The first five pages

We have gone over the top ten reasons why agents and editors reject a submission. Now I’d like to talk about the next ten reasons which may or may not merit a rejection. The reasons why the writer might still have a chance (with reasons 11-20) is because various houses or agencies have varying perceptions of what makes for good writing.

Reason 11

The first five pages.

Five pages to get an agent or editor’s attention is a bit arbitrary. But it represents human nature more than the quality of your writing. They may say send me 5, 10, 50 or the entire manuscript but they never promise to read every word. They’re busy. The more practiced they are the more likely they will know in the first five pages whether a prospective author knows what they’re doing. Don’t expect them to see promise, or a good premise, or with a little work, amazing characters. They don’t have the time to baby sit, even if your work is potentially the next great American novel.

The only way to describe my gut feel on this subject is to write to you from my heart. I took a chance on my romance novel, Autumn Breeze, by taking 2 chapters to set up the story. There was no way around it. Although a romance, it was really about how a 14-year-old girl genius coped with change to the point that she solved some very adult problems and was the catalyst for the romance. Therefore I started with the girl Autumn. I recommend that if you have 2 or more protagonists. Lead with the character that has the most to lose, the one who is the driving force of change in the story. Autumn happened to be all of this and more.

I self-published because I was burnt by a couple romance agents who were more worried about me being a male author than in addressing the merits of the story. The good news is Autumn Breeze did win General Romance of the year 2017 by the San Diego Book Awards Association.

I’m not a big believer in foreshadowing in the beginning of a story. I recommend in medias rex (jumping into the middle of things). Don’t tell us about your character’s premonitions, show us reacting to change. This has more gut-wrenching impact of the reader, because if a character is in peril or their friend is the audience will worry about something they can understand. They can, see, feel, smell, hear the ugly. Avoiding the abstract and sticking to the tangible is the way to go in all genre fiction. Even in sci-fi there has to be something for the audience to wrap their senses around, even if unexplained.

If it is very likely that you only have 5 pages to get your point across, be succinct. In Autumn Breeze chapter 1 was 7 pages in which I laid out—through showing—the main features and problems of the story through the eyes, other senses, ruminations and dialogue interactions of a fourteen-year-old girl.

If you want to see my problem and how I solved it, Amazon has a look inside feature which allows you to read the first ten pages of most books. Just type in the title and my pen name RW Richard and you are in.

One other highly recommended step. Hire a content (and sometimes grammar) editor to go over your manuscript before you send it out. It is human nature to want to shout out, I’m done. All that happens if you send out your manuscript after you’ve completed it is that you’ll be done as in well-cooked, stick a fork in you. And doesn’t that hurt?

Here’s the editor I worked with on Autumn Breeze: Kim Nadelson, kmnadelson@yahoo.com. Finding ediotrs is easy. Just type into Bing or Google freelance editors and explore. Absolutewrite.com/forums is a great place to go for writer opinions on possible editors.

Note: When trying to decide the POV character for any given scene pick the character who is most impacted in the scene.

How not to get published, point 2.

1.      Please do blast a copy of your query.

There are companies that promote the query blaster, perhaps because fools and their money are often separated. A query is generally an email in which you ask an agent or editor to consider your work for publication. People teach courses on how to write them. There are writing books on the subject. To sum up, these pedagogical sources recommend three paragraphs plus a sample of your work. The short paragraphs are often in this order:

1.      Introduce yourself with short relevant resume .

2.      Describe your story.

3.      Write why you chose the agency, agent or editor and based on the books they represent why you are a good fit.

All this should fit on one printable page, minus the writing sample, which should be attached. Some books or teachers add to write using your author’s voice or style. That’s tough.

All this is well and good as a starting point. Let’s call it your generic baseline. Then you take this well crafted package and email it to 100 companies. Some suggest that you drop the part about how you are a good fit with so-and-so and the books they represent so that you can get that work out there in front of as many eyes as possible in as short a time.

You are wasting your money on a number of counts.

1.      You must do research on the agent and agency, editor and publisher to discover if you are a good fit and to personalize your query.

2.      Doing said research, you will discover that my soup kitchen analogy from Point 1. does not hold. Each agency agent publisher and editor have ways they want to see your material and they say so. It is your job to dig into persons, or companys’ web sites to discover this. If there is a difference between agent and agency or editor and publisher follow the agent or editor, because if you get past them, you’ll get your chance.

3.      These professionals are daily assaulted by creative usage of the English language. They need order and rules to speed up the process.

The agent or editor then assign, just as said in point 1., their interns to read all submissions and instantly reject any that don’t conform to the rules they published for the prospective author to follow.

Sorry, you have just been caste out into the cold. You’ve received your 100 rejections and you can now go about with your badge of honor telling every writer you know how you tried, am ready to quit. They’ll tell you to keep going and you might.

I have tried to tell multiple friends about this pitfall at conferences, meeting and critique groups, often to no avail. With limited persuasive time I had to move on and hope they’d consider my point.  One reason why people don’t listen to this obvious point is that they can’t do research on the computer. They’ll say things like Hemmingway did it his way. Hemmingway was a professional journalist with many contacts and those contacts told him what they wanted.

Besides the agent, agency, editor and publisher web sites you need to find these people. Ideally, you’ll meet them at a conference and you’ll like them and they you. This is way better than showing up as a stranger in their email in-basket. Barring this try sites like:

www.agentquery.com

www.absolutewrite.com

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