Tag: Mike Nappa (Page 10 of 23)

Reason #19: You Pitched Me Two Awful Ideas In A Row (Bad Reputation)

/ Mike Nappa

An Editorial Team reason for rejection

Dear Mike,
Look at these adorable pictures of my kitties eating supper off china plates. Everyone should see this! That’s why I’d like you to represent my coffee table book filled entirely with pictures of cats eating fancy food on expensive tableware…
Sincerely,
Cat-Lady

Dear Cat-Lady,

No thanks.

Mike

Dear Mike,
OK, I know you didn’t like the Cats-n-China idea, but you’re going to love this one: How about a fictional biography of my childhood? I can fudge a few historical papers and voila—I’m a survivor of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster! No one would check out the stories, I’m sure, and besides if they did the controversy would sell more books…
~~Cat-Lady~~ Survivor-Woman

Dear Survivor-Woman,

No…just…no.

Mike

Dear Mike,
Hey, it’s me again! Cat-Lady Survivor-Woman, and…

Dear Cat-Lady Survivor-Woman,

NO.NO.NO.NO. Whatever it is…NO!

Mike

Yes, my examples here are a little extreme, but you get the idea.

When you’re sending out pitches to editors and agents, you must remember that your name is irrevocably associated in my mind with whatever you send. If you send me one awful idea, I’ll probably shrug my shoulders and move on to whatever’s next in my pile. If you send me two awful ideas in a row, you’ve just earned yourself a brand name—and it’s not a good one.

You see, for me (and for most other agents and editors), it’s two strikes and you’re out. After you send me two obviously unpublishable books, it’s unlikely that I’ll give your third book more than a glance. After all, I will instinctively consider the source. “Isn’t this that strange lady who wanted to fabricate her childhood? No thanks.”

Hey, your third book might be a legitimate bestseller destined to make millions, but in my eyes you’ll be like “the boy who cried wolf” in the old fairy tale. I definitely won’t come running when you call.

So be careful what you send me. Every word you write shapes your reputation in my eyes. And if you send me garbage twice in a row, the third time you won’t even make it in the front door.

What You Can Do About It

1. Guard your reputation like a brand name.

As an agent, I’m extremely careful about what I will and won’t send out to editors. My own authors will testify that I’m sometimes a big pain in the butt in that regard. If I don’t think their writing is up to quality, I’ll insist that they rewrite until it is. Why? Because once I attach my agency name to their writing, we are all judged the same. I can’t afford for Nappaland Literary to be associated with poor writing, or else editors will stop listening when I pitch new books and new authors to them.

You need to guard your authorial reputation with the same tenacity.

Rejection in itself is no shame. But rejection because your writing is awful, your ideas are weak, or your perception of quality is woefully inaccurate—that’s a death sentence in terms of a writer’s career.

You must remember that every time you write something and send it out, those words shape an editor’s perception of you and the product (writing) that you are selling. That determines your reputation in the writing community—and your reputation can often mean everything.

So make sure to guard your good name among editors and agents—and never let yourself be accused of sending out two bad proposals in a row.

2. Send to the right targets.

One reason authors are ignored by editors and agents is because they prove themselves to be irrelevant. Just as bad as sending me two awful book ideas is sending me two proposals that obviously aren’t what I’d publish.

This ties into what we discussed earlier in Reason #7, but it bears repeating. If you want to get my attention, you’ve got to appeal to the audience I’m trying to reach. If you consistently send me books that don’t do that, pretty soon I’m giving up on you. You’ll get that form letter rejection before I even read your cover email.

So take care to send your proposal to the right people—to editors and/or agents who might actually want to buy it. (Read more about this at Reason #7)

3. Take time to become a better writer.

If you’re getting rejected on the basis of the quality of your manuscripts or the appeal of your ideas, it’s time to step back from the business side of writing and concentrate on the craft instead. Too many people like the idea of “being a writer” more than they like doing the work of a writer. Make sure you are someone in that second category and not the first.

Sometimes you have to admit that your writing needs to improve. Instead of whining about how no one will publish your work, learn how to create works that people have to publish in spite of themselves. Self-study opportunities are available in the writing reference section of your local library. You can also join a local writing group where so-called friends will gleefully rip apart your work and (hopefully) help you make it stronger. Creative writing classes are taught at just about every university and community college in the nation as well.

If you don’t want to get a reputation for mediocrity—and you want to avoid being ignored on the editorial desk—do what it takes to get better. (Whining is optional.)

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #20: Your Agent Pitched Me Two Awful Ideas In A Row

/ Mike Nappa

An Editorial Team reason for rejection

Honestly, this reason for rejection is kind of undeserved. After all, you have no control over your agent’s bad taste—and you certainly can’t tell your agent not to pitch someone else’s book. But this is a case of you suffering by association.

First, you must understand the way most agents make money. It’s rare for an agent to make a healthy living off only one or two clients. We agents typically get only 15% of whatever royalties an author’s book earns. If a book is reasonably successful—say it sells 20,000 copies in its first year—an agent will likely make only $3,000 or $4,000 from that book. That’s certainly not enough to support a family, let alone all the expenses associated with a literary agency. Plus, most books simply aren’t “reasonably successful,” and they fail to even earn back the royalty advance paid before the book was released.

So, agents make money in the same way discount stores make money: they sell in bulk. More authors means more contracts which means more residual royalty income which, over time, will hopefully accumulate into a respectable annual salary. For many agents that means this job is mostly a numbers game, and the bigger the numbers the better.

At Nappaland Literary I’ve deliberately kept my author roster smaller—never more than a dozen writers on my rolls at any one time. But that’s a luxury I have that most don’t. Many of my colleagues routinely accept new authors regardless of how many writers are already on their rosters—and most represent 50, 60, even 100 authors at once. From a numbers perspective, that’s just smart business. But from a quality viewpoint (which is where many editors sit) that means you never know exactly what you’re going to get next from Janice A. Agent.

If I’m an acquisitions editor working with your agent, and she sends me a crap proposal from some “exciting new voice!” that she signed at a recent writer’s conference, I’ll probably roll my eyes and reject. If the next book she sends me is equally publishable from her slush pile of awful ideas, from a different writer on her roster. I’ll begin to suspect that she doesn’t really care about (or recognize) quality in writing. I’ll assume she’s just playing the numbers game, throwing stuff out there and hoping some of it sticks.

Once I have that perception of an agent, it’s going to be hard for any book she sends me to get serious consideration. I’m going to assume she’s mostly running just a factory of awful ideas. Somewhere in there, than means your book will be negatively impacted by your agent’s lack of consistency in judging manuscripts.

The result? If your agent has recently sent me two unpublishable manuscripts in a row, and your book is the third one she sends me…well, I might just reject it sight unseen as one more in a stream of awful ideas. Or I might be predisposed to reject it before I even give it a serious look. Either way, it’s not good for you. Sorry, but that’s the way it happens sometimes.

What You Can Do About It

1. Pick your agent with care.

Too many authors think that any agent is better than no agent at all. These poor souls will often sign with whomever is the first agent to show an interest, regardless of that agent’s background or track record.

Don’t be that desperate. Remember that your agent’s reputation will become your reputation if he or she represents you. As the old knight said in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “Choose wisely.”

A few things to consider when choosing an agent:

• Who else does this agent represent, and what is their quality of writing?

• How many authors are on this agent’s roster?

• What is this agent’s editorial experience in publishing? (i.e., has this person ever had to deal with writing quality from a hands-on editorial perspective?)

• Has this agent published books with several different publishing houses, or mostly with just a few?

• Am I impressed by the quality of writing I see in books published in association with this agent?

2. Ask your agent which times of the year tend to be “slow seasons.”

The thinking here is that you want to get your proposals ready to pitch during your agent’s slow seasons. Why? Because then you know that he or she isn’t flooding editors with other people’s awful ideas. That helps your proposal to (hopefully) land on an editor’s desk in a time when it can be judged on its own merits instead of being judged as part of a rainbow of books that have all been submitted within days or weeks of each other.

Also, if Joe Z. Agent is able to focus more attention on your proposal because he’s not as busy trying to salvage other people’s awful ideas, he may also be able to give you constructive criticism that’ll really help your writing stand out in comparison to others. If Joe Agent is worth his salt, that kind of attention will be invaluable to you.

3. Let the chips fall where they may.

At some point, regardless of the possibilities, you have to just recognize that you can’t control everything when it comes to getting your book through the publishing committee approval process. If you’ve chosen your agent with care and done all you can with your book manuscript, it may be best not to stress about the other factors you can’t really control.

So, you know, grab a café mocha, watch a sunset through a picture window, and let your agent do whatever it is you hired her to do. Then sit back and see what happens!

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #21: You Don’t Have an Agent

/ Mike Nappa

An Editorial Team reason for rejection

I know I should be happy about this reason for rejection—after all, I’m a literary agent myself. The fact that most publishers won’t even look at your work unless it comes to them through someone like me should make me feel giddy with the joy of an undeserved monopoly. But the author in me just chafes as this universally-accepted discrimination against independent writers. It just seems wrong on a moral level—and it’s often ineffective on a practical level as well.

Some big names in publishing were once slush pile refugees, including people like Mary Cahill, Philip Roth, Judith Guest, and even Anne Frank. But those were the good old days, and now cost-cutting at publishing houses combined with the occasional terror threat (like the anthrax scare of 2002) means that times have changed..

So, do you really need an agent to publish books?

Yes. And that stinks.

Take, for instance, the recorded message that greets aspiring authors who call Simon & Schuster with a great new idea:

“Simon & Schuster requires submissions to come to us via a literary agent due to the large volume of submissions we receive each day.”

Honestly, in the great capitalist society of America, you ought to be able to approach any publisher directly with your book ideas and proposals, but that’s just not the way publishing works in the 21st century. So you need an agent whose primary job is to build relationships with the decision-makers at the different publishing houses, and then use those relationships to approach a publisher for you, knowing that your work will at least be considered for publication. Without that relationship, most publishers will either fire off a rejection without ever looking at your book, or even worse, ignore your submission and never respond to it.

Here are situations when you might not need an agent:

if you already have a relationship with a particular editor or publisher;
if you have a friend that publishes with a particular house already and who passes your manuscript to his or her editor; or
if you self-publish a book and it sells over 20,000 copies without the help of an established publishing company.

Otherwise, I’m sorry to report that you’ll most likely need an agent before most publishers will even look at your manuscript. Are there exceptions to this rule? Sure—and I hope you’re one of them. But you probably are not.

What You Can Do About It

1. Find an agent willing to take a chance on you.

This is a long, tedious effort that simply duplicates the process of pitching a book to publishers, only you pitch to people like me who may or may not be able to get you a publishing deal. The same rules apply, however, and if you find an agent willing to represent you, then your book has a much better chance of actually showing up in bookstores someday.

Best places to look for an agent are going to be in the following reference books:

Literary Marketplace (published annually by R.R. Bowker; this book is expensive, so just check it out at your local library)
Guide to Literary Agents (published annually by Writer’s Digest Books)

2. Be your own literary agent.

This is a complicated solution to your problem, but it can work. After all, my entire agency grew out of the fact that I was first representing my own work to publishers. But there are pitfalls when you are your own agent.

Sometimes a publisher will view you as illegitimate, thinking that you’re an agent in name only as a means to get your proposal past the “no unsolicited submissions” policy. I’ve been running Nappaland Literary Agency since 1995, and I still get this kind of treatment today. It’s unfair, but it happens.

Other times a publisher will clarify their policy to exclude you anyway—meaning they’ll only take submissions from New York City agents or something like that. And if you do get to the point of negotiating a contract, they’ll offer you less if you represent yourself because they assume you couldn’t get a “real” agent to negotiate your book.

Still, if you are interested in representing yourself, you may want to check out Martin Levin’s book, Be Your Own Literary Agent.

3. Network with agents and editors directly through writer’s conferences.

The real value of a writer’s conference is not in all the little workshops and keynote sessions. Sure, you might learn something at those, but those classes and lectures aren’t what will get you published.

The real value of a writer’s conference is that it gives you an opportunity to meet face to face with people who influence actual publishing decisions—editors and agents themselves. So check out Newpages.com/writing-conferences or the Shaw Guides to writer’s conferences and workshops (http://writing.shawguides.com), pick out one or two that have a strong faculty, and make plans to attend, to mingle, and to get some face time with your target editor and/or agent.

Be aware, though, that a strong faculty is not one that’s simply filled with successful authors—it’s one filled with editors from recognizable publishing houses and agents from established literary agencies.

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #22: You Didn’t Give Me Enough Writing Samples

/ Mike Nappa

An Editorial Team reason for rejection

When I’m shooting for a sale of your book in my publishing board, I’ve really only got three bullets in my gun: 1) your marketing platform, 2) your sales history/potential, and 3) the strength of your writing.

If you are a newer author, you will be inherently weak on the first two items in that list. So, I’ve got to really build up item #3 to the point where it compensates for the weaknesses in the first two areas. That’s where you’re writing samples come in.

In my publishing board meeting, I will highlight the artistry of your prose. I’ll probably even read aloud powerful passages, and pick random snatches from several pages just to make my point: This author is AWESOME from beginning to end. Who cares if she doesn’t have a TV show on cable? Her writing—and your reaction to it right now—is proof by itself that people will buy this book.

Ah, but what if you only sent me an outline? Or maybe a summary with a sample introduction? What if you sent me the first 10,000 words of your novel, but nothing else to show that you can actually sustain a story for a full 100,000 words?

You may think you’re just saving time, making your job a little easier in the face of unrealistic expectations from publishers who demand too much. But what you’re really doing is sabotaging your own presentation in the publishing board meeting.

Let me ask you something: If you were playing baseball and you knew you had to hit without a bat, would you step up to the plate? Of course not. But that’s how you make me feel when you send me an idea without enough writing samples to demonstrate the superior strength of your skill as an author. And then you complain when I reject your book—even though you were the one who sabotaged both of us by submitting an incomplete proposal.

I know. It takes time—a lot of time—to write up samples for a book. And since I require you to write your samples on speculation (meaning, without any guarantee of payment or a contract), you could lose both time and money by writing extensive samples for me. But…

You must remember that I didn’t make the rules, and until you are successful enough to break the rules, there’s only one way to avoid a rejection for this reason. You’ve got give me enough stellar writing samples to accomplish what we both want to happen in publishing board: approval for your next book contract.

What You Can Do About It

1. Write enough to meet the expected requirements.

If you know that a certain amount of writing samples is required before an editor will seriously consider your book, then just buckle down and write. Don’t waste time trying to prove to me that you are a deserving exception to the rule, or demanding that I overlook the requirements because you’re just too busy to meet them.

Hey, nobody ever said it would be easy for you to get published. In fact, sometimes we like to make it a little hard, just to weed out the halfhearted and the weak. But you don’t have to fit in either of those categories—and besides, didn’t you say you wanted to be a writer?

Here’s what you’ll typically need to deliver:

• For a fiction book, you’ll have to write the whole thing. Will the editor actually read the whole thing? Maybe, maybe not. That’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that rarely any editor will consider a novel from a newer author unless the whole book is written.

• For nonfiction, it’s a little easier. You’ll need to write: 1) an annotated table of contents, 2) an introduction to your book, and 3) one sample chapter from your book (usually the first chapter, but can be any chapter you choose).

2. Become famous enough that your writing skill doesn’t matter.

We’ll talk more about this in Reason #54, but for now suffice it to say that one way to avoid writing is to be famous. Publishing companies are enamored by celebrities, so much so that celebrities often don’t even write their own life stories. So if you want to “be” a writer instead of doing the work of a writer, then put your writing career on hold. Pursue the life of a celebrity instead—become a rock star or a TV talk show host or a movie actor or whatever.

I know this sounds like cynical advice, and maybe it is a little bit…but I also I promised to always tell you the truth in this book, and I know this pathway to authorship works. So if celebrity is within your reach or ambition, go ahead and pursue it. Once you hit the national consciousness, you’ll have your pick of book publishing opportunities—and you may not even have to write a single word.

3. Review Reason for Rejection #14.

Don’t be lazy!

Do the work it takes to succeed, and (shocker!) you just might succeed.

Looking for more? Check out these links:

Reason #23: I Already Rejected This Book Before

/ Mike Nappa

An Editorial Team reason for rejection

A few years ago I got an email proposing a book about the life story of some remarkable woman who suffered through illness and poverty etc. before becoming a remarkable woman who still lives in illness and poverty today. Sure, somebody may be interested in reading that kind of tragic life story, but it’s not the kind of book I tend to represent. I sent a rejection.

A month later, I got an email—from a different address—about that same remarkable book about that same remarkable woman. Rejected.

Then, over the course of the next year or so, I got that same book proposal—from supposedly different names and several different email addresses—at least 20 times. Every time my response was an automated rejection. I have to wonder if, after the 13^th rejection, that author truly thought I would suddenly come to my senses and rejoice at the opportunity to represent that tired, unpublishable book. Did the author really think the 14^th rejection wouldn’t come? Or the 15^th? Or the 20^th?

Please.

Once a book is rejected, that’s pretty much it for that editor or agent. There are a few exceptions—which we’ll discuss below—but generally speaking, once rejected, always rejected. If you keep re-submitting a book after it’s been rejected, you’ve destroyed your credibility as an author with anyone who has seen your work before.

Additionally, it makes you seem desperate and dense. If you can’t sell this book to me, I don’t want to see it rehashed and re-sent to me again. I want to see if you can come up with something else, something completely new that’ll “wow” me out of complacency toward you. I want to see that you’ve grown since your last proposal, that your writing is getting better, that your market savvy is getting keener, that you really do deserve to be published.

Otherwise we’re just a broken record that plays only one word: Rejection…rejection…rejection…

What You Can Do About It

1. Learn to accept rejection as a natural part of your writing success.

Listen, rejection is nothing to be ashamed of in your writing career. Everybody gets rejected—and I mean everybody. Even J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected by 12 publishers before Bloomsbury UK finally agreed to give it a chance.

One of my earliest royalty books was rejected a whopping 22 times before a tiny little publisher in Minnesota picked it up—and went on to sell over 100,000 copies of it. In fact, my books have been rejected a few thousand times…and yet I’ve still managed to sell over a million copies of books I authored or coauthored.

So if you get a rejection for a book, don’t waste time trying to change an editor’s mind or foolishly thinking you can “trick” an editor into accepting something he or she previously rejected. Life’s too short, and you’re too good, for that kind of self-defeating behavior. Accept the rejection as another step on your way to success, and move on.

2. Be aware of the exceptions to the “no re-submits” rule—but use them sparingly.

There are rare occasions when it is acceptable to re-submit a manuscript that’s been rejected. Generally speaking, you should never re-submit a rejected proposal. But, just in case the opportunity arises for you, here are the exceptions to this rule:

• The editor or agent suggests revisions and invites you to re-submit after changes have been made. One caveat, though: Never do more than one round of revisions for an editor in this situation. If the editor doesn’t like your book after you’ve tailored it to his or her tastes a first time, it’s unlikely to pass muster the next time.

• The editor or agent says her current load is full but she’d be open to taking another look in six months or something. This one’s easy. Wait six months and re-submit, reminding the editor that she requested the re-submission.

• There’s a change in the editorial staff and you know your book never made it to committee last time. Hey, if the rejecting editor leaves and no one else has seen your book, that means it’s a new proposal for the new editorial team. In this case, simply submit again as if for the first time.

3. Write something new.

So your book got rejected? So what? If you’re as talented and intelligent as I think you are, then simply shrug it off and start on something new. Take charge of your own success by giving yourself a brand new opportunity with a brand new book.

And if that gets rejected too…well, so what? As long as you’re willing to try again, you’re never without opportunities.

Looking for more? Check out these links: