Want to know what an editor thinks? Ask an editor.

Some authors spend a lot of energy trying to guess what editors want. They think about it, read books about it, ask their mentors, and ask one another. The people they tend not to ask, however, are the editors themselves, often out of a misplaced sense of propriety.

Here are some typical misconceptions:

* That you only get one chance to query an editor about your book. Not true! You asked a simple question, you didn't key someone's car or threaten their families. You can certainly ask again in the future, especially if you have significantly re-thought your project.

* That you are "out" at a press for future books if they turn down one of your pitches now. Again, nonsense! Most editors won't even remember who you are if it never got past the inquiry stage.

* That it is easier to publish at a lower-tier house than at a higher one. Actually, the opposite is sometimes true. There are exceptions, and prestige is a relative thing depending on your field and the standards for promotion at your institution, but many editors at higher-tier houses report frustration that they sometimes never even see certain projects because of erroneous author assumptions about how unapproachable those editors must be.

* That you have to hold your mouth exactly just so and submit one particular way versus another or they'll never look at it. In reality, any good editor is happy to consider a good pitch, however it arrives. Some of them don't even know what's on the publishing house website about the "rules" of submission. Most are fine with an e-mailed inquiry, and 85% of the editors I speak to want to use e-mail for everything... most don't want paper at all, although a minority still do. The ones who do will tell you after you inquire.

The bottom line is to let editors decide what editors want, and the only way to do that is to ask them. Learn to write amazingly effective, to-the-point inquiry letters that say succinctly what you're working on, how you think it fits with their stated list/press/vision, and why you're the perfect person to write this now. Then get those letters out there, to editors you admire and would like to work with. The less you second-guess editors and the more you give them the opportunity to think for themselves about your research and whether it will work for them, the better.

Oh-so-true illustration from that old internet classic, i can has cheezburger.

More on pre-conference planning

One of Booklab's faculty authors returned from a recent conference with feedback on how his pre-conference preparation went. He viewed the university press booths completely differently based on discussions we had about publisher lists. One of the presses had been courting him, and he was able to see what else they published in his field, look at the actual books, and speak to an editor.

One of the advantages to going to the booth at your professional association's big annual meeting rather than just looking at catalogues is specialization. The press will go out of its way to identify itself to you and your colleagues in terms of your specialty. Also, book are expensive and time-consuming to gather (most libraries won't have all of them), so you'll be able to go through many of them all at once and make more informed decisions about the suitability of a particular publisher for your work. Imagine how much easier it will be to create a targeted prospectus with this kind of understanding.

Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press

This is so useful for academic authors, and I hope to find more of these soon. Don't forget to check out Ken Wissoker of Duke University Press in an earlier post here. Booklab believes (okay, I believe, but I like speaking as Booklab -- so authoritative) that there is no substitute for knowing actual editors at actual presses. More about Lindsay Waters here.

Booklab Loves Sage Publishing Ltd.

Two titles that faculty have found useful in Booklab come from Sage Publishing, Ltd. Both Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks and Designing Research for Publication have been of enormous benefit to authors. Have a look at some of these exciting titles (exciting if you love research, writing and publishing, that is).

Just one note to the publisher if they happen to read this. Spend some moola to sexy up the book covers a bit! For example, we had no idea until we got deeply into Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks that Wendy Belcher is a faculty member at Princeton, or that she was a journal editor for eleven years. This important information should be on the book cover, along with blurbs from opinion makers among faculty, and more specific cover art. This is no slam to your artists (designing books is challenging, and I applaud the professionals who do it well, especially given time constraints and tight budgets), but such strong information can really sell a book title. Credentials count in this business, so let us see them!

Pre-Conference Planning

Why is Booklab getting involved in pre-conference planning? Simple -- our authors make deals there. University presses are well-represented at most major academic conferences, and it can be a great place to make contact with an editor at a top-tier press who might be interested in publishing your field-specific book.

But don't just show up at the conference and expect to get a meeting. Although that can happen, the odds are against you given how busy most publishers are at their booths, how challenging it can be for you to present your concept quickly and effectively, and also what a brief time many university press editors actually spend at the conference; some just fly in and out -- you'll often find other staff actually working the booths for the full days, depending on the press and the importance of the conference.

The best way to approach a conference with a book is to come to one of Booklab's faculty author groups and ask about pre-conference planning. This is always done in a group setting rather than one-on-one, so that your colleagues can benefit from the discussion. You'll learn how to think about university press editors and their lists, how to craft a conference package that will get an editor's attention, and what to say to the editor long before the conference (as much as several months ahead) that will get you the meeting you want.

The image above comes from Yale University Press's web site, and it shows some of the staff at the Ecological Society of America meeting in San Jose, 2007.

Journal Experiments: Starting Again, and Again

I'm still energized by the Journal Experiments, and every time I return it is with wonder and amazement at just how useful/fruitful they are. For those of you unfamiliar with them, the original post is here, from a year ago. We examined some cool journals between then and now, but with the new faculty fiction-writing group starting last week, it's time to get into them again even more seriously.

This week's journal is The Missouri Review, a 30-year-old literary magazine based at the University of Missouri. It is extremely high on my list of must-subscribes, and I encourage anyone who is thinking about submitting to it to read back issues from the library to get a feel for it, and then subscribe as a way of supporting this amazing world.

The editor, Speer Morgan, is also a literary practitioner, with several novels, plus award-winning fiction in The Atlantic Monthly. I was struck by the fact that although -- as is customary -- his essay about this edition precedes the entries, he chose to list that essay at the end of the Contents. Hard to say if that was a deliberate nod to his authors to put them first, but it sure seemed that way and I liked it. Poetry editor for the summer '09 issue Katy Didden has a number of publication credits as well, and she is a doctoral student. The poetry editor listed on the website, Marc McKee, has a similar background.

Why do I pay attention to editors? Because I have a personal bias toward knowing who editors are and thinking about them as people with tastes and preferences before submitting to a journal. Usually the individual editors do not make all decisions (it tends to be more collaborative), but they are often the first readers of submissions. I admire editors, and I consider myself as an author an applicant for a position on their lists, not just someone saying "Hey you! Publish me!"

Journals are such little worlds. The Missouri Review is a spectacular one. I will soon add it and other much-loved literary magazines to the recommended list at the upper right of this blog. As I read this issue, I'll post more about contents.

Brilliant series from Duke University Press!

This series is a genius idea, and I'll post all of the installments if the press makes more. This is Duke University Press's Editorial Director, Ken Wissoker, explaining how it works at Duke:

Publishing cliché series -- is it true that "Editors don't edit anymore"?

I've decided to start a little series dedicated to the shopworn publishing clichés I hear in this goofy, amazing profession. The first is something I hear from unpublished authors mostly, that "Editors don't edit anymore." Then Ecco editor Lee Boudreaux brought it up again as a sore point in the March/April Poets & Writers. Boudreaux points out "Having worked at two different houses, I literally do not know who they're talking about. Who just acquires and doesn't edit? I feel like everybody I've ever worked with sweats blood over manuscripts. And you reap the rewards of doing that."

Agreed. My editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard, worked so hard. I was amazed at the dedication, the time invested in back-and-forth work over drafts, and the general sense of care and craft that went into Elisabeth's work.

When some people hoist this particular canard (and yes, I know that I'm combining clichés here), they also like to cite Maxwell Perkins -- the longsuffering editor of Thomas Wolfe's Southern Gothic doorstop Look Homeward, Angel -- as a real editor. Oh please. Even Wolfe finally decided that the interdependence had to end, and he left Perkins's publishing house, Scribners, to sign with Knopf. If you're going to cite Perkins as a real editor and the rest as pikers, then I'll consign you to a corner of literary hell where all you can read for eternity is The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises over and over and over and over again.

Since when are an author's lies the editor's fault?

I grow weary of armchair critics who blame editors and fact-checkers for bold, audacious falsehoods by authors. "What happened to editing?" these critics cry. "Where are the fact-checkers?"

They're right where they've always been, stupendously overworked and underpaid. Do these critics seriously believe that a busy editor with 50 nonfiction books on her list is also personally responsible for making sure that every one of them is absolutely true? Or that an underpaid fact-checker who works for an entire publishing house, not just one editor, can possibly think of and then catch everything in every manuscript?

I'm not talking about having a basic fact-checking procedure. Some of that is routine, and if my own experience at FSG is any indication, it does happen. Not only did I have to provide evidence of certain facts to the publisher, but I also had to spend a couple of hours on the phone with a lawyer going over the potentially actionable parts. All fine, all good, but (I would add), all my responsibility as an author. The fact-checkers and lawyers were there to advise and instruct, not to police. Even if they were there to be the truth cops, if an author has the deep-seated, pathological ability to fabricate things that happened years ago in a place that no longer exists, how would an editor or fact-checker ever know?

If you think you're so smart and no one would ever pull one over on you, take down any major nonfiction bestseller from your shelf and ask yourself how you would start proving that the important, big-picture aspects of the book are true. Where do you begin? Someone says, for example, that they should have checked to see if James Frey ever went to prison. Really? Okay, but if you don't know that's the suspect fact, where does it fall in a list of maybe 2,000 other facts that need to be checked? Now multiply the book in your hand by dozens of books, piled up all around you. They all need fact-checking. Where do you start? How long will it take? Whom do you hire, and what happens when most of the facts do check out? At what point do you stop and conclude the book is true?

Sure, it would have been nice if somebody knew that a young woman in starving Eastern Europe in wartime couldn't hide a stash of apples to toss over a fence to a boy in a concentration camp, and that her beau couldn't have made it to the fence in the first place. But that fact amid all the other checkable facts becomes a needle in an amazingly complex haystack. In retrospect we know a lot of things that are not at all evident in the moment.

I believe the critics should give editors and fact-checkers a break. The responsibility for telling the truth rests with authors.

Was your editor really angry in that e-mail?

Or were you being just a wee bit sensitive? I ask, because authors forward me correspondence from editors quite often, asking me to read between the lines and tell me what s/he was thinking at the moment they hit "send."

Almost always the e-mail is much tamer when I read it than it was in the mind of the nervous-nellie author who sent it to me. Sometimes the note is neutral, completely harmless. Other times it has a little bit of what I call "New York cheddar" to it, but nothing to worry about (New Yorkers can snap at each other when they're happy, let alone when they're not... it is getting better, but unnecessary snippiness is still their collective worst habit). Some of my authors have over-interpreted a simple "No," or "I don't think so," as "Go away and never come back, I'm canceling your contract you worthless excuse for an academic professional."

For the most part, everyone got up this morning thinking about themselves, not you or me. Most e-mails are just language, and the typical professional is careful not to put genuine anger in writing. Even if there was a major issue between you and your editor, you'd hear about it in a different way than casual e-mail.

Authors will continue to send me these e-mails, and I'm always happy to read them and try to help if I can. But your editor is probably not angry at you, and you won't lose your book deal just because you asked questions about it, even if you do get a sharp taste of New York cheddar in return.

Image swiped from Flickr.

Iowa Book Doctors and the Hippocratic Oath

I have no direct information about whether the Iowa Book Doctors (http://www.iowabookdoctors.com/) are good or not, but it seems like an interesting organization headed by Cheeni Rao, a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop who has a book coming out from HarperOne in April. I love the Hippocratic oath on the website:

We swear to fulfill, to the best of our ability and judgment, this covenant:

We will help those who ask for our assistance, gladly share our knowledge, and teach them how to reach their goals.

We will apply all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of over-treatment and therapeutic nihilism.

We will remember that warmth, sympathy, and understanding are as necessary as constructive criticism.

We will respect the privacy of our clients, for their problems are not disclosed to us that the world may know.

We will teach the craft of writing whenever we can, for teaching a writer how to write effectively is a far better course than leaving them alone to toil in confusion.

If we do not violate this oath, may we enjoy life and art, respected while we live and remembered with affection thereafter. May we always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of our calling and may we long experience the joy of helping those who seek us.

PS: Why am I highlighting a competitor? Because there is no such thing as competition. We all do different things for authors. I also like Where Books Begin, http://www.wherebooksbegin.com/.

Thoughts on submission for 2009

Now that I'm back at Booklab after some decidedly non-bookish time in the Florida sun, I've had a chance to think about some of the odder aspects of publishing. The oddest for me personally is the submission process, as I have blogged before. The word "submission" carries strange overtones, primarily one where the writer is the supplicant and the agents and editors -- who supposedly hold all the power in the submission process -- are the grantors. Over time, a sensible soul might logically step back from the gatekeeping process and ask if this is really the only way to the page. It isn't.

The sane writer (whether of books and essays, or a singer/songwriter, or a playwright, or a poet) learns to thrive on internal validation, and understands that creative output is a God-given gift and right, not a gatekeeper-dictated privilege. It is not dependent on age (in fact, most bestsellers come to authors over the age of 55), it does not favor youth and innocence, and it need not stop if one gets what some people love to sneeringly call a "real job." Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. Rita Mae Brown was once a bricklayer. (I've always found that really cool.)

If I could impart one useful phrase to everyone who visits Booklab discouraged over rejection, it would be this: "Who are these people?" Submission is often necessary, and I believe in heeding wise agent or editor counsel, but submission does not overturn the essential authority of you as an author. You're the one who chooses when you start, how you progress, when you stop, and -- even if it has been decades -- when you start again. No other person -- parents, teachers, mentors, employers, agents, editors -- controls a bit of it.

I guess this is the part of the post where I sum things up in a pithy way, and then add an image about perseverance. But I'm feeling too contrary for that. After all, some people really aren't good writers and never will be. Yet who am I to decide? I can think of five or six people on the bestseller lists right now who write books that I find problematic in the extreme, with issues ranging from poor writing to "ew" subject matter to aimless execution, and I can name a host of wildly talented people who aren't published and possibly never will be. Far be it from me to say your good work will prevail in the traditional submission process if you are diligent. Maybe it won't.

But you still get to decide. It's still your life and your ride. And if you silence yourself because you didn't get one over in an arbitrary, power-laden process called submission, you may deprive me and others of your breakthrough work.

Here's an interesting quote from Spike Lee when he learned that Barack and Michelle Obama went to one of his movies on their first date in Chicago: "Actually, Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, “Thank God I made it. Otherwise you would have taken her to Soul Man. Michelle would have been like, ‘What’s wrong with this brother?’ ”

Lee made that movie, and all the others, without asking anyone for permission. In fact, Lee never really participated in the submission process as it is traditionally defined. Read his bio here, and you won't see one word about how he offered his work to someone else and silently begged for validation.