Lawrence Block: Writing the Novel

You can do any or all of those things if you want. I told you before that nobody ever said you had to write a novel. Nobody’s saying now that you have to publish one, or try to publish one. It’s your novel, for heaven’s sake. You can circulate copies among your friends, lock it away in a safe deposit box, or use it to insulate your attic. You can submit it to fourteen publishers and thirteen agents, and then, satisfied that you’ve made the effort, you can put it in the outhouse next to the Monkey Ward catalog, so that it won’t be wasted.

Or you can bundle it off to a fifteenth publisher or a fourteenth agent.

If you want something badly enough, Fredric Brown pointed out in The Screaming Mimi, you’ll get it. If you don’t get it, that only goes to show you didn’t want it badly enough.

This is no place for specific advice on marketing your novel. Market conditions change constantly. Annual editions of Writer’s Market and marketing columns in Writer’s Digest will keep you in touch with these changes as they occur. If you’re writing category fiction, your own day-by-day research at bookstores and newsstands will let you know just who’s publishing exactly what.

A few marketing observations, however, might be useful.

It’s been a trend of late for publishers to adopt a policy of declining to read unsolicited manuscripts. This doesn’t mean they’re all a bunch of flint-hearted old dogs. It simply means that more and more of them are finding that the cost of reading over-the-transom submissions is unaffordably high, given the infinitesimal number of such submissions that wind up getting published. By limiting their reading to agented manuscripts and others that have come recommended, publishers can save thousands of dollars a year.

What does this mean to you? First, let me say that it’s not as disastrous as it looks. It certainly doesn’t transform the business of novel writing into a closed shop. You don’t need a track record, or an agent, or even a membership card in Author’s League in order to have your novel considered for publication.

What you do need is permission to submit your novel, and what I would suggest is a query letter. Let’s suppose you’ve written that gothic novel of the windswept moors of Devon and your market research has led you to believe that it would have its best chance of acceptance at any of six paperback houses. You’ve checked Writer’s Market and learned the name of the editor at each house who’s likely to be in charge of gothics. Now you sit down and write each of the six editors a letter, something like this:

Dear Ms. Wimpole,

I have recently completed a gothic novel with the working title of Trefillian House. Its setting is Devon, its heroine a young American widow hired to appraise antique furniture in a creaky old mansion on the lonely windswept moors.

Would you be willing to look at a copy of the manuscript? I’m enclosing herewith a self-addressed stamped envelope for your reply, and I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

I would suggest you write a letter of this sort whether or not the house in question reads unsolicited manuscripts. You’ll get a reply, and a much faster reply than if you submitted a complete manuscript, as it takes rather less time to read a letter than a novel. If the reply tells you thanks but no thanks, that they’re no longer an active market for gothics, that they’re overinventoried with books set in Devon, or any other sort of negative reply, you’ll have saved the cost of submitting your novel to them and the time they’d take returning it.

If the editor agrees to consider the manuscript, you’ve cleared a hurdle. Trefillian House is no longer an over-the-transom submission, no longer pure slush. It’s instead a manuscript an editor has agreed to read.

This doesn’t mean Ms. Wimpole’s going to buy your book. It doesn’t mean you should get your hopes up, only to be deflated when the manuscript comes winging back to you. But it does mean that you’ve improved your odds a little bit.

Your query letter will have served another purpose. In it you’ve already described what you’re sending — not the nature of your novel, but the nature of your submission. You’ve labelled it not the manuscript but a copy of the manuscript, and that’s precisely what you’re going to submit.

To several publishers. Simultaneously.

Publishers, like everybody else in this imperfect world, like to have things their own way. For years they managed this by somehow getting the word out that it would be unethical for an author to submit his work to more than one publisher at a time. Never mind the fact that a manuscript could languish on a publisher’s desk for months on end. Multiple submission, one was given to understand, was underhanded and unfair.

The hell with that noise. The only possible argument against simultaneous submission is that it’s improper to lead someone to believe he’s the only person considering a novel if this is not in fact the case. By describing what you’re sending as a copy, both in your query letter and in the covering letter that accompanies your manuscript, you eliminate this possible source of unpleasantness, and you do this without displaying an unpleasantly aggressive manner. You wouldn’t want to say, “I’m sending this novel to ten other guys at the same time, so you better hop to it if you want to get there fastest with the mostest.” That just might rub Ms. Wimpole the wrong way.

It should go without saying that we’re talking about a clean legible copy of the manuscript, a photocopy equal in quality to the original. Not a carbon copy. Not one of those old-fashioned photocopies on smelly purplish plasticized paper. If that’s the best you can do, you’ll have to do better.

I would suggest that you have between four and six copies of your novel in circulation. More than that gets confusing. When you submit the novel, describe it again as a copy and make it clear that the editor has encouraged you to send it. Don’t take it for granted that she’ll recall your name or anything else about you. It may be hard for you to grasp this, but at this stage of the game Ms. Wimpole plays rather more of a role in your life than you do in hers.

You might write something like this:

Dear Ms. Wimpole,

Thanks very much for your letter of February 19th. As you suggested, I’m enclosing herewith a copy of my gothic novel, Trefillian House. I hope you like it and that it will fit your publishing requirements. SASE enclosed.

It’s virtually impossible, when submitting to more than one publisher at a time, not to project a fantasy in which two or more of them accept the book the same day. There are three things to keep in mind when this fantasy strikes:

(1) It won’t happen.

(2) It should be your biggest problem.

(3) Your agent will handle it.

Speaking of agents, do you need one? And, if you do, how do you get one?

It’s possible, certainly, to represent yourself, just as it’s possible for you to act as your own attorney or remove your own appendix. And there’s less potential hazard than you’d face in the courtroom or the hospital.

Some very successful authors act as their own agents, making their own deals and doing quite well at it. They let their publishers act as their representatives in the foreign market (usually at a higher commission than most agents charge) and generally remain with one publisher for many years.

Personally, I think they cost themselves money, but it’s hard to prove it to them. They see the 10 percent commission they’re saving and they don’t see the money they’re not earning by going it alone. They don’t see the clauses in their contracts that a decent agent would insist be changed. They don’t see the higher advances and better rates they might be receiving. But that’s their business. My business is writing, and I’m pleased to leave the dollars-and-cents side of it to my agent.