Editor — Substantive and Copyediting: Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy
I’ve been invited to participate in the San Francisco Writers Conference, February 12-14 in downtown San Francisco.
I’ll be attending as an independent editor, giving one-on-one consultations with writers and participating in an “Ask a pro” session with other editors and agents.
The conference is in its 7th year, and is a great opportunity for writers to meet and network with industry professionals.
Initial responses have now been sent on all the queries I received during the Dragon Moon Press open submissions period. If you have not received either a rejection or a request for a full manuscript, I did not receive your query. Make sure you check the address posted in the submission guidelines and try again.
For a relatively-unadvertised submission period during a month that’s usually hectic for everyone, the volume was encouraging without being overwhelming. It was a great experience and I’ll definitely be doing it again.
Full manuscripts were requested on just under 10% of submissions. Out of that 10%, I am making an offer to one (1) so far. (Yes, that one knows who they are.) I have not yet received or read all requested fulls.
About 25% of submissions did not comply with the posted submission guidelines, with deviations including (in order of frequency): submitting to the wrong address, lack of synopsis, lack of title (oops!), lack of sample pages and use of attachments.
No submissions were rejected for non-compliance. That is to say, I didn’t receive any queries that would have been accepted had they followed the guidelines more closely; the submissions that did not follow the guidelines had other issues which made them unsuitable.
1. The writing simply wasn’t good enough – Mediocre writing or storytelling, wooden and uncompelling characters; consistently poor grammar and sentence structure, etc. Just not at a publishable level.
2. Major plot flaws too deep to change – The premise was deeply flawed, too predictable or overused without offering anything new or notable, wasn’t compelling, or went in a direction that I didn’t think worked.
3. Too slow to get started, or so heavy-handed at setting up a plot that it all just felt contrived and sloppy – These submissions had fifteen pages to get me hooked and make me care. If nothing happened in those first fifteen, I wasn’t interested enough to keep going, and a customer wouldn’t keep reading, either. There’s some overlap here with #1, but sometimes the story can still be flat and not go anywhere even if the quality of the writing is good.
4. Too similar to something already published. OR, used characters or worlds copyrighted or licensed to someone other than the author, or otherwise contained inherent rights issues – Don’t try to get your fanfic published, kids, unless you’re trying to get it published by whatever company officially licenses it.
5. Not a fit. Non-fiction, true crime, gratuitous torture, sexual torture, sexual slavery and gore, mainstream fiction, spy thrillers, mysteries, and bodice rippers.
6. Good, but not quite there yet. Show me the author’s next one.
(Trends that had no bearing on acceptance decisions, but are interesting to note)
* Genre breakdown:
* Gender breakdown: 40% female authors, 60% male.
* Manuscripts utilizing real historical figures as main or important characters: 5
* Manuscripts previously released as podcast fiction: 4
* Manuscripts that compared themselves to Twilight: 3
* Demons and angels were more popular than vampires by a margin of 4:1
* Manuscripts featuring gender-swapping or other body-swapping: 2
* Abrasive or insulting queries: 2
* Manuscripts with prologues: 20%
* Manuscripts submitted in languages other than English: 1
* Countries represented: 10 — a very respectable showing!
Thanks for participating, everyone, and keep writing.
The Boom Effect is an auction to raise money for the trust fund for Tee Morris‘s daughter, who bears the affectionate online pseudonym “Sonic Boom.” SB recently lost her mother, and the podcasting and writing community has come together to help Tee afford her final costs, and now to help to secure SB’s future.
Podcasters, writers, crafters, artists, musicians and more are offering their goods and services for an online auction on February 27th. You can subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed to stay in the loop, and follow @theboomeffect on Twitter.
For my part, I’m offering up Item SB008: Professionally Edited Short Story.
To the winning bidder, I will give a choice:
If you’re an aspiring writer of short fiction, you can get a free professional edit on one short story under 7,000 words. This will include proofreading and copyediting in the form of a red-lined and commented .doc file, and a consultation, if warranted, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript, with my professional recommendations.
For the long-form fiction writer, I’m offering another valuable service: The same full treatment, but for a query letter. I’ll use my other hat as Editor-in-Charge at Dragon Moon Press and my personal experience receiving queries and submissions, and work with you to structure and polish your query to give your manuscript the best possible chance, no matter where you choose to send it.
There are a lot of tempting one-of-a-kind items already up for bid, and more are still being added. Please give the auction a look and consider bidding and lending your support.
An excellent manuscript will outshine a not-so-great query letter, but your query is still your first chance to make a good impression so it should be as polished and compelling as it can be.
I’ve offered a lot of advice on querying on this blog, and will continue to do so. Demonstration is a helpful means of education too, so I had thought about writing up a sample query letter that does all of the things I recommend and none of the things I warn against. Instead, I’m going to direct you to two other sites with examples that I think are very clear and helpful.
Editor Cheryl Klein annotates a query letter that worked for her, highlighting all the bits that made her happy.
Now, to see the process that gets a query to that sweet spot, head over to Ulysses, who won a contest to have his query critiqued by The Rejectionist. This is also a great peek into how the person reading your query letter thinks. Highly recommended.
Several times on this blog and in interviews elsewhere, I’ve mentioned that publishing looks like a very slow-moving industry from the outside. Your editors and publishers look calm, unruffled and unmoving on the surface, even when they’re paddling furiously underneath.
Today I finished up ARCs for Cold Magics by Erik Buchanan. I have two signed manuscripts in the queue for edits, and drafts pending with the authors on two more.
I wrote in my guidelines for the Slush Rush that a 4-6 month response time could be expected. That seems like a very long time, I know. To be honest, I don’t expect it to take me that long. But it means that January 1 was not the day to start mailing me to ask if I’d looked at your query yet, to ask if response letters had gone out yet, or to ask me why I haven’t sent you a response yet.
I understand that it’s easy to get excited and anxious when you’ve got a submission out somewhere, but I’m sorry. I’m not answering any “Have you answered yet?” mails. The time it would take to respond to them is time I need to be spending on work — work that includes reading and sorting those submissions.
1. Wait until the response window has closed, and THEN send a polite note if you haven’t heard back yet. In my case, the response window closes in JUNE. It is not June yet, last I checked. Also don’t immediately follow your submission with a “did you get it?” mail, or a separate mail to tell me you’ve submitted. If I’ve requested submissions, then I’m expecting submissions, so I’m checking for them. (Also, if I didn’t get it, I’m probably not going to get the query you send to the same address asking if I’ve gotten it, either!) As Gwen Gades of Dragon Moon Press says: “Many publishers will tell you how long it should take to get a response to you… but NONE of them will say ’43 seconds.’”
2. Even if you do wait a reasonable amount of time before you follow up, if you don’t get an answer right away, don’t keep mailing. Sending off another query every day, every two days, or every week, just makes you seem high-maintenance. High-maintenance is bad. Things aren’t going to move any faster once your manuscript is accepted somewhere — it’s perfectly normal for it to take up to an additional eighteen months before your book is actually in print — so don’t give off the expectation that you’ll be constantly prodding for a status update even when you’ve been told not to expect news yet. Publishers have a lot of projects going on at once, and they get to each of them in due time.
3. Use proper channels. You don’t have to mail someone at work, AND at home, AND comment on their blog, AND leave a Facebook message, AND @ them on Twitter. Seriously. If the front door is locked, don’t go around the house trying all the doors and windows. Trying one additional avenue after a reasonable amount of time is okay. Sometimes a server blinks. But don’t think that doing the contact info rounds will get a response any faster, and especially don’t do a full-spectrum blitz.
4. If you’re going to ignore #1, #2, and #3, at least accept responsibility for your actions. If you get a response that asks you to be patient, don’t get defensive and tell me that it’s someone else’s fault that you’re mailing me early or often; and don’t get overly dramatic and repentant in your apology or tell someone at length how busy you know they must be. It’s not going to get you that answer any faster. Just thank them for the response and give them space.
5. If there’s an extenuating circumstance, don’t wait, but do explain the situation. If the feedback window is open until June, I don’t need to know that you’ll be away from your email for three days in February. But, “I know your guidelines say not to expect feedback until June, but I just wanted you to know that X has expressed interest in the manuscript also, and I wanted to give you first dibs on it. Please let me know if you’re interested so that I can give X an answer,” tells a publisher what’s going on and gives them a fair shot to make time to read and respond, where “Hi, I was wondering if you’d looked at it yet,” doesn’t.
I met Tee Morris my very first day of college. He helped me move into the dorm for marching band camp, and when an unlikely foot injury benched him on the sidelines later that week, we got to talking and clicked at once. We’ve been close ever since, and even though we went in different directions after college, it’s one of those friendships where after just a few minutes together it feels like we’ve never been apart.
I drove six hours to Tee’s book launch for Morevi, his first novel. From that visit and the conversations that came out of it, my own career with Dragon Moon Press was born. People in the podcasting community talk about how Tee’s helped and supported them, and I can assure you that it isn’t just talk. Tee kept me moving, kept me singing, and kept me true to myself through a lot of tough times, and without him I wouldn’t be where I am today.
Wednesday night, Tee’s wife Natalie passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.
The podcasting community, Tee’s listeners and readers and friends and fans, have already been wonderfully generous in their support, donating money and offers of help to see Tee and his young daughter through the significant and immediate financial and emotional burden to whatever degree they can.
I don’t normally make personal posts on this blog, but I think certain circumstances call for exceptions. Tee is an author, a client, and above all, a friend, so I wanted to put a message of love and support where I know he, and anyone else, can see it in their own time.
A trust fund is being set up for his daughter. Much love to Pip Ballantine, too, for generously organizing the online initiative for it. If you’d like to participate, details are here.
Nominations are now open for the 2010 Hugo Awards, recognizing excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy.
Members of last year’s Worldcon in Montreal and members who register for this year’s Worldcon in Melbourne are eligible to nominate and vote. You can also make your recommendations to other voters (and get an idea of theirs) at the hugo_recommend livejournal community.
2010 is the first year that I am eligible for a nomination in the Best Editor, Long Form category. The simple fact of being eligible is a thrill.
Being eligible, though, isn’t the same as being worthy.
Lou Anders, Editorial Director at Pyr, said it best in the Editors’ Roundtable interview in which we both participated for Clarkesworld Magazine last summer. He said:
Winning a Hugo someday is a dream of mine, of course, but doing consistent Hugo-worthy work is my real goal. My work is not Hugo-worthy yet, but I’m on the right path, learning my way one step at a time.
In 2009, Dragon Moon Press published six books in which I was deeply involved. DMP published perhaps a similar number to which I contributed a single proofreading pass, but that I don’t consider “my” books in the same way, and that I don’t count as my credits on my own website or on sites like the SF Editorwatch wiki.
Of those six books, only one was chosen for publication by me. I keep saying that publishing is a slow business? Well, all those contracts were already signed and sealed before I took on my role as Editor-in-Charge.
The “best editor” Hugo isn’t about catching the most typos or bringing about the best transformation from manuscript to final draft. It’s about having the eye to pick out exceptional manuscripts and bring books and authors of consistent and reliable quality to print.
Before I set out as an editor, I worked as a pricing analyst for a large publishing house. It was my job to work on sales forecasts, using past history and like items to determine how many copies a book would sell, so that we would know how many copies to print. I was in the business because I love the books, first and foremost, so I read all the books I could get my hands on.
I read the books that sold well; I read the books that didn’t sell well. I read the books that were fads that quickly faded and the books that were consistent classics. And when I read the books with the sales numbers at my side and my “trend-spotting” reflexes sharply honed, I started to develop an eye for the qualities that make a book a classic — the characteristics that make it great, and enduring.
It was with that behind me that I went into professional editing, and it’s from that experience that I still draw. In 2009, I stepped out from behind the red pencil and into the slush pile. As a result, you’ll be seeing a lot more of “my” picks in 2010, and I’m excited about the books you’ll be seeing from us. We’ve got some excellent fantasy and science fiction lined up.
Starting in 2011, I’ll be able to say “I chose these books for you.” That’ll be another big step closer to that goal, and you can be sure that I’ll be working all year with determination, ambition and integrity to get there and keep going.
This year, it’s a big enough thrill just to be eligible, and to have the opportunity to discover great books and great authors. It’s been an honor and a joy to work with great writers, and to meet and learn from some of the most talented and insightful minds in the industry in 2009, and the future only looks brighter. “Begin as you mean to go on,” they say at each new year — here’s looking ahead to a brilliant 2010.
