5 Reasons to Drop In on the Agent Auction

One of the most exciting writing events of the year took place yesterday, but that doesn't mean it's over for you.

Miss Snark's First Victim blog runs a yearly Bakers' Dozen Agent Auction, and it's one of the best ways I know to get a read on publishing industry trends, particularly in Young Adult fiction.

60 aspiring authors 
(middle grade, young adult, and adult) submit log lines and their novels' first 250 words. Sixteen well known literary agents bid on the submissions, offering to read 5, 25, 50, 100, 150 pages, or the full manuscript. The agent who bids highest "wins" a first look at the ms. And the author, of course, "wins" a read by an agent.

This year's auction was fascinating, on a lot of levels. You need to hike over there and have a look at the comments on submissions, written by both readers and agents, and in some cases by editors. Here are some global judgements, based on this small sample:

Guest Post: How to Know When to Query

Quinn: Things that make
 you go 'Wow'

Today's Guest Post by Susan Kaye Quinn 
Launches her new novel, Open Minds.

How do you know when your story is ready to query (assuming you’re going to make a pass at the get-an-agent-traditional-publishing gauntlet)?

This was always my question, when I first started writing. In my previous life as an engineer and scientist, there were measureable goals, actionable items. Projects came with deadlines, tests, and presentations. You knew what you were supposed to do (for the most part), how to do it (sometimes), and when you were expected to have something to show for your efforts (always).

This is how it works in the normal muggle world. But in the world of fiction…not so much.

In creative works, you are in charge of deciding what to write, and how many times, and what revisions must be made. And when to stop. That last one was the most difficult of all for me, because how was I to know I had reached THE END of the endless revisions?

Getting Ready for NaNoWriMo?

Lit agent Janet Reid, pictured above, circa Dec. 2

National Novel Writing Month is seventeen days away. As I'm sure you know, the project aims to get tens of thousands of people around the world writing 1,666 words a day (every day, which means laptops perched on Thanksgiving tables) to complete a 50,000-word manuscript inside a single month. I've never tried it, but I'm planning to this time--in fact I'm cheating a little: I've already got 20,000 words written, and a solid outline, so I'm not starting from scratch.

I've heard tell that literary agents dread December because they're deluged with queries

Querying for Emotion

Querying an agent? Make her swoon.

We talked yesterday about how to forge an emotional connection between yourself and your concept question as a way to make your writing more powerful and true.

But there's another sort of emotional connection we'll have to make when our novels are finished--the connection between our query and our dream agent.

Over on her kidlit blog, Mary Kole put this clearly. She says she wants a query to make her care. Well and good. But she's talking about more than showing high stakes and conflict, or teasers about the troubled backstory of our MCs. What Kole is asking for is a gripping, powerful emotional connection that occurs through a finely wrought combination of language and storytelling.

Is Your Book Like No Other?

Mirror, mirror, what do you see?
I think I look like Harry P.

A tweet from literary agent Amy Boggs has got me thinking, lately. She said: "When a query says: 'I haven't seen a book involving this before,' I can usually think of 3 such books off the top of my head."

The notion of "comparables," in pub biz parlance -- those (preferably bestselling, famous) books that are enough like yours, but not too much like, has been occupying me lately, and also occupying both of my crit partners. One partner's agent asked her for a list of comparables, and she had a hard time thinking of any. The other, who is in the process of querying, is worried that her novel is too much like another (bestselling, famous) one with a similar subject -- so her job is to set it apart. In literature, of course, there's nothing new under the sun, and there's not a thing wrong with that. But the notion of comparables when it comes to marketing is particularly slippery -- because what, precisely, are we comparing?