What do you do when you’ve got a decent manuscript but the agents just aren’t biting?

Stephannie posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I have a manuscript for which I am seeking representation. I have been told by editors of major publishing houses, during conference critiques, that it is “intriguing, well written, and very good”. I’ve been shopping it around to agents and can’t seem to get anywhere. I get great comments from them but no ‘bites’. How do I determine if the book is unsellable or I haven’t connected with the right agent for it?

Randy sez: Publishing is a subjective business, so there isn’t any infallible way to to know if your book is unsellable.

There is an infallible way to know if your book is sellable, of course. If you sell your book, then it was sellable. But there’s no way to determine that in advance.

However, there are indicators: How many editors have said the manuscript was “intriguing, well written, and very good?” What was their level of enthusiasm? Have you shown the manuscript to agents at conferences? What was their response? Have you studied up on how to write a query letter? How much research on agents did you do before sending them queries? How many agents have you queried? Did you get personalized rejections or were they form-letters? Do you have any friends who are published novelists and who are familiar with your work? If so, what is their opinion of the novel?

It’s not possible for me to trouble-shoot things from here, since I’ve not seen the manuscript and I don’t have the 8 hours it would take to evaluate it. (And I don’t do full manuscript evaluations, ever. There are many people who would do a manuscript evaluation for a lot less money than I would charge, and I see no reason to compete with them when I have so many billions of other tasks on my plate.)

Here are some possible explanations of what’s going on:

Maybe your manuscript really isn’t all that good. Ouch! That’s a painful and frightening possibility, isn’t it? This is why I asked what the level of enthusiasm was of the editors who looked at it. Your answer to that will tell you whether this is a live option.

Maybe there’s something in your pitch to the agents which is a show-stopper. Agents generally won’t tell you this when they reject you, because they’re too busy. They figure that if you can’t be bothered to learn how to pitch your manuscript correctly, they aren’t going to be bothered to teach you. (If you were an agent getting 100 pitches per week, you’d probably feel exactly the same way.) But if you were to pitch your novel to an agent at a conference, you’d have his undivided attention for 15 minutes, and if there was some major show-stopper in your presentation, he’d be very likely to tell you. Maybe nicely, maybe bluntly.

Maybe you aren’t querying the right agents. Agents have different likes and dislikes. If they don’t do your kind of fiction, they aren’t going to want to represent it. I don’t know how well you’ve researched agents before sending them queries, so I have no way to know if you’re trying to sell ice cream to Eskimos. But my agent friends tell me all the time that they get queries for projects that are OBVIOUSLY the wrong sort of project for them, and anyone who had done their homework would know this.

Maybe you just haven’t sent out enough queries. Good agents often have full lists and just aren’t looking for new authors. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are plenty of agents out there, and if your manuscript is any good, and if your query letter is any good, you’ll eventually hook up with the right agent. But it may take some time to find him. This is one reason I asked about whether you’ve got any published novelist friends who could give you an opinion.

Querying agents is not a full time job, so you should be spending the bulk of your time working on your next manuscript.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

The publishing world has changed radically in the last couple of years, thanks to those pesky e-books. Do the old rules still apply? Does chaos rule? Or are there ways to survive and thrive in the new environment?

Jonathan posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’ve been reading what you have been posting regarding self e-publishing with a lot of interest lately. It seems like it’s almost creating a “wild west frontier” type aspect in literature, in which a lot of the traditional “rules” are being thrown out because there are simply better ways to do things.

My question regards the writing itself- with this new freedom for authors to publish what they want, how they want, do you see any trends towards fiction that might have been considered “unmarketable” in a more traditional situation? In this new system that seems to be developing, are there any forces besides market that will dictate what fiction is now? For instance, if I want to write something crazy and experimental (but hopefully entertaining) is there a better chance that I will find a market willing to read it in an e-publishing situation where I am taking most of the marketing onus upon myself?

Randy sez: It’s an exciting time to be alive, if you’re an author.

For the last five hundred years or so, the process of publishing a book was a very expensive process. (In today’s world, despite massive improvements in personal productivity for editors and their colleagues, it can still cost more than $50,000 to produce and publish a book, and that’s not counting the advance that must be paid to the author.)

That meant that large corporations needed to underwrite most books. Corporations who had a high priority to not lose money.

Big corporations aren’t bad people. They aren’t people at all, at least not people who bleed when you poke them. They’re organizations. Their goals are different from yours. When you go to a big corporate publisher to get your book published, you have to take their interests into account, or there’s no deal.

Furthermore, even if you do find a publisher to publish your book, typically you sell it rights to publish in a limited geographic area, such as North America. Getting a book with North American rights into the hands of Australian readers means either an expensive mailing of the printed book from North America to Australia, or selling the Australian rights to an Australian publisher, where it may not have the same economies of scale that it does in the larger US market.

E-publishing changes all that. For a few hundred bucks, you can get a graphic artist to make you a decent cover. For a few thousand dollars, you can get a full-service edit by a really good freelance editor. For a few hundred more dollars, you can find somebody to convert the book to the usual e-book formats. Everything else is free in the e-book publication process. Many e-book authors prefer to do it all themselves, so it’s possible to do the entire book at no cost (other than the cost of a computer, which is a one-time expense.)

So now just about anybody can e-publish their novel. But that doesn’t mean that anybody is going to buy it.

Certain of the old rules still apply.

Quality matters, just as it always has. Excellent writing is more likely to sell than crummy writing.

Marketing matters, just as it always has. If nobody knows about your great novel, nobody is going to buy it.

Luck matters, just as it always has. The nice thing now is that there are more ways to get lucky.

In the old days (before last year), getting lucky meant finding the right agent and the right editor at the right publisher at the right time with the right book, the right title, the right cover, and the right marketing.

If you screwed up on any of those, then your luck wasn’t likely to be all that great. And not all of those were under your control. If your publisher screwed up any of the things that it controlled, your luck was just as bad as if you, personally, had screwed up. Authors didn’t control their own destiny.

That road to nirvana is still open, and a few authors are getting lucky all the time. Hooray for them! We should all wish to get lucky that way.

But there’s a new road to nirvana, e-publishing. Now you need the right e-book at the right time with the right title, the right cover, and the right marketing. And all of those are under your control.

You have fewer things that you must get right with e-publishing, and if any of them get screwed up, it’ll be your fault. Which can make you long for the bad old days when you had “Big Corporate” to blame.

It’s interesting to see how many disaffected authors are out there, eager to “stick it to The Man” by doing an end-run on big corporate publishers. I’m not one of those disaffected authors. I have many editor friends who work for big publishers (although it’s been disconcerting to see so many of them lose their jobs in the last couple of years). I don’t hate big publishers. They’ve produced great books over the years. They’re now trying to drive an aircraft carrier through the rapids, and if they’re slow to react, that’s the nature of the beast.

In the old days, big publishers had numerous editors, sales-people, and marketing folks who functioned as “gatekeepers.” Their job was to make sure that a book didn’t lose money. Most of the time, they succeeded, although in most cases, the book in question didn’t actually earn much either. The few big winners paid for the entire party.

That is one of the things now changing with e-publishing. There is no gatekeeper. Not really. (Unless you’re writing something so irredeemably evil that the online publishers refuse your book.) Only market forces determine what will sell.

In the old days, every publisher had its own rules for its gatekeepers. Part of the hassle of getting published was finding a publisher whose gatekeepers would sign off on you.

So yes, Jonathan, if you’ve got something wacky and experimental and you want to try it, go right ahead. The categories are blending. If you want to write an Amish werewolf erotic western with Zen overtones, go right ahead. No gatekeeper will stop you, and the market will tell you if that’s a viable category.

But remember that you still need the Big Three: quality, marketing, and luck. Without those, your books won’t sell.

I teach quality and I teach marketing, but I’ve not yet figured out how to teach luck. So all I can do is wish you well, along with everyone else who sits down to write the next great Amish werewolf erotic western with Zen overtones.

Have fun!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

As e-books continue to take the world of publishing by storm, it’s natural to wonder how any good books are going to be found by readers in the rising river of e-books. Won’t they be lost in the flood?

Heather posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I have lately been doing lots of reading on the e-pub buzz and thinking about marketing implications as they relate to fiction. I think to aid the ‘average’ ebook reader in making good fiction selections there will be a rise of some type of ‘recommendation medium’ (like blogs or an offshoot of social networking) that judges/reviews fiction ebooks. Do you see something like this currently developing and if so how as an author do you intend to take advantage of this marketing tool?

Randy sez: Yes, this sort of thing has already developed and will continue to grow. The basic idea is known as “crowdsourcing” and you can Google this word or search for it on Amazon to learn all that you want to know about it.

What is crowdsourcing? For the case of selling e-books, there are three fundamental elements: an open market, word-of-mouth, and a “similarity measure.” Let’s look at each of these in turn:

An open market is necessary for crowdsourcing to work. You make a sea of products available to anyone at reasonable prices, without unnecessary constraints. E-books fit this description exactly. There are hundreds of thousands of e-books available on Amazon now, and many more public domain e-books available at places like Project Gutenberg. This is in sharp contrast to the field of traditionally published books, where publishers and their marketing people make decisions about “what will sell.” The market of paper books is only somewhat open, because the economics of book production require that gatekeepers refuse most books for publication. They have to do this. They couldn’t afford to publish them all.

Word-of-mouth is also important to crowdsourcing. People like to talk about the books they read. They don’t talk about the books they don’t like. What happens is that good books get talked about and they tend to get read by more people who also talk about them. Good books get a chain reaction of word-of-mouth. Bad books don’t get talked about and they tend to get read by only a few people. Reader reviews are essentially word-of-mouth on steroids. This is one thing Amazon does very well — it encourages reader reviews. I read the 5-star reviews and the 1-star reviews of any book before I buy it. I also look at how many reviews there are and what fraction of them are 4 and 5 stars. If a book has many 1-star reviews and many 5-star reviews, it tells me that it’s a controversial book, which may well mean that it’s a very good book. If it has many 1-star reviews and few 5-star reviews, then it’s probably not very good. All those reviewers out there generally do a good job of sifting the good from the bad.

“Similarity measure” is one thing Amazon gets stupendously right. For any book on Amazon, you can see a list of several other books with the caption: “Customers who bought this item also bought:” For example, people who bought my book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES also buy Jim Bell’s book PLOT & STRUCTURE. No surprise there. The two books cater to the same reader. Amazon wisely gives readers a choice to buy them both as a bundle. When an online store tells customers what other people are buying, it’s a terrific way to let people know which books the masses of customers believe are similar.

When you create a completely open market with word-of-mouth in the form of reader reviews and then show customers what the market believes are similar products, the cream rises to the top. Quickly. The junk falls to the bottom. Quickly.

How do you take advantage of this? By writing your best possible book and by getting it out there on the open market in the online stores that do reader reviews and show similar products best. In our current world, Amazon mastered those skills sooner and better than anyone else. Barnes & Noble is making strides to catch up. Competition is good, and we should all hope that several excellent online retailers gain market share by putting these key elements together. Right now, Amazon and B&N are the big players because they deserve to be.

Quality matters, now more than ever. Write a good book. Write a great book. Then get it out there to the online retailers that have mastered crowdsourcing.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.