I spent a few days thinking of ways to mortify Betsy in this space, but I don’t have a copy of her updated book, and I don’t have the patience to click on every link in her blogroll looking for things to hate. I considered writing about how your publishing ‘team’—your agent and editor and publisher—functions like a family, more specifically a family in which your publisher fucks you under the stairs while your editor pretends not to notice.
Instead, however, in an effort to be helpful, here’s some shit writers don’t need to care about:
Query Letters
If you can’t write a good query letter, you can’t write. They’re business letters—that’s a lower form of writing than Tea Party signs. Describe the book. Either your description sounds like money to that particular agent, or you get a form letter.
Still having trouble with your query letter? Try this easy tip: take up scrapbooking.
Agents
Before you have an agent, your goal is finding an agent, not making agents’ lives easier. Screw agents’ lives. The only reason they have lives is that after they clawed from the grave, they hungered for 15% instead of blood.
Worrying about guidelines is bullshit. If they like what you’ve got, they’ll ask for more. If they like that, they’ll want to represent you, and you’ll slavishly agree. That’s the nature of the relationship.
Worrying about wasting their time is bullshit. Agents are hip-deep and sinking, dealing every day with the desperate, the manic, and the spittle-flecked; and those are their –clients-. Don’t worry about alienating them. This is a group of people who one day looked at writers and thought, I want to represent them. They’re not gonna remember your half-assed crazy.
Just remember that this relationship is based on mutual trust and respect, so never reveal your true self.
The State of the Book
Is publishing in decline? Yes.
In other news, you’re fat and lazy, a talentless hack. Nothing will change any of that. Publishing is in the shitter. Our goal is to swirl around as long as possible before we’re flushed. We’re not gonna reverse the direction of spin here.
Will e-readers revolutionize publishing? Sure, because an influx of semi-literate control freaks is what every industry needs. Our problem isn’t the shortage of digital formats, it’s the shortage of customers.
The one thing that distinguishes people in publishing is that instead of faking expertise about corrugated paper products or commercial real estate, we fake expertise about books. We’re nothing special. There’s the same proportion of assbaggery in publishing as in the Solid Waste Association of North America. The difference is one group pushes a product that’s full of crap, and you know the end of this sentence.
People are idiots. People in publishing are, largely, people. We’re working in a crazily dysfunctional industry, and when by some miracle a book actually sells, we desperately try to reverse-engineer the success. But that only works when luck isn’t a determining factor. You can’t reverse-engineer a coin toss. Why is Lethem more popular than Everett? No reason at all. Why did Harry Potter sell more than 3,000 copies? No reason at all.
None of that matters. Franzen doesn’t matter and Vargas Llosa doesn’t matter. Gish Jen and Stephenie Meyer doesn’t matter and I don’t matter and you don’t matter. Editors, agents, readers, the state of publishing, the technology of reading, the insulting advances and print runs and jacket copy, the blogging, the twitting, the social media, the self-promotion: doesn’t matter.
I’m trying to write this like a comment without worrying where it’s going, but I think where it’s going is here: the first step is admitting that we’re powerless over everything but the writing. And the second step is coming to believe that the best way to deal with all those distractions is to hate them.
What do you care about as a writer, that you shouldn’t? What do you not care about, that you should?
Filed under: Agent, Authors, E-books, Protocol, Publishing, self-loathing, The End of the World as We Know It, Writing, You Go Girl | 65 Comments »
Sitting on another late train home opening my mail. All the usual stuff, droves of fan mail, scores of query letters, and then a letter from The Writer Magazine. They want to excerpt five pages from my opus The Forest for the Trees and they will pay $200 clams.
Friends,
Okay: You’re a writer, I’m a writer. It’s five in the morning, your neighborhood is asleep except for the guy whose having an affair with the lady down the block and the kids huffing under the magnolia tree and Old Man Needer who has been walking in his sleep since Leno went off the air and he keeps waiting for the national anthem and those planes flying in the air and flags flying…..before the 24/7 became a plague on humanity. You sit, turn on your computer (if you have a typewriter I admire you; if you are actually writing with a pen or pencil I love you). You write this sentence and you shuffle for another cup of coffee. You’re back. You read and reread your sentence and you continue. . .
Dear Betsy:
Betsy Lerner 