Re: Agent advice


"Brian M. Scott" <b.scott@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ipizz649qb8s$.bot92c4zpfxb.dlg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Fri, 17 Aug 2007 18:35:32 -0500, "Patricia C. Wrede"
<PWrede6492@xxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:13ccc771ufmd945@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

[...]

(after all, how many people don't submit anything until
their second or third manuscript has been finished?).

I'd like to take that as a serious question. Admittedly my
interest in writing for publication is small, but I haven't
any trouble imagining finishing, or nearly finishing, at
least a second ms. before submitting anything. Given the
emphasis on writing *careers*, that doesn't even seem a
terribly odd approach. Is it really so unusual?

You hear quite a bit about people who'd finished a first novel, started
sending it around, and took so long to sell it that they had a second or
even a third in circulation by the time the first one got bought. You don't
hear much about people who finished a novel that they thought was perfectly
saleable and stuck it in a bottom drawer to wait until they finished a
second one. It is, IMNSHO, some sort of ultimate in cat-vacuuming.

You do, very occasionally, hear somebody declare that they are going to
write two or three novels and trash them "because of course the first couple
can't possibly be any good." I don't think I've ever heard of anyone
actually *doing* this with malice aforethought (though I've certainly heard
of it happening by accident, especially pre-computer -- floods, fires,
moving...and one memorable incident in which the *only* copy of a ms., which
was being *hand-delivered* to a publisher to avoid getting lost in the mail,
was stolen along with the car when the author ran in for coffee on the way).
Once you've put all that work into something with the intention of getting
it published, it's pretty difficult to sit on it for another year or two,
for no reason other than some hypothetical advantage to having two mss. to
market, rather than one.

As somebody -- Michelle, I think -- pointed out, "I've written
one/two/four/six novels in addition to this one" is not a selling point to
an editor unless some of those other books have *sold*. There are tons of
writers who've finished multiple books before finally getting the hang of
it. Bertie MacAvoy has said publicly that she'd written sixteen novels
before she finally got one that would sell; one of my good friends (a
natural short-story writer) finished three unsellable novels before writing
a fourth that sold. And when I say "unsellable," I mean part of the
apocryphal million-words-of-crap -- stuff that wasn't "almost good enough"
and that with a little polishing and a solid midlist track record could be
sold after all.

It's a pattern that's all too familiar to editors, which is why "I've got
more..." isn't a particularly good selling point. They'll usually be happy
to look at other submissions when they've decided to buy *this* one, and
they're generally very pleased to find somebody who has another ms. that's
good to go, but that's not what experience has led them to expect.

Furthermore, there's the little problem of the time lag. As I said
elsethread, few writers are lucky enough to sell their first novel within
its first, oh, six or eight months out on the submissions circuit (I didn't
even get my first rejection letter for a year and a half). For most
writers, there will be plenty of time to finish a second novel, or at least
get it well under way, before the first one sells. That lag still applies
if, when you start circulating your mss., you have two of them
already-written and ready to go, rather than just one. Which means that if
you have two ready-to-go when you start submitting, you may have three or
four by the time the first or second one sells (assuming a year per book,
minimum writing time). It's hard for editors to find room in the list for
that much at once, and they know from experience that authors get testy if a
publisher sits on their novel(s) for three or four years. They'll deal with
it when it comes up, especially if they're excited about a new author, but
I'm not sure I'd recommend *trying* to set them up for it.

Patricia C. Wrede


.

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