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From Publisher’s Marketplace, June 22: Children’s/Young Adult: I guess the big question is whether or not this book existed in April. I’ve been a bad blog-reader recently… so far behind on reading my usual blogroll. So, let’s see what’s out there, shall we? Julie Leto has an excerpt of her new book up. I can’t wait to read DIRTY LITTLE LIES! Gena Showalter has been on a bit of reading binge recently, and both books she’s blogged about look like real winners. I basically gave up on Bombshells a while ago because they premises sounded so wonderful and then I could never get into the actual storytelling, but I might be tempted to try again. Must pick them up. Marianne Mancusi has had a bad week, and some anonymous poster is giving her trouble for blogging about it. Stick to your guns, Mari, it’s good for teens to feel they can be upset about stuff and the world’s not going to end! (Lord knows I needed that lesson at age 16, and, um, now.) Alison Kent’s got a great post on the recent discussions about whether chasing the market = selling out and how much is “acceptable” (make sure to read the comments trail as well). Of course, the big question is, acceptable to whom? The fickle fans? Your conscience? Your kids’ college funds? Exactly why this is a good topic. (Oh, and Lydia Joyce has a blog up about what writers make, but it’s really mathematical and makes some assumptions I don’t quite agree with). Rachel Vincent has an excellent post on plotting and world building (apparently apart two is forthcoming), and in the comments section, Heather Dawn points to a March Midnight Hour post by JR Ward on the same topic. Haven’t been able to bring myself to read Ward yet, but the lavish praise in response ot her post makes me think I will have to try to grit my teeth through “rhage” and “phury” and “beeczar” and read the damn things. I also want to read Shannon Stacey’s 72 Hours, after hearing Jaci rave, but I’m on a strict book diet, what with the deadline pressure and all. I just need to finish up Nalini’s Singh’s latest Desire and then I’m back on the wagon. Justine Larbalestier has a whole bunch of great “our writerly neuroses” posts up, including one on getting used to nos, and one on praise addiction. Both are quite timely for yours truly. Scott Westerfeld, on the other hand, is so busy writing about airships in 1914 that the most we’ve heard from him of late is posting the weirdo papaerback cover of PEEPS. (Love the idea, but what’s up with the poufy lips? Have they been hanging out in Diego? Jana got good news from her agent (go give her a high five) but Shannon’s been having a rougher time (go give her a hug). Shanna Swendson’s stories make me glad I’m not in the dating pool. Kristin Nelson asks if it’s rude to be an agent caught up on queries if that means she can send your rejection in minutes, and oh, wow, does Bookseller Chick have some amazing posts up recently. And finally, Deidre Knight’s Amazon blog has an interesting post about remakes. (Honestly, I like Dennis Quaid just fine, and I do have a soft spot in my heart for him, etc. etc., but I was totally underwhelmed by The Big Easy. Could not for the life of me figure out what the big deal was, what “the scene” everyone always talks about is, or what kind of accent Quaid thought he was pulling. I rented it because a lot of people told me I had to see this one scene blah blah blah, but neither Sailor Boy nor I could figure out what any one was talking about. Maybe a generational thing?) Oh oh oh, and before I forget! Cindy Procter-King sold to RED SAGE! Woo hoo, go, Cindy! So excited for you. I love red Sage, and not just because I’m occasionally on the cover. Well, what a day yesterday was! I’d been dying to write a particular scene all day, but I got caught up in three of the most stunningly orgasmic bits of promotional yumminess and was completely distracted all day. And here’s the worst part (for you) — I can’t spill the beans on any of them yet! But, rest assured they are completely scrumptious, and when the time comes, you will all get to savor their utter deliciousness yourselves. Sailor Boy is growing weary of my constant squealing, however. Because, dear blog readers, I’ve been squealing. And gasping, and jumping around. What? You want hints? Okay, okay. Hints (in a lovely, LSATy way): There are three promotional items. Ah, I could do this all day and y’all still wouldn’t be any closer to guessing… Speaking of the clueless, count me in. I’m totally mystified. Has anyone else noticed the willful ignorance going on in some of these author/agent/editor chats of late? I’ve attended four in the last two weeks, and whoa, nelly! At times I’ve wanted to pull the person aside and ask them to think about what they are asking! Really simple stuff, too. I saw someone ask an agent who had just finished rolling off a lengthy list of places where she had sold books as well as talking about one of her clients who had sold a book to house A, if she was “one of those agents who only sold to House B.” And just when I think I’m done being surprised, I get what I if an agent would find a pretty insulting question! Another writer asked if, after signing with an agent who previously rejected you, should you shop your rejected manuscript to other agents behind her back. Uh, I guess only if you were in the market for a new agent, full stop! (The topic of writers who won’t let go of their old books is one for another day.) In general, I’m glad I’m not an agent. I think I’d be the super mean kind. Miss Snark without the convenient veil of anonymity. Next there’s the broken records. Having been at four of these things, I’ve now seen one person ask the same question at all four opportunities (even twice to the same agent, as if she’s somehow going to get a different answer in a different venue!). They aren’t Magic 8 balls, sweetie. Here’s how it works. You either believe Agent A when she says that X isn’t going to work, or you thumb your nose at her and anyone else who says otherwise and make it work to spite them. What’s actually going on here is that Madame X is getting an answer she doesn’t like. Perfectly fine, perfectly normal, I applaud her for soldiering on in spite of it. But there’s such a thing as a second opinion, and then there’s third and fourth and fifth and so on. At some point, you have to think that the consensus wins, right? And I don’t buy the argument that she’s just gathering information about who to submit to, either. Because editors and agents are famous for saying they’ll never like such-and-such, only to read a such-and-such they fall head over heels for and forgetting all their standards. So stop asking, start blowing their socks off with the actual submission. And then there’s broken record type 2, where Diana, by dint of having sat in on all these Q&As, has simply seen the same question asked over and over again by different people. I don’t blame these people. They probably weren’t at the other chats and so their questions were, perhaps, perfectly reasonable. But it was still a lot of “yawn, yes, yes, chick lit is a tough sell right now, ‘historical’ means regencies and scottish, and let’s get on to new territory, m’kay?” No one’s fault but mine. Should have probably gotten out of there while the getting was good! But the really clueless person in all of this is me, because on Romancing the Blog, someone asked the following question: If an unpublished author has set her sights on writing single title historicals for one of the major publishers, but is offered a deal from a category publisher, would you recommend taking it, viewing it as a stepping stone to her destination? See, this sounds like a serious question, but it left me scratching my head. I want to know how this person even got into such a situation in the first place! It sounds like quite the story! Not easy to break into category, after all. It wasn’t like Brenda Chin just called this random unpublished historical author and said, “Hey there, wanna write me a Blaze?” (Don’t laugh, I know people who HAVE gotten random calls like this and had to decide whether they wanted to write in the genre before accepting the offer. But it weren’t never an unpub for category romance.) And this is also not similar to a situation in which a person submits a story to a publisher and then doesn’t accept the deal because it’s lower than her expectations. Category rates are pretty well known boilerplates. So, why the HELL would this single title historical aspirant go off and write, revise, query, submit, revise, etc. a category romance novel with a publisher, knowing what her likely deal would be if she got accepted, if she wasn’t interested? Asking if that’s what you want AFTER the contract is offered seems like a rather bassackwards way of going about it, to me. Okay, let the hate mail flow. I’m bound to get some real doozies today, between the tease and the rant. Last night I had dinner with Firebrand Literary Agency’s newest star, Megan Atwood! Megan is a darling woman, a big fan of Buffy (we’re such soul sisters!), and responsible for starting the FLUX YA line at Llewelyn Publishers. What did we talk about? Well: Simone Elkeles debut, HOW TO RUIN A SUMMER VACATION, which is one of the FLUX launch books discovered by Simone, and which yours truly read an ARC of; my book and the challenges of sequels; and then the usual gabbing about boys, clothes, food, Scott Westerfeld, and how we like DC. The Knight Agency’s own Nephele Tempest is answering questions at the YA-writers Yahoo loop all this week. To join, you must be an RWA member (make sure to include your member number in the request to join). Jenny Bent is answering questions at Romancing the Blog today. Run run run! Enjoy! Woo Hoo!!!!! And I’ve got a lot of other wonders for you in the coming weeks, my pretties, including but not limited to the unveiling of the official Secret Society Girl website, more giveaways of advanced copies of Secret Society Girl, the arrival of the author copies of Secret Society Girl, some Secret Society Girl contest announcements, and that’s just the beginning. By the way, if you haven’t already joined, this is the perfect time to get in on the Secret Society Girl Newsgroup. There’s going to be a special part of the web page with all kinds of goodies that’s only accessible to Society Members. So join now! And for those of you in the DC area, don’t forget to pencil this in on your calendars: Please join Diana Peterfreund to celebrate SECRET SOCIETY GIRL An Ivy League Novel —A Delacorte Press Hardcover— Tuesday, July 18th at 7:00 p.m. Borders Books & Music Okay, had all the promo you can take for one day? Mee too. Unfortunately, the day has just started! So, craziest thing happened last night. I was on the couch, working, and Sailor Boy was at the dining room table, and we all of a sudden heard this crazy tire-squealing, mad about-to-crash driving sound coming from the major thoroughfare outside our apartment building. This, sadly, happens a few times a week. It’s almost become a game to estiamte when we’re going to go from the “screeeeeeeeeeeeech” sound to “crash!” Well this crash was close. Like, under our window close. So we run to the window to look out and that’s when about ten cop cars go whizzing past. And a helicopter, with a spotlight. I guess the guy was a runner, too, since the cop cars and the helicopter were circling our area for several minutes. (We made sure the chain was on the door). There was one parked at the entrance to our building’s parking garage, and a bunch of cops ripping apart the white SUV the person had crashed. Quite the scene. It was a time I wished we had TV so we could have seen our building on the news. Okay, must go do some work! Here’s my plan for today: 1. Write another chapter of SSG2. Tonight, I’m having dinner with a very special industry person. If I get any scoop, I’ll make sure to pass it on to y’all! First I loved Malcolm Gladwell. Then I was pissed at him for his “all chick lit is the same” crapola on his blog during the Viswanathan scandal. Now I love him again, because I think I agree with him on his views of intellectual property. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?041122fa_fact Go read it now. And then let us discuss how pure our inspiration has to be for it to count? Had I been Bryony Lavery, the playwright of Frozen, I would not have thought that quoting from a decade-old non-fiction article in my play would have been a problem. Gladwell asks: How could she have been so meticulous about accuracy but not about attribution? Lavery didn’t have an answer. “I thought it was O.K. to use it,” she said with an embarrassed shrug. “It never occurred to me to ask you. I thought it was news.” I think this is what disturbed me so about the Holy Blood, Holy Grail case in England. It also matters how Lavery chose to use my words. Borrowing crosses the line when it is used for a derivative work… But Lavery wasn’t writing another profile of [serial killer psychiatrist] Dorothy Lewis… And she used my descriptions of Lewis’s work and the outline of Lewis’s life as a building block in making that confrontation plausible. Isn’t that the way creativity is supposed to work? Old words in the service of a new idea aren’t the problem. What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea. In the end, Gladwell decided that he wasn’t upset about the lines from his piece that had been co-opted into the play, though admits that it wasn’t until he realized how briliant the Tony-nominated script was that he was able to fully articulate how robbed he didn’t feel by the transformation. (Small cynical observation: one wonders if it were a piece of crap, would he still be cool with it?) Dorothy Lewis, the psychiatrist profiled in Gladwell’s piece, was the one who first brought this case to light, and even asked Gladwell to turn over the copyright on his article so that she could further her lawsuit against the playwright. She said that details of her life had been lifted wholesale to create the psychiatrist character in Frozen. And she was disturbed (one reason among many) because the play’s character had an affair with her collaborator, and she feared people would think that she had done the same in real life. Lewis is upset not just about how Lavery copied her life story, in other words, but about how Lavery changed her life story. She’s not merely upset about plagiarism. She’s upset about art—about the use of old words in the service of a new idea—and her feelings are perfectly understandable, because the alterations of art can be every bit as unsettling and hurtful as the thievery of plagiarism. It’s just that art is not a breach of ethics. I guess this is why you only write about real people who are dead. But then again, who can stop to count the novels where the whole point is to speculate on whom the author is really talking about? Primary Colors, Valley of the Dolls… these kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge inspired by pieces have long been a staple of creative types everywhere. To divorce a writer completely from inspiration is to force them to create pieces that have absolutely no resonance with the audience! As long as the names are changed to protect the innocent… (wait, do I have to quote Dragnet to use that line?) This is, naturally, a subject of great interest to me, as I have written a book with an obvious real life counterpart: Yale University and its system of secret societies. The book is not a roman a clef, not a fictionalized memoir. It’s a novel. I made it all up. Naturally, I researched heavily to make sure I was making up all the right stuff. And parts of the people in the book remind me of parts of people I knew at school. But then again, shouldn’t they? If all my characters bore no resemblance to Yale students, then how could I claim to be writing about Ivy league kids? The whole point of fiction seems to me to be to make it as true-sounding as possible. As Mark Twain said, “the difference between fact and fiction is that fiction has to be believable.” I hear a lot about industry trends on loops and such. As I posted in my last post, folks on the PAN loop started a great discussion about trends in the historical romance marketplace based on what one editor said at a conference about “sex in chapter one” and also “a man in a chain mail is tougher than a man in lace cuffs” (and boy, did the Georgian writers have a hissy over that one!). And I’m on another loop, run by the tireless and amazing Dorothy Thompson (really can’t say enough about what a great gal this chick is, and how many wonderful resources she’s been providing for her fellow writers), where she actually has agents come in to comment on writer questions about market trends and review pitches and such… I digress. Anyway, the point is, I see a lot of people who want to freak out as soon as an editor or agent in one of these venues says such-and-such is dead, or you need to have this in your so-and-so genre book. And I want to remind everyone that sometimes, it’s just one person’s opinion. To that end, let me present today’s quote of the day, regarding taking agent proclamations with a grain of salt (emphasis mine): From Jeff Kleinman of Folio Lit: Use whatever information you find useful from these editors and agents, and throw out the rest. Whatever you do, don’t panic, hearing the kind of stuff we talk about. Sometimes people get all upset, going to a talk about, say, “Trends in Nonfiction” – someone on the panel will say that memoirs are dead, and all the memoirists in the audience will gasp and turn blue; and the reality is that no trend is dead – it just hasn’t had the next breakout book to hit yet. Let’s face it, Marley & Me is just a memoir about a guy and a dog, and there are millions of those stories out there – so who will want to buy another book like that? Millions of people, apparently. So don’t take what we have too say too seriously. Cool, huh? I just want to say, pursuant to my PAN-list complaints of last week, that there’s been an amazing conversation going on on the PAN craft list in the past few days about the historical market and the sex-earlier-in-book (yea, even unto the first chapter) issue and also resurging historical time periods. I don’t write historicals, but then again, neither do several of the folks taking part in the convo, including Allison Brennan and Angela Knight. So, here I am ducking my head and admitting I was wrong. Keep up the good work, ladies, and let’s pray that we’re not told, as the discussion moves more into market issues, to move it to PAN-industry. Question: Have you been reading Julie Leto’s Marisela Blog? She posts Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and her posts are always a whole heap of industry savviness, craft goodness, and just plain old common sense. there have been several doozies in the past few weeks. Seriously. Go read now. I’ll wait. I might be a bad blogger in the next few weeks as I try to write write write on SSG2, which is due at the end of August. The foot is hurting again. Cortisone didn’t do it. This is clearly going to be a long process. OMG, why have I not been watching Veronica Mars? I’m just about to finish the first season on DVD. Amazing. And, this is really embarrassing, but am I the last person on earth to realize that Keira Knightley was the stand-in body double security person for Queen Padme what’s-her-face-Amidala Natalie Portman in Star Wars: Episode One? How humiliating. Sadly, realizing this yesterday as I read an issue of Spin featuring Miss Knightley while I waited at the Mazda service station sent me off on a whole little mind-tangent of thoughts about Eps 1-3, which, you know, makes me very sad. Very. Sad. As if waiting at the car dealership isn’t bad enough, waiting at the car dealership while being reminded of those abominations (well, parts of 3 were cool, but none featuring Padme) practically sent me into a black spiral of depression. Sailor Boy and I have decided that, should we have kids, we are raising them in a household that only recognizes three Star Wars films, all starring Harrison Ford. I’m sure that by the time our progeny is ready for school, there will be a whole subculture, and perhaps even charter schools devoted to raising children in a Jar-Jar free environment. So that’s the plan. May the force be with us. So, some of you may remember a few weeks ago, when your polite host got a little passionate about the topic of an author’s appearance. The comments trail stirred up quite the controversy apparently not lacking in heat, and just the other day, I exchanged emails with one of the participants, where the issue came up again (re: Ann Coulter, who I totally agree with the point about her being hot helping a lot with her career, but that’s non-fiction, and a whole different ballgame). So what I managed to miss during all of this, what with me being out of town and all, was that Jami had actually blogged about it on her blog, Red Hot Romance. Oops, sorry, Jami. Her point seemed to be, since I said one of the reasons I don’t want to think about looks mattering is because, well, it’s something I can’t control whereas I can keep writing better etc., that maybe writing is not the best career for a control freak, since there are SO MANY aspects of the business that we don’t control. (However, I think I retract the comment about it being a matter of control, because despite the insistence of the commenters that looks do matter, they failed to explain how all of the not exactly camera-friendly bestsellers — and you know who I’m talking about here — have been so hindered by their looks. Sorry folks; you can argue until you’re blue in the face on this point, and even bring up some anecdote about an erotica author not being highlighted on the Geraldo show because her publisher thought she wasn’t pretty enough, but I’ve met a hell of a lot of bestselling authors, and most of them aren’t about to win a beauty contest, and their readers couldn’t care less. COULD NOT CARE LESS. And I saw the Geraldo piece and could only remember one specific author on it, and that’s because I’ve had dinner with her. I thin kthe point of the story was that erotica was back, baby. and not about a particular author, so I don’t know if that girl’s sales were hurt at all by not appearing. her books will still get bought. And I’ve spoken in recent weeks to a whole bunch of editors and agents and publicists on this topic, and the prevailing opinion is that most successful writers are socially awkward, overweight shut ins with facial tics and the personality of a paper bag, but their stuff still won’t stay on shelves. So… there’s that. It’s just a matter of being inaccurate, wildly inaccurate, and some little fairy tale that authors like to tell themselves in order to, as Miss Snark says, not concentrate on the REAL issue — the writing.) Now Jami herself did not actually use the phrase “control freak,” but some of the people commenting on the post, occasionally anonymously (which is always fun), did. (BTW: this blog should not be construed in any way, shape, or form as an attack against Jami. Nothing but love for the James-ster, who is, if not a control freak, an a capella freak. So there. So, allow me to make clear once and for all: My name is Diana, and I’m a control freak. Oh, completely. And, quite frankly, despite the sticky industry wickets I may get stuck on due to the characteristic, I think it’s actually the perfect personality type for a person whose job it is to create their own world, all it’s rules and places and people and be lord and mistress of every single word on several hundred pages of text. How can you be a writer if you aren’t interested making things bend to your will? We’re creators, dammit. But that doesn’t mean that I’m unaware of the fact that I have absolutely no control over what is happening to my book right now. Buy-in, distribution, orders, print run, any kind of large scale publicity, what other books are out my month, what else is happening in the world that affects book-buying budgets, what reviewers say, blah blah blah — nope, I’ve got no control over that whatsoever. Wish I did, but I don’t. And I know that, and I’ve always known that because, as regular readers of the blog know (despite anonymous claims about my alleged naivete), I’m the kind of person who actually gathers up information about her chosen profession before leaping into it. You know why? Because knowledge is power. Knowing how the business works means I know what I can control and what I can’t. And in my research, I learned that I could control the following things: 1. The book I write. That’s it, but that’s enough, and you’d be surprised how many of people haven’t even bothered to look into it that much. And yeah, it’s super hard to look an offer in the face and say, “this isn’t what I want,” but that’s your control switch, right there. That’s the part of the publishing business that you control. Everything else is pretty much you saying how high when they say jump. Hopefully, if you made the best choices during the you-in-charge part (i.e., picking agent, picking marketing strategy, picking publisher — or NOT) then you can roll with all of the stuff you have no control over. Is it easy for me? Hell to the no. But despite how I might grit my teeth and clench my fists and fantasize about getting in there up to my elbows and mixing it up a little bit — you know, because I’m a control freak — I think I’ve got the better end of the deal. I know what it is that I can’t do anything about, and it’s irritating, but I signed up for it, I knew it was going to happen when I signed up, so I’m going to deal with it. Much worse off than me is the opposite — the person who not only has no desire to control what’s happening to them, but doesn’t even know what it is they aren’t controlling because oh, you know, it’s beyond them. They’re not a control freak! Heavens! That passive person is the one who lets themselves be taken in by scam agents and bad legitimate agents because, gee, they don’t know any better and shouldn’t they just let the agent handle it and not tell the writer where they are sending their stuff and who has rejected it and why? That passive person is the one who signs some horrific author-unfriendly deal, either with a vainity press or a big publisher who intends to screw them over, doesn’t read the contracts, doesn’t ask for clarification about certain terms, figures she has no control over it anyway and maybe she shouldn’t want to know what it all means, or, certainly, her agent caught it all, right? That person is so accepting of the fact that she has no control over how hard a publisher pushes her book that she does nothing to generate pre-pub buzz herself, or she has her head in the sand so much about how these things work that they get the most bizarre expectations of their book’s trajectory adn start, I don’t know, getting tummy tucks in preparation for a television appearance that’s never ever ever going to happen. If these are my options, I’ll pick control freak. I’ll pick the person who knows exactly what she can and cannot affect about her career and studies how to handle those things. At this point, I’m reminded of a sketch I have framed on my wall. It’s of a woman sitting in an umbrella and flying through the air, and the caption reads: “If you hold on, you have the illusion of control, but it’s easier to let the wind carry you.” Maybe all of this is just the illusion of control. After all, if I was actually controlling any of those three things listed above, I’d be able to write Dan Brown meets JK Rowling meets Stephen King meets Nora Roberts, get an agent who would find me a publisher that would send liveried slave hunks to my house to feed me peeled grapes and Dom in order to induce me to sell the rights to them, and then buy my own continent, right? Ah, but here, we are confusing control with perfection. What I don’t have any illusions about is the fact that my desire to control what I can and understand what I can’t is not attached to an expectation of perfection — from the stuff that is out of my hands, at least. (My control freak tendencies, sadly, go hand in hand with my perfectionism.) Of course it’s not going to be perfect. Some parts are going to be a walking dream. Others, a walking nightmare. It’s good to know that, going in so you can mentally, and often physically, prepare yourself — by having a back up plan, an escape clause, a way to work around the manner in which you may or may not being screwed. Control freaks have the upper hand in this. Because of their desire for control, they are constantly analyzing the situation. They can see when the writing on the wall begins to take on that particularly funereal pallor that says, “change your name, dump your agent and write in a whole new genre, honey, because this baby’s a dud.” The control freak is the one who says, “Hmmm, my publisher’s publicist seem unaware that I exist. Perhaps it’s time to invest in some indie promo.” The control freak is the one that plans her own six-city tour, then asks the publisher if they’ll consider springing for a big sign for her to take with her on her travels. The control freak is the one that, realizing her cover sucks, decides to do some viral marketing to imprint the cadence of her rocking title on the reading public instead. They may not be able to control the covers or the marketing or the promotional push, but they are able to prepare for and control their own reactions to it. And that the most important part. Is it the illusion of control to realize how much is beyond your control, and to take steps to work within those constrictions? I don’t think so.
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