Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

An agent I queried asked for the first five pages of the Nethereal manuscript last week. The pages were rejected in a frank and highly professional manner. The gesture is highly appreciated.

I went into Heinlein phase five bracing myself to face criticism. I conditioned myself as best I could to take negative comments with an open mind, revise the book if they made sense and ignore them if they didn't. Funny thing: There really hasn't been any criticism to speak of. The most common replies I've gotten have been: A) nothing and B) form letters. The two or three personalized responses all amount to, "Your premise and execution are fine, but it's not what we're looking for."

The dearth of feedback is something I didn't anticipate. I have plans in place to deal with, "Your work is bad, and here's why." Instead I'm left grappling with, "Your project is OK. For someone else. But I don't know who it is."

On further reflection, I believe I'm facing the following difficulties:

It's impossible to sell a manuscript unless the buyer reads the whole thing. Not only can't you judge a book by its cover; you really can't judge it till you've read the last paragraph. Readers may have that luxury, but not people whose jobs depend on acquiring new titles. And yet...

Agents and editors don't have enough time to read every manuscript submitted to them. It's a fact of the busy world we live in: more so for literary agents and acquisitions editors, who receive thousands of submissions a year. These conditions force them into the paradox of judging something piecemeal that can only be fairly evaluated within the context of the whole.

Faced with this Joseph Heller reference, most professional writers advise researching agents and editors' tastes before querying them. A common strategy is to look up agents' recent deals to find out what kind of books they represent. Mining the acknowledgements pages of novels in the same style and genre as yours is often recommended as a good way to find like-minded agents and editors.

I've been following that advice for years, but...

I haven't found anything close enough to my work to identify an agent/editor with similar sensibilities. From one perspective, the fact that I can't find other books like mine is good. Agents and editors often say that they're looking for fresh material. On the other hand, it's bad because people usually stick to what's worked before and don't go too far beyond their established tastes. I know I do that. There are sound logical reasons for playing to one's strengths.

Frankly, I don't want to work with an agent, editor, or publisher who isn't excited about my book. Agents are salespeople (so are writers), and the best salesmen are genuinely passionate about the product. A project has no better friend than an editor who's willing to champion it to the publisher, and a lukewarm publisher is apt to bury a book at the end of the list (or drop it altogether).

The way I see it, I have two options:

1. the Jim Butcher method: which ain't gonna happen, if only because I have too little charm and too great a fear of jail to crash invitation only industry lunches.

2. the black hole: wherein I keep throwing message-laden bottles into the ocean hoping that just the right alignment of circumstances prompts an agent to request a sample based on my query letter, that the partial reading elicits a request for the full manuscript, that the MS convinces the agent to approach an acquisitions editor on my behalf, and that the editor agrees to take on the project.

I might be a timid eccentric, but I'm a very patient timid eccentric.