There Are All Sorts Of Ways To Fail

When I worked as a full-time editor I was frequently amazed by the submissions that I received. I worked for a book packager which specialised in highly-illustrated esoteric non-fiction: we packaged books about retreat, meditation, religion and myth on behalf of publishers who didn't have the time or the in-house expertise available to produce the books themselves. And yet every day I received proposals for books which simply didn't match our very specific requirements. Among the many submissions I received were illustrated children's books, car maintenance manuals, fiction of all kinds, memoir, graphic novels and pet-care manuals. My favourite was a children’s story which, judging from the illustrations appeared to be about trolls but I couldn't be sure: it was written in Dutch, with no translation provided.

I received a query letter hand-written on scented, fairy-printed paper, with a sprinkling of loose glitter which fell into my coffee as I opened it; and an entire manuscript which must have been a third or fourth carbon copy (remember those?) judging by its feintness and blurring (that one was made even more memorable by the absence of any spaces, punctuation or paragraph breaks, so the entire text was one great big run-on word). Then there was the hand-written manuscript which arrived with a cover letter urging me not to destroy it, as it was the writer’s only copy—but no postage or return address was provided for its return; and one writer sent me a banana, surrounded in layers of bubble-wrap and encased in a cardboard tube.

All of the writers responsible for those ridiculous submissions must have thought they had a chance of publication with us, or they wouldn’t have bothered to send their work in: but because of the nature of book packaging it was very unlikely that we would ever be able to commission their books, even if those books had come close to our requirements. As a result, the writers concerned wasted everyone’s time and money by making a submission that had no hope of getting accepted.

Because the writers failed on so many basic levels, they failed to get published regardless of the quality of the work that they submitted. If they had only researched their market more carefully before submitting they could have saved themselves time, money and disappointment: and instead could have sent their work somewhere it had at least a chance of being considered for publication.

Queryfail Two Is On Its Way!

Following the rather mixed success of the inagural round of Queryfail, which spawned Agentfail and stirred up so many people that even I blogged about it, Queryfail 2: Queries Never Die has been announced. It's going to take place this coming Friday, April 17, and people are already twitching in anticipation. In all sorts of ways.

Just bear in mind that Colleen Lindsay, who organises the whole thing, works in New York, so the timing is going to be a little strange for those of us in the UK. It'll give us all time to have a decent amount of coffee before the fun starts, and to have a few glasses of weekend wine before it finishes.

Queryfail?

Ten days ago Colleen Lindsay (who blogs over at The Swivet, and is a literary agent with the USA-based Fine Print Literary Management) organised Queryfail Day: a day-long Twitterfest. Colleen was careful to advise those taking part not to post anything which might indentify any of the writers whose queries were being discussed; and she warned that the exercise was not being done to make fun of anyone, but was an attempt to show, in real time, how overwhelmed agents and editors are with submissions and why so many of them fail.

I thought that the concept was potentially useful, very interesting and funny (although I haven't read it all and I didn't participate—I'm not one of the Twittering classes). However, plenty of people take the opposite view and many seem to feel that those who took part ridiculed the writers concerned.

In a few days I'll post my own response to Queryfail: Publishingfail. Expect it to move slowly, as most things in publishing do. And to keep you going until then, here’s some further Queryfail reading.

Editor Unleashed discusses The Queryfail Trainwreck; Justine Larbalestier leads her own excellent discussion; Book Publishing Today discusses Queryfail too; and even The Guardian gets in on the act.

Query Blasting: The Scattergun Approach

There are all sorts of organisations out there which will, for a fee, send your query to agents or editors, or your press release to newspapers, TV stations and the like. They usually do what they promise, and e-mail your information out to all the names on their mailing lists—and those lists can be vast, with tens of thousands of names on them. But what is the usual outcome of such a scattergun approach?

Well, first, you pay for their services. Then they send out your information (and if they've written your press release or query letter for you, they'll have charged you extra for this and will probably have written a formulaic, template-based piece which will have a very limited effect); and then—nothing.

You're unlikely to see good results, or to even make back the money that you paid them. Because the queries that they send out on your behalf will be generic, one-size-fits-all; they're not going to be personalised, addressed to individual people, or even targeted to appropriate agents or editors who represent your genre; and the press releases will go out to all their media contacts regardless of whether you're promoting a book about train-spotting in 1920s Sweden or a contemporary romance novel with an S&M twist.

Let me remind you: each time you send anything out, you have to target the right people. If you had a problem with your phone bill, you wouldn't just write to every person in every phone company you could find, would you? Regardless of what country you, or they, are in? No. You'd write to the customer services department of your phone provider, and tell them exactly what the problem is. It's the same with queries, submissions, media packs, press releases, and review copies. You must send them to the right people, otherwise the whole exercise is a pointless waste of everyone's time and money.

Unsolicited Manuscripts

Most of the big publishers, and an increasing proportion of the smaller ones, state that they’ll no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t submit to them: it just means that they have to solicit your manuscripts before they’ll even consider reading it.

One way to arrange this is to write a concise, appropriate and brilliant query letter. Tell them a little about your book: make them desperate to read it. If you can spark their interest sufficiently they’ll ask if they can read more and suddenly, your manuscript will be solicited.

Note that this won’t work with publishers who refuse unagented work: to be read by those publishers, you need to have an agent of your own. But it can open several doors that seem at first glance to be tightly locked shut.