FRESH ON FRIDAY: 5 Things to Leave Out of Your Book Proposal

A FEW YEARS AGO, I surveyed several fiction editors of my acquaintance, asking what newer novelists tended to leave out of their book proposals. 
   One of those editors responded, "Chocolate!" (with a smiley face). So, a few months later, when I sent her a proposal, I included a few bars handmade by a local chocolatier. 
   This got no reaction, so I asked her about it when I saw her next.
   "Oh, yeah," she said. "The chocolate. Why did you do that? That was weird."

   Of the myriad of reactions one is hoping to get from a proposal, "weird" is not one of them. And here, based on stuff that I have heard about from actual acquisitions editors, is a list of other things that you should leave out of your book proposal:

• Confetti. You should have learned around the time you were five that negative attention is not better than no attention at all.
• A manuscript on anything other than white paper. The cuteness of a romance printed on pastel paper wears off about one sentence in.
• Manuscripts printed in anything other than black (or dark navy) ink. The one thing common to every editor I know is eyestrain; purple ink is not your friend.
• An 8" x 10" color glossy photo of your smiling face. Your object here is to sell a book, not to convince the recipient to cast you in their toothpaste commercial. Occasionally, on proposals that were requested as a result of face-to-face meetings, I have put a thumbnail face shot on my proposal cover page, to help the editor remember who I am. But that's it.
• Your idea for the book cover. You are the writer, not the art director.

TUESDAY TIPS: The Perils of Packaging

ALTHOUGH I DO NOT go out of my way to publicize the fact, many readers who follow my books are aware that I occasionally illustrate my own work.

   The backstory here is that this was not my original intention. For the first Beck Easton adventure, Deep Blue, I wanted a simple map of a cave system to precede the initial chapter, so I drew one up and sent it to my publishers, together with a note asking them to provide it as a reference piece for their illustrator. 

   The art directors who worked on that book were extraordinary (its cover won a major award that year), so I was more than a little surprised when  they replied that they liked what I had supplied, and if I had no objections, they would prefer to use it, not as mere reference, but as the actual illustration for the book.

My illustration of an Adams-
pattern dry fly, as it appeared
in my 2008 title, Wind River.

   Buoyed by that experience, I have created artwork for some of my other titles. For In High Places, I drew small illustrations to open each chapter. And for Wind River, I drew a pen-and-ink drawing of my favorite trout-fly pattern: an Adams dry fly. I've even had art directors inquire whether I might be available to do illustrations for other writers' works (I always politely decline; writing for me is therapeutic, whereas making drawings just feels like, well, work).
   So, knowing that I do my own illustrations on occasion, new writers often confide in me that they have what they are certain is going to be a sure-fire sales strategy.
   "I'm writing a _______," they will tell me (and in that blank goes "children's book," or "book of poetry," or "survival guide," or whatever). "And my ________ is going to do the illustrations." (This second blank is usually filled in by "neighbor," "cousin," "daughter," "baby-sitter" ... you name it.)
   Then they wait for me to congratulate them on an inspired and masterful approach.
   And they are astonished when I tell them that using such a tactic will drop the likelihood of selling their first book—which, as we all know, is already quite slim—by at least half.
   You see, in submitting a manuscript with pre-commissioned illustrations, you are moving from the realm of "writer" to "packager." And packaging—teaming up the work of two or more creative individuals—is traditionally a publisher's job. So at very least, you are stepping on toes by proposing it.
   Beyond that, unless you've got a diploma from the Parson's School of Design hanging on your wall, what strikes you as "great illustrations" may not get the same reaction from a professional art director.
   Even award-winning artwork designed for gallery display may not work very well in the limitations of a print environment. My books, for instance, are all printed with a single-plate process, which means I have only one shade of ink with which to work: jet black. And while some of my illustrations may appear to have shades of gray, that effect is an optical illusion; every line in my drawings is the same deep shade of black.
   Add to this that publishing houses are businesses, which operate according to economies of scale. That being the case, they may wish to commission an artist to illustrate several books, sometimes across various house imprints. This allows them to negotiate a better price per project and, and when you propose a book using your own illustrator (or yourself as the artist), you deny them that economic tool. 
   I realize that it sounds here as if I am saying, "I can do this, but you cannot." But bear in mind that I have never pitched a book predicated on use of my own illustrations. The first time my artwork was used, it was the publisher's idea. And in subsequent books, any illustrations I've provided have come with a note from me saying that they were being provided to be used, or not, as the art director saw fit, and that, if my artwork did not mesh with their vision for the book, then I would not be upset in the slightest.
   Because, after all, in this industry it is the publisher who packages the books, and not the writer.
   Understand that going in, and you'll have a much, much better chance of success.

    

FRESH ON FRIDAY: Dictionary Words

YEARS AGO IN PRAGUE, citizens deal with miscreant city council members not by voting them out, but by defenestration; they chucked the offending politicians out of the town-hall window.
   What I just did there is, in my opinion, the only way a writer should use an uncommon word. I used the word "defenestration" (with which I assume many readers will have no familiarity), and then I immediately defined it in context.
   Doing anything else is just rude.
   When she was small, my daughter referred to uncommon words as "dictionary words," because they caused her to set aside whatever work she was reading and seek a dictionary. 
   This, of course, is not desirable for any number of reasons. It vexes the reader. It interrupts the flow of the work. And it obliterates suspension of disbelief because, in setting aside the book to seek out another, the reader is reminded that he or she was reading in the first place.
   No less an authority than the late Elmore Leonard detested dictionary words. While there is no rule against them in his famous "ten rules for good writing, he does note in his rule on speaker attributions that, "I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with 'she asseverated,' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary."

TUESDAY TIPS: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

NEWER NOVELISTS TEND to obsess over minutiae.
   When it came time to deliver the manuscript for my first novel, for instance, I made sure that it was printed out on archival-quality, 100-percent-cotton, 24-pound bond paper. And because I didn't trust the old rubber-band and shirt-cardboard method of keeping the pages neat in transit, I came up with a novel (pun intended) method of shipping the manuscript.
   Our family had recently acquired a FoodSaver: one of those vacuum-sealing systems for taking all the air out of food we were packaging for the freezer. And I got the idea of packaging my finished novel using the FoodSaver. Once I'd removed all the air from around and between the pages, the manuscript resembled an inch-and-a-half-thick hunk of marine plywood with a title page pasted to the top of it. It looked as if it was capable of protecting its bearer from small-arms fire ... well, the first round, at least. No additional protection was required; I tossed the vacuum-packed pages, a cover letter and an on-disk copy of the Word file into a manila envelope, and popped it into the mail. 
   Naturally, this surprised my editor when he received it. He told me he showed my plastic-wrapped, stiff-as-a-board  manuscript to the entire office, so I used the same technique to ship my next manuscript as well.
   Then I had the occasion to visit my editor in his office at the publishing house, and he showed me the file drawer in which he kept his current projects. Two hanging files held my work, included both of my original manuscripts. And they were still in their vacuum packaging.
   "You never opened them?" I asked.
   "Oh, no," my editor told me. "We hardly ever work on a physical manuscript anymore, and on those rare occasions when we need a paper copy, we just print one out from the Word file."
   After that, I never mailed another vacuum-packed manuscript. For that matter, not long after that, I ceased to mail anything at all.
   These days, my manuscript goes to my publishers as a Word file formatted in Times New Roman; if the publishers want a different font, I have full faith in their ability to reformat as needed. As for maps, drawings, or other images, those get sent out as high-resolution .jpg files. And the whole thing gets "shipped" either as an email attachment or (if the image files are too large), as a set of files sent out using a relay service.
   Advising me on how to go about my work, a sage editor once told me, "There are two keys to working successfully. The first is not to sweat the small stuff. And the second is to understand that most of what you encounter will be small stuff."
   I took his advice and decided to concentrate my time and talents on the large stuff.
   Like creating creating stories.
   And telling them as well as I can.  
   

FRESH ON FRIDAY: Letting it Rest

MOST SATURDAYS, WHEN I'm home in Florida, I go the same place for dinner: Shannon's Casual Cafe, in Orlando. The Saturday special is prime rib, and recently I called the owner in the early afternoon because my daughter needed to be at work at five; I asked him when the first prime rib would be ready.
   "We just took it out of the oven," he told me. "Now it has to rest. Give us half an hour to forty-five minutes."
   When chefs talk about resting cooked meats, most people assume that is so the food can finish cooking on stored heat. While that is true (to a very limited extent), there is actually another reason that a smart chef does this.
   Cooking a roast or even a steak forces the juices of the meat into its core. Immediately after cooking, the core is super-saturated with juice; cut it then, and most of the juice will run out, leaving a dry and tough cut of meat behind.
   But let it rest for several minutes, and the juices will migrate back to the outer regions of the meat. After resting, the roast or steak will be tender, moist and succulent.
   I mention all this as the prelude to saying that your fiction needs to rest as well. Not to redistribute the juices, but to allow what you thought you wrote to migrate out of your head. If I re-read something I wrote the same day that I wrote it, I will miss even basic errors (such as typing "and" when I meant "an," or "top" when I meant "to"—things I do all the time).
   But if I wait until the next morning to read my work, I'll catch a lot of stuff that needs revision. And then, if I set that work aside and revisit it a couple of months (or even a couple of weeks) later, I'll be objective enough that I can edit it as though it was someone else's work.
   Many novelists procrastinate. It seems to be the nature of the beast. And that being the case, there might not always be a few spare weeks or months in which to let the work rest. In that case, my preferred option is to change the line spacing and the font so the work looks different from what I keyed in. That, or I will prep it as a down-and-dirty ebook so I can read it on my Kindle. And of course, at some stage I'll always set up my MacBook so it can read the work back to me. Those tricks give me at least a shade more objectivity when I'm reviewing something I just wrote.
   But even better is to develop the discipline to write ahead of schedule, so you'll have time in which to let the work rest.
   Give that a try.
   And as for me, for some reason I find myself daydreaming about tomorrow ... and prime rib.

TUESDAY TIPS: Where it Counts

SOMETHING PEOPLE ASK ME all the time is how long, in word count, a novel should be.
   I've said here before that my own novels vary in length; when I'm writing suspense, 97,500 words seems to be the sweet spot. And when I'm writing an espionage thriller, it may trend longer: as much as 115,000 words.
   That doesn't mean that your novel is going to come out to either of those lengths. War and Peace clocked in at just under 600,000 words, and Atlas Shrugged came in 50,000 words longer than that. At the other end of the scale, your typical shorter inspirational romance novel is going to be around 45,000 words, give or take.
   In 1952, when The New York Times reviewed The Old Man and the Sea, the Grey Lady pronounced Hemingway's work a "novel," even though later critics have called it a novella because of its brevity (26,601 words and, in most editions, less than 100 pages of actual story).
   I side with the Times on this one (possibly the one and only time you will ever hear me say this).  More than mere word count goes into determining what is a novel and what is a novella. And Hemingway's depth of character development, his use of subplots, and the perceived passage of time in this book all push the work into the more highly evolved territory of the novel, despite the extraordinarily modest word count.
   Not, mind you, that you should submit your first novel at 27,000 words and offer, "But Hemingway did it!" as your defense. Nor would I turn in a 600,000-word tome.
   Once you get established as a novelist, the publisher will spell out in the contract what's expected in terms of word count. In the meantime, for shorter romance novels, at least 45,000 words is a safe target. And for longer contemporary novels, while 70,000-120,000 words is often mentioned as the range, I would shoot for 90,000-100,000 words; this produces a work substantial enough for a shopper to view it as a good gift or a vacation read, without making the book so long that the publisher is going to incur extra production costs.
   All of this assumes, of course, that the length of your novel passes the first test. It has to be long enough to adequately tell the story.

FRESH ON FRIDAY: Working the Issues

YOU ALREADY KNOW (and we have said here previously) that the characters in your novel should not be perfect. Most novelists get that.
   Flaws, issues, challenges: readers relate to characters who have those. But for your novel to truly sing, you need to work those flaws, those issues and those challenges.
   For instance, in my debut novel, Yucatan Deep, my protagonist was a cave diver so haunted by the loss of his best friend that it really wasn't wise for him to continue diving. And my deuteragonist was the protagonist's fiancé, a brilliant and talented trauma surgeon, deaf since childhood.
   Naturally, the surgeon does not want the diver to go back in the water. And this conflict comes to a boil while they are out for dinner at a nice restaurant in West Palm Beach. So they have a heated argument ... in public ... in sign language.
   Virtually every reviewer commented favorably on that scene. A couple of readers wrote and said that they wanted to marry the trauma surgeon. I felt bad, writing back to let them know that she existed only in my imagination.
   So, are your characters in your work-in-progress less than perfect? Good for you. 
   Now go put their issues to work for you.