11, 2010   DG&B   Miriam, opinion, reading, YA  
8

My Way or YA?

by Miriam

My “away” vacation this year was spent in the Outer Banks with my family, mostly eating, drinking and lounging on the beach (actual swimming was not really possible given the profusion of jellyfish). A couple of those days were also spent reading the last installment of Richelle Mead’s delightfully unputdownable (yes, I know, it’s not really a word, but it fits the bill) Spirit Bound. I could tell you that, by doing so, I was catching up on work – around here, we like to read books from each others’ lists so that we can speak intelligently about them at cocktail parties – but I’d be lying. In fact, I’d been hounding Jim McCarthy for a copy of the book to take with me, even though the ones the publisher had sent over were designated for rights sales. The reality is that ever since Jim urged me to read the first Vampire Academy book, I’ve been hooked on the series. Will Rose have to kill Dimitri? Will she be able to save him? Will Lissa and Christian work through their issues? The series is about serious teenage vampire angst with a body count and boasts a thoroughly engaging, kick-ass heroine, so as soon as I finish a book, I start bugging Jim for information about the next one. (He doesn’t find this annoying at all.)

As you all know by now, we like to think of ourselves as serious publishing professionals, but we’re also just big old geeky readers who can be sucked in by certain books like swimmers by a riptide. These days, it seems that a lot of the books dragging us out to sea are YA titles. I love Amanda Foreman’s quote about her love of YA books in this New York Times piece: “A lot of adult literature is all art and no heart, but good Y.A. is like good television. There’s a freshness there; it’s engaging. Y.A. authors aren’t writing about middle-aged anomie or ­disappointed people.” I think this perfectly explains the boom in this category in recent times and why it is adults are so captivated by literature meant for tweens and teens. Even when tackling difficult, dark subjects, the writing in this genre is all about possibility, about the ability to overcome obstacles and get to the other side. Who can resist that message and the edge-of-your-seat plot twists?

One of the takeaways for me is that the reason YA is so huge among adults right now may be that readers want good old-fashioned great storytelling that takes them away from their uncomfortable realities (the economy, the state of world affairs, global warming, the Kardashians) and makes them believe in possibility. What do you all think?

August 10, 2010   DG&B   about us, changes at DGLM, Chasya, great books, interns, Jane, Miriam, Rachel, Stephanie, what we're looking for, What's New at DGLM  
5

Welcome to DGLM, Stephanie DeVita!

by Stephanie

Hi blog readers! Now that both Jane and Chasya have so kindly introduced me, it’s my turn to chime in. I guess the best way to begin is to give you a little information on my background here. I may be new to the website, but I’m not entirely new to the blog. In fact, I have actually been puttering around this office for longer than you think.

I began at Dystel & Goderich over a year ago as an intern. I was determined to find myself an internship in publishing, particularly during the latter half of my college career. I hadn’t had much luck early on, so by my third year at NYU, nothing was going to stop me. I applied and interviewed for the internship with DGLM all while living in London, where I was spending the spring semester of my junior year. Fully aware that my geographical gap could create a handicap, I knew I had to be persistent. And luckily for me, according to Lauren, I was persistent enough that it exhibited my determination, but not too persistent that it made her want to burn my application and any remaining evidence of my existence. So with that, I was offered the chance to join DGLM that summer as an intern. The semesters passed, I continued to stay with the agency, and before I knew it about a year and a half had gone by and I had graduated from NYU. Then I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity by Jane and Miriam to take over for Chasya as she looks to begin a new chapter in her life. I knew that the timing was right; I felt comfortable here, and I had spent enough time working on the less essential tasks that I had developed the desire to explore the business further and carve out my own place in it. And as clichés go, the rest is history.

In giving this blog post some thought, I remembered something Rachel had said in her welcome post: “I think the one thing I truly love about working in a literary agency is that I get to see the entire process of publishing, from a rough manuscript to a finished book on the shelves.” I might make fun of Rachel for her love of Vegemite, but her words are very true. I’m very excited to finally get the chance to dive in and take on my own work. My time at DGLM has allowed me to expose myself to an industry I have always wanted to be a part of, and now it’s allowing me to embark on a new journey in my life—one that will allow me to build the career I’ve always wanted.

The bottom line is, I’m excited to take on this new responsibility within Dystel & Goderich, because now I get to hear from you. Yes, you. I look forward to hearing your ideas, your thoughts, your opinions. You all have stories to tell. Trust me, I’ve read a lot of them. But now I’m ready to do something with them. Turn them into the books they deserve to be. There are certain subjects I’m particularly interested in reading, which you can find in my bio on our website. So let me hear from you. I can only rearrange the pens on my desk for so long….

August 04, 2010   DG&B   advice, Miriam, writing  
1

Iceberg theory

by Miriam

Being a lifelong Hemingway fan—yes, few writers are easier to parody, but few have also done so much with clean, well-lit prose—I’ve always found his “iceberg theory” of writing to be absolutely dead on. Instead of trying to throw everything and the refrigerator into your book, why not have your accumulated knowledge inform your characters’ motivations or the choices you make in telling their story rather than overwhelming it. There’s nothing more tedious than a writer who has to show off every bit of research that went in to his/her saga about 19th century pickle canning for instance.

In this excerpt from George Rabasa’s Views from the Loft: A Portable Writer’s Workshop, the author offers some helpful tips to keep the iceberg from sinking your narrative ship. My favorite is #10: “Research does not make the story. The story makes the story.”

July 28, 2010   DG&B   advice, From the Vault, Miriam, queries  
2

From the Vault: Query perfection

Happy summer, everybody!  For the next while, there are going to be some absences from the blog as we take vacations, but we’d hate to leave you guys hanging.  It’s no secret that we blog much more now than when we started this baby, and there are far more of you reading than there were way back when.  So we thought we’d bring back some blog entries of days gone by that you may have missed if you just joined us in the last year.  We’ve cued up enough, but if you have any favorites you think your fellow readers might enjoy, give us a shout below!

by Miriam

The perfect query letter does not exist. (Well, perhaps it lives in the fantasy realm of unicorns and dragons, but certainly not in our day-to-day publishing world.) And, yet, everyone seems to be chasing the formula for that elusive, perfect query letter (EPQL) and its pursuit is giving a lot of people agita and heartburn. It’s a recurring theme during the Q&A portion of agent presentations at writers conferences. Many internet sites and print publications aimed at writers spend a lot of time on the subject and, in talking with individual authors, it seems that confusion about this subject is universal.

So, I will try to elucidate what makes a query effective — not perfect, mind you, just effective — for us here at DGLM:

1. It should be succinct and to the point. The purpose of this missive is to introduce yourself and your project and ascertain if the agent wants to take a look at your proposal/manuscript. It is not the place to go into longwinded detail about the weather, your passion for shell collecting (unless, of course, the book is about shell collecting), or your great-aunt Mary’s faith that you would one day be a published writer. It should, however, be no more than a page long and look and read like a letter not a report.

The first paragraph might mention how you came to query this particular agent and/or agency – perhaps noting that you saw a nice acknowledgement of the agent in a book you admired or you looked on the agency’s web site and identified with the agent’s profile somehow or anything that shows that you did your homework and that this is not just a form letter being sent to 6,000 agents.

The next paragraph should tell the prospective agent what the book is in a couple of sentences. Here is not the place to summarize your entire book. You want to highlight the strongest themes or the elements that make the book distinctive (e.g., “My novel tells the tale of star-crossed teenage lovers separated by their families’ bitter feud.” Not, “Romeo grew up in Verona and was part of the Montague clan. He met and fell in love with Juliet who was a member of the Capulet familiy and who spent an inordinate amount of time on balconies or talking to her nurse….”) Unless you’re very good at writing concise plot summaries, the less said the better. The idea is to get the agent to the actual manuscript.

The final paragraph should tell us anything relevant about you – this is your first novel or you’ve been published in numerous literary journals or John Cheever was your godfather or you’re a neurosurgeon who has an MFA from the Iowa writing program, etc. – and ask if you may send a sample of your project or the complete manuscript.

2. On the technical side of things: Spell check and then carefully proofread the query. We have had instances of great hilarity over a dropped letter in a strategic spot. Someone once queried us for a book about “pubic policy” and, juvenile bunch that we are, we didn’t stop laughing for days. You don’t want the query to go directly to the form rejections pile because of typos, grammatical errors or because you addressed the envelope to one agent and sent it to another.

It’s okay to single space query letters – as you would any other letter – but it’s not okay to make your margins less than one inch wide and your font teeny tiny so that you can fit a three-page description into one page. Ease of reading is half the battle among us bleary-eyed publishing people. (Everything else in your submission package should be double spaced and single sided.)

Finally, unless you’re in prison, type your queries rather than handwriting them. One of my favorite queries of all time was a six-page handwritten saga describing the author’s genealogical connections to everyone from the British royal family to Lassie.

3. Did I mention doing your homework? If the agent you’re querying only represents science fiction and fantasy, don’t send him/her a query for a self-help proposal. That’s a waste of everyone’s time and postage, and there are so many places where you can find information on agents and publishers that it should be relatively easy to identify your target.

4. Use any edge you have. If you met one of us at a conference, lead with that. If your father went to school with one of our spouses, tell us that. Anything that helps us identify yours as something we should pay attention to is fair to include. Ultimately, it’s the actual idea and writing that will determine whether we offer representation, but that won’t happen if your query doesn’t make us request your material.

Caveat: Even if you follow my directions slavishly, there’s no guarantee that your query will be that EPQL we’re all looking for. As with everything else in this quixotic business, you can sometimes do all the wrong things and still end up with an agent and a book contract. And, conversely, you can do all the right things and not get your foot in the door. So, my advice is to better your chances by crafting as good a query letter as you can and then trust that your efforts and the strength of your work will pay off.

Originally posted in December 2006.

July 21, 2010   DG&B   controversy, e-books, future of publishing, Miriam, opinion  
7

You can’t take it with you…or can you?

by Miriam

As you all know, we’re obsessed with electronic rights around here and pretty concerned with issues like piracy and copyright violations stemming from all the ways technology makes it easy to rip off an author’s work and not compensate him or her for it.  And, now, my friend Joan has sent me this link about a device that will allow you to put your entire library, not to mention that heavy backpack full of textbooks, into your e-reader of choice with little fuss and no muss. 

Full disclaimer: I’ve known Ian Sullivan, one of the inventors, since he was a four-year-old with an aversion to clothes and I was his longsuffering babysitter.  Before I take him to task for contributing to the downfall of the publishing industry, what do you all think of his invention?  Is it merely a boon to those of us who want to cart our entire library with us when we’re on the move?  Or is it another sinister way to encroach upon author rights?

July 14, 2010   DG&B   favorites, fun, Miriam, reading  
4

The real Camelot

by Miriam

I’ve been fascinated by the Arthurian legend since I was a kid. The impossible struggle to be good in the face of temptation and evil, the idea that a belief in magic is as necessary for survival as the quest for something of meaning, the courage and passion and the heartbreaking losses and defeats, the notion that the human spirit can triumph over the darkness that sometimes threatens to engulf us…all that and Excalibur. I’ve read dozens of versions over the years, from Chretien de Troyes’ to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s to John Steinbeck’s to T.H. White’s to Mary Stewart’s to Richard Monaco’s to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s, and always hoped that there was more than myth and folklore to the story of the great King Arthur and his court.

So, it was with great delight that I came upon this piece in the Daily Mail. How cool is the discovery that there was, in fact, a real Round Table (which was not a table at all)? Hopefully, the new information will spark a new wave of Arthurian storytelling.

July 07, 2010   DG&B   fun, lists, Miriam, opinion, reading  
7

Stephen King’s pop culture

by Miriam

I’m a fan of Stephen King’s work…in Entertainment Weekly. His stuff for the magazine has a playfulness and wit, not to mention brevity, that is often missing from at least his most recent (and by recent I mean the last 15 to 20 years) long form writing. I find his recommendations for films, music and, of course, books, always intriguing and occasionally baffling—and those are the best kind. Here are his Top 6 summer reads. I know at least four of them will make their way onto my night table pile.

July 06, 2010   DG&B   Miriam, opinion, queries, rejection  
26

Sometimes, the answer is "no"

by Miriam

So, once every ten weeks or so, each of us at DGLM have to come up with a lengthier than usual blog post. Turns out that on this, the hottest week in memory, it’s my turn to come up with something to charm and/or entertain you, dear readers. Unfortunately, I think the heat has melted several key synapses and I can’t remember a single book I’ve ever read. Heck, I’m not sure I remember how to read. It really is that hot.

While casting about for subjects that don’t involve having to research the Modern Library’s 100 greatest books so I can tell you why I like the ones I’ve read or how embarrassed I am about the ones I haven’t, it occurs to me that we haven’t discussed the whole not-everyone-should-be-a-writer thing. Before you all turn on me with the internet equivalent of torches and pitchforks, hear me out.

All of us here at DGLM (including the interns) are inundated with query letters and manuscripts on a daily basis. As you know from all our nattering on about slush and having to decide what to request, we see everything — from the brilliant to the “what the…?” For the purposes of this post, let’s consider the truly awful queries which are sometimes accompanied by truly awful manuscripts. Contrary to what many of you may think after receiving a rejection letter from an agent or publisher, most of us in the business do not enjoy turning people down. Some of us have harbored our own literary fantasies and come to terms with the fact that we don’t have the courage or the talent to pursue the writing life. Most of us understand how hard and lonely a path this can be and respect the perseverance and love that it takes to plow ahead in the face of doors slamming in one’s face and the dedication to continue to work on one’s craft even when encouragement and support are in short shrift. We don’t like to turn things down, but we have to.

What most of us never say to an author whose unquestionably unreadable work has crossed our desks is that s/he should stop writing with an eye toward publication. In our eternally hopeful society, where the can-do spirit is practically encoded in our collective DNA, telling someone that they should give up trying to do something they’re just not good at is tantamount to shooting puppies. But honestly, some people should not be trying to get published. (Please note, that I’m not saying they shouldn’t be writing – if that is an enjoyable, even therapeutic pastime, carry on! – just that not everyone should be trying to get their writings published.)

Yes, ours is a subjective business and Jim McCarthy may go into a rage if someone says they didn’t love Madame Bovary while I am often called names when I say I just don’t get what the fuss about Salinger is about. But, those authors and most of the ones that do end up successfully published bring enough talent to the table – whether as storytellers, prose stylists, or thinkers – that their works enrich us on whatever level they touch our lives. Alas, too many people who are bad storytellers, incoherent and ungrammatical writers, and who have nothing new to say, think that they should have a book contract. I’m not sure there’s much that can be done about this, but I do wish we could be more honest and forthright about the fact that they probably should set their sights on other talents they might be able to develop instead of giving them false hope that maybe, if they keep going, they will attain their publishing ambitions.

As writers, do you find yourselves biting your tongue when a colleague you don’t think is particularly talented is railing about how no one “gets” their work?

June 30, 2010   DG&B   advice, fun, Miriam, opinion, our clients  
5

When close is too close

by Miriam

Having started out in publishing working for a brilliant and somewhat deranged literary agent (no, not Jane, it was her partner at the time, Jay Acton) and in an era of delightful scandals (editors sleeping with their married bosses and creating corporate maelstroms, the multi-martini lunches, the temper tantrums that involved office furniture being launched at unsuspecting assistants, etc.) in our always interesting business, I’m drawn to stories of agents/publishers behaving badly. So it was with a touch of voyeurism and a dash of nostalgia that I read this piece about former über-agent Harriet Wasserman and the implosion of her career.

The thing that struck me most about the piece, however, was Wasserman’s more than questionable judgment in her relationship with Saul Bellow. We often say on this blog that we strive for longterm relationships with our clients and we’ve even revealed that we consider many of our clients friends. However, the kind of inappropriate closeness between Wasserman and Bellow is, if nothing else, a cautionary tale. Ultimately, authors come to us for our professional services. They need our objectivity and our pragmatism much more than the occasional hand-holding and sympathetic ear we also offer. I’ve seen countless situations where a sort of “transference” takes place between a client and an agent and the expectations (on both sides) cease to be professional and start becoming tinged with the personal and emotional. That doesn’t do anyone any good.

So, is this to say that agents and their clients shouldn’t be friends? Of course not. The creative and financial collaboration between these two parties are often enriched by a professional friendship. But, I think neither party is well served to cross the line and treat the other as you would your best buddy. Your agent is not the person to unload all of your neuroses on just because they’re obligated to take your call and you should start looking for a new agent in Publisher’s Marketplace if your agent begins to unload his marital problems when you call to ask about your royalty statements.

Have any of you had inappropriate dealings with agents or other publishing folks (no need to name names, people)?

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