Fifteen Seconds to Query

I don’t write very much whiny stuff, so cut me some slack here, okay?

In the literary world, when you as an author want to sell your novel to a publisher, the accepted procedure is to write what's known as a query letter. In a page or so, you write out what amounts of a business description of your book and you request that a literary agent or a publishers reads it.

It's a weird system. It throws me into an unnatural state of mind quite foreign from anything I ever learned in a team player environment where the process of producing publications is organized and logical.

As authors already know, there are magazine articles and books and workshops galore on how to sell yourself to literary agents and editors and publishers. These venues contain a plethora of strategies on how to be oh, so seductive in your literary wiles to hook the interest of the biggest and best movers and shakers in the shark tank.

I think what annoys me most about the whole querying process is that we strip the humanity away—which is to say we strip my strength away—when we pitch projects by query letter.

In one four-hour workshop I took, writing guru Elizabeth Lyon, author of A Writer’s Guide to Fiction and four other books for writers, said that you’re lucky to get fifteen seconds of an agent’s attention. That’s why everything has to be as perfectly thought out as a NASA flight to the moon, and you’ll notice we aren’t doing much of that lately.

Fifteen seconds?

I certainly appreciate hard work, lots of writing and rewriting, learning my craft, attention to detail, saying something important, and not being the proverbial wannabe from hell. And I have devoted a lifetime (well, since I was 16) to that quest.

It has been a stunningly isolated quest. As I grew up and pursued a writing career, I did it without having any influential relatives. If I ever decide to reincarnate with this crazy compulsion to keep on writing, I will be much more attentive to pre-planning in the family department. I’ll set up those connections ahead of time to make sure I have a famous aunt or uncle working as a high-end author or a powerful literary agent or a major publishing executive.

Another benefit I have never had this lifetime is a writing mentor. I am still waiting for my cosmic connection, my matchmaker angel, to apply his or her magic and hook me up with someone mentor-worthy. I wonder how different my life would be now had I shot the breeze (and had my manuscripts dissected) by someone whose work I would list in the competition section of my fiction book proposal—Richard Bach, James Redfield, the woo-wooey side of Richard Matheson (What Dreams May Come, Mitch Albom. They all made a big dent in the bestseller lists, and yet I have found (and a few other aspiring woo-woo authors I have met on PM have found) that publishers often shun woo-woo fiction.

Richard Bach had a fabulous, life-changing mentor, but Richard Bach doesn’t mentor or read manuscripts from woo-woo wannabes.

Last month when I joined Willamette Valley Writers in Oregon I asked the prez Bill Johnson how to find a mentor. His distilled response was fat chance. He told me abruptly as if defending himself against any request I might make that he wouldn’t mentor anybody. I don’t know if he was taking evasive action from my puppylike enthusiasm for knowledge or if he was just grumpy, sort of like how a jaded prostitute views another horny client who just paid the money. Love the cash flow; hate the job.

He did go on to advise me that publishing is all about relationships. That, of course, fits in with my thinking. If I could sit around discussing future publishing projects as it’s done in the computer peripherals industry, maybe I’d get somewhere. But all I get is fifteen seconds.

I’d love to take more classes, attend a bunch of writer’s conferences (schmoozing in Maui would be especially nice), and get that great presentation portfolio including professional portraits and glitzy coordinated promo paraphernalia—anything to make that fifteen seconds work better for me.

Unfortunately, survival is one small step for Joshua more important than attending a writer’s conference where I can buy time with an agent to pitch and schmooze. I have been thinking of giving up my health insurance to afford to do that, but I would hate to be critically injured on my drive to the conference. Then where would I be?

Apparently there are very few agents who do woo-woo. I contacted Mitch Albom’s agent because my novel has a lot in common with The Five People You Meet in Heaven and even Tuesdays with Morrie. Said agent told me he wasn’t interested in reading it and advised me to find an agent who represented books like mine. His email also looked as if a five-year-old had typed it, but I digress…

As I said, next life I will pre-ordain my connections. I just hope my acquired skill comes back to me—the child prodigy writes his first novel at age three, and where did he acquire so much information about enlightened sex practices?

You’ve got to read some of my personality tests sometime. It’s very important for me to believe that what I do for work (and when writing is my work, I’m talking about that) is helpful to society. My joy and my motivation come from feeling that I make a positive contribution. Much of the angst of not having my novel published is the overall feeling that I failed to make a contribution—that maybe I should have used those thousands of hours of self-absorbed writing time to pick up roadside trash along our nation’s highways.

It’s not that my book is unworthy of being published. The aforementioned writing guru who wrote a great book on writing fiction said this: About every ten years, I get some novel that excites me with the author's talent and the story. Joshua's did that for me. He's got that ineffable quality everyone is looking for--original voice. The closest comparison I was able to think of was in the league of a Tom Robbins or Kurt Vonnegut.

Kinda has me scratching my head…