Positioning Yourself for Success by Diana Flegal

I was in the right place at the right time.

We have all heard someone that has met with success say that, and most of us believe it is a chance thing. They are just lucky like that, or we spiritualize it and say they are highly favored of the Lord, blessed. We do not expect good things to come our way.

I think though, that we can arrange to be in that right place at the right time.

You are fresh out of college and ready to go- DO YOU seek out those who have graduated, and baby stepped their way to reaching their personal goals? OR the friend who is living with mom and bad mouths the establishment, spouts conspiracy theory, or believes the universe will bring it to you- so you might as well play tomb raiders 24/7?

You are newly divorced; betrayed by your spouse- DO YOU seek out the woman who has been there and moved on to establish herself in a new career and is helping others do the same thing? OR head to the bar to drown your sorrows and show that good for nothing you have still got it? (BTW: That good for nothing is not paying attention to you.)

Your company is downsizing and heads are being chopped right and left. DO YOU continue to give 8 hours for 8 hours of work while you quietly begin to seek out available opportunities? OR post Facebook tirades against your present work place and throw fellow team members under the bus?  (You best remember it is a very small world.)

Most of us can see the value of good behavior and handling yourself professionally in difficult circumstances.

But what does this look like to an aspiring writer?

You spend every spare moment you have writing the next great American novel. You aced the Writer’s Digest Novel Writing courses, and your instructor has encouraged you to find an agent. DO YOU research agencies looking for your type of material, read over their submission guidelines, choose an agent within each agency, and send single emails in the manner they requested? OR do you group email twelve agents your full manuscript, then check back in with them every day- warning them they are missing out on the next big thing?  

You have written and rewritten a Historical Romance, and procured an agent. While your novel is a well crafted inspirational tale of redemption, no one is looking at HR right now. You have seven rejection letters kindly expressing hope you can place this story elsewhere. Your Facebook writer friends and your agent have mentioned the benefits of meeting professionals in this business face to face. DO YOU sell a few dusty figurines on Craig’s list, hold a yard sale, and squirrel away a year’s worth of birthday, anniversary and sock drawer savings and register for a quality writer’s conference where you can meet acquisition editors that have successfully sold HR face to face? OR do you despair and delete your manuscript files, scrub your hard drive, and apply for a job at Taco Heaven?

Proverbs 10:3 in the message bible tells us: God will not starve an honest soul. I like that. Too much credence has been given the ‘starving artist’ adage. “You will never make any money painting pretty pictures or writing sad stories. You need to train for a real job.”

Phooey.

Yet, success most often comes to the one with sweat on their brow. 

Proverbs tells us the how’s and the how not-to's of success. Listed here are chapter and section headings the writer of the Message Bible chose. Peruse them. I believe you will be directed to position yourself as you dig into this treasure trove of wisdom.

An Honest Life (10:1-7)

Fear of God Expands Your Life (10:22:29)

Without Good Direction, People Lose Their Way (11:1-8)

A God Shaped Life (looks like this) (11:17-31)

Love Learning (12:11)

Wise People Take Advice (12:13-28)

Walk With the Wise (13:1-19)

There is a Way That Leads to Hell (14:1-13)

Sift and Weigh Every Word (14:14-28)

God Doesn’t Miss a Thing (15:1-13)

Life (can) Ascends to the Heights (15:12-26)

Everything With a Place and a Purpose (16:1-9)

It Pays to Live Seriously (16:10-27)

A Whack on the Head of a Fool (17:1-16)

Words Kill, Words Give Life (18:1-24)

If You Quit Listening (19:1-21)

Deep Water in the Heart (20:1-11)

Drinking From the Chalice of Knowledge (20:12-20)

The Very Steps We Take (20:21-26)

God Examines Our Motives (21:1-8)

Do Your Best, Prepare for the Worst (21:9-30)

The Cure Comes Through Discipline (22:1-16)

The Thirty Precepts of the Sages (22:17-22)

Restrain Yourself  (23:1-15)

Buy Wisdom, Education, Insight (23:16)

Intelligence Outranks Muscle (24:1-23)

Rescue the Perishing (24:25)

A Person Without Self-Control (25:16)

Fools Recycle Silliness (26:1-15)

Like Glaze on Cracked Pottery (26:16-18)

You Do Not Know Tomorrow (27:1-15)

Hard work has its reward. Food and shelter, yes. But more than that- there is a satisfaction like no other when you live in the place you were meant to live. Are you practicing the art you were meant to practice? Have you positioned yourself for success?

Why Are There Submission Instructions? by Linda S. Glaz

We handle very little sci-fi/fantasy/spec fiction of any kind. And we definitely DO NOT handle anything that has profanity or graphic sexuality. We each also have particular genres that we prefer to see. We ask that authors follow our non-fiction or fiction guidelines and then submit to us.

And yet…I continue to get erotica, fantasy, erotic fantasy…well, you get the picture.

We also spell out exactly how we would like submissions to come to us. In a proposal with specific information included as well as sample chapters…the first three sample chapters. And still, I get the first chapter, the last chapter, and the “one that’s really good”!

Editors and agents spell out what they want to see for a specific reason. We can move through them much more easily if they all are in a specific format. They is nothing that hurts the eyes more than to be on submission 20 for the day, and have it come through single-spaced, Arial-10pt. At that time of the day, I’m lucky to still be able to see double-spaced, Times New Roman-12 pt. But at least my eyes are used to it, so I can still see well enough to do what I think is a good job responding.

It is never good or professional to send proposals to all of the agents in one agency, even worse to blanket the entire industry of agents with the same email. All of us listed for each other to see.

When a professionally done proposal per agency guidelines is sent to one agent at a time (and I’m fine with authors sending out multiple submissions; I wouldn’t want you waiting before sending another), we can take those proposals more seriously. A well done prop gets your foot in the door. The more professionally done, the better.

Think about whether or not you would want your instructions followed; it opens the door immediately. And even if the writing isn’t quite there yet, an agent will probably be willing to have a second look if you followed the instructions the first time.

Do your homework. Know what the agents are looking for. Don’t ‘assume’ anything. If you follow the guidelines on agency sites, the chances are you are already ten steps above most.

Good luck, best wishes, and follow those instructions to a ‘t’.

Why do I insist on email submissions by Terry Burns

The quick answer is that I do almost all of my work online and very seldom have a need for a hard copy print out these days. A hard copy manuscript is practically useless to me. Besides that I tend to lose them. I toss them in the inbox in the study along with a bunch of junk mail, and they can get away from me. I seldom work there, mostly I work wherever my computer is, so I don't get in there to dig them out and deal with them often. I don't feel all that bad about it because our submission guidelines say I don't take hard copy submissions at all. Authors should NEVER submit without checking submission guidelines, so if I get one, I figure I'm dealing with someone that doesn't follow instructions anyway.

Most editors I'm working with prefer to work electronically, so I need clients that will work with me in that manner. A person that tells me they don't know how to do attachments or they seldom email might as well be telling me they deliver handwritten manuscripts. I need people who are keeping up with the changing technology of the industry. A contract for one of my clients calls for delivery of a hard copy manuscript. That client is ready to send the final manuscript but when I checked with the editor to be sure, she said even though the contract calls for hard copy, she'd rather have it electronically. Exactly what I'm talking about, I want to see how well a submitting client handles the technology.

A lot of editors and agents don't want any attachments to an email. Some want electronic submissions but want it all in the body of the email, no attachments. Others, like me, don't want hard copy submissions and do want them as an attachment, not in the body of the email. Some will take hard copy submissions and some, like me, don't.

These differences point up why it is so important to check the submission guidelines before we send to anybody. Those who don't want attachments probably are concerned about them containing viruses. I understand that. I have massive virus protection and several layers of backups, but understand at some point that I will have a problem. It's a cost of doing business.

A proposal in the body of an email is not a virus threat either, but I prefer them attached as a single word or .rtf file because I like to see if the writing is properly formatted, and if it's a project I like it is easier for me to use it as a base to build an agency proposal on. I actually am evaluating the proposal, whether it provides what we ask for in our submission guidelines at www.hartlineliterary.com and whether we can see how well it would give us what we need to market the project as much as we are looking at the writing itself.

So often at conferences I hear people say "I don't see why they ask me to submit like this, or any reason a proposal needs to contain that, or some other facet called for in guidelines." We ask for a little more in a proposal than some others but we would rather have something and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Other Hartline agents (and other agents in general) may accept things differently. I can't say it enough, we should never submit to anyone without checking their submission guidelines to see if we are sending what they would like to have in the manner they would like to see it.

Twenty-dollar Proposals by Andy Scheer

I groaned when my wife brought me the Express Mail envelope.

Without opening it, I was nearly certain the sender had wasted his money. He'd gone to a lot of work, a considerable expense, and also made more work for me. Not a win-win situation.

Inside I found a neatly done cover letter, a brief proposal, and a fifty-page fiction sample. Without reading it, I was nearly certain I'd soon be sending him a rejection. What a shame.

By simple arithmetic, any writer contacting an agent for the first time has the odds stacked against him. Agents receive far more proposals from potential clients than they can possibly represent.

The work of deciding whether to decline becomes easier if the writer proposes something in a genre outside my expertise. Or if the sample chapters are laced with material I find offensive.

But in this case, the writer simply hadn't paid attention to the information on the Hartline website that four of the agency's five agents “accept ONLY e-mail submissions.” So I was expecting the proposal wouldn't cover — at least in any depth — the required information. It didn't.

Not surprisingly, the fiction style didn't impress me. The prose felt flabby—loaded with telling and double attributions (both a tag and a beat) for every line of dialogue, plus funky punctuation. I didn't enjoy spelling out my major reasons why I thought the piece was not yet ready for publication, but I felt the writer deserved at least some return for his twenty-dollar investment.

I just wish he had invested his postage money in a book from Writer's Digest, learned more about the craft, then emailed me a proposal — for free.

What do I represent? by Terry Burns

I don't understand why people will submit to an editor or agent without looking at submission guidelines to see what they are representing and how they want to receive it. Would they go to a doctor without first checking to see if they are a general practitioner or a specialist of some kind, to see if they treat whatever they need treated? Would they go to a store looking for something without seeing if it was something the store sells?

But it is clear from the submissions that I receive that many, maybe even most, have not bothered to look at what the agency, or me personally are trying to represent at the present time. They send me things that our guidelines clearly say we do not handle at the present time, wasting not only my time but their time.

I'm from West Texas, the Texas Panhandle to be precise, and I wear a big hat. I don't know how many people jump to the conclusion that I only handle westerns. Every conference I have people who say they did not submit to me because that's not what they write. I would represent a good western, but at present only have a couple of clients that write them.

There are those who won't send me a romance because they figure I'm an old cowboy and wouldn't like them. I'm also Irish which means I tear up in a good chick-flick or like a romance that brings a smile to my face. Admittedly if it gets a little too flowery for me I tend to pass it to one of the ladies, but other than that . . .
I work with a lot of middle reader and young adult. Seems a lot of people don't expect that out of me either, totally ignoring the fact that I have 5 kids, ten grand-kids and two great-grandsons. And you don't expect me to be drawn to things for young people? True, I don't do things aimed at those younger than middle reader because I'm not a good judge of them. They all look cute to me.

I like historical or historical romance if it catches my interest. I like a good mystery, but they don't seem to like me, I'm having trouble finding a home for the few that I have. I handle some nonfiction but not as much these days. There is so much available online for free that it can be hard to place, and when it does find a home it is more about the platform and name recognition of the author than anything else. I am particularly not having any luck in the devotional market, way too many people there chasing too few publishing opportunities. Again it may be more about platform and name identification than anything else.

I like inspirationals and women's fiction, books aimed at a male audience if it is something that can also appeal to female readers. Mostly it needs to be a book that is well written, one that pulls me in from the very first page and keeps me in the story all the way trough. I like books that make me feel what the author is feeling: happy, sad, mad, scared . . . some genuine emotion.

People are making a mistake if they take a look at me and decide because of my age or the way I dress or the way I talk or some other characteristic that I will like or will not like something. There are plenty of places starting with those submission guidelines or the many places where you can find out more about the books that I'm placing that will tell you for sure whether we might possibly be a match or not. It should be that way for all agents or editors. Before we submit to one we should have a good idea whether they are a possibility or not. Blind or mass submissions seldom work. For one thing, many agents or editors feel if the submission they are receiving is not personal to them that it doesn't deserve a personal response.

So, does that help to figure out what I might or might not like?

HARD TO SAY NO by Linda S. Glaz

It’s doggone hard to say no to a query for a good book.

But let me ask you this—when you walk into a book store and drop ten to twenty dollars on a book, are you willing to accept only good? OR do you expect the book to be very exceptional? I guess that’s what it all boils down to. But I’m not sure who hurts more when there is so much potential and we have to say no.

Let’s look at a few reasons why.

First and foremost would be sending me things I don’t handle. It’s pretty straightforward on our site that we don’t handle profanity and explicit sexuality. If your little sister or grandma would blush, we don’t take it. I’ve received more than a dozen queries for erotica this last two weeks alone. And if the query makes me blush…

Second, let your masculine characters be masculine. Men don’t talk a lot. They get to the point and move on. They don’t internally whine as much as women do (sorry, ladies), but they are different creatures than we are. They aren’t constantly trying to figure out their feelings. When they look at girl, they don’t stop and think about the weather forecast. They’re GUYS!

Third, don’t age yourself as an author if you’re over 50 by having your young characters named Wilma and Horace. Not gonna happen in 2012. Or have them say things like groovy, golly, and “gee she’s swell!” as well as a myriad of other things that younger people today wouldn’t say. This goes for internal dialogue as well.

Fourth, please don’t preach in your novels. If you are writing inspirational, be subtle, go easy. NO one, not even another Christian wants to be preached at. Characters can have faith-filled existence, but you don’t need to ram it down the reader’s throat. Even a scene for coming to know Christ doesn’t need to be preachy.

Okay, four reasons why I might say no. There are others: poor grammar, punctuation, no sense of formatting whatsoever, bad attitude in query letter, informing me that God told you to write the book and so I have to take it. And on and on and on.

Next week I hope to give you a few hints about what an agent loves to see. At least, from my perspective.

Have a good one.