Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room

Inviolate time

Josh Getzler

In this new world of constant accessibility, where the ability to receive (and therefore deal with) emails, text messages and phone calls on the subway, in bed, walking down the street...everywhere and at any time, it is increasingly difficult to come up with boundaries, with unreachable time. I was thinking about this at Starbucks this morning, between meetings, when I was "just checking my email" for a half an hour, the ice in my coffee melting as my stress level rose. I suddenly thought that it would be wonderful to Turn Off for a while, just enjoy the coffee and decompress. Then I pressed Send--I've been too busy for too many days, with too much upcoming busy-ness to take that particular half hour to smell the coffee.

For so many of us, this compulsive attention to communication is both freeing and shackling. We are no longer tied to a desk to do our jobs or our homes to talk to our families and friends. But we are also, then, always available, and sometimes don't want to be. It can become manic. Annoying to spouses and kids. Unhealthy.

I have two times each week where I am offline; one through ritual, one through choice. Both are vital to my mental health for different reasons. The first is that I observe the Jewish sabbath. As such I don't do many of the activities that make up my week, including talk on the phone and use my email. What I do is rest--read, walk, spend time with my family and many friends, and generally recharge my batteries. If I didn't have those 25 hours each week, I would have burned out several times by now. 

My other inviolate time is from 3:30-4 PM every Friday, when I take a drum lesson in between my daughter's and my son's. He's the family drum pioneer, starting more than two years ago. We got an electronic drum kit, so our grouchy downstairs neighbors would have less to complain about. And I found myself, almost every night as I went to say goodnight to him, idly picking up the sticks and tapping until my wife wanted to kill me. Finally I approached Joe's teacher, the amazing, ever patient Brad Meehan, and asked if he would take me on as well. While I played bad Talking Heads covers on guitar in a band in high school, I'd never played drums except on my steering wheel.

I loved it immediately. I was not natural. I took forever to learn a new beat, a new song. I never have time to practice (the neighbors are glad). But it's a half-hour a week of joy for me, when I don't need to think of the manuscripts teed up on my kindle, or the submissions I need to make, or the follow-up calls, or the bills to pay. Over the last year and a half I've learned Green Day and reggae, salsa and backbeat. My youngest daughter (the true pop star in the family--she dressed as Ke$ha for purim, god help me) decided to join the party, and now Brad deals with three of us every week.

For me, the drums have become a vital anchor to my week. I'm incredibly off-kilter when I need to miss time, particularly when it's unplanned. And if one of the kids can't make it, and I get an extra 15 minutes of playtime, it's like a snow day in elementary school. I don't need to practice two hours a day to achieve that happiness, either (though I'd be a LOT better!). Just that half-hour a week.

And last Sunday (sorry FB friends for the repeat), I got to play on a real set, on a real stage in a rock club, at Brad's students' recital. I did a Cowboy Mouth song from the late '80's, Jenny Says, right after Joe's Footloose and before Ita's California Gurls (and three after the 4 year old did We Will Rock You!). Here's a link. 

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=3549405728288

Am I ridiculous? Possibly. But ecstatic--if goofy--and far away from the responsibilities and pressures of daily life. And that's healthy.  

Against Synopses

Josh Getzler

I’m now over my compulsive refreshing of Amazon Rankings after last week’s frankly fascinating flurry of ascents (descents) into the heights (depths) of the charts. One last note: I also found it interesting that movement on the Amazon charts did not necessarily result in a comparable degree of success in the B&N.com charts. This probably has to do with a combination of differing demographics of who buys from B&N versus Amazon, and particularly in one case, when an author really concentrates on Amazon and ignores B&N. In any event, it was, anecdotally, my most retweeted post, and thanks to everyone for reacting. (And to Harry Potter’s Psychiatrist, neither the author nor I organized the Goodreads giveaway, and I suspect there will be others.)

This week’s particularly hectic. I’m two weeks out from my son’s Bar Mitzvah, so much of my free time is being spent talking to caterers and figuring out table seating charts. We’re also noticing that the boy’s formerly high and clear voice is beginning to waver a bit as he sings. Given that he just surpassed my wife in height (she's not Manute Bol, but it's a milestone nonetheless), we’re hoping like crazy that it doesn’t change any more between now and the beginning of June.

So just a quick word today on synopses, which are on my mind because I had to ask two of my clients to supply them for editors who requested them. The reason I didn’t have their synopses on file is very simple: I hate synopses, and don’t include them in my submission requirements.

When I was in college in the late 1980s, I took a course in Derridian deconstruction, which dealt with a number of arcane philosophies of literature and politics. One of the things it taught me was to take a text—complex, filled with the ebbs and flows of drama or plot—and break it down into its fundamental, chronological components. For my final paper I took Absalom, Absalom, broke it down into its plot elements, imposed Derridian Differance (with an a), and…sucked all the life out of Faulkner’s masterpiece. (Aside: I reread my paper four years after graduation, and didn’t understand one word. But it was, of course, very impressive.)

And that’s my problem with synopses: They take an author’s labor and break it down into dry plot elements. We want to read a story, be transported along. We don’t simply want to know what happens. We want to know in the author’s sweet time. It’s why I hate reading synopses, and most authors hate writing them. I feel that a letter with a paragraph or two with the idea of the book—genre, basic characterizations, length—and the first five pages, gives me a much better sense of whether I have an author I want to work with than two pages of “and then they find the daughter dead in the bathtub. And then the maid screams. And then the police come…”

OK, off my soapbox. Back to seating charts.   

 

Going Against My Own Philosophy: The story of how three very different books turned me into an Amazon Rankings Stalker for one day.

Josh Getzler

Today’s post is about not practicing what I preach. Since Amazon (and Barnes and Noble, but mostly Amazon) began to rank books several years ago, I have spent serious amounts of time vainly trying to convince my clients that if they spent their days pressing “refresh” on their ranking every five minutes, they would a) get carpal-tunnel syndrome, b) become unproductive at their writing right when I needed them to be producing the next book, and c) quickly descend into obsessive-compulsive mania, placing ever-more meaning on the fact that they went from, say, 116,065 to 116,172 between two and three am. “It’s counterproductive to your career to concentrate on your ranking so compulsively,” I would say. “The important thing is to do your best at marketing your book, working in tandem with your publisher to make the most of the window you have to sell the majority of your books.”

 

And it’s not that an Amazon ranking is reflective of any absolutely quantifiable metric (if you aren’t working in Seattle). We know it’s some combination of sales, page views, reviews, and alchemy. We don’t know how many books you need to sell in order to rise (fall? It’s such a pain when getting better means having a lower number). It’s all relative. Certainly it gets harder the higher up (lower number) you are to move the dial. And forget about the top 50 or so, which are all different editions of Hunger Games and 50 Shades of Grey these days anyway. So I tell my clients that while it’s OK to check every so often, don’t make yourself crazy.

 

I spent today going against everything I have been saying. I was dying for the numbers to refresh (which incidentally happens once an hour, unless the book is in the top 1,000, in which case it changes more often). I cursed when a title went in the wrong direction and tweeted madly when it rose (fell). And the interesting thing to me, and the reason I played the Amazon Stalking game so rabidly today, was that I had three titles moving significantly, and all for different reasons.

 

The most “normal” reason to be interested on a rainy Tuesday was because one of my clients had a book published this morning. Whitney Johnson’s Dare, Dream, Do (which I misstated on Facebook at 5:30 am—in my congratulatory post to her—because in my sleepy haze I used the title with which she had submitted the book to me, rather than what we decided on with the publisher, Bibliomotion), is a marvelous, inspirational book about finding your dreams and going for them. Whitney, who works in finance and venture capital in Boston with Innovation guru Clay Christensen, has spent the last several months—really almost a year—setting herself up for this day. She’s been talking with her vast network of contacts throughout the country, very nicely and with the right balance of savvy and fervor and belief in her message of empowerment, and built an almost palpable buzz for her book. I always believed that she had a chance to do well, but it wasn’t until ten days ago, when I saw Whitney organize the TriBeCa Film Festival’s Disruptive Innovation Awards (where I became a rock star dad to my 9 year old daughter when I emailed her a photo of Justin Bieber at the awards…), that I understood just how powerful her network was. Entrepreneurs, CEO’s, techies, media folk all knew about her book—and all liked and supported her, and promised to tweet and post on May 8. I couldn’t wait to see what would happen to her book when it went on sale. And there were hints that it was going to be good—her ranking had gone from 100,000 to 50,000 to 20,000 to 11,000 over the last week.

 

The second reason I was so interested in Amazon rankings today had to do with a book published in February: American Cancer Society CMO Dr. Otis Brawley and journalist Paul Goldberg’s How We Do Harm, which is Otis’s discussion of the ways that cancer patients in the US today are being over- and under-treated. (I’m being facile, because the book is about much more than that, but it’ll do for this discussion.) How We Do Harm had had a nice launch, with many strong reviews and a second printing, but it had been out a while and was sitting in the 10,000 range in ranking. That’s good, but the book had pretty much stabilized there for a couple of weeks. Then Otis spoke before a large group of medical journalists around ten days ago; and then was interviewed on television; and then was quoted in a number of medical blogs; and all of a sudden the number started to improve. And then, this morning, co-author Paul Goldberg emailed me “We’re in the Times—D5.” And it was an almost half-page article taken from the NY Times Wellness blog that discussed the book and interviewed Otis (with a large photo). I wanted to see what that would do to the rankings.

 

The final reason I was looking was for a unique situation. Several months ago one of my first clients, Keith Raffel, had taken a thriller he’d written, Drop by Drop, and released it himself in e-book form. He’d done quite well, selling several thousand copies at prices ranging from $1.99 to $5.99. Keith’s a former Tech CEO (as well as the traditionally published author of several books), and knows a little bit about incremental analysis. He’d hit a little dip in sales a couple of weeks ago, and decided to do something he’d never done before: put Drop by Drop on free download for the weekend, then see a) how he’d do in free downloads, and b) whether that might goose sales. Turns out he had more than twenty-three thousand free downloads, hitting the top ten in the whole free Kindle store. And when he began charging for it again, he found that he was selling considerably more copies than before, and was sitting around 500 in paid Kindle sales at the start of the day.

 

So when I woke up in the morning, Keith was around 500, Whitney (who’d gone on sale at midnight) had dropped all the way to 3,300, and Paul and Otis were at around 3,400. It is now 10:12 PM as I type this, and I’ve had a fascinating day. Keith stayed around 500 all day—but that was a good sign, as it’s pretty easy to drop off the face of the earth from that number if you don’t sell for any length of time. Otis and Paul, through traditional publicity (the story in the Times) augmented slightly by social media (several of us—but not hundreds of us, mind you--shared and tweeted the link to the article), went all the way to 1,300. In the late afternoon I received an email from their editor informing me that they were going back to press for a third printing. And Whitney, who was filled with positive energy and whose friends were overflowing with a bounty of good will toward her (she had people—what we call “big mouth influencers” cheering her on all day), was ubiquitous on social media. It would not at all surprise me if the number of people who saw a tweet or a Facebook post about Dare, Dream, Do today numbered in the millions. This evening, after she appeared in a sold out PivotBoston conference in front of 120 women, Whitney’s debut, on its launch day, hit 645, and #12 in the personal finance chart. And with events planned all over the country over the next couple of weeks, I would not be surprised at all if it improved as time passes.

 

So you can see why my mouse hovered constantly over “refresh.” For disparate but incredibly exciting reasons, I needed to ignore my own philosophy and—for one day, anyway—embrace my inner Amazon Stalker.   

 

On Paperless Post

Josh Getzler

OK, so it’s now been a week and a half back from London, and it’s taken every bit of that time to make a dent in the combination of work I had begun before I left for two weeks, and the work I knew I was beginning when I returned. I’ve got a lot of books out on submission, and that means I’ve received a lot of passes in the last ten days (some interest as well, but lots of passes). I spend lots of time reminding my clients that “it only takes one.” But there are times I need to be reminded of that as well.

Much of my off-time has been taken up with preparations for my son Joe’s bar mitzvah, coming up in a month. My wife and I are knee-deep in fabric samples, menus, and punch-lists. One of the great revelations, though, has been using an online service—in this case Paperless Post—for our invitations. In the same way that electronic manuscript submissions have changed the way publishing works, electronic invitations are now a perfectly reasonable and accepted way to send not only birthday party invites to the six-year-old ballet party, but even—as in our case—to what will turn out to be a party for 300.  And one of the great things about the electronic invite—like an emailed submission or a kindle download—is the instant gratification. No need to call Uncle Irving after a week and a half to make sure the invitation got there in the mail. The new problem is that there are some folks—mostly of a Certain Age—who don’t use email regularly. We have a printout for them. We certainly had moments of wistfulness, where we wonder whether our son will regret, in thirty years, not having a hardcopy of his invitation. This is rather like my own wonder whether I’ll regret not owning a physical copy of, say, Wolf Hall. But I suspect he’ll be OK, that this will be pretty standard very soon. The real tipping point will be when wedding invitations will be sent via email with regularity. Well, as Joe’s just told us about his first real crush, I suspect he’ll lead our family in that category as well.

In thirty years, when we begin to let him date.

 

London Report, part 2

Josh Getzler

So when last I wrote, I’d had two days at the London Book Fair, with another to go. And so I did, and it was terrific, and a wonderful experience. I feel like it’s a great idea for an agent—even one whose role is not to sell foreign rights—to go and take meetings in the International rights bullpen at Earl’s Court. Part of the reason is just because it’s a good idea to inhale the atmosphere—of camaraderie and commerce, professionals jacked up on caffeine extremely focused on meeting their schedules. It’s a bit like when I spent a few summers working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. If you look from above, or on TV, it looks like chaos. But really it’s a bunch of collegial folks doing business.

So last week I said that I’d go through some of what I heard in London; what markets were wanting and hesitant to take; eager to see and backing off. Here goes (realizing that these are gross generalities, and others might have heard different):

1)      Europe’s economic struggles are clearly affecting its publishers. Spain and Eastern Europe in particular were very frank in saying that previous aggressive buying has been curtailed. I went with fifteen or so books at the front of my list; my Eastern European co-agent said that they could only see being successful with around three—two of which already had buzz and several other foreign sales; the third was Anne Tyler. With Spain it was somewhat less specific, and more sad smiles and “times are hard.”

2)      On the other hand, Brazil seems to be very healthy. Whether from not being in Europe or from having a large population with burgeoning readership, the word from Brazil was “lay it on us.”

3)       France is…unique. I have three British historical novels (my joke is that I’m looking for one novel set in every century—to date I’m good with the 11^th, 12^th, 16^th, 17^th, 19^th, 20^th and 21^st Centuries. So if you have a good thriller set around Edward III, I’m your man!). A French editor smiled, shrugged, and said “what else do you have?” She was very pleased, however, when I said that I thought the French Revolution could be the next Tudors, and was looking for a good novel set around the storming of the Bastille.

4)      Everyone wants a “tentpost thriller” with a Franchise protagonist. Yes, well…

5)      Nobody wants to see any more dystopian YA, particularly paranormal. Unless, of course, you know…it’s good. But that’s glib. It’s really that from the YA side, there’s a sense that we’re ready for a next trend, to come after the Hunger Games followers are exhausted, which came after the Twilight followers were exhausted. There was a bit of a sense it could simply be realistic fiction, a la John Green; or perhaps witches or angels or new shapeshifters. Zombies are finishing their cycle too, it would appear. The amazing thing, of course, is that it’s going to be the one incredible story, rather than any industry-wide desire for a trend, that will ultimately determine what will be the next Big Thing.

On Wednesday night, after the nice announcer lady kicked everyone out of Earl’s Court, I went to a pub and had my last supper in London, while I read a manuscript. While I was eating, I noticed that the pub was becoming more and more crowded, and the predominant color being worn by the locals was blue. I discovered that the Chelsea Football Club was playing a Champions League semifinals match against the powerful first-seeded Barcelona club, and the match was about to start. I almost stayed to watch, but knew it was going to become extremely crowded, and I was going to be leaving for the airport early the next morning. So I went back to my cupboard under the stairs, petted Scabbers, and watched while I packed. I’m a very big sports fan with a wide range of likes. I’d never watched a high-level soccer match of this type before, though. It was exhilarating. And Chelsea, which won 1-0, had precisely ONE shot on goal in 90 minutes. And I couldn’t take my eyes off it. This evening I saw on my friend Mark James’ Facebook page that Chelsea had—almost miraculously—defeated Barca again to advance to the finals. All I can say is Go Blues! And next time I’ll watch from the pub.  

 

All Fair

Josh Getzler

Greetings from Cozy Single Room 17 of the London Lodge, otherwise known as the Cupboard Under the Stairs (Where's Hedwig?).

I'm here for the London Book Fair, having arrived Monday morning off the red-eye and leaving Thursday noon. So it's 2 1/2 days full of meetings, followed by beers and the occasional curry. Ive always said that, other than New York, the city I could most easily move to would be Rome. But after visiting with the family this summer and returning now, there really is no contest. I've taken to London--rain, expense, tiny hotel rooms and all--and...well, I guess I'll have to go to Rome soon to compare...

OK, so how is this Fair different from all other Fairs (sorry, Passover hangover)? Well, let me start by saying that my comparisons are the BEA in New York, writers conferences both regional and national, and professional baseball winter meetings from my other life. I've not yet been to Frankfurt or Bologna, which my sense is this most closely resembles. But from my experience, this is actually closest in atmosphere to a baseball winter meeting.

The first thing is that this doesn't at all resemble any writers conference, most notably because there simply aren't many authors visible. This is a working conference for publishing professionals--publishers, agents, international rights managers and reps, suppliers and other vendors. It's incredibly commercial--it's a trade show, where the product (sorry authors for using the word!) is books. In that respect, there are similarities to BEA--big convention center, with booths for all the publishers. But in New York, there's a real sense of the presence of writers, and also of the Public. Librarians, booksellers, and fans buy tickets and travel the floor, picking up ARC's (though fewer and fewer each year) and seeing what the publishers have to offer. Here everyone seems to be associated with a house, an agency or a supplier.

Another difference between this and every other conference I've attended is that I am constantly hearing other languages--moreso than at BEA. Of course, this is the first time I've attended a conference where I'm specifically selling translation rights. But the International Rights Center is very large and well-populated, and in any five square foot area I'm as likely to hear Chinese or German or Dutch, French, or Spanish. Today, for example, I met with (consecutively) a German publisher, our Italian co-agent, a Brazilian publisher, a foreign literary scout, a British editorial director, our British co-agents, an American editor and his British counterpart, our German co-agents, and another British editor. Yesterday I met with French agents, Korean agents, and had drinks with a bunch of film folks. Tomorrow is six more, plus an author schlepping in from Manchester for coffee.

I'm beat, but also exhilarated. The people have been simply wonderful--smart, productive, all excited to talk books. I've been pitching and re-pitching, seeing what's getting nods and what blank stares. I'll go through that analysis next week, when I've had the chance to recover and really consider what I've been hearing. And yes, there's lots of talk about ebook pricing and distribution, and belt-tightening etc that we always hear and complain about. And of course folks who've been to a bunch of these fairs say that it feels, you know, DIFFERENT from the good old days. But that's not the way I see it--and not simply because I am, as ever, looking for good things. It's because there IS a sense that books can sell--whether because of or despite the growth of e-publishing. Publishers are looking at opportunities to grow or expand lists to reflect and exploit this new reality. They are, among other things discussing launching e-original imprints (almost all the publishers are doing this, particularly for their genre fiction).

And the other reason I've been enjoying this trip so much is that it has given me a chance to meet people I've sometimes never even spoken with, but only communicated via email. There's a ton of two-cheek kissing and "so THERE you are" in the entrance to the rights center, and good-natured complaining about sore feet and inability to navigate the cavernous Earl's Court convention center.

I can't wait till tomorrow.

On vacation

Josh Getzler Greetings from the Holy City of Orlando, where I'm on vacation for the week. It's allowed me to detatch a little (though with iPad, iPhone and Kindle in tow, not TOO detatched)--I even had a chance to read The Hunger Games (which I liked and am looking forward to reading the rest) and my old friend Lindsay Faye's Gods of Gotham (which I'm halfway through and LOVING). Plus I've spent time with my gang at Disney and Universal Studios, with the pilgramage to Hogwarts set for Thursday (can I get a little chametz dispensation to try Butterbeer?). So more to come next week, when the dispatch will be from the LBF, which ought to be extremely interesting.

A Few Short Takes

Josh Getzler

Today's post is short after the last couple, because I am sitting with my wife and kids, watching the NCAA Women's Basketball championship game. The eight year-old, our future scrappy point guard, is in pretty much awe of Baylor's Brittney Griner, who's 6"8 and dunks (and is brilliant). If our Ita REALLY grows, she'll be a foot shorter. But she can ball, so watch out Title IX! I mean of course she first has to conquer the NYC Yeshiva League, but we're all pretty ambitious.

But I did want to mention that I had the opportunity late this afternoon for a real Holy Cow moment. An email came in as I was about to leave the office from Jen Besser, the editor of Geoff Rodkey's brilliant Chronicles of Egg: Deadweather and Sunrise. It had a wonderful subject line: HOORAY!. There was no message, only a link: http://rickriordan.blogspot.com/2012/04/deadweather-and-sunrise-avast-ye.html . Click the link and you'll know why my beer at Ear Inn taasted particularly good.

Next week I'll be blogging from Orlando, where the family will be having seder with Mickey, Donald, and Harry and Ron and Hermione. I wonder if Butterbeer is kosher for Passover...

Get Out Of My Head

Josh Getzler

On Sunday afternoon, my wife and I sat down at the Public Theater near NYU in comfortable clothes. We popped sucking candies into our mouths, made certain our phones were off-off, and watched a thirty-something redheaded man enter what looked like a dilapidated office from the 1980’s, set down his coffee and turn on his ancient computer. It didn’t work, so he turned it off and waited the requisite ten seconds, then tried it again. As he waited for it to boot up, he looked around his desk and picked up a dog-eared copy of The Great Gatsby. He started to read out loud. He stopped (except for three intermissions, including a supper break) seven hours later, having acted the part of Nick Caraway (along with his co-workers at the office, who took on the roles of Gatsby, Daisy, Tom et al) in a complete reading of Fitzgerald’s book. The play was Gatz, and it was a revelation.

The performance itself, which was somewhere between a staged reading of the entire book and an actual play, isn’t the point of this post. The point is the text of the book—the rhythmic, controlled lines that bridged Hemingway’s minimalism and Faulkner’s genius sprawl. The lines that were all in first person, never deviating from Nick’s perspective, never showing something Nick didn’t see except when he said “they told me that…” or “I heard that…”

Sometimes Fitzgerald wrote his way into corners, such as the scene where Gatsby and Nick were discussing from across the Buchanans’ lawn  whether they thought Daisy and Tom were inside. In order to find out, Nick needed to say “Wait here, I’ll check,” then trudge to a window, look in, trudge back, and report. It’s clunky, but necessary to stay in perspective.  Had Fitzgerald written a different kind of book, he could have panned into the house either by using an omniscient third person narrator or by “head-hopping” to, say, Daisy, sitting at the kitchen table not eating fried chicken or drinking ale. Would have perhaps been faster, not as slightly annoying to read. But, then, you kind of realized as Nick made his way to the house that he was annoyed, too; that he didn’t want to be doing this any more than we wanted to read it. It was an effective, if slightly excruciating, scene.

One of my pet peeves when reading my clients’ manuscripts (you know who you are, You and You and You…) is the overuse of head-hopping. My assistant, the ever-patient Maddie, who often reads along with me, will come in in the morning and, as we discuss our opinions, peer over her monitor and say “So, how many perspectives do we need to work around?”

And here’s the thing. Notice I didn’t say she asked “So, how are we going to work it into one perspective?” Oftentimes—particularly in novels with large casts, with scenes taking place simultaneously in different places, in the third person—it’s neither practical not necessary to be in one tight perspective. The trick, though, to me at least, is to be in as few heads as possible. I don’t like to be confused, paragraph by paragraph or chapter by chapter. I believe (most of the time, at least) in clarity of voice. I also don’t mind a couple of tight perspectives combined with a strong omniscient narrator—that can be very effective, particularly in place of zipping off into someone’s head for a short time. All it means is that you can’t say “he thought” but rather need to show it through action or conversation. It also forces the writer sometimes to really think through ancillary scenes and really assess their reason for being.

At 10:15 on Sunday night, after one of the more extraordinary days of both theater and literature I can remember, my wife and I left the theater and went home. I flipped on my iPad before bed and checked my email, and browsed through a couple of queries. I got to one where, in the first five pages the perspective changed three times. Sighing a little,  I moved it into the “Queries No” file. Sorry, Old Sport. No head-hopping after Gatz.

 

Brush Strokes and Heavy Lifting

Josh Getzler

Last week, when Jeff Cohen challenged me to a conversation about agent-author relationships, I wanted to get into one of his comments, but it didn’t fit into the time or space I had. So I’m going to take Extra Time like they do in soccer and discuss the question of whether I would send a book out on submission when it’s not really ready, just to get it off my desk. That was the basic question, right Jeff? No matter, it’s the question I’m answering, because it gets into a far more existential issue than whether another scrub would make a novel more marketable. Rather it has to do with intent, and with the true definition of “done” and whose decision that it, really. Hell, this could be my first Derridian deconstruction of text since my senior thesis (which I reread five years after graduation and didn’t understand one word I’d written after “By Josh Getzler”). So let me impose some late-80’s differance and see where it leads us.

First things first, I almost never simply get a manuscript, say “OK,” and send it to publishers. Once in a while with a reprint (because, well, what are you going to do?), but not with a manuscript that comes to me unpublished. And it’s not because I want to leave my mark or impose my will. It’s that most of the time, when I read a submission—even a terrific one—there are things in it that I think could make the book more marketable, or a better read, or better organized. So I always give it that kind of a once-over. I was originally an editor, and actually digging into text is something I love. But I do my best not to do unnecessary tearing apart.

Often, though, there is a need for edits, where either the plot outshines the character, or the pace needs speeding up (rarely does it need slowing down!), or where relationships need clarifying or worlds need to be built better or…whatever, it needs editing. There are then two ways I go about it: I either write an editorial letter with broad issue suggestions, or I go through the manuscript using Track Changes and do a full-on, roll-up-the-sleeves line edit. Often I will have a phone conversation with the author as well in order to clarify my points, particularly when I get the sense that I will get pushback on my tweaks. My clients know that I use the terms “brush strokes” and “heavy lifting” to describe the degree of work I think a manuscript needs before I feel it is ready to go out on submission.  Those terms also give a sense of how many times we’re going to need to do it, since a Brush Strokes ms often needs just one go-through and a scrubbing, while a Heavy Lift mostly needs to get to Brush Strokes first.

One thing to say here, which leads to the conclusion, is that my edits and suggestions are exactly those. I recognize and understand that this is my author’s writing, and he or she is very much entitled to disagree and choose to ignore me. And that doesn’t mean I won’t submit the book. And here’s the salient point. If I’ve chosen to take an author on, and have gone through the material to the point where the author is satisfied, unless I believe that the book is embarrassing in some way, I am likely to submit it. It’s not that I haven’t refused ever—I have several times told authors that I felt that their books are unsalable and either need another edit; or, occasionally, ought to be shelved for the time being. That could be because the market shifted away from the subject of the book; or there was something fundamentally flawed with the plot or characters that I felt that nobody would buy it and it would be a waste of the editors’ time to make them read it (which then would be a bad reflection on both the writer and on me).

But the point is that I believe that my role is to be the first reader, the advisor, the sounding board, the conduit between the author and the publishers. My judgment had already been made—I took the writer on after submission  because I felt that he or she was talented enough for me to spend my time reading, editing, and submitting the writer’s work. So while I will discuss and argue with the writer about decisions and choices, I will often defer to the author when I feel that further edits will not be useful. This is particularly true when I feel that the author has had it, and is becoming resentful of my suggestions. Then we get into diminishing returns on further edits, and it’s worth stepping back and preparing for submission.

The good thing, I have found, is that most of the time, my authors and I get to the point of saying “we’re ready” at the same time. We get to the best possible place for the manuscript, where the kitchen smells great, like a cake is in the oven. And then, when it’s completely baked to our satisfaction, we take it out and serve it to the publishers.

Hope that helps! 

 

A Response, Not A Rebuttal

Josh Getzler

When Jeff told me that he was going to write his blog post this week on the relationship between author and agent, he made it sound dire. He gave me warning because he said that he wanted to give me the chance to rebut his post. I appreciated the opportunity, and waited quite apprehensively to see what he was going to say.

Ultimately, though, my response is hardly a rebuttal, but rather an expansion of sorts, from my perspective, of the relationship between writer and agent. I want to spend much of the time, actually, discussing an element of this relationship which has always been important but now, as the industry changes seemingly hourly, is even more so: Agent as expectation manager.

Yes, yes, Jeff is right that writers take the very blood out of their veins, give the outpouring to someone who (most of the time) isn't even related to them (and oftentimes not in the same city or state), and asks them to do right by them; to select the correct editor to submit to, to write the most pursuasive pitch, to negotiate the best contract, to stay on top of the publisher to ensure that the book gets the best possible chance to succeed. And the very vast majority of agents take that incredibly powerful responsibility very seriously and work hard to achieve the greatest success. As Jeff said, most of us are in this because we fundamentally love books and are excited to find something we think is terrific; so of course we want to see it reach its potential. It's also how we can pay the rent.

And there is the joke that we all hear that so much of our job is talking insecure and apprehensive artists off ledges that we ought to get degrees in Psychiatry rather than English (or business or writing, but you get the idea).

But now--and particularly in the past months--we have a new responsibility. It's now very important to alert our clients (whether current or potential) that being a writer no longer means, simply, Being a Writer. Rather, with the concurrent blossoming of social media and online communities along with the tightening of most publishers' purse strings in marketing and publicity, a writer is now responsible not just for writing his or her book, but also for getting word out.  And we've hit a tipping point recently, I think. Within the last year, I've seen writers who sign their contracts with a platform either in place  or planned out in detail exceed expectations regarding presales and early momentum. Conversely authors who don't--or who are either resistant or indifferent to this new paradigm--are unhappy, confused and resentful of the fact that simply writing something of quality is insufficient to success: They also need to go out and shill for it.

Both reactions--acceptance and enthusiasm on one side, rejection or grudging, half-hearted attempts on the other--are perfectly reasonable. I totally understand why an author would want to walk away from this crazy business rather than have to spend hours thinking of 140-character updates that might result in sales. I also see how a well thought-out strategy starting several months before publication and going a few months after pub can be both exciting and satisfying to an author who really buys in. (Incidentally, I'm not bringing up the publisher's role at all--that is the subject of a different post from this one.)

So my detour-filled addendum to Jeff is this: Not only do we need to manage an author's expectations on editors' responses, advance and print run sizes, sales figures, and subsequent contracts, we now also need to manage marketing and publicity expectations, and get into very detailed strategies as to how best to market the book on line--which the author needs to do whether he or she wants to or not. We need to do so early--on signing perhaps, and certainly on offer of contract. We need to understand each client's appetite for self-promotion, just how far we can or should push. We need to set up meetings with online consultants--or know enough to do it ourselves. We need to do our homework and learn from other writers' successes and failures. We are no longer "simply" first readers, shrinks, contract negotiators and cheerleaders, but marketing consultants as well. And we all need to get used to it.

PS--Initially when I read Jeff's post I was going to discuss how much work I do on manuscripts before submitting them, and whether I ever go out with a book I'm not 100% excited about or think isn't 100% done. It's a very reasonable question, and one I'll discuss next week. 

Today’s Tom Sawyer

Josh Getzler

Last night, I sat down with my wife and our three children, opened the 135^th anniversary edition of Tom Sawyer (with all the original illustrations), and began to read out loud.

I really didn’t know what to expect, either from my 21^st century kids, suffused with loves of both literature and nick @ nite; or from the book itself, which I hadn’t opened since college at the latest, if not high school. I remembered liking it, but in an “it’s good for you” kind of way. I remembered the story, but had no memory of the words, of the style. I knew it was less earnest than Huck Finn, less noble—and taught less often in literature class.

What I didn’t remember, and maybe never knew or appreciated until last night, is that Tom Sawyer is a modern upper-middle-grade novel (albeit with a much more advanced vocabulary).  And it’s hilarious. And Mark Twain knew exactly what he was doing, and was stunningly brilliant, even while making three upper west side tweens collapse on a couch, punching each other in order to make one of them “holler ‘nuff.” And they kept at it the rest of the night, to the point where I heard, an hour after they should have been in bed, my eight year old gleefully yelling at her overmatched sister to “holler ‘nuff, Jessie—holler ‘nuff…DAD! She won’t do it!” I couldn’t even get mad.

From the standpoint of structure, the first chapter of Tom Sawyer does absolutely everything I want my writers to do in 2012. It gets directly into action, but sets the scene. It introduces almost all the main characters (in the first 9 pages), makes the reader understand the personality of the protagonist through action rather than exposition (for the most part), and sets up several conflicts. And while my kids may have had a hard time chewing on a phrase like “her resolution to turn his Saturday holiday into captivity at hard labor became adamantine in its firmness,” they had no trouble at all understanding the showdown on the street between Tom and an as yet unnamed antagonist:

“I can lick you!”

“I’d like to see you try it.”

“Well I can do it.”

“No you can’t, either.”

“Yes I can.”

“No you can’t.”

“I can.”

“You can’t”

“Can!”

“Can’t”

This is perfect down to the way each line gets shorter, but more passionate; sentences turn into exclamations and grunts, until they boys are rolling on the street "and covered themselves in dust and glory.”

What I didn’t realize however, as I read this to my kids, was that Twain knew exactly how he wanted to market this book—that he was thoroughly modern in his desire to cross over from the children’s book audience to the mass market. As he says in his Preface (and remember, this is in 1876!),

“Although this book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.”

And of course, those “queer enterprises” revolved around painting fences and playing hooky and fooling the adults, and sometimes getting caught and being in trouble, and trying to impress the girl next door and figuring out whether your instincts are good or bad, and whether you can make the stranger facing you on the street holler “’nuff.”

This isn’t a call for a return to a simpler world. Rather, it’s a simple expression of admiration for a writer who was modern for 2012…in 1876. Jeez, I can’t wait till Chapter 2!

 

Is Badass-ness Physical?

Josh Getzler

 

I had a very interesting lunch today with an editor, who is in the relatively unusual circumstance of working on both adult and young adult (and in fact the crossover "new adult") fiction. We were talking, as we do at these lunches, about what each of us was reading, and what we were looking for from our submissions. This is a particularly useful exercize from my perspective as agent because I can (as I did) go through my list in my head and move projects up and down in priority to mention based on what I'm hearing. I didn't expect to mention a beauty and makeup nonfiction project I have because I thought she worked on fantasy novels. But that was precisely what she said she was looking for, and we spent some time in the until recently to me foreign world of blushes and lip colors.

 

Then we entered a different phase of the conversation, and I thought it was fascinating. The editor said that she's been seeing an awful lot of strong female characters whose strength was of a particularly physical type. They weren't admired or respected for the brains, she said, but because they could kick the boys' asses physically. That was a cop-out, she said. Why weren't they allowed to be smarter, or respected for their ingenuity or problem-solving ability, particularly in middle-grade and YA?

 

I thought about that (as I mentally moved one of my projects--with a teenage girl who protects the two geeky boys from physical harm--down on my list of possible pitches), and said that I figured that many of these girls were being written somewhat archtypically, as empowerment characters for the young girls reading the books. When I mentioned this conversation to my wife this evening, she took it even further. Girls, she said, are kind of allowed to be--supposed to be, at times--smarter than their male counterparts. But it is empowering for them to be admired for their physicality as well.

 

My badass female leads come in a number of shapes and sizes, and largely become less physcially deft as they are older, even in books with a lot of action. I think I end up on the side of approving of strength in female characters for any reason. I have two daughters, one of whom is very physically strong (as well as being sharp academically), and one less physical (if still very strong in other areas). When they read, I want the message to be that girls can keep up with--and occasionally surpass--the boys, whether in figuring out whodunit or on the basketball court or in science class or even on that rare occasion when defending themselves against vampires.  

The Joy of Submission

Josh Getzler

 

I spent a good amount of my day today submitting manuscripts to editors. It was largely two of the…many (more than six) projects I have on my plate ready to roll, with several more on their way.

Yes, that’s a ton. But I’m fortunate that these are timed so that I have almost no editor overlap, which is often a source of great stress (please forgive the digression): What do you do when two projects ought to go to the same person at a publisher, when simultaneous double-dipping is typically frowned-upon? My list, thankfully, is broad enough now—and many editors’ mandates narrow enough—that where three police procedurals might once have gone to the same editor, I can now divide it into the Historical Western procedural with romance, the contemporary Boston procedural with the Jewish sub-angle, and the one with vampires and other beasties.  

Today, though, I really was able to go to very different folks, since I was going out with a young adult novel with a paranormal element (aliens, not sparkly vamps—this time) and a police procedural for adults. Both are dark, angsty novels dealing with identity and love. One’s by a man, one by a woman, and in fact one is likely going to be read more by men, and the other by (young) women. Most of the editors I sent the procedural to are men (though there is one woman I am really thinking could love it), while the YA editors are almost entirely women. In both cases I went “out wide” to more than ten editors—all of the Big Six, plus several larger independents.

My clients are excited—for one it’s the first time at the dance; not so the other. But in each case this was one of the most optimistic, adrenalin-filled days (OK, afternoons), where all of a sudden there is the knowledge that it’s Out There, with editors we’ve discussed at houses we’d like to make their homes.

There is excitement as well because there is visible activity going on. OK, so back 10-15 years ago there would be a more physical sense of a manuscript being Out, since it would be a physical box with, you know, paper, rather than a phone call or email and a brief zap. But still, one of the authors knew that something was going on because all of a sudden she was seeing Publishing House IP addresses on her website.

Of course, tomorrow—or rather sometime at the end of the week, when all the editors have called me back and all the manuscripts are delivered to the appropriate inboxes, and the little jokes and greater hyperbole in my pitch letters are read, the waiting begins all over again. It’s a brutal process for the writer. For me it’s a lot of underlying brutality, rather than the ever-present pain to the writer. After all, tomorrow I get to start submitting the business book and the thriller, while finishing reads on two other client manuscripts, notes on three others, and contract negotiations for three others still (all different projects and authors!).

My hope for the procedural and the YA is that there will be an editor who just heard from me, who will have dinner plans cancel and will hang out at work an extra hour and decide to see what I was talking about, and then find herself at 10 transferring it to her kindle for the subway to Brooklyn or Astoria or the Upper West Side, and will call me tomorrow and say “I can’t put it down.” And while there are all manner of pitfalls as to what happens after that, we will know that the excitement will be sustained. 

 

Facebook VS Twitter IMHO

Josh Getzler

 

I was at a cocktail party last night and was talking to another agent about our respective social media habits.

 

"I love Twitter," she said. "It's immediate, it's quick, and when something is happening in the world it suddenly explodes and I feel like I'm in the middle of something big." She went on to say that she tweeted almost exclusively about publishing-related topics and didn't like Facebook because she found it too big and overwhelming. It seemed to be an almost sensory reaction to the different photos and drawings and videos. Also the fact that it was more personal--by design--than Twitter.

 

(Note: That's the way she--and I in this case--use it. It's a tool to get short snippets of information out, to retweet our clients' brilliance (and occasionally to suggest to our followers that they buy one of our clients' books). Certainly there are all manner of people--I'm talking to YOU, Kanye--who are a bit more intimate in their tweets.

 

I found that fascinating, because I find myself drawn far more to Facebook precisely because it's a bit more sensory. I like seeing the graphics and clicking on a video. I also like the fact that my Facebook community is a combination of publishing folk, friends from different stages of my life, and relatives. They have a very wide range of social media styles--from the FB version of the Twitter feed, businesslike and filled with reshares; to my high school classmates showing pictures of their kids or discussing their jobs (which are not like mine, by and large); to my own, which is more like the former than the latter, except that if you are my FB friend you know that I love the Muppets, Angry Birds and the NY Liberty, as well as my clients and family.

 

I don't feel like I need to be exclusive in one direction or the other--I don't spend enough time on either to feel like it's sucking away my life--but I'm finding it interesting hearing what others think. I'll be glad to see comments this week, and will be more active responding to them.

 

And what the hell is Pinterest?

 

Happy Valentine's Day! 

Oh My God It's 11:25! (Or #agentday)

Josh Getzler

Yesterday, when I was running around with my son, interviewing with him for a new school (my wife and I sat with the headmaster for two HOURS, while he got to go to history class!), there was a Twitter hashtag thingy called #agentday. My assistant told me about it this morning, because she said that it totally stressed her out.

"All these agents were tweeting about what they were doing all day. It stressed me out and I DO all this stuff," she said (only better).

So today, it sat in the back of my mind that I ought to think about the different elements of the business I work on during a somewhat typical Tuesday--where I was not having lunch with an editor or submitting a book (both of those will happen tomorrow). I realized that, like eating the proper amounts of all the food groups, I actually worked through a very significant number of the parts of the publishing process, all in different chunks of the day:

I started by writing notes on a contract, which is the second part of contract negotiation. The first part is where the editor makes the offer and the agent says "What? That's IT?" (No, no...). Here I was finishing a review of a pretty reasonable agreement for a book where I had already negotiated a contract with the publisher before. Where I saw discrepancies between the two agreements, I said so, then sent it along. I recieved a new version of the agreement later in the day, which likely will very closely resemble the final contract by day's end tomorrow.

After the contract review I had a phone call with the daughter of one of my clients, who has entertained the thought of entering this industry. My client is no slouch in the brain department, and he had described his daughter as "the smart one." She is living in Seattle, though, and doesn't want to journey East, so she's going to have a bit of a tough go at making a living editing. But she was very smart, and lovely, and certainly was interesting to speak to. I think about the publishing industry, and the fact that there are in fact so many very smart young writer/editor/readers, and I think about what Simon Lispkar said to me when I joined Writers House in 2007: "In order to be successful, you need three things: Taste, luck, and perseverence. You can't have just two. But if you have all three, you can survive--eventually."

After I finished speaking with the now completely discouraged (but REALLY smart) Seattle-an (sic? What do I know?), I had an exciting meeting with two clients who are working on a women's beauty book. They are both extremely well-versed in the industry, and are kind of rock stars. When I read the original proposal, I believe I understood every third word. Now I'm starting to get the hang of it, and their projet is one that marries old and new publishing in an extremely exciting fashion. We realized that there was a real question as to whether the book would drive the website or vice-versa, and whether there was greater potential revenue through royalties or sponsorship income. Absolutely fascinating.

After lunch of sushi at my desk (note: HSG was going to take advantage of both Restaurant Week and our office location to go to suddenly affordable Nobu, but my partner Carrie saw my look of panic at my to-do list and suggested we skip it and order in. Bless you, Carrie!), I got to do one of my favorite things: dig into a manuscript and make editorial suggestions. What I was doing was somewhere between an in-the-margins memo and a line edit. Look, many, many agents started out as editors or writers--or at least with degrees in English. We LOVE working with text. We don't ever get to do it as much as we'd like. So when we have an extended period of time where we can read and make constructive suggestions, we grab it. It was a blas.

After a quick stop to pick up #1 son, take him home, and oversee Homework for Three, I met Jess and Carrie at the West End bar for a quick drink and discussion, and then we went to Columbia for a reception with their MFA program. It was a blast, not just because I had the opportunity to meet with a good number of smart, dedicated writers (lots of memoirs and literary Novels of Brooklyn), but also because I got to hang out with a bunch of agent friends. We sent writers to each other, caught up, showed each other pictures of our kids, and drank white wine in the Low Library rotunda. It was a lovely, rather old-school way to end the day. I may have met a new client or two in the evening--or maybe not--but regardless, it was a fitting end to a day that shifted through so many interesting and stimulating directions.

When I got home, my son wasn't yet asleep. "How was your day, Daddy,"he said. "Did you do anything interesting?"

"You bet," I said. "All kinds of things."

State of the Union

Josh Getzler

I just spent the last hour and a half watching the State of the Union address (and pregame, and DVRed the postgame show), and I have to say, I simply love the pomp of the event. We are an amazing political experiment in the country, and while the system is broken in so many ways (regardless of what side of the aisle you sit), this is one of those nights that transfixes me amidst the political mishegas of congressional gridlock and an election year.

This time, for the first time, we watched with the kids, two of whom have the strep I generously shared with them last week. As is the case with all kids, they were very impressed with the entrance and the introduction and the first, oh, ten or so words of the speech, then wanted to know if they could switch to Victorious. But then I told them I used to work there, and they perked up (albeit briefly).

"You worked in the United Nations?"

"Congress, Sweetie, this is the Capitol Building."

"My class visited the UN last year." Then she turned back to J-14.

There was a notable, if subtle, change in the look of the House chamber this year: No teenagers kneeling near the podium in polyester ties and grey slacks (or skirts). That's because a few months ago, the congressional page program, expensive and long since redundent from the use of cell phones and email, had been abolished. And it was one of those understandable shames.

I worked as a page in the House during the summer of 1985, before my senior year of high school. I lived in a dorm in one of the House Office Buildings with 17 year-olds from all over the country, and spent my days running from the House floor to assorted office buildings, carrying messages and (much of the time) boxes containing folded American flags to be raised on top of the Capitol. (Actually--spoiler alert!--there is a little flagpole on the side of the Capitol roof where a fellow spends his entire day raising and lowering flags in order to send them back to assorted districts with certificates that the flag few "Over the Capitol." And you know what? I think that's just fine.)

I spent those eight weeks meeting and becoming friends with kids from all over the country, from my West Virginia-bred roommate who'd never met a Jew before to the page from Utah who was the first Mormon I'd met. The entire gamut of political views was represented, and we spent huge numbers of hours geeking out over whose office was nicest, which Members were most respected (Jack Kemp in the House, Ted Kennedy in the Senate, judging by the number of people who showed up when they spoke, as opposed to the nearly empty chambers most of the rest of the time). It was a program that was only incidentally valuable in terms of actually running the Capitol efficiently (it WAS 17 year-olds!), but there was something else great about it: It was an incubator for future public servants, a first step for the politically interested (or just well-connected...). It was an unforgettable summer.

I've stayed in touch with several of my fellow pages over the ensuing 26 years (Jeez!), and when the announcement came that the program was going to be disbanded, the budget saved, we posted for a while on Facebook and were wistful. Because while, of course it was a relic of a bygone era, it's sure a pity to see it go.  

 

 

Organizational Behavior, take 2

Josh Getzler

Last week, while cleaning up our apartment for a party, my wife and I did a little bit of thematic organization of our bookshelves. We have five floor-to-ceiling built-in units, which were the cornerstones of the renovations we did on the apartment when we moved into it nine years ago. (We also have units in each of our kid rooms.)

Clearly, for us the having of books, and the displaying of them, is a vital element of our aesthetic sense. When my wife and I started dating--16 years ago today, in fact--I was living in a studio apartment, just graduated from business school and trying to figure out whether to go into minor league baseball or back into publishing, whence I came before the MBA.

The most striking thing about that apartment, which I loved until Donald Trump took away my view of the Hudson River, was not the fact that I could get 80 people into it every third Saturday night for parties. Rather it was the wall of books I had, which I'd lugged first from my room at my folks', then from my college dorms/apartments/houses, then to West End Avenue.

I'd increased the number of books in my library by at least a third during my three years at Harcourt. I also had developed a new way of organizing my books. Because I had spent some time learning how the sausage is made, as it were, I'd become fascinated by the trim size of books; whether they were 6x9, 5x8, Trade paperback or mass market pb. I'd learned that a thriller was larger and boxier, a literary novel smaller and sleeker--and closer in look and feel to a trade paperback.

So I began to organize my books by publisher and by trim size. It was, in a word, ridiculous. At least to everyone but me. Histories were next to mysteries, novels next to philosophy texts, Ball Four next to Absalom, Absalom, because their books were the same size. Then I started dating Amanda, and then married her. And we needed to merge our stuff. And we almost got divorced when I started to put her books into piles by size, and she stopped me. And not gently. I believe she might have called me a lunatic. Certainly she rolled her eyes. And then pointed out that while she would indulge me by letting me organize them at ALL, it would make a lot more sense to be thematic, rather than, well, random but, you know, neat.

So as we put our books away before the party--now we double row, five years back in publishing and all these years together having made even our abundant shelves bulge--we saw our sections. The business school and MEd books are now in a corner; the British history books dominate, the mysteries are in their place, the Judaica and Penguin Classics near the dining room table. There are still a couple of shelves nearly in trim size order, but that kind of project no longer makes sense.

This isn't a blog post about the fact that I am simply grateful to have all these books; that they are beautiful and smell good, like must and coffee and red wine and suntan lotion, depending on where I read them; and that isn't it a pity that future generations will have less and less of it as ebooks predominate. While romantic, if you know me and my collection of gadgetry you know that that's not where my sentimentality lies, entirely.

Rather, this is about the feelings I had when cleaning up about these books as representatives of stages of my life, and that now, at 43, I was having a new party, cramming too many people into my apartment. There are now guides to child-rearing and World History textbooks alongside my shelf of books I edited or represented. As in my bachelor pad with the well-organized shelves 16 years ago, when I went out with an old friend to see Restoration and soon found myself in love, engaged and married, I am happy in my life.

Sweats and Shakes

Josh Getzler ...or, hello from 102 degree fever. Been asleep almost all day and feel awful. Real blog returns next week.

A Seventh-Grader’s Analysis of Banned Books

Josh Getzler

 

Last night at 9:30, our 12-year-old son, Joe, much like his parents before him, realized he hadn’t finished his homework due this morning. He was supposed to write an essay about a book he’d read which had been banned. At 10:45 (when we’d forgotten he was even awake…) he strode out of his room in t-shirt and Muppet boxers and said “I am finished. I will read to you.”

 

What follows here, with Joe’s permission, is his unedited essay. If it sounds like a speech it’s because he’s supposed to present it, and he has, uh, a flair for the dramatic. I think it says a mouthful.

 

I haven’t had too much experience with banned books. In fact, you could say I’ve played it relatively safe. I’ve read moderately light fare by authors such as Judy Blume, Andrew Clements, Beverly Cleary, and the like for most of my life. The more adult books I’ve read are mostly of the tamer quality, such as James Herriot’s “All Creatures Great and Small” and autobiographies (the naughtiest of which being ventriloquist Jeff Dunham’s “All by My Selves”, which chronicles the life of the scandalous puppeteer). I have, however, read some books that have been banned in some places, or criticized as inappropriate. Here are a few of them:

• One of the earliest banned books I remember reading-or, more to the point, being read to me-was Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen”. I know it was banned because it is on my mother’s “I Read Banned Books” bracelet (which I am wearing in class today). The story is a surreal, though not incredibly rude, one: a little boy named Mickey floats out of bed and meets 3 chefs who desire milk for the morning cake, which Mickey finds and gives them. Even the less keen-eyed of readers will notice that when Mickey floats out of bed, his pajamas come off. And no, Sendak does not show Mickey naked without his more private parts, as others have done when drawing naked characters in usually lighter fare (case in point: Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” comic strip, which shows plenty of naked characters while leaving out the private bits). Rather, the boy’s genitals are out where anyone can see them, and thus this book has aroused controversy (as well as for the apparently phallic-looking milk bottles in the background) and was named #25 in the ALA’s 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books 1990-2000.
• Also on the “Banned Books” bracelet is Dav Pilkey’s “The Adventures of Captain Underpants”, a favorite of mine when I was younger (and confidentially, it still is). Needless to say, the title basically tips you off to why it’s been challenged: a grown man runs around wearing nothing but underwear and a curtain that serves as a cape. But you have to admit; that’s kind of its charm. I mean what else could it be? “The Adventures of Captain Undershirt”? Not as funny.
• One of the aforementioned “Frequently Challenged Books” is J.K. Rowling’s famed “Harry Potter” series, which is placed at #7. I have read all 7 of the books, “Sorcerer’s Stone” through “Deathly Hallows”, and despite their jaw-droppingly long page-span (according to Wikipedia, book #5 is 870 pages long!) they are for the most part very enjoyable. Fantastical elements of the wizardry world aside, there are few reasons for this series to be challenged. Maybe it is because of  witchcraft? You know, seeing as half the cast is made up of witches and warlocks, and in #3 a wizard choir sings a musical rendition of the “Double, bubble, toil and trouble” scene from Shakespeare’s witchy…ahem, Scottish play. (#1, I am an actor, so I am refraining from saying the exact name of the play. #2, I now begin to wonder if the song is only in the movie version of #3.) It could also very well be because of the house elves, led by the character Dobby the House Elf, who delight in working and therefore work in Hogwarts’ kitchen. They wear sacks as shirts, and in book #4, Hermione Granger tries to start a petition to free them, saying they are “indentured servants”. Plus, characters use some pretty foul language in #7, most notable of which being Ms. Weasley’s cry as she defends her daughter Ginny from the evil Bellatrix Lestrange: “Not my daughter, you female dog!” (I say female dog because it is a direct meaning of the word she actually uses). So, yeah. I guess they are pretty naughty.
• Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is one I’ve read. There are many Roald Dahl books I like: “The BFG”, “Matilda”, “George’s Marvelous Medicine”, “The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me” and especially “Fantastic Mr. Fox” are all my favorites by him. I recognize “Factory” more for the 2005 Tim Burton movie, which I have seen several times (and yes, I am ashamed to admit that I have only seen the Gene Wilder original once completely.) but I have also read the book a few times, and can see its position as one of Dahl’s best. However, the first edition apparently featured the Oompa-Loompas as black pygmies, and was criticized for that reason. The copies I’ve read seem to have corrected this error, as has the 2005 movie. But it still lends a slightly dark undertone to the otherwise-rosy children’s book.
• Hugh Lofting’s “Dr. Dolittle” is one I recognized, as I read it, as a pretty controversial book. A subplot involves the African Prince Bumpo, who wishes he were white, and the doctor bleaches his face to make it so in order to gain his freedom. Good grief. That’s pretty racist. I guess it was included because in 1920, this stuff wasn’t as serious as it is today. But still…that’s nasty.
• And finally, I have finished reading the play version of George Orwell’s “1984”. Of course, you in the class are also reading it. I’m sorry for finishing it while you are still in the middle of it, but my parents insisted. I won’t spoil anything for you, but let me just say, the rest is even creepier than it is now.

So, there you have it. These are some banned books I’ve read. Which shall I read next? Well, after I finish another of James Herriot’s autobiographies; “All Things Bright and Beautiful”, I shall begin reading “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. Wish me luck!

But before I end this, there is something serious I have to talk about, and that is on the subject of banned books as a whole. The ones I have listed are only a fraction of the numerous censored, banned, and challenged books in American literature. In truth, there are many, many, many more books that have been banned in certain places due to what is perceived as inappropriate content. This is not right, for although most banned books feature content that can be perceived as prejudiced or offensive, it is still sugarcoating American literature. To pretend these books did

not feature such content would be the same as saying these prejudices did not exist, and that is sugarcoating American history. As Judy Blume put it:

“[I]t's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.”  

(From AFI’s page on challenged books).

So please, tell anyone you can about this travesty. It is a sad fact, but it is true, and only you can make it stop. You can make a change.

 

 

2011 By The Numbers, (with paragraphs!)

Josh Getzler

So the year is ending with a real bang. Nancy Bilyeau's The Crown (over which I still have major schpilkes), is getting great reviews and is setting up nicely. I got a call the day before leaving for vacation that I will be selling a new book at the very beginning of January. I am eagerly awaiting three new publications between the beginning of January and the end of May. And I'm in the middle of several manuscripts with truly great potential. So I decided that I would go through the last year in numbers. It's been an exciting, nerve-wracking year with an awful lot going on both for my own business and for the publishing industry in general. Here are some of the highlights.

Number of months HSG Agency has been in Soho: 7 (May 23)

Number of clients on my list on Jan 1: 28

Number of clients on my list now: 41

Number of deals made during calendar year 2011: 12 (domestic: Doesn't include foreign contracts)

Number of books in those deals: 20

Number of Adult novels: 7 (of the 12 deals)

   Mysteries: 4

   Thrillers: 1

   Women's fiction: 1

   Literary/science fiction: 1

Number of Adult nonfiction books: 3

Number of children's books: 2

Number of books currently out on submission: 16 (note: this is an ENORMOUS number, and not what I would really like to have out simultaneously. That being said, there are still enough publishers/editors, and the books are disparate enough, that we can handle it. And we are also going to have 6 new manuscripts coming up for submission early in 2012. But we also expect three or four of these submissions to turn into deals in January. So that's pretty good.)

Number of clients I signed out of conferences in 2011: 2

Number of clients I signed from referrals in 2011: 7

Number of clients I signed from the slush pile in 2011: 4

Number of clients who are spouses of other clients: 1

Number of clients I have who are the result of Cali Yost, whether directly or indirectly: 4

Average number of submissions received weekly: 80 Number of full manuscripts in my "Must read RIGHT NOW" list: 18

Length of time, from first query to sale, of Sam Thomas's historical mysteryThe Midwife's Tale: 6 Weeks.

Length of time, from first query to sale, of Sheila Webster Boneham's mystery Drop Dead on recall: 2 years and a bit.

Length of time, from sale to publication, of Otis Webb Brawley and Paul Goldberg's medical screed How We do Harm: 1 year, 7 months.

Length of time, from first electronic text conversion to publication, of A.B. Bourne's The First Secret of Edwin Hoff: 6 weeks.

These are some interesting, specific-to-me numbers, which should not be taken as representative of, well, any greater trend or tendency of other agents. It has been a pleasure blogging this year--it's made my Tuesdays sparkle a bit, and I really appreciate the feedback I've gotten. I look forward to continuing and to getting still more of your comments and corrections and praise and pillory.

May 2012 be happy and successful in all the ways you wish it to be.

Josh

Pre-publication Schpilkes

Josh Getzler

In 23 days, my client Nancy Bilyeau's Tudor-era thriller The Crown will be published. It's been some ride for this debut novel, which I've talked about here before both explicitly and obliquely (please see "bad-ass nun" from last week).

Things are starting to come together. Reviews are beginning to stream in, bloggers are requesting copies of the book for future mentions. Nancy, who has been in the magazine world for years but is still a newby at this part of the business, is being advised how to behave when interviewed or reading in public or blogging or tweeting or commenting or breathing.

We received our finished copies of the book last week and inhaled the incomparable aroma of freshly-baked novel--I almost felt I needed to buy the book flowers after I caressed it gently for...well, longer than I should have.

Nancy and I have become inveterate refreshers of the Pub Lunch Book Tracker (emails fly--"Hey, did you see that you dipped below 6,000 in ebooks for 15 minutes last hour--High Five!"), and worriers that someone's going to miss something. ("Hey, didn't they send out ARCs to that independent bookseller in Wisconsin? Why didn't we hear from them?" "Oh, you mean the one behind the strip mall 60 miles out of town?" "Right." "Oh damn, you're right--we should get on that--could affect our standing.")

This is not, incidentally, a column about neurotic authors. Hardly. It's actually about my own pre-pub jitters. I'm using The Crown and Nancy as examples because The Crown is one of the books happening now (and because I know Nancy reads this blog and will laugh at me--(and you were at 6,435 on ebook when I started this, btw)). And because she's been very active in the best possible way in helping herself build up to publication day.

But I will tell you, every time a book I represent comes out, I get what my grandmother called Schpilkes. I'm looking over our blog lists, making sure I've retweeted appropriately whenever my author mentions casually that it would, you know, be nice if you pre-ordered her book, maybe, if you feel like it. I start asking editors (casually, of course--which is Agent for "transparently") if they've gotten any pre-pub buzz from the sales force.

Oh, and I have to do this while being the very Rock of Gibraltar to the author, who is either freaking out or pretending not to be freaking out, particularly when every high school classmate and third cousin is coming out of the woodwork asking, not WHETHER the author is going to go out on tour (which they almost always are not--tours are expensive, often sparsely attended, and quite inefficient, unless you are Stephanie Meyer and can sell tickets), but rather how many stops. "Oh, no? You're not? My sister's boyfriend went to 37 cities with his xeroxed shapeshifter erotic memoir and said it was...blahblahblah." (Slaps forehead).

And now, in this particular situation, I am about to go to Florida for Christmas week with my family and come back in the homestretch (which is actually nothing compared to this spring, when my client Geoff Rodkey's middle grade debut Deadweather and Sunrise will be published three days before my son's Bar Mitzvah). Most of publishing is either shut down (publishers) or consumed with holiday specials (retailers).

But there is one place that doesn't sleep, and where conversations continue and reviews land and jitters can be allayed, and that's the online world. For all its faults, the internet is always open. It gives us something to do, another blog to comment on, another reviewer's opinion to analyze (is "stately" good when referring to pace?). We'll have plenty of time to obsess in the 10 days leading up to pub--and then beyond, when we'll be able to stop speculating and deal with real data!

And yes, Schpilkes happens all the time, to varying degrees. And in the end, I rather love it. It's like the hot stove league in baseball, or the presidential campaign (which I love less these days)--an opportunity, before the fact, to speculate, to worry, to almost vibrate with  excitement. To have Schpilkes. We'll see what happens on January 12. I feel pretty good.

Happy Chanukah and Merry Christmas, and next week from Miami for a year-end wrap-up.  

 

The Paradox of the Strong Female Protagonist

Josh Getzler

 

My assistant Maddie tells me that every time I tell her I'm loving a submission, she looks at it and assumes she's going to find a strong female lead. I've got a 16th-century nun, a 17th-century midwife, a post-apocalyptic 15 year-old zombie killer, an unhappily-virginal 18 year-old zombyre lover, as well as a lawyer, a slayer, a trucker, a dog trainer, a bargain hunter and an innkeeper (and I've left some out!).

 

You could get into why I like strong women so much (hello mother, wife, daughters, partners, etc), but that's not challenging. What I find interesting is something Maddie said to me this afternoon as we were discussing yet another manuscript with a strong female voice:

 

"Why is it," she said, "that so many of these girls and women, regardless of age and also regardless of competence or capability, tend to the unsympathetic?" (Note to clients reading this--it's obviously not about all the female characters we have :))

 

Hmm...now that made me think, particularly in the context of the crime and adventure novels I work on. Then she continued:

 

"And why is that not a problem with most of the male protagonists we work with?" Even better. A real gender studies question, and not manufactured, and without agenda.

 

What's it all about? Is it a question of writers trying so hard to make their female protagonists hard or strong that they make them unfriendly? Or is it that they are concentrating so hard on plotting (which is often fast-paced and frenetic in the kinds of procedurals and adventures we work on) that character development and personality might sometimes be sacrificed. And possibly because--particularly in historical novels--in order for a woman to rise above her typical place and be the kind of person who would solve crimes or take part in adventures she would need to be very strong and possibly threatening to the men who would deal with her. Are authors overcompensating, then needing to dial back some of the aggression? Are we, as readers, equating feminine strength with being unsympathetic or unpleasant, while we are more accepting of a male protagonist exuding machismo; or think of a quiet, brooding...unpleasant man as darkly sexy?

 

Ultimately it simply doesn't bother me terribly much. I like the strength of my bad-ass ladies and don't apologize for them. I understand the need for a reader to root for a heroine, but I don't like weak women any more than I like incompetent men--and I don't think you need to sacrifice strength for attractiveness. I have two daughters who love Cappie Pondexter, the shooting guard for the WNBA's New York Liberty. Cappie is hard and she's aggressive and she fights and she takes over games and runs the offense. My girls think she's awesome, and don't care that she fouls overly hard sometimes, or whines to the refs or yaps at the opponents or pouts when she doesn't get the call. She's our bad-ass heroine, and we love her.      

 

Baker's Dozen, properly spaced

Josh Getzler

I spent most of my day today involved in one of the more fun publishing events of my year: Authoress's Baker's Dozen agent auction. It's a pretty simple idea: Ms. A puts out a call for submissions on her ridiculously well-monitored blog, Miss Snark's First Victim; gets too many so has to spend a couple of weeks culling a few hundred to sixty roughly half adult, half kid); then asks (politely--she's very polite) 13 agents to look at the first 250 words of each and bid on how many pages we'd like to see.

The auction, which started today, lasts two days and the winner of each of the individual auctions receives an exclusive on the pages for a while. The fun of this auction, apart from seeing a pretty wide variety of projects (more on them in a moment), is the interaction (read trash talk!) among the agents.

I enjoy it because I get to write emails, comments, tweets, etc to a number of colleagues I know mostly from their deals on Publishers Lunch and their Twitter Avatars. I see whose taste is close to mine; who is particularly competitive; what kind of strategies folks use.

This was my second time participating in the auction, and I found that a significant change from last year was the fact that much of the posturing among agents happened on Twitter. It was a little more public than writing smackdowns in the Comments section of the blog, and it got a lot of people talking about how the process humanized us a bit (one writer said she had never even heard of Baker's Dozen before, but was watching the bicker-tweets like Game of Thrones. I was honored. But doesn't, like, EVERYONE die in Game of Thrones? Just asking...) The other thing that I enjoy is seeing What's Out There in a concentrated space.

Admittedly this is not precisely reflective of the entire market because Ms A has her own biases (particularly toward YA fantasy and unhappy girl teen lit), and the writers skewed overwhelmingly female. But I can tell you that there are a LOT of suburbs with girls who have the ability to kill with a kiss, or are really faeries or succubi or doxies or demons. Fewer sparkly vamps than usual, but that market may finally be saturated. And no zombies that I can recall. Adult books were much more all over the place.

So over the course of the first day of bidding, I won 3 auctions. Two were manuscripts I knew I wanted from the beginning for their settings and set-ups, while the third was one I liked because of a particular turn of phrase in one paragraph. I will be interested to see if any of these turn into passion projects. I certainly hope so--one of the things a Tweeter said today was that she was very happy to see so many agents so excited to FIND things. It's very true. And it's nice for the mask to come off sometimes, and let us reveal ourselves for the excited, optimistic, enthusiastic supporters of books we are. Best of luck to everyone on day 2, and I look forward to more trash talk (politely, of course!)

NaNoEdMo Edited, Not On iPad (sorry for version 1!)

Josh Getzler

 

So NaNoWriMo is coming to an end. Thousands of lawyers, barristas, stay-at-home moms, teachers, chefs, students and financial analysts who woke up early and went to bed late every day for the last month are tapping their way through their last entry in November. They will type their final periods, save their work, and...what?

It's a fascinating psychological moment, this. First of all, if you've made it through, congratulations! It's a terrific feat of persistence, stamina and resolve to write every day (or nearly every day, from what I understand) for a month. You can get an awful lot done; learn about yourself, understand a bit about what it takes to write a piece of long fiction, perhaps work through a story that's been burning or percolating its way through you for months or years.

Some people can finish a whole novel (or at least a draft) in the course of the month. Most don't, and are left with half or two-thirds of a story and a new calendar page with a puppy dressed in a Santa costume. What to do?

Well, the first thing NOT to do is send it out on submission, as almost assuredly it's not really done. But that's not even a particularly interesting statement. Really, what most people who haven't done this before need to do is take a deep breath and simply soldier on. The purpose of the November Exercise is to kickstart your writing. It's not really to actually go start-to-finish in a month. Now the goal should be to finish a draft and then set out to edit like crazy (and then have more objective people than your spouse or sister read it). Then, eventually, after even more sweat, you can think about whether your germ of an idea in October could turn out to be Water for Elephants, a famous NaNoWriMo success.

A great example of the benefits of NaNoWriMo is a young writer named Samantha Sweeney, who's studying at Simmons College in Mass while writing for Metro newspapers out of Boston. Sam decided to try her hand at NaNoWriMo, and her editor not only let her write about the process, but syndicated her columns around the country.

I read about Sam on the subway on the first Tuesday in November, got in touch with her, and we've been talking and emailing all month as she's been writing her novel. It's a family drama set in Queens (think Brothers McMullen) and explores many domestic themes (with a particular emphasis on abandonment). As November winds down, the story isn't complete, but Sam has made great headway in taking an idea, a character, a mood, a setting, and beginning to shape it into a novel.

It's been a fascinating process for me to follow (and, I suspect, for Sam to write), and I hope that there will be a lot of emails, drafts, edits to come as November transitions to December, and the weather gets chillier and then turns again. Because as anyone who's sat down and sweated out a book (whether in stores or in storage) knows, this is a long and difficult road, where the first month is barely a prologue to the months (and at time years) that make up the entire creative arc of a successful novel. So if you've made it this far, congrats and good luck on the rest of your journey, and when it's ready--really ready!--then I hope to read it, love it, take it on, and see it through to great success.

On Rejuvenation

Josh Getzler

I had a long, interesting discussion this afternoon with one of my clients, about a manuscript I'd read that he'd written several years ago. He'd left the manuscript after an aborted set of submissions, written the book I'd taken on (which is currently on submission itself)...and another...and another, but couldn't get the first one out of his mind.

Every so often, when we'd be discussing his current manuscript, he'd say "One of these days I really want you to take a look at the first one--it's really interesting, and I feel like it could go somewhere." And every time, I'd nod and say "yes, yes, when we're done with the first one--don't want to confuse the issue!" 

And that's generally true. When I'm working on one manuscript by an author, I typically don't like working on another one parallell-ly.(There are some exceptions--you know who you are!) I don't usually submit more than one project by an author at any one time--don't want to confuse the editors and have two projects by the same person show up at an editorial board simultaneously (bad submissions etiquette!). But my author was quietly persistent, and I finally agreed to take a look at it. I did, had comments, and arranged to speak with the author. He said he'd look through his previous notes and compare them to what I had to say.

When we got on the phone, he started by saying "Thank you."

"What for?"

"For letting me read my book again like a fan, rather than like an author."

It was great, he said--it had been such a long time since he'd simply sat down and gone through it A-Z that he didn't remember where scenes fit in, when particular turns of phrase appeared, when characters  appeared and surprised and behaved in certain ways. It's a dark book, and not terribly hopeful, really, but the author said the following to me which I think is so striking that I'm copying it verbatim:

 It was as if I was a reader, reading someone else.  Too often writers, never ever get that opportunity because they are in the middle of the shit.  It’s impossible to be distant enough to really enjoy it, and forget suspense, because there are no surprises.  In a weird way, despite all the work that needs to be done, I felt a surge of optimism because I liked what I read.  Too often, we work, and work, and work, and don’t have the ability to enjoy the writing, the story.  I found my jaw clenched and my hands perspiring when there was confrontation, and I felt joy when (Character X) killed (Character Y).  The whole experience kind of rejuvenated me with respect to my writing, my ability, and my future. 

I feel like this kind of thing happens all the time during the process of working in the different aspects of publishing, whether as agent, author, editor, designer...whatever. We get so close to the project, wrapped up in the minutia of drafts, corrections, copy, contract language and terms, marketing plans and sales figures that we forget what it's all about. I got into publishing because I love to read books, and now I have the opportunity to make a living dealing with them in the most intimate way. And there are certainly many times, when my day is spent trouble-shooting and problem-solving, when that fundamental raison d'etre gets lost. It's a lovely thing when someone can slap me in the face a little and remind me what this is all about. It can be (as it was today) the first time I open a box and see an advance readers edition--all the romantic schmaltzy words about the feeling you get are ABSOLUTELY TRUE! It can be when a review comes in that absolutely gets the book. Or (as happened a week or so ago) when a bookseller Facebook-chats an author and says that her book is the one the bookseller is going to evangelize about all winter.

But I still come back to my client today, and feel like his words were thoroughly inspirational:  The whole experience kind of rejuvenated me with respect to my writing, my ability, and my future.

I hope that everyone out there who's feeling a little worn out or jaded or raw can spend the next few days, as you experience Thanksgiving with your families, trying to feel rejeuvenated and excited and hopeful as we enter the holiday season.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Pit of Email Despair

Josh Getzler

I need to change my email routine. It is obvious. I spend my day facing my computer looking at my inbox. Certainly when I’m writing another email or talking on the phone or going to a meeting or reading, I’m not always seeing the inbox, but my subconscious takes in the relentless rectangular flashes at the bottom right corner of the monitor, and I know the list is building.

It used to be that I’d get an email every few minutes, here and there, and the vast majority were Fresh Direct ads or news aggregations or unsolicited queries, where I was able to filter them to a folder to read and discard (aggregations), read and respond (queries), or just discard (ANOTHER offer to transfer my credit card balance). A few times a day I’d hear from an editor or a client or another agent or a friend or my wife or mother (or now, surreally, my son, which really freaks me out). Those I’d answer right away, then continue what I was doing.

The other day, though, I realized that I had email-surfed for three straight hours without stop. Every time I’d finish responding to someone, three more appeared on the top of the inbox, frequently responding to another email in the thread, and therefore needing further response.

So this is what it feels like to drown.

Look, on some level it’s a good thing, that there is enough on my plate to keep me occupied steadily—frantically!—all day long when I let it. It also certainly becomes addictive, as any spouse of an email-beholden person will tell you, and you don’t want to let ANY time elapse before responding. But that kind of instant gratification very rapidly becomes counterproductive and incredibly stressful when not managed appropriately.

I have two wonderful clients, Cali Yost and Whitney Johnson (actually I have many more than two, but I’m only going to discuss these ones—the rest of you will have your turn!), who are truly remarkable at managing this kind of chaos. Cali is an expert in work-life fit management (which barely scratches the surface of her genius), while Whitney, who has a varied business resume ranging from venture capital to Harvard Business Review blogging, has become a remarkable advocate for disrupting your routine. You see where this is going? I clearly am stuck in workplace quicksand with this never-ending email procession, and need to disrupt my behavior in order to accomplish my own daily agenda, rather than finding myself at 5:30 with half my to-do list open and falling further behind.

This is going to be a process, I can see, both because it’ll be tough to change what’s been a very ingrained habit—I get an email, I look at it, I respond if I can, and then I move on (and it’s however many minutes later). Whether it’s pressing on with my list and only going to non-agenda emails at certain times of day (except emergencies); or giving myself a certain number of minutes per hour; or setting up a new filtering system; or…something I haven’t thought of (and I’m certainly open to suggestions), I still need to accomplish the following:

1)      I still need to service my clients—be responsive, as timely as possible, be THERE for them.

2)      I need to figure out how to be nimble enough to simultaneously trouble-shoot and press on with the agenda for the day.

I’m not ADD—In fact I really hate multi-tasking, even though I need to do it all day. I’d much rather write a long list, start at A and go to Z, and go home. But this job is more interesting than that, and more spontaneous, so I have to balance it all. These are fascinating problems. They have less to do with publishing than with business or life in this incredibly fast, always connected world. They’re not unique, and they may be simplistic. But they’re not simple, and I’ve got to fix them. We’ll see how it works.

 

 

 

More on NaNoWriMo (and a PS on Backspace)

Josh Getzler

Well, instead of wrestling with the iPad this week and getting to the same awful place as last Tuesday, I'm doing it right on the Dashboard. In deference to Jeff Cohen, I will only say that I told that Pleasuring machine to go Pleasure itself any number of times. (Incidentally, for a great--and likely out-of-print--book which needed to self-censor what was clearly more colorful language, check out the Late Dick Schapp's wonderful diary of the '69 baseball season, The Year the Mets Lost Last Place. Beside all the cursing, Schapp also slips into Quebecoise French when discussing Les Expos (RIP), describing a pitcher who learned to throw his curve "a Philadelphie, which means the Hard Way." That's become my family's shorthand for anything hard--my son got a lousy grade on a test and wasn't allowed to go on the computer, he was learning about consequences a Philadelphie. But I digress.)

So we're now in week #2 of NaNoWriMo, and as I look through the Twitterverse and FB reports, I've seen a lot of initial excitement of "OK, I've always WANTED to write a book" turn into "Wow, this is HARD." It certainly is. But I think that part of what I'm seeing, particularly from new authors who've never done this before, is the frustration borne more out of a lack of planning than the lack of the germ of a good idea. That's because so many writers sit down on November first, hear an imaginary shotgun go off, and start writing on page 1, with only a vague idea of plotting, character personality, or voice. That's why NaNoWriMo is fundamentally a sucker bet.

What you really need to have done is spent October planning and storyboarding in order to be ready to write in November. Otherwise, there is a good chance that the whole beginning of your project is going to be world-building or meeting your characters before actually exploring their lives. It's novel-writing a Philadelphie. 

I'm not saying that you need to actually outline everything. That works for some people, doesn't for others. But I think that a good  deal of thinking--whether it's actually writing up backstories or a basic synopsis or sketchy outline of point A to point Z, or staying up at night going through scenes in your head--needs to go on before you start writing November 1. Yes, I know it's Nov 8. But it's not too late to do some of this work. After all, you still have 22 days to write (21 if you are human and take Thanksgiving off!)

And then...it's not over! That's one of the great things about NaNoWriMo. It's entirely artificial. It was started as kind of a kick-start for writers who need to get rolling on projects they might have thought about writing but never got around to starting. So while it pays to sweat for the month (butt on chair, as Ben said, or words to that effect), once it's over, it shouldn't be the end. Keep going. Finish writing. EDIT. Think of the ways to improve the writing/plot/characters etc. It's unlikely that a full, clean draft can be completed in just 30 frantic days.

Then think very hard about whether it's ready-ready. It's a pity to write the beginnings of a good idea, wrap a messy bow around it, and submit it to agents. Some will work--don't get me wrong--but most feel half-baked.

OK, I'm off my soapbox. I've got another topic, so bear with me. (I know I usually have more of a unifying theme, but I also usually don't have a draft eaten by a device.)

I spent one day last week at the Backspace Writers Conference in NYC, talking to both a lot of talented and well-prepared writers and a wonderful array of agents taking advantage of the local site. I spent part of the morning on the general agent panel, and then had what I suspect was a harrowing couple of hours for the authors, where another agent and I (Jason Allen Ashlock in the morning, Meredith Barnes in the afternoon) workshopped either query letters of the beginnings of manuscripts. We discussed everything from length of query to different standards of length of letter, from the very basics of structure (The Hook, Book, Cook method, per Barbara Poelle among others) to long discussions of what makes a memoir big enough to warrant acceptance (Janet Reid's Act 3). 

But one of the best parts was hanging out in the Teacher's Lounge, which was where the agents went to  check emails and drink water between sessions. It was a relaxed, fascinating, and incredibly collegial bunch of real book lovers who were all excited, overworked, slightly apprehensive about the future, but fundamentally positive. A terrific, productive conference.

Pounding the Pavement for Elmo and Miss Piggy

Josh Getzler

The past few months have been like paradise for my son the Muppet fanatic. During the summer the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY opened an exhibit about Jim Henson’s Fantastic World, with films of interviews about the entire oeuvre and an enormous variety of Muppet paraphernalia (including the original Kermit and the Muppet designed for Mayor Bloomberg). In addition, the Muppet movie is coming out in November, and last Friday saw the release of the documentary Being Elmo, about Muppeteer Kevin Clash. Finally, we received word that Frank Oz, who is the man behind Bert, Animal, Yoda, Fozzy Bear and Miss Piggy (among many others) was going to speak at the moving image museum. It’s a good time to appreciate the fuzzy and blue (and orange!).

Now that I’ve experienced some of these events, I’ve seen some interesting things, and I was surprised at how they relate to my writers.

The Muppets movie hasn’t been released yet, though its Facebook page is counting the days (as indeed it did the weeks and months before) with interesting and not-at-all-annoying updates that don’t beat us over the head with breathless anticipation but still keep it in our heads.

Being Elmo is a bit of a different animal (hah hah!). It’s a documentary, for one, rather than a caper, and it debuted at Sundance and other film festivals. It tells the story of Kevin Clash, the incredibly talented—and tall—and African-American!—man who plays Elmo. Clash frequently tells of having people come up to him and saying “I didn’t know that Elmo is black!” to which he responds “Elmo isn’t black—he’s furry and red! I’m black.” (Side note:  A couple of years ago, we had the opportunity to visit Sesame Street’s studio in Astoria and watch the show as it was filmed. Kevin Clash was directing, and it really is amazing and disconcerting to see him act as Elmo, in that voice, finish a scene, tuck the puppet under his arm, and speak like Kevin.)

Again, I’m not sure whether it was simply a fun confluence of events, but on Sunday in the space of two blocks there was a screening of Being Elmo and the Frank Oz speaking event—the number of forty-somethings (and30-somethings, and…) in Kermit t-shirts and Fozzy caps was remarkable.

The Frank Oz event was not simply sold out—it was sold out AND the simulcast in another theater in the museum was equally packed. According to the president of the Jim Henson Legacy foundation, who introduced Oz, part of the reason for that is that he “never does this kind of thing. He never goes to the Star Wars conventions, never goes to ComiCon, never makes the rounds.” After listening for the next two hours, I think I understand better why he doesn’t. He thinks of himself as a director, a performer; not a publicist. He doesn’t feel like he needs to go on tv and be asked, over and over, to “do” Animal or Bert. He tells a great story, and is a serious artist. But the time his eyes lit up and he truly became animated was when a boy not more than eight asked if Oz would sign his Fozzy doll. Oz called him up to the stage and not only told the boy stories but showed him how incredibly difficult it is to stand there with one arm up and act.

Last night, after our weekly Sing-off watch-fest with the kids (Go Afro-blue!), my wife and I turned on Jon Stewart, who announced that his guest was Kevin Clash, who was there promoting Being Elmo. When Clash came on, he simply took over the program. He was comfortable, charming, very funny, and had no problem whatsoever telling the story, in character, of how a stewardess once asked him to tell the passengers on an airplane to take their seats, and how his daughter used to ask Elmo to ask him to buy her stuff. It was dynamite, and would have made me want to see the movie even if I didn’t have all three kids begging for it.

So where’s the lesson? Well, it’s this: I have clients who love the stage, who are willing to travel around the country to speak, who are active on social media and understand how to use it; who are effortlessly witty and charming and instinctively draw the market toward them—the Kevins, as it were. Others are more reluctant, who prefer to have their body of work tell their story, who will appear occasionally, but entirely at their own terms, who can’t stand the idea of guest-blogging or tweeting or posting regularly on Facebook or maintaining a website. The Franks, as it were. They can certainly still reach their market. You just need to look harder for them.

(For the funniest two minutes ever on the Muppet show, click below)

 

Missing a week

Josh Getzler

 

It finally happened. The combination of (endless) Jewish holidays, the catch-up at work from missing lots of time, a nasty boomerang version of the Bouchercon Plague (anyone who was in St. Louis knows what I'm talking about, cough, sneeze, hack), and losing the wretched 15 minutes in the morning because of early bus for the girls has finally caught up with me. It's 4:45 PM, and I'm not going to make it this week. I just can't bring myself to write a half-assed recap of the NY Times on Amazon. Would rather just say sorry and turn the page.

Page turns. Better material next time. Have a good rest of the week.

Telling Stories

Josh Getzler

When I was 13 I spent a month at a writing program at St. Mary’s College in Maryland. I had been at a school through seventh grade that did not emphasize writing (my mother just snorted when she read that); so while I was a rabid reader, and kind of an instinctive writer, I didn’t have experience at putting together anything longer than a thank-you note.

I remember distinctly the first class I had at St. Mary’s, sitting around in a circle with seven or eight other young teenagers, holding a pad and a pen and…waiting. Our teacher, whose name is lost to me, was a young guy with long hair and a beard and a very gentle voice. His first lesson, in its simplicity and wisdom, changed my life.

“You all tell stories to your friends, your parents, your teachers, right?” he began. We all nodded. “Well, when you want to write a story, pretend that you’re at the kitchen table or the lunchroom at school, and tell your story the same way. You’re just writing it down, rather than speaking it. But the idea is the same—if you want your friends to be interested in your story in the lunchroom, you need to be quick, you can’t be repetitive, you need to be interesting and entertaining. It’s not different when you write a story. You don’t need to worry about using big fancy words or unusual style. Just tell your story.”

Simple, right? Even tautological. If you want to tell a story…tell a story! (And this doesn’t mean Don’t write well, or Don’t choose your words carefully. Not at all. It just means that you need to keep the reader interested in what happens. One of the great tricks, in fact, is to write such interesting stories that the writing pyrotechnics are rendered subtle.)

I spent a great deal of the next ten years trying to put those tools into practice, whether it was through writing articles for the high school or college newspapers, exploratory short stories for assorted courses, or a long novel still sitting in the 10MB hard drive of my first Mac. Or a blog.

It’s now 2011. I get 20 queries a day from authors who have spent years writing their novels. But the difference between the ones who achieve representation and the chance of success and those who don’t, is that the former pass the lunchroom test, while the latter don’t. (OK fine, so sometimes a writer comes along who is SUCH a talented wordsmith that he or she can get away with fancy language and obscure structure. But not often, and even those don’t always succeed without a strong enough story to drive the plot and prop up the writing.) Often, I hear editors and agents and authors talking about writing a prologue with a particularly action-filled scene as a kind of false beginning before the “real book starts.” They’re saying what that teacher was saying in Maryland that day in 1981. Be engaging off the bat and reel ‘em in. Make them put down their tunafish sandwich and hang on your words.

The impetus for this column is that my son came home from school the other day and told me that his seventh grade language and literature teacher had allowed him to spend the Free Writing class time working on a story for the school literary magazine. He’d spent several weeks over the summer attending a wonderful, empowering writing program for children called Writopia, where tweens and teens sat around with laptops writing stories and workshopping them with supervision from young, smart teachers. The kids had to read their work out loud to their teachers and peers to determine how interesting they were. I’d talk to him after he’d come home (when I could pry him away from Youtube), and he’d describe their classes. And as I heard him recount it, it was clear that introductory writing now is much the same as it was in 1981. He’d learned the lunchroom lesson.

But this was the first story he’d written away from Writopia, where he’d used the tools he’d learned over the summer, put them together and actually finished. Thirty years after St. Mary’s, I was looking at myself, and it was thrilling.

“What’s it called?”

He looked at me with intense pride:

“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Marshmallow the Dog: An epic novella.”

 

Schedules

Josh Getzler

I’m all messed up, and it’s all because of scheduling. For such a long time—years, in fact—I’ve been able to wake up very early in the morning, clear my head, get some work done, and then wake the kids. If my alarm went off at 5, I’d be at the computer or Kindle by 5:20 and have an hour before I’d need to get into the shower and start to wake people up and get breakfast started. The kids needed to be out of the house by 7:30, and we had it down to a chaotic ballet.

And I cherished that hour. I could email with European editors or authors, read a real number of queries or MS pages, or dig into an edit and feel like I accomplished something. I could even write a blog post, and get it up on Dead Guy (WiFi willing) before the first sleepy child asked for five more minutes. I’d get to the office and be dealing only with the current day’s crises.

This year, when we got our schedule for the kids, alarm bells went off. We had to leave at 7:15. Disaster! Everything needed to be pushed up 15 minutes, and now the little zombies need to wake up closer to 6:20 than 6:40, and my morning time would be 45 minutes rather than an hour. (As much of a morning person as I am, I have a real aversion to waking up before 5 if at all possible!) I tried to make it work. I tried to be faster. I tried to shave at the office. I tried to read more quickly. It hasn’t worked, and I ultimately gave in. For the last two weeks I’ve woken up at 6 and gotten ready, then tried to make up for lost time at the beginning of the day in the office. But it’s not working. My whole routine is blown. I’m late with the blog, my inbox is cluttered, I’m oddly tired considering that I’ve been getting more sleep. The kids at least are still making their bus.

I know I’ll figure it out and adjust, but it hasn’t happened yet. Guess I’ll post Monday nights now, after Sing-off! Sorry for the non-publishing, kvetchy post. Back to normal (!) next week.

 

Middle Grade Boys and the Internet

Josh Getzler

Last week, I had the distinct pleasure of walking three blocks up Hudson Street to the Penguin offices to sit in on a marketing meeting for Geoff Rodkey’s wonderful Princess-Bride-with-13-year-olds middle grade adventure novel, The Chronicles of Egg: Deadweather and Sunrise. The book, which is the first of a trilogy, sold to Putnam in April and has gained some wonderful momentum. We had an interesting, exciting conversation, with members of the various divisions discussing what the plans for the book could be.

One element, though, which I thought was extremely interesting and brought about several minutes of discussion, centered around the particular topic of What do Middle Grade Boys Do on the Internet? Geoff and I both have middle grade sons (I also have middle grade daughters, but they were not our target there), so we were able to give anecdotal testimony, which we all thought was pretty interesting.  It also made me think in a new way about my son’s internet habits.

The first thing is that neither of our tweens was on Facebook. They’re certainly aware of it, and have looked at different pages—my son has seen mine, and I’ve let him go on assorted Muppet-related FB pages at times. But he doesn’t have an account. His school has a closed network through Moodle, which he uses to discuss homework with his classmates. But he does spend every possible minute online.

Most of the time, he’s on Youtube, which was not at all intuitive to me. But when I think about it, it’s the equivalent of so many kids growing  up in front of the TV. Only now, he gets to choose what to watch, and has it delivered in bit-sized chunks and by himself. He watches Loony Tunes clips, Muppet Show excerpts, and when he thinks we’re not looking, Family Guy. (We’re not yet in the danger zone of puberty, so we haven’t had him looking at THOSE sites yet.) He spends the majority of his time, though, being on a social network different from Moodle and different from FB: a much larger than I thought could be possible group of people who create video mash-ups of cartoon characters performing pop songs. 

I had to really hold my breath before allowing him to be part of this. He’d been creating these mash-ups (Phineus and Ferb doing Tik Tok, for example), with pretty great creativity, for months, and was begging me to allow him to upload them. I was, reasonably, apprehensive, since there is really very little in the way of possible monitoring of this kind of user group. But we agreed that I would have complete access to his account and would monitor occasionally. If I saw anything I didn’t like, I’d take him off it, he agreed, and also said he’d give no true personal information.

He’s now been on this group for several months. He feels like he has a real (if ephemeral) group of friends, who are also creative and—from what I can see—unthreatening. He has a bunch of followers, and it’s been terrific for his self-esteem to have people see his work and compliment his artistry. And it hasn’t (yet) even had a whiff of creepy.

Geoff’s son’s experience, while also Youtube-centered, was different, but it also indicated that there are an awful lot of kids lurking around Youtube. It certainly gave the folks at Penguin—who’d been thinking more in the way of Poptropica—pause. It’ll be interesting to see what they end up deciding to do.

I’d be fascinated to hear what you, who are reading this, think of these habits. Do you have kids? What do they tend to do? Have you had any issues with any sites? I’d love to hear what you think.

 

St. Louis Toodle-oo

Josh Getzler

One of my favorite weeks of the year is the Bouchercon mystery/thriller conference, held each fall in rotating cities. Like summer’s Thrillerfest, Bouchercon is different from most of the conferences I attend because it is really a meeting of industry folks—agents, editors, already-published authors—and their fans, rather than (largely) writers looking for representation or publication. As a result, the business I do is very different. Let me back up and it’ll be clear.

At a typical conference, I spend part of my time on panels; typically one general agent panel about the state of the industry, and one where I give a certain amount of advice on how to write a pitch letter (or somesuch). I then spend a number of hours each day taking pitches from authors looking for me to represent them. The rest of the time I’m schmoozing with attendees, whether at meals or at the bar, talking about publishing (or baseball, or whatever they want) as the invited professional. I enjoy it greatly, and get a new client out of these conferences every so often.

Bouchercon, though, is very different. Because the panels are packed with published authors of all stripes (from mega-sellers to small press cozy authors), and because the Anthony and McCavity Awards are given out, it’s kind of become Old Home Week for folks in the industry, and the majority of business takes place in restaurants and bars—most particularly in the hotel bar. I look several weeks in advance at the posted list of who is attending, and justify my plane ticket and four nights away from the family by scheduling my days full of catch-up meetings with editors and writers and other agents. My joke is that I had around 15 meetings over three days halfway across the country with people who work an average of 12 blocks from my office in Soho.

But it’s easy and efficient to do it this way—it would probably take me three months to set up lunches and drinks with all of the people I saw in St. Louis. And since I was particularly discussing a few specific projects, the face-to-face time was useful as well to convey my enthusiasm. (With one exception: I was scheduled to meet with the redoubtable Otto Penzler, who’s just relaunched Mysterious Press with Grove Atlantic. I walked up to him in the bar, where he was having a drink with an author, and he turns to the other fellow—who turned out to be Jonathan Santlofer—and says “Oh Christ, it’s Getzler. He probably wants to pitch me a fucking BOOK!” Without batting an eye, I said “Of course not, Otto, I’m just here to have a glass of wine with you and catch up.” Which I did, and ended up in one of the more fascinating conversations of the weekend, made all the more interesting when Irish novelist Stuart Neville joined us. I’ll pitch him the novel this afternoon.)

It is of course moments like that, where people from all over, with differing experiences but the common ground of crime fiction, get together, that make Bouchercon special. Another was watching the First Novel panel—at 8:30 in the morning when nobody is truly awake (including the writers, three of whom I’d seen long after my conversation with Otto the night before!). But it was a terrific panel, partly because moderator Joelle Charbonneau was well prepared with pithy and interesting questions, and partly because the authors themselves were so different. There was a British writer with a DaVinci Code thriller getting a lot of buzz, a Minnesota humorous cozy writer, a dark Pittsburg noir author…you get the idea. They had very different—and all very appropriate—experiences. They’re all pretty savvy with respect to social media, and all terribly excited to have a book out.

Another difference between Bouchercon and other conferences has to do with size. There were enough publishing professionals in St. Louis that the organizers were able to put together a bowling tournament on Friday with 13 five-person teams with proceeds benefitting the St. Louis Public Library system. The team I played on, with my marvelous (and newly signed!) client Linda Hull; her editor, Midnight Ink’s Terri Bischoff; Dead Guy contributor and Tyrus Books head Ben Leroy; and author Dan Krokos, came in second to Brad Parks’ Minotaur team by 1 ½ points (meaning approximately one not-made spare by one bowler out of five over the course of three games). Devastating! But fun. (Photos on FB—I think every team posted their team photos somewhere.)

Finally, as I looked around the bar on Saturday night, I marveled once again at how consistently supportive crime fiction writers are of each other. There is a spirit of help and support and cooperation in this community that’s different from what I’ve seen in other genres. There’s a sense that there are enough readers to go around, that the writers are also readers and fans of each other. They admire each other and honestly applaud each other’s success.

So when I left very early on Sunday morning, tired, loaded down with new books, filled with information and gossip, I was exhilarated. I didn’t feel so much that I had any brilliant insights into the future of electronic editions or distribution streams. Rather, I felt happy that with all the instability and uncertainty  in the publishing industry, there is still such a smart, constructive, excited group of professionals working through this new paradigm into a future suddenly more worthy of optimism. 

 

First Day of School

Josh Getzler

I realized on reflection that my insights into the state of British publishing after my trip a few weeks ago were pretty pedestrian. So I will spare you. Instead, in honor of the beginning of the school year, with all of its optimism among the newly-sharpened pencils and slightly too-big uniforms (which will be too small by June), even amidst the trepidation of new teachers and different classrooms, I will give a bit of an update on the first four months of Hannigan Salky Getzler. Hopefully it will give some kind of an idea as to the way I work and how a startup agency revs itself up (certainly not to be completely extrapolated out into the general agent population; but on the other hand I don’t think I’m terribly far out of the mainstream).

 

1)      Setup of office and systems: When Carrie, Jess and I moved over to HSG from Russell & Volkening, we’d all been part of established agencies with systems in place for many years. Starting anew gave us the opportunity to explore fresh ways of doing things, particularly technologically. It’s been something of a mixed-bag so far. On one hand, our internal administrative flow has been pretty efficient, particularly once Jess finished the bar exam and we all began to have a little continuity of time together in the office. On the other, we decided to run our email system through gmail on the Cloud, rather than using a server, and that’s been spotty. The interface with Outlook can be unstable, and if you are a pack rat like I am, and also have several devices running mail simultaneously (I regularly use my desktop at work, my Blackberry and my iPad over the course of a day), it can be hinky. Always fine if you use the basic gmail website. Less good if you try to use the device’s interface. Our indispensable fourth wheel, Maddie, has  MacGyver-ing things with patience and genius for the last two months, but I more than occasionally want to throw my Blackberry against a wall. 

 

2)      Design: We spent a bit of time working on image, both within our little piece of the incubator space we have on Spring St, and in terms of logo and web design. On one hand, it sometimes felt like we were taking time away from constructive work to decide on things like which curlicues looked best on the sides of our logo, or even to take real pictures. But we do want to show ourselves as professionals who care how we present ourselves. Hopefully if we do so in the right way, then authors will have confidence that we will present them appropriately. So within the next short period of time we will be launching our new HSG website and debuting the logo. One thing I also learned was that it’s time to retire the photo I use in all my social media and admit that the hair is grayer and shorter and the glasses are a presence. In a related note, I received in the mail yesterday my invitation to my 25^th high school reunion.

 

3)      Social Media: I realized this summer that if I’m going to tell my clients that they need to be “active in social media” then I’d better learn more about it and expand my own usage. And while I still believe that many people clutter up FB and Twitter with bad jokes and updates from the bathroom, I see clearly the business and marketing value (as well as the reconnection-with-old-friends upside) in being aboard. There is a direct marketing power to putting out information that can be reshared and retweeted well beyond your own circle of friends. And even though there can be a lot of misinformation out there, there have been a number of long, wide Twitter conversations about elements of publishing (not to mention politics, entertainment, and fantasy baseball) that I’ve found fascinating. It IS where some of the smartest agents, editors, publicists, and authors meet in virtual round tables, and you can really get a feel for their personalities a lot of the time.

 

4)      The pace: While nowhere near as relaxed as 20 years ago, this was the first year in at least three or four where I didn’t feel that everyone in an agency or publishing house was tied to their desks, wide-eyed, feeling that if they went to Fire Island for a weekend they’d find their job eliminated by Monday. (Booksellers were not as sanguine…) It has meant that turnaround time has been a bit slower all the way down the line, from getting reads on submissions to comments on contracts to in fact being able to read submissions in as timely a fashion as we have wanted. But the wheels have been grinding, and business has certainly continued to be done. And it’s not that everyone isn’t always swamped—everyone has WAY more work than they can do. It’s just that there was a feeling that, even though it is looking different every day—there is still a book business.

 

5)      Sales: I don’t want to sound like everyone was sitting around fat and happy this summer. It was a season of change, where independent publishing went beyond early adaptors and agents started to explore their roles. At HSG we made our first foray into working with a client on editing, converting, designing and producing a book independently, and were very proud to see that book (The First Secret of Edwin Hoff by A.B. Bourne) released into the world in an organized, professional, and (we hope) successful fashion. That process alone will be the subject of another week’s blog. But we were able as well to complete sales of a number of projects, some of which were new and got done relatively quickly (within six weeks of submission, start to finish); and two of which—Sheila Boneham’s mystery series and James Phelan’s YA post-apocalyptic trilogy—I’ve had out on submission for more than a year (two?). Those sales were incredibly satisfying, since I tell my clients, and authors in general, that when we take you on we really do keep at it and try to sell. And I’m grateful to Sheila and James—and to the other clients I’m still out with over a long time—for sticking with us as we press and prod, trying to find the right fit, the next editor, the unanticipatedly correct house, even when it’s long and frustrating and seemingly hopeless.

So there is a bit of an update. There’s more to come of course. Now it’s off to St. Louis for Bouchercon, one of my favorite weeks of the year, to see authors, other agents, and travel four hours by plane to have meetings with editors who work an average of 15 blocks from my office. Full report next week.

 

One from the Road

Josh Getzler

Ok, so I know I was supposed to do another London post today, and talk about some book-related lessons learned from my trip a couple of weeks ago, but a) I'm on a train to DC today for a meeting, so this will be a bit shorter than usual, and b) I want to talk about Jeff Cohen's post from Sunday.

No, Jeff, you're not in trouble--and I don't have the right to put you in detention until I sell your next book!--but I think I have a bit of an explanation that could go toward relieving some of your frustration regarding craft/dog/cooking etc cozies.

I think, first of all, that you are correct, that the primary concern of a reader is the quality of the book, and not simply the hook. Yes, there are a lot of people who like crafts and dogs and cooking--and haunted guest houses! But I believe that they will only invest in one (or perhaps two) in a series if the quality of the book isn't strong. That's for two reasons--a) people don't want to waste their time, and b) there are a lot of examples of those kinds of books. So if a reader doesn't like your craft mystery, there are seven other series to try out.

But it is important to mention that the initial hook isn't irrelevant. I know that I'm very willing to give a chance to a thriller with a picture of St Peter's on it, or the Dome of the Rock or the Houses of Parliament. If a mystery has a knight Templar or a Centurion or a sepia drawing of a Victorian alleyway, I'll read it. At least one of them!

My wife says that when she was growing up and in an airport, if there was a hammer and sickle or a swastika on the cover, she'd buy it. Are these instincts really any different from the craft buyer or the recipe club sleuth aficionado? Ok, I'm off the soapbox. One last thing--greetings Ben! Dead Guy readers are in for a treat. Have fun, Champ! And see you at Bouchercon.

Cheers!

Josh Getzler

Well, vacation in the Tudorverse is over, and I can only say that this was the first time I’ve ever been grateful for the grey weather of London! Seriously, I hope all of you out there made it through with only minor inconveniences, and that everything is back to normal soon.

When we decided to take this trip, we made the decision to limit the history to two eras—16^th Century Tudors (of course) and the two world wars. We basically thought we’d give our kids lessons in Henry VIII and Winston Churchill. (By going to Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, we necessarily added William the Conquerer, but only a bit; and we talked about the current royal family as well, particularly as you couldn’t turn around without running into a William and Kate coffee mug or plate or cigarette lighter.) We figured that if we started adding in Stuarts and Plantagenets and any Charles except the current Prince of Wales, we’d only confuse them.

That strategy turned out to be very useful for our middle-grade kids, as it allowed us to work around a giant figure and teach about the times he lived in through the filter of what was going on in his life. It’s also why some of the places we went to worked so well—Hampton Court Palace, the Churchill War Rooms, both of which were devoted either entirely or significantly to the particular figure (we simply ignored the William & Mary parts of Hampton Court Palace)—while others were too diffuse to be effective for kids.

Surprisingly, one of the less-exciting places for the kids was Westminster Abbey, which is always a highlight for me. Sure they were excited to see Elizabeth and Mary’s grave. But the fact that they were stepping on, say, Oliver Cromwell or Geoffrey Chaucer or Harold Wilson did nothing for them. They needed, in effect, a linear plot—one where you might have two main perspectives, but where you didn’t want to muddy the waters by getting too far into the heads of the nonessential characters.

One of the oddest highlights—for it was truly a highlight—was the London Eye. At first, we were wondering why it even exists—an enormous ferris wheel on the Thames that dominates the skyline of the South Bank, creating a strange juxtaposition with the majestic houses of Parliament opposite. My wife and I talked about it, about how it felt weird to think of it as an essential tourist attraction/symbol of the city like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty or the Coliseum. And, of course, it really isn’t THAT comparable—the Tower or the Abbey or Buckingham Palace certainly fit the bill. But it’s the first such place that can even be in the conversation, of a shiny, technology-based, modern version of something old and venerable that has proved very quickly to be fun, user-friendly, and immensely popular. It reminds me of…wait a minute, I’ll think of it.

As this was the history tour rather than the literary visit, I’ll stick to that theme, and give a few impressions of what I heard and saw regarding books next week. Hints: the current situation with Waterstone’s could have a Borders-like effect on the industry in Britain, but for a different reason; and James Patterson is REALLY popular.

 

London Calling

Josh Getzler

 

Greetings from row 60 of a Virgin Atlantic red-eye from Newark to Heathrow. It's 2:30 am, the nine year-old is sleeping on me, my knee is begging for a stretch, and there is no way I'm going to be able to get up for at least another hour or two--bless her, the nine year-old knows how to sleep. The turbulence of the last four hours has subsided sufficiently to allow me to write in the convenient-yet-awkward manner afforded me by the iPad, and I marvel anew at my son's feat, during six hours of a flight to Israel last year, of writing an entire original episode of the Muppet Show on an iTouch. Kids.

 

This is the first time we're taking our brood on an extended trip that didn't include their grandparents, a Seder, or both. It's simply a vacation, after camp and before school, during the second-slowest week of the publishing calendar (Christmas Week being the slowest).

 

We decided on London partly because we thought it would be a gentler transition to another culture for the kids if they spoke the same language as the natives; partly because my wife and I know the city well from our previous trips there; and partly because between Amanda's career as a World history teacher and my own representing a good number of books set there, the kids feel a bit like they know the place already.

 

OK, so the London they are expecting is a bizarre combination of Hilary Mantel and JK Rowling, and is filled with Tudors and Muggles. They may be disappointed on Friday to find that there are no Royal beheadings scheduled on Tower Green, or on Sunday not to find Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell at Hampton Court Palace. But they'll be relieved that the Millennium Bridge was rebuilt after the Death Eaters destroyed it in Half-Blood Prince.

 

I'm incredibly excited to experience London in a third stage of life. The first time I was there I was with my own parents on a trip like this one. I was a teenager and my lasting memories were experiencing Wimbledon; being horrified, as a New Yorker, to discover that people ate pigeon; and having my life changed by The Smiths when I heard Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now for the first time on BBC1 on the way to the Cotswolds.

 

The next time I was there was on my honeymoon. On a Saturday afternoon at the National Portrait Gallery, my new wife gave me a three hour summary of a thousand years of British history without a note or a blackboard, simply taking me from painting to painting from William the Conquerer to Diana, William and Harry. It was a revelation in two ways: I knew that Amanda's future students would be extraordinarily lucky to have her, and that I was going to spend the rest of my life, one way or another, accompanied by Stuarts, Tudors, Windsors, chivalry and Shakespeare, and Bedlam and the East End.

 

Now I return as Dad, fresh from 15 years of reading Allison Weir and Conan Doyle, Bruce Alexander and PD James; watching Prime Suspect and Upstairs, Downstairs; and seeing my kids experience Harry Potter and Mary Poppins. Recently, my son read Maile Meloy's superb historical fantasy of 1954 London,The Apothecary (coming out in October from Putnam). He was so struck by it that both my wife and I read it--devoured it, really. (It's a can't miss.) We decided to tweak our itinerary a bit, and will be hitting the Chelsea Physic Garden this afternoon before we even officially check in to our hotel, in order to experience one of the key scenes of that book. The week will be filled, we hope, with moments like that one which will entertain and--not even stealthily on our part--educate. I'll be fascinated to see what my kids' takeaways will be. Will they find the next Smiths? Become infatuated with Churchill? Obsess over the identity of Jack the Ripper? Want to follow cricket? (Nah...)

 

Tune in next week.

 

In Praise of Thalia Book Club Camp (Edited)

Josh Getzler

Six weeks ago, a box of books arrived at my apartment, filled with a combination of already published paperbacks and Advance Readers Copies (ARCs) of ten diverse middle-grade novels. There was the latest installation of the 39 Clues series; The Apothecary, the first children’s book by novelist Maile Meloy; graphic novel Astronaut Academy; Shakespeare’s Secret by Elise Broach; Liesl and Po, a new dystopian fantasy by Lauren Oliver…and more and more.

So what was this? A publisher trying to show off to an agent who represents middle grade fiction? No,the books were published by a wide variety of houses. A job-seeker giving a visual resume of her wide-ranging taste? No, though that would be a new one!

Nope. It was homework for my 12 year-old son, from a remarkable program he has now just completed called the Thalia Book Club Camp (TBCC). Run out of Symphony Space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, TBCC is a series of one-week programs for either middle-grade kids or teenagers. Each day one novel is analyzed, with writing exercises, frequent field trips either to locations in the book or places relevant to it (a backstage visit to the newly constructed scale replica of the Theater at Stratford-on-Avon in the Park Avenue Armory during the Shakespeare’s Secret day, for example), and highlighted each day by a visit from the author for a Q and A and book signing.

It’s a pretty remarkable program, with an avid and growing following (the sessions sell out months in advance) and one that expects diligence and rigor from its 9-12 year-old participants. Joe was told in no uncertain terms that he was expected to have read all the books prior to the start of the session, since once of the exercises on the first day was to compare the books that were going to be discussed that week. And to his credit, Joe buckled down and stretched himself, reading books he might not have gone for naturally (high fantasy or a novel in verse) and making it through. In the end, he appreciated and enjoyed stories that he hadn’t even particularly liked for the first 50 pages but needed to finish, and he understood why they had been assigned. It was eye-opening for him, and wonderful to watch for me.

One of the other things TBCC did extremely well was to give the kids a different context when going through these books: the place that these books have within publishing. The authors, when they came in, talked about how long it took them to write, and how difficult it can be to get a book published. The kids got to understand illustration and its place in children’s books. And on one exciting day, they visited Random House, met President and Publisher of RH Children’s Books Chip Gibson, and served as a kind of focus group on covers. Then, in a big surprise, they walked into an office to find Eragon author Christopher Paolini waiting for them to talk about finishing his immensely successful fantasy series that he began when he was 14. Joe came home each day with a different perspective on the world of books and publishing, and with several new favorite authors. In fact, my wife and I needed to change part of our itinerary for our upcoming trip to London in order to make time to visit the Chelsea Physick Garden because it's featured in The Apothecary. 

Of course as a parent, one of the things I loved was the fact that it also meant that Joe spent so much of his time this summer reading a wide variety of terrific, interesting books, rather than, say, more Archie Comics, which certainly have their place but get to be a wee bit repetitive and enervating after a while.

At the end of each week, TBCC concluded with a reading of the participants’ writing, in the Symphony Space theater, by two professional actors. We had seen one of them this past winter in The Importance of Being Earnest--a fact that was significantly more exciting for us than for Joe, who simply loved that the guy had gotten Joe's super hero's voice spot on! The actors read the poems and fragments and stories and descriptions with as much humor and verve and respect as if they were reading Wilde or Shakespeare instead of a fourth grader from PS 196, playfully intoning "To Be Continued" or "The dreaded dot...dot...dot..."

This reading was one of the more interesting parts from the perspective of my own career, rather than just as a Dad. Not because of the kids’ talents (some were extraordinary, some were finding their voices), but because before each work was read, the actor gave a short bio of the author (taken from interviews the kids did with each other), where among other things they said what their favorite books were. In two weeks, so 40 or so kids (some were there both weeks, so there was a bit of repetition), more than half said that their favorite books were the Harry Potter Series. Around a quarter included the Hunger Games Trilogy (which surprised me, as I thought that would have skewed older), and a bunch of others added The Ranger’s Apprentice and Percy Jackson. And a vast majority said that if they could ask anyone about writing it would be J.K. Rowling. These are sophisticated, broad-minded kids. They ALL love that wizard.

Since Joe started TBCC, I’ve had lunch with a bunch of children’s book editors. I’ve been relentless in suggesting to them that they contact TBCC to get their talented, buzzworthy local authors to participate in future camps. Not that the curator of the  program needs help—her eye is pretty much unfailing and her list is so spot on and eclectic that she clearly does fine without my pushing editors her way! But I can’t help preaching this from the mountaintops. From its fascinating insights into the world of publishing, to the transcendent selection of novels, to its ability to entice authors to come and speak to the participants, to the interactivity of the writing and drawing the kids did, to the excitement of hearing their works read by real actors on a real stage, the Thalia Book Club Camp is a unique and extraordinary program. Joe can’t wait till next year. And neither can I. (And I have an author, who lives in the Village, with a big debut about an adventure with pirates who might be perfect…dot...dot...dot...)

 

Tuesdays in August

Josh Getzler

When I was working in baseball, when we would discuss our attendance projections before the season, we used to say, “Well, we know we are going to do well on Saturday nights, or fireworks nights, or games against the Mets affiliate, or Opening Day. But how are we going to do on Tuesdays in August?” That was code for “just another game,” when there wasn’t any special promotion, when it’s the middle of the week in the middle of the season, and attendance reflected the core market.

Tuesdays in August became such an ingrained part of my thought process that I ended up using it in other contexts. When I ran my synagogue for example, and we needed to plan how much food to get for the post-services reception, we had the High Attendance spread and the Tuesdays in August spread. When my wife and I would get up—even in the middle of winter—to discuss what was going on during a day that didn’t need unusual pickups or babysitting, we’d say “Eh, it’s a Tuesday in August.”

I thought of this when I got up this morning, obviously, because it is a Tuesday in August, and theoretically should be a grind-it-out, not-much-going-on kind of day. But it’s not. This whole summer hasn’t been, really. I’ve been able to start a new business, sell books of wide variety and great interest (and submit, but not yet sell, a good number more to a good number of publishers), read an enormous number of manuscripts, send two children to camp, and watch my father recover remarkably from serious illness. There is no such thing in my life any more as Tuesdays in August in the metaphorical sense.

And yet, I think I’m the happiest I’ve been in years (as long as I don’t look at things like partisan politics, my dwindling investment portfolio, print runs for non-best-sellers, and the fact that there are nightly riots in the city I’m visiting with my wife and children in two weeks). And today also marks another milestone, another non-Tuesday-in-August event: Today is the first day, as I write this later than usual at my desk in my office, that I look around our area and see the whole of Hannigan Salky Getzler Agency in one place for the first time. The Bar Exam is over for Jess, Carrie is back from her vacation and I still have time before mine, and Maddie is drinking her third cup of coffee while trying vainly to keep me organized and the HSG trains running on time. We just got logos for the company that we’re excited about, and our website is, at last, in the works. I even registered for Bouchercon, one of my favorite weeks of the year.

And tonight, I’m going with my family to see the New York Liberty (I’ll write an evangelistic post about the WNBA another time!), and it’s both breast cancer awareness night (so pink jerseys) and a night where the team is placing their former center Rebecca Lobo in their Ring of Honor. I look forward to sitting with my beer and watching the game, and wondering whether, six months ago when the marketing department was planning their promotions, they looked at the calendar at this game and said “well, we better do something fun for this one—after all, it’s a Tuesday in August…”

 

Location, Location, Location

Josh Getzler

When we talk about a successful piece of writing, we typically discuss quality of writing, character development, plot, pacing, originality, and setting. Most of the time, a novel—OK, a crime novel, since that’s what we talk about most on this blog, and it suits my purposes here—can get away with being a little shy on, say, character development, if the plot is original and moves quickly. Or an author can be forgiven an unoriginal plot (say, a foiled assassination) if the characters are fun, sympathetic, or thought-provoking. I say this because the element I am discussing today is one where originality is not always necessary, and where there are plenty of successful novels out there where it’s not emphasized. But when it works, it can be illuminating, educational, and add great value to a story.

That element, which has come up several times in compelling fashion recently in books I’ve taken on and either sold or expect to sell soon, is Setting (particularly City) as Character. This isn’t World Creation. I’m not talking about fantasy. And it’s not making up a plausible town, inhabiting it with the characters of the story, and making the reader imagine it. Rather, it’s the Venice of Donna Leon, the Botswana of Alexander McCall Smith, the Gaza of Matt Beynon Rees, the Ancient Rome of Stephen Saylor. Also the New York of Linda Fairstein or Victorian London of Bruce Alexander.

In each of these cases, the protagonist has a particular relationship with his or her city, and occasionally meanders away from the investigation in order to muse on it. Much of the time it’s full of the satisfied, still-passionate and occasionally exasperated love of a spouse or parent. One of the best examples is Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti, who feels every day that he is living in Paradise—one with murder and corruption, but also wine, canals, and a lovely apartment with a wry wife and difficult teenage VENETIAN children. Sometimes, like in Rees’s brilliant depictions of life in Palestinian cities and refugee camps, the feeling can be one of despair and frustration at beauty destroyed or potential lost. His high school teacher Omar Yussef walks the crowded, fetid alleys of Dehaisha, where three generations have lived without hope, and tries to instill humanity and education and order into a town filled with nihilism and violence.

This has come up with me because I’ve been working on several novels where the location matters, and where making the setting into a character can lift the book into a different level of commerciality. The most recent was a police procedural set in Mumbai. In the first draft the setting was very much in the background. Yes the cop needed to wend his way through crowded streets and endless traffic, and explained the juxtaposition of the skyscrapers in the business district with the slums that have more people crowding into tiny spaces than live in all of Idaho. But the book was really about a murder. And while there are an awful lot of police procedurals about a murder, there are NOT a lot of police procedurals that take place in Mumbai, and certainly not ones where Mumbai is as much of a character as any of the humans inhabiting it. I wanted to see that; I wanted to learn what cops in Mumbai ate and drank in the morning instead of donuts and coffee (or croissant and espresso…you get the idea); how the businesspeople and teenagers and shopkeepers dealt with them; how the police department there differed from Scotland Yard or the NYPD.

So I sent my client back for a rewrite, with instructions to back up, relax, allow himself to Make Mumbai A Character (but not describe the weather too much!). I told him that in this kind of a book, he could allow the pace to slow slightly if, in describing the cop waiting for a suspect to exit a building, he wanted to let him go across the street for a chai and a chapati.

I got the second draft last week and sat down to read. My author had eliminated or scaled down a number of American expats, secondary constables, and a suspect or two. In their place was Mumbai, in its fragrant, sprawling, occasionally anachronistic splendor, a character to be reckoned with.

 

 

Packing for Camp

Josh Getzler

In a couple of hours, my wife and I will be loading our middle daughter onto a bus that will take her to Paradise in the Berkshires for the next month. It’s her first year at sleep-away camp, so she’s only going for a month, though given the opportunity she would have left the day after school ended and come home September 1. Our other two children talk about whether we’ll try to buy the apartment next to ours in order to give them places to live when they get older; this one says she’ll post updates from California on Facebook.

I remembered, as we were helping her pack (actually as my wife and I packed and my daughter discussed with her sister which of the Bieber posters would look best over her bunk), that when I went away for the summer, figuring out what to read was a Thing. It was a combination of what I was required to read from school, what I had started just before I was supposed to leave, what would signify to the other kids that I was not a dork even though I read—a lot. I remember going to an outdoors-y camp in the middle of nowhere and bringing ONLY Lord of the Rings--figuring it would take me the month to get through them--then having to write begging my folks to include some Agatha Christie in their package with the sweatshirt and extra underwear when I realized I simply was never going to appreciate LOTR no matter how many times I tried, and was going to memorize the months-old Creem magazine I'd brought if they didn't send reinforcements. And I remember frying my body next to a pool in Israel because I couldn’t stop reading O Jerusalem. And I remember five of us, boys and girls alike, sneaking out near the lake at Camp Redwood in 1978 because Beth Wachtel had her older sister’s well-thumbed copy of Forever and we’d all HEARD about it…

Which brings me back to last night. I guess the thing that made me happy was that my daughter did in fact WANT me to give her books, that she intended to read during Flashlight time (funny that what used to be illicit is now mandated!), and that what she wanted was books. But in this case, the interesting part was that we were loading Monster High, Dork Diaries and Who was Queen Elizabeth (prep for late August England trip) into her hand-me-down first generation Kindle. And that it was normal.

Our kids are 8, 9, and 12. They have bookshelves full to bursting with printed books, and e-readers loaded with electronic editions (frequently duplicating what’s on their shelves, Dan Gutman and Andrew Clements and Judy Blume will be happy to know—though not Forever, as far as I know!). They are happy to pick up a printed book and are comfortable navigating their way through the menus. They spend hours every week at Barnes & Noble, but also get a real thrill out of the ability to push a button and have a book appear.

They are a transition generation, as mine was with computers, and it will be interesting for me to see what their apartments will look like—will they need to place a premium on wall space for bookshelves, as my wife and I did every time we moved? Or will built-in bookshelves go the way of milk crates filled with LPS or CD racks? My brother-in-law the techie says he sees it happening by 2020. I see it taking longer (but that’s another column).

I look at my daughter’s duffel bag with her sleeping bag, sunscreen, ponytail holders, box of already-addressed envelopes for letters to her parents, grandparents and BFFs (no emails allowed) and Bieber posters (sigh). The Kindle (with the name tag taped to the back) is perched on top of it. I hope she doesn’t drop it in the lake. But I also hope she takes it there. 

 

The Death of Borders

Josh Getzler

It came as little surprise yesterday that Borders announced that it was liquidating its stores and laying off all 11,000 of its workers. It’s been a company in death throes for a couple of years, and the question  was really when it was going to go, not as much if.

The press releases, and indeed much of the reportage about the cause of Borders’ decline, as been the all encompassing “because of ebooks.” And while certainly the growing market penetration of electronic distribution of books cost Borders market share, it’s not the only reason.  It also has to do with the price of real estate, and the fact that Borders decided to hitch its wagon to three forms of entertainment that would all be slammed by alternative distribution methods: Books AND video AND music. The trifecta.

Every time I went to the Borders near my parents’ home in New Jersey over the last 10 years or so, I was struck by how…empty the store seemed. There were large swaths of empty space between the three unintegrated sections of the store. It didn’t lend itself to shopping for multiple media—If I wanted a CD, I could go into the store, go to the music section, pick out my album, and go to the front and pay with a minimal need to pass a book or a DVD. On one hand, it led to an efficient purchase (when they actually had the album in stock, which was rarer and rarer). But they lost out, oftentimes, on the impulse book purchase. Now it’s not that I’m saying that they needed to put comedy DVDs next to rock CDs next to thrillers. But integrating the display tables, not the general racks, would have been useful.

But that, of course, is only part of it. As first the music industry, then the video market, became progressively more digital, both in its distribution forms with mp3’s and streaming video; and in its retail outlets, with itunes and Amazon in particular grabbing market share; the tripartite superstore became less efficient. When Borders didn’t really adjust, but rather simply made the other sections more barren while not contracting, their ultimate failure was assured. And this is where real estate came in—they simply couldn’t sell enough books to justify rent in superstores that were intended for revenue on books to only make up 1/3 of the total. And when you combine that with the fact that their in-store sales had plummeted because of the online distribution outlets (whether physical or digital), it was really over.

So what are the lessons? There will clearly be multitudes of articles about this, ranging from “forget it—first it was indies, then Borders, next it’ll be Barnes and Noble and you won’t be able to go anywhere but Target and WalMart to buy a book;” to “bookstores can survive if they play to niches—whether children’s stores, or outlets dealing with crime fiction or fantasy or romance.”

What’ll be correct? Too soon to tell. But one thing that appears certain is that the bricks-and-mortar businesses will need to integrate themselves with electronic distribution. That could mean, as some outlets are starting to do, that you can look through their books, then download right there through them onto your Kindle or iPad, with the store getting credit for the sale. Or perhaps they need to expand the “neighborhood bookstore” feel (particularly regarding children’s books) in order to drive greater foot traffic into perhaps somewhat smaller spaces. Or in fact it could mean a return to the indie model, if publishers will be willing to give smaller stores favorable rates (which could have an impact on royalties to authors, but which many authors I know would be willing to sacrifice if it meant the overall survival of bookstores). I had lunch last week with an editor at one of the biggest houses in New York, and he was saying “look, times are hard, but that’s partly because we haven’t figured it all out. We’re in an industry in flux. But it’s not a dead industry. Not as long as authors are still writing and people are still reading. We haven’t figured out how to deal with a new business paradigm that will take us more efficiently into the next 10 or 20 or 50 years. But that doesn’t mean that the world is coming to an end.”

That’s not a lot of comfort to the 11,000 laid-off Borders workers. But they’re not out of work because of publishers any more than the folks who worked for Blockbuster Video are out of work because of Warner Brothers. They are the victims of innovation, which is inexorable.

 

Lessons of ThrillerFest

Josh Getzler

I love ThrillerFest, the crime fiction conference just concluded over the weekend. As a fan of thrillers, it’s a chance to walk down the hall of the Hyatt and see, say, MJ Rose chatting with Steve Berry, or watch the crowds part as Ken Follett and his agent Al Zuckerman stride across a ballroom, their marvelous twin white manes  almost shimmering in the dim light of a cocktail party. They do not wear nametags.

There are many such sightings at ThrillerFest, amidst the panels and hallway rendezvous with friends from around the country and business done over cocktails in the bar while watching THAT agent chat up THAT editor to impress THAT author sitting two tables away. For me it’s also a chance to see clients like Keith Raffel, in from San Francisco for a panel and to see his daughter who works for some new agency down in Soho--and also to discuss submissions and strategies and to see his friends from the thriller writing community.  I also had the pleasure for the first time of having two clients on panels this year. Both Keith and Nancy Bilyeau—who got to discuss historical thrillers with Katherine Neville, David Liss and Steve Berry (among others)—appeared. (Unfortunately, simultaneously and on Saturday morning, which prevented me from seeing either. Gotta wait for the podcasts...).

And I think that one of the pleasures of ThrillerFest (perhaps more so now than it would have been 15 or 20 years ago) is that with the proliferation of social media, it’s not simply that I’ve read these folks’ books or perhaps an interview in a magazine or a review in a newspaper. Now I may be Facebook friends with them or read their blogs or follow them on Twitter. So when I connect a face with a name, I feel I’m meeting someone I kind of know already. There are some people who feel pretty uncomfortable about this somewhat artificial intimacy, but it’s a pretty self-selecting group. Even the folks who are only expanding their online presence for commercial reasons put up with strangers asking them for their peach pie recipe they’d put up on Facebook a month ago.

But my other role at ThrillerFest is as participation in the literary speed-dating exercise AgentFest. Bescause ThrillerFest is in NYC, the organizers are able to gather (con…rope…threaten..wheedle) 50 or so agents to accept 3-minute pitches from mostly first-time authors for two hours on the Thursday of ThrillerFest. The agents are then invited to a cocktail party. That usually does the trick. AgentFest is the difference between ThrillerFest and any other conference. It has both the Joe Finders AND the science teacher from Morristown who has written her techno-thriller in the Starbucks after classes. Most conferences are one or the other—they are either pitchfests with only a few well-known writers, editors or agents, or industry conferences without the pitch sessions.

What I have found most interesting about AgentFest over the years is that, for whatever reason, there seems to be a theme to the pitches; a particular kind of thriller that is the hot trope of the year. Last year, for example, I stood up at the break midway through, turned to my friend Alex Glass of Trident, and said “Wow, lot of Nazis this year, eh?” And there were—not WW2 spy novels, though, but grandchildren of Austrian Jews, say, going back with a scrawled diagram to find the Monet hidden in Tati’s old woodshed, watched by a wizened caretaker whose own family had harbored fugitives…or had they?

This year, there were two themes. The first is what I will call the Viral Thriller. In some ways this is the return of the techno-thriller. But now, rather than the nukes and subs and F-96 fighters of the 80’s, the technology is used to spread viruses, either actually—terrorists disseminating germs throughout a city/country/continent/planet—or virtually, where terrorists knock out electrical grids or the World Bank or the security system at the Pentagon.  The protagonists, now, are doctors and hackers as often as CIA agents, and are more often female than they ever have been.

The second theme, which has recurred since Jack Reacher hit the scene, is the loner, almost always a veteran back from Afghanistan,  returning home in the US to find something needing to be cleaned up in his hometown. He doesn’t want to do it—he wants to sit by himself and drink whiskey and forget about the desert—but he’s talented and well-trained, and when his teenage cousin is kidnapped, he takes his traumatized body out of the double-wide and kicks ass.

Both of these subgenres are what I call Crowded Rooms right now—there are so many examples of them out there that in order to get a nibble with one, an author really needs to be a standout writer, with protagonists or plots that so exceed the others that Alex or Diana Fox or Yishai Seidman or I need to take it on and believe in it.

But the marvel and lesson of ThrillerFest is that when you’re done with your pitches, and have dragged yourself to the bar to commiserate with the other aspiring thriller writers, you can see Robert Crais chatting with JT Ellison or Andrew Gross having a drink with up-and-comer Kira Peikoff, or Al and Ken graciously holding court in Ballroom 2, and understand well the possibilities of this art, of this business.

 

Reading for Fun When You Read For Work

Josh Getzler

Like many of you, I am back today from three days off filled with family time, a bit of culinary overindulgence, and heat (and in the case of the New York area, quite a bit of rain as well, although yesterday was stunningly beautiful). And like many of you reading a blog that’s fundamentally about books, before I left my apartment on Friday for the weekend away, I thought about what I was going to read.

For people in the book business, this is a fraught decision. On one hand, I have a somewhat ridiculous number of client and potential client manuscripts to read, dealing with a pretty wide variety of topics and genres—it’s an embarrassment of riches, really, when your reading choices for work include several mysteries (both cozy and procedural), an historical thriller, two literary novels and several middle grade and young adult books of high quality.

And on some level, that opportunity is there every evening, every vacation, every subway ride. But then the question starts to nag: Well, what about all the material that is actually out there, that my colleagues and wife and friends are excited about? Didn’t I get into this business partly because I have spend my life reading books simply to get lost in them; not also because I was analyzing them for potential marketability?

Before I go further, and make my clients and potential clients think that I’m not enjoying reading their work, or immersing myself in their stories, let me go back to that: I do love reading manuscripts. And it’s one of my life’s great pleasures reading new material from people I know and respect and work with. But there is also strategy oftentimes invading those readings. I often sit with notes, or scratch out submissions lists at my desk as a particular project takes shape. And, by the way, you’d want me to do that anyway, if it helps sell your books. Right? So then the question comes back: What do I take with me for three days, when I want to put away the pen and read next to the pool or while waiting for rain to stop or before bed?

Well, there are a number of authors I read whenever they release a new book, simply because I follow their series or careers and love them. This brings in Donna Leon, Daniel Silva, Linda Fairstein, Steven Saylor, John Feinstein…many others. Then there are the books, both nonfiction and fiction, about topics in history or politics I particularly dig. Right now I’m on a British history jag (as you might have realized!), and also reading a bit about late 19^th Century New York. But my son is about to take a two week course at Symphony Space where he reads five YA books a week , discusses different themes of each, and meets several of the authors. He just got a large box filled with books and ARCs from the course, and many of THEM look very interesting. Since my YA and middle grade list has expanded in the last year, it’s always good to see what’s chosen on a list like this, and I like to be able to discuss books with my son anyway. So perhaps one of those…

Finally, every so often there’s a zeitgeist book where everyone you talk to is reading a particular book, and you feel silly if you haven’t as well  (Harry Potter, Hunger Games…Game Change was like that for a little while and to a lesser degree; also Wolf Hall.) I’m thinking about Tiger Mother, particularly since we just received report cards…

And then there are the classics that I feel I ought to read, to fill up some of the many gaps in my personal list. I’ve always wanted to read Les Miserables, and, I mean, it’s about a Revolution…or The Brothers Karamazov..or Infinite Jest. But July 4 weekend around a pool with three kids of my own and a number of in-law adults and children didn’t seem to be the right time or place.

So where did I end up? In the middle, as always! I read the first 100 or so pages of The Serpent’s Tail by Ariana Franklin, the first 150 pages of a promising YA manuscript by a potential client, and the first 75 pages of three clients’ new manuscripts. I never had enough time to lose myself in any one book—though I had moments—and enjoyed all of them. It was a little bit of a shame that there was no extended period to sit and immerse myself in one thing or other, since there are few greater pleasures. But it was a lovely weekend, with family and friends. And now it’s the beginning of a lovely week in publishing, culminating in Thrillerfest, one part of which will comprise next week’s column.

Happy Birthday, JJ!

Starting the Process

Josh Getzler

Yesterday I officially took on a new client: that minimally-modified first sentence turned out very much to be an indicator of things to come, and the English Civil War Era mystery it was attached to had great pace, a sleuth/midwife we can root for, and the promise of a multi-part series with intelligence, suspense, and heart. The author and I exchanged some emails over the weekend; he spoke to a few clients of mine, I told him in pretty great detail how I planned to approach submitting the book, and we agreed to work together. There are a couple of small tweaks I asked him to make in the book—what I call “brush strokes,” rather than “heavy lifting”—and he also agreed to write up a plan to create an online Virtual York of 1644 that will add value to his mystery novels by giving interested readers additional history of the real setting and events of the time.

So what happens next? 

Well, this is one of the most fun parts of my job: Submissions. The manuscript will be done in a few days, during which time I will be putting together my list of editors for submission. In this particular case, the list ought to be pretty long, as I can approach editors who are interested in both historical fiction and mystery, and since there is definitely a feminist bent to the story, I’ll be able to expand it even further to some editors looking for women’s suspense (although that may be a bit of a stretch). Regardless, it’s a group of editors I know and like, and have spent a lot of time getting to know and like—we have lunch together, and even our shorter exchanges during the course of other submissions help us get to know each other. I’ll probably spend another post discussing the dos and don’ts of submissions from an agent’s perspective, but we’ll just say that I’m doing it appropriately—not double-dipping houses (submitting to two editors in the same division simultaneously, which gets them (understandably) very unhappy), deciding among editors at the same place when there’s more than one who might be appropriate, and then thinking of my pitch.

Pitches from agents to editors can either be done on the phone or over email. Both have been successful for me in the past. In this case, I’ll probably use the phone, since, again, it’s a group of editors I have experience with. I’ll be able to convey my enthusiasm, and I won’t need to go into great detail about the plot of the book in a pitch letter, as I sometimes need to do in, say, a science fiction novel with different worlds and beings. But one thing my authors sometimes don’t realize, and which I think is a matter of simple consideration to the editors, is this: I don’t send the manuscript out into the ether without asking first if I can send it. A number of clients have said “Wow, I thought you choose your list, then just attach it to an email with a “Here it is, hope you like it” message.”  I’ve found greater utility in the way I do it, and for a couple of reasons. First, I find that there are times that I don’t realize that an editor hates, for example, dystopia, or would rather stick a fondue fork in her eye socket than see another knitting mystery. In those cases, rather than passing on an already-attached manuscript (and rendering their entire publishing company useless to the submission), they will most often recommend a colleague who might be more receptive to the topic.

The other reason I ask permission first is that it gives me one more opportunity to get the book’s idea and subject in front of the editor. Now I can say “May I show you this great mystery about a midwife during the English Civil War” and follow it up with “Per our conversation, here is the great mystery about a midwife during the English Civil War.” Every little bit helps.

I’ll do that. And then…we wait. I’ll get into further detail on this process, and others, next time. Happy July 4! 

 

The Modifier Zone

Josh Getzler

“Josh stretched his tired arms and wearily dragged his calloused, tapered fingers through his curly, tangled hair as he struggled to rouse his overworked body out of his comfortable bed, the tinny chirps of the chrome iHome alarm clock mocking him…chirpily. He staggered blearily past the cluttered wood desk and opened the white door to the beige bathroom, where he splashed cold water on his scruffy cheeks and shook himself awake as the minty toothpaste shocked his sleepy tastebuds into awareness. He trudged heavily into the book-lined family room, past the herringbone sofa and the orange chairs, stopping at his dark brown Jack Spade messenger bag to take out his red Dell laptop. It is 5:15, and you have entered…The Modifier Zone.”

One of the more common flaws I’ve found in the queries I read is the Modifier Dump, when an author—whether in looking to be absolutely sure that the reader knows precisely what the room looks like or the character feels, goes adjective and adverb crazy. A tree is not a tree—it’s a green, leafy tree. A person doesn’t walk down the street—he walks down the wide, car-filled, green-leafy-tree-lined, newly-paved highway.  At times it’s an excuse to show off SAT words: “The perspicacious toddler lugubriously imbibed the apple juice, perspiration trickling over his bloated digits.”

Regardless, it’s the sure way to make me stop reading. When I am looking at the beginning of a book, I want to be hooked. That’s not a revelation—everyone wants to be hooked at the start of a book. It either needs to have action that draws the reader in, or a description of a place or character that makes you want to continue because that character or place is going to do something or be the site of something interesting. And you don’t need a lot of words to make that happen. (And you sure don’t need to describe the weather. Weather, unless we’re talking about, say, the moors or the desert or the ski slopes or the Islands, is rarely relevant; and when it is, it’s often self-evident.)

Rather, in a short space, you (typically) need to place the reader in time and location, and indicate something about the person or people involved, and what they are doing.

I was talking to my assistant, Maddie, yesterday, about an exciting query which had come in through the weekend. It had many of the elements I salivate over—foreign, historical setting, crime, class issues, badass proto-feminist protagonist, and author with a great background and the chops to pull off an ambitious novel of this ilk.

“How’s the writing?” Maddie asked.

“Marvelous,” I said, and read the first sentence to her. “On the night I delivered Mercy Harris of a bastard child, the King’s soldiers burned the city’s suburbs and fell back within its walls to await the rebel assault.”

There is so much good about this—in 29 words, the author managed to convey so many things—let’s see how many:

1)      The narrator delivers babies. So the protagonist is a doctor or a midwife. Not an amateur, or it would have been “The night I helped Mercy Harris deliver her baby.”

2)      More than that, the narrator delivers bastard babies, which means that the story takes place during a time where that is important.

3)      It’s set in a city.

4)      With a wall.

5)      It’s set during a time and place where there is

1. A king
2. A rebellion

So the reader immediately knows that there are big things going on—a civil war of some kind—and also local dramas of childbirth. We don’t know where it’s going, exactly, but we want to continue. And in these 29 words, there is one modifier—bastard—and it’s vital, and evocative. It would say something very different about the book if the adjective were “illegitimate,” right? And it wasn’t necessary to say that the night was dark or rainy or dangerous, because the details given are more than sufficient to pique our interest. I don’t know if the author will be able to sustain the prose or the story, but I do know that I want to read on, and I’m inclined to like it.

So the takeaway on this I suppose is that for me the best writing is careful writing, where the pyrotechnics can be subtle, the adjectives minimal and always germane, and the weather implied. Many agents and editors talk about wanting to be transported to a different or unfamiliar time and place, with unique characters and gripping plots. That’s an incredibly tall order, and one whose difficulty is only magnified when it is burdened with unnecessary modifiers.

 

Does Size Matter? (Not a Post About Anthony Weiner)

Josh Getzler

Quick post today, as I need to wake up Number One Son  early to cram for his sixth grade math final exam; a test for which he is reasonably well prepared but blithely unconcerned. He is not at all certain that understanding absolute value will have any impact on his future career as a muppeteer.  I’ve informed him that it’s tough to be a muppeteer if you’re grounded for the rest of your life as the result of failing your sixth grade math exam, so he’s going to wake up at six. We’ll see.

Today I want to talk about word count. Many of the query letters I get have beginnings like “Naked Came the Zombie is a 78,426-word story of romance among the Undead…” I’ve always found the decision to include a precise word count interesting, as well as of only limited utility. Certainly by the time it’s published, the count will change. And does that include titles, bylines, headers and footers, or just text? Really, it doesn’t matter. The point of including word count (which I DO understand, by the way, and don’t mind—though  you can certainly round to the nearest thousand or even round number if you’d like when approaching me), is to tell me that you’ve written a “book” that’s the size of a “book” rather than a novella or an epic.

But what does that mean? I’m asked that question all the time at conferences. “Do you care how long my book is? Are there guideline?”

And that’s a tough question, because there are exceptions all over the place that prove the rule. My mother-in-law was telling me last night that she just got to an amazing plot twist on page 1,300 of Vikram Seth’s massive A Suitable Boy. I can’t even imagine what some of my editor friends would say if in my pitch letter I said “You know, it takes a little while to get going—but wait till page 1,300; it really starts to fly!” (That of course isn’t fair in this case—A Suitable Boy is pretty much awesome from the get-go…)

I typically tell novelists that while it varies, and there are exceptions, and don’t ever take this as gospel, and many other hedges, I typically feel that around 60,000-120,000 words means a “book.” 55,000 words? OK, that’s fine—it’s just a short book! 130k? OK, but it better move along really quickly. Cozy mystery? More often on the short side. Historical multi-generational romance? Tend to run on the long side.  There are some genre publishers, particularly mass-market romance houses, which do give a stricter limit, but they tell their authors that up front. I always tell authors not to write with word count in mind as a strict guide. Writing quality, character development and pacing are the important things, and they will rarely be disqualified if they don’t fall precisely within the numbers.

OK, so that was the tidbit for this week. Onward to absolute value!

(whew, made 500 words!)

 

 

Liking the Tudors

Josh Getzler

The genesis of this column was a conversation I had with my client Nancy Bilyeau while we were walking around BEA. Nancy’s book, The Crown, is a Tudor-era thriller with a Novice for a protagonist, a burning-at-the-stake for an opening scene, Bishop Gardiner blackmailing our heroine, and an inappropriately hot priest named Brother Edmund. As we walked around the Javits Center, Nancy, who has been ramping up her online presence, started talking to me about the way Tudor lovers REALLY get into their heroes. She talked about Twitter feeds in the voices of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, role-playing games where you can BE in Hampton Court in the service of The King, and the fact that there are myriad Facebook pages devoted to the principals of the era.

I thought it was interesting, and was pleased that Nancy was doing such a good job expanding her platform. I mentioned it to my wife, Amanda, who wondered how, say, Katherine Howard would tweet about being caught cheating (as one poster on the official Katherine Howard FB page put it: “yeah me and culpepper did it. AND I'D DO IT AGAIN!”).

But it wasn’t until last night, when I saw that Nancy had “Liked” Anne Boleyn  and Elizabeth I, that I decided to go into the CyberCourt of Henry VIII. And it was fascinating.

I knew unscientifically that there are “a lot of people out there” who are into the Tudors. That’s why there is a large cottage industry of books, movies, TV series, even coffee mugs and mouse pads with Henry’s face (either his own or Jonathan Rhys-Meyer’s dreamier update from the Showtime series). Also, as Amanda says, because there’s just so much THERE—sex, politics, war, sex, history, courtly manners, torture, religion, and, oh yes, sex.  But the Facebook presence of 500 years-dead Royals was incredible, and illuminating.

The first thing I did was follow Nancy to Anne Boleyn’s “official” (!) FB page, which has been liked by almost TWELVE THOUSAND PEOPLE! In contrast, poor Katherine of Aragon, whom Anne replaced as Queen after the world’s longest lapdance, only had 97 people like her. However, “Katherine of Aragon: England’s Wronged Queen” had 250 supporters, while “Katherine of Aragon: England’s Greatest Slut and Hypocrite” only had four Haters. So clearly the cybercommunity thinks she got the shaft, but still is more interested in the younger, hotter model.

I was pretty surprised to see that Anne of Cleves had a rousing 539 followers (considering that she was something of a blip on Henry’s radar), while the airheaded (and beheaded) hottie wife #5 has 252 followers as Catherine Howard but 272 as Katherine.

The biggest up-and-comer was Catherine Parr, Queen of England and Ireland, who just broke 300 Likes and has the most posts; while possibly the coolest was "We are rad enough to detest the conniving bitchface who was Jane Seymour." Nancy said she’d try to join that one (it’s invite only!). I’m not at all certain I’m rad enough.

But the funny thing was, when you take a step away from the serious semi-historical pages (which are impressive but not, platform-wise, material except perhaps for Anne’s), you start to understand how big the Tudorverse actually is. For instance, while Queen Mary had only 127 followers, her half-sister Elizabeth I has more than 3,000. Move ahead 500 years, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has 61,000 followers on her official FB page, which is dwarfed by the official page of the Showtime Tudors series, which is liked by 733,000 admirers of JRM’s abs and Natalie Dormer’s flirtatious appeal (Amanda used to sit very happily on the couch every Sunday night to watch “History Porn,” which was a dangerous thing—they tended to switch off between the sexy weeks and the beheadings and rack and boiling alive…). The movie page of The Other Boleyn Girl has 107,000 followers.

When I actually stopped playing around and went to book pages, seeing whether historical fiction buffs who gave Hilary Mantel such great fame with Wolf Hall also spent time in social media, I found a very respectable 5,538 followers. Philippa Gregory, who has made a cottage industry of Tudor romances (and who shares a publisher with Nancy), has a rousing 26,772. Which would be wonderful, until I saw the page below hers on the suggestions list when I went to search: the Philippa (Pippa) Middleton Ass Appreciation Society, 229,844 strong. Some things, I suppose, never change.

The point of all this is that Nancy was on to something real, and something that anyone looking to figure out how to market books (or many, many other products) is going to need to face when slamming up against fewer brick-and-mortar distribution retailers for their romance or mystery or literary novel: People are coming together in significant numbers in all different parts of Cyberspace. And you can find them, and join them, and NEED to spend time with them. And then they will find your book, and trust you. And it’s clearly a lot more work, and there are dead ends (the Katherine of Aragon tribute page by a history class at Lower Merion High). But the target markets are out there, and it feels like when you connect with them, the momentum can be marvelous. I can just imagine seeing @therealhenrytudor Tweet “Just read #TheCrown—kudos @Tudorwriter”. Now THERE’S a blurb!

 

The Big Show

Josh Getzler

First day of the post-BEA, post-Memorial Day early summer, and lots going on. This week’s going to be a bit of a topic-hopper, centered around the industry’s trade show last week.

First of all, I love trade shows, conferences, conventions. Always have. I love going to big halls and seeing huge displays of products, with members of companies standing there anxiously hoping that theirs will be viewed favorably. It’s colorful, energetic (even in down years), and for my own role, kind of a one-stop shopping to have meetings (or just schmooze) with people I typically interact with over email. And I love seeing librarians walking around with bags of ARCs, looking to see whom the publishers are promoting heavily; and reporters chatting up editors in chief next to blown-up book covers; and hearing people who spend their lives thinking about the industry give their opinions about its direction. I feel giddy when I enter the Javits Center (inevitably I also feel warm, as it’s always such a long walk to get there from the subway!). I know I like it an inordinate amount; more than I should, on some level.

And it was interesting: One of my clients sent me a link to a blog that vigorously posited that the publishing industry was still treating digital rights and companies specializing in digital rights as ugly stepchildren, as the white haired old men in charge kept their heads in the sand and pretended that their business was still where it was 20 or 30 years ago. Well there are a couple of issues I need to take with that idea. The first is that many of those decision makers are now women (and have been for quite a while now); and the second is that I feel like it’s an easy shot to say that the publishers are behind, rather than saying that they are starting to think about it.

The first part of this blogger’s problem is that he felt that digital companies, whether publishers or manufacturers, were  segregated into a silicon alley, away from the traditional publishers in their own section of the floor. He failed to mention that University Presses, self-published authors, a number of children’s book publishers, and, in fact, traditional publishers themselves, were somewhat clumped together as well. It’s easier to navigate a huge trade show when it’s organized this way. But I saw his point (a bit): digital publishing IS mainstream, and ought not appear to be relegated to a corner where the Boys with Toys can play while the serious business goes on in the main areas.

Except, of course, that everyone went to the digital area. And seminars—full days of seminars—were organized about the subject. And the biggest news of the show, from what I saw and heard, came out of Amazon, where the launch of its publishing unit under Larry Kirschbaum engendered the most animated discussions of the show. Yes, there is still a wariness among literary aesthetes about electronic readers and readings, an almost reflexive, elegiac  wistfulness when looking at a gorgeous ARC of a new novel and wondering if you’re holding a relic of an already overtaken version of an industry. And I think a lot of people still feel that they shouldn’t even admit enjoying and appreciating the experience of reading digitally, that it’s disloyal to Art to appreciate progress. But a huge number of people were using their tablets to find their way around the Javits floor, or responding to tweets reminding them that, say, the new Captain Underpants ARC was being given away (I became a rock star when I brought that home), or that Duff McKagen from Guns n Roses was signing ARC’s.

Ultimately, this was a transitional BEA, almost a high school school social, where the traditional publishers and digital folk looked at each other across the gym floor and waited for someone to ask someone else to dance in public, even though they all knew they were going to be steaming up their windows together at the end of the night.

Well, THAT went far afield…

Till next week!