Samhain Publishing Ltd. Weblog

Pitching Dos & Don'ts

Conference season is upon us. You’ll see Samhain editors out and about at various national and regional events this year. Our executive editor, Laurie Rauch, kicks off our season at the 2010 Written in the Stars Writers’ Conference next weekend and will also make an appearance at the Desert Dreams Conference in mid-April. I’m thrilled to be participating in the Silken Sands Conference, the Spring Fling Writers’ Conference and the Capital Region RWA Conference. And you’ll find plenty of Samhain staff to interact with at the Romantic Times Convention, Lori Foster’s Reader-Author Get Together and the RWA National Conference.

We’ll be taking pitches at all of these events, so by popular request, here’s my (very) complete list of pitching dos & don’ts.

How NOT to Write a Query Letter

For every good query letter I read, there are five not-so-good ones. No matter how many times we editors—and agents—go over it, a lot of writers don’t seem to listen or care about what we want to see and what we don’t want to see. I’m really good at listing things, so I’m sure you can figure out what’s coming. =)

1. We are not the administrators of a dating site. You’re not going to find the love of your life by submitting a profile to us. We are not interested in how tall you are, how much you weight, what color your hair or eyes are, or how old you are. Nor do we care if you like long walks on the beaches and long soul-searching conversations. We don’t care if you’re divorced or how long you’ve been married or how many kids you have. What we do care about? Your story.

2. At this point in time, your initial query letter, we don’t care why you write. We only care about if you can write a good story. If a nasty divorce caused to to write the story, of if another life-changing event caused you to write, we don’t want to hear that. At this point, we don’t have a relationship with you. I’m not saying that we won’t care about that, but that wouldn’t come until we have an author-editor relationship with you. You wouldn’t lay every little thing out on the table during a first date, would you? The same theory applies here.

3. If you have a relationship already with the editor you are working with, you still need to write a query letter for your submission. If you had to do a huge report at work and present it in front of the Board of Trustees for your company, would you simply throw the report on the table in front of them and say “Here it is”? No, you would explain it and try and make yourself look as good as possible. When you don’t take the time with us, we feel like you don’t care as much as you should. There are certain times when you have such a good relationship with your editor, and you’ve been talking about a manuscript, you may not need a query letter. That is rare, though. If you have to even stop and wonder if you have that relationship with your editor, then you need to write a query letter and send it with your manuscript.

These are just a few of the things that are standing out in my mind right now. If I searched my brain even more, I would have about ten times this to share with you, but that wouldn’t be a blog post, that would be a novel. Not really what we’re going for here. =)

What are your thoughts on query letters?

Short and Sweet...

Short and Sweet

Do you find yourself skipping over portions of books? Do you tend to buy shorter 200-300 page books rather than the larger tomes? Why?

I asked myself that question a while ago when I finished a book by a well-known author. The book was over 500 pages and action packed from beginning to end. The main character(s) were constantly on the move and under time crunch to “save” something (the world/another person, it doesn’t matter). Yet I found myself skipping large portions of the book.

Why? Information dump.

I love history. I love conspiracy theories. I love tangled webs. But put them all together and add a fiction plot and more often than not I am disappointed in the book. Make the book a romance on top of that and things can get really tricky.

I feel for authors who are excited about the information, the legend, the myth, and in some cases, the history surrounding an event. It’s a tightrope walk to figure out what is important and what isn’t. I often think the author is more in love with the facts and information than with the characters of the book. The author is so eager to share his/her fascination with the details that they forget they are writing something that is for the beach or the sofa rather than the classroom. The number one thing I dislike more than anything when reading a book for pleasure is to be lectured to. Having an author lecture his/her point of view and using the characters in the story for the vehicle causes me to put that book aside. Fiction reading should be stimulating, satisfying and enjoyable.

While the information may be fascinating, I only need to read the part that connects the dots for the story – the characters and the plot they are involved in. If the plot is so complicated that it requires minute attention to detail and learning obscure fact, chances are the book should have been a series. A series would allow the information to be given to the reader in short doses not all at once.

So to keep this blog short and sweet…what books have you read that are wall-to-wall information dump? Did you like it? Are there situations where that type of book works?

Got Rhythm?

Sometimes I get a submission with a premise that excites me and a synopsis that reveals a well-plotted story, but I don’t fall in love with the voice. One aspect of voice that is important to me is the cadence of the prose. While I love the rhythms of skillful writing, choppiness will prevent an author’s prose from engaging me.

When the meter of an author’s prose sings, it’s a beautiful thing. I certainly don’t expect (or want) a romance ms submission to be written in iambic pentameter, but meter is not just for poetry. Rhythm in prose is difficult for me to describe, since it’s one of those I’ll-know-it-when-I-hear it things. But, as in music, some authors have perfect pitch, while others may be naturally tone deaf.

Why I love digital publishing

When I first started editing for Samhain, I was doing it because I enjoy to read and edit, and I thought it’d be a great way to earn some extra spending cash. That was all fine and dandy until I started to learn more and more about Samhain and digital publishing.

And then I realized that having Samhain as a side job was simply no good for me.

Why, you ask? Because I want more. I want to be completely immersed in digital publishing and Samhain and books and authors… get the picture? =) I really didn’t know anything about digital publishing when I started this gig, but now that I’ve become a lot more knowledgeable on the subject, I’m a huge supporter and advocate of the the digital publishing industry.

Here are some of the reasons why.

1. Green is the thing right now. Everyone wants to save the world, save energy, save the whales, save the polar bears…you get it. Well, one of the top things on that list is saving trees. And ebooks do a great job of that. Try this on for size… Did you know that 40% of printed books are pulped? Yeah, you heard that right. Next time you walk into Barnes & Noble or Borders, take a lot around and imagine almost half of the books in there being trashed/recycled. Yeah, that’s pretty staggering.

2. In the majority of cases, digital books are cheaper than paper books. Now, I don’t know about you, but the amount of money I’ve spent, and continue to spend, on books is pretty high. I think I could probably pay off the mortgage on our house. =P With digital, there are less production costs, so the cost of the book doesn’t have to be as high to make up for those costs.

3. Ah, the space-saving abilities. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had to buy bookshelf after bookshelf in order to have space for the ton of books I buy. And trust me, it’s a ton. They’re overflowing everywhere, and thank God I have a husband who is understanding and doesn’t mind it. Because to be honest, if I had to choose one of the other, it’d be a pretty tight race between the hubby and the books. =) But with digital books, it’s not an issue at all. And if you don’t want to buy an external hard drive to keep them on so they don’t take up space on your computer, Google Documents works great for storing them, so long as they are a compatible format. I tend to go with PDFs, so Google Docs works great for me.

4. Digital publishers can take more chances with what they contract. In the case of the New York publishing houses, they have to be very careful with what they pick up. They have to choose stories they think really have a chance at selling very well. With us, we can take more chances. We don’t have to choose stories that we know will make us a ton of money. We can choose a really good story with a non-traditional storyline that may not be as widely accepted as most. We can choose something because we love it, and hope that everyone else loves it as much as we do. A perfect example of this is Butterfly Tattoo by Deidre Knight. Traditional publishing houses didn’t want it, but it’s become a well-known, much-loved story. All because an editor took a chance on a story she loved.

How NOT To Get Automatically Rejected 101

This blog gives a little peek into one facet of an editor’s job. It applies not only to Samhain, but to probably almost every other publisher/editor out there. The Rejection Letter.

Let This be the Start of a Beautiful Relationship

New authors often wonder what editors expect from them, and what they can do to ensure a productive editor/author relationship. It’s quite simple, really. It’s all about communication and professionalism.

When you receive your first round of edits, be prepared for your precious words to be criticized and dissected nine ways to Sunday. After all, an editor is supposed to point out things that could be improved. We’re looking for inconsistencies, faulty logic, impossible timelines, ambiguities, outdated content, point-of-view slips, weak transitions, misplaced modifiers, repeated information, insufficiently developed characterizations, unbelievable motivation, jarring speeches, noticeable patterns, junk words, punctuation errors and opportunities to deepen the reader’s level of emotional engagement. So, yeah, chances are we’ll find a few things that we’ll ask to be changed.

A Pen by Any Other Name

Choosing a pen name for a writing career is probably as difficult for most people as choosing a name for a child—and the same amount of thought and care should probably go into the decision. Yet just like those urban legends of parents who name their kids Female (Fuh-MALL-ee) or Lemonjello (Le-MON-juh-lo) or Shithead, there are always going to be pen names out there that will have you wondering just what the heck the author was thinking. So at the prodding of the Samhain staff and in the hopes of keeping authors from being made fun of at the industry playground, here are some tips to keep in mind when choosing your pen name.

All about self-editing

When I got my reminder last week that it was my turn again to post a blog, I couldn’t think of anything other than things that have already been done. Query letters, professionalism, submissions….and I think I was even the one who wrote two of them. Nice, huh? So I got to thinking about it and I decided that I needed to do one on self-editing. And no, doing a Spell Check doesn’t even begin to cover what you need to do to prep your manuscript for submission. Keep in mind that when you submit something, the cleaner and more polished it is, the more it is going to be looked at by the editor in a positive light. Don’t even ask me what we think when we see something full of grammar mistakes, word misusage, punctuation errors… The list goes on. The easiest way to do this is to number them, so, well, that’s what I’m going to do. =-)

Recovery mode

Now that I’m back from RWA Nationals in Washington D.C., I’m in full recovery mode. I’m sure the 2000 other women who attended are feeling much the same thing. If you’ve never attended a conference, and especially a conference of this size, you’re probably wondering just what recovery mode entails so I’m going to share some insights with you.