Current stats on the querying process for Within the Box:

total queries to lit agencies: 498
rejections: 401
outstanding: 97

Until a couple days ago I was getting bogged down by the unrelenting turndowns, with nobody expressing any interest. The closest I had come to a positive response was an agent saying "This looks interesting but I don't handle this genre so I'm forwarding this to So-and-So my colleague". From whom I never heard a subsequent peep.

But over the weekend I opened a reply email that said "I really like your premise, but the writing didn't send me quite as much as I'd hoped. I can't offer you representation but please feel welcome to requery me if you revise it".

That may not seem like the kind of reply that would send me over the proverbial moon, but let me unpack it a little.

Lit agents might have been uniformly turning me down because they knew the market well enough to conclude that no publisher was going to go for a book about that stuff, at least not from someone who isn't already a market draw. Which would mean I couldn't fix the problem, nobody was going to agent this book. But she was saying she liked the premise.

Lit agents also might have been turning me down because of my lack of a Platform. It's something that they want from their nonfiction authors, that you already have a built-in audience, a following likely to buy your book. It's not something that they tend to look for from a fiction author (although they still care very much whether you've been previously published, and by whom, and how well it sold). I think it's stupid that they grade autobiographical memoirs by the same criteria that they evaluate a stock market portfolio management guide or a chronicle of the people who settled a Pacific island. Memoirs ought to be split into Famous Person Memoirs and Representative Memoirs and Expertise Memoirs and Memoirs That Entertain. If people have heard of the author, it's a Famous Person Memoir, and agents can sell those the easiest. Representative Memoirs are where you don't need to know the specific individual so much as you need to know about the Group, the collective cluster of people associated with some known social phenomenon — soldiers of the Vietnam war, the first women elected to American political office, the software developers of the first wave of widespread personal computer use, these are all identities where if you knew the book was about what that was like, you might want to read it. Expertise Memoirs come from really qualified experts in their field, publishing nonfiction for them is like gettting published in a relevant academic journal. You need to show the publisher that you are regarded as someone who really knows your topic. That leaves Memoirs That Entertain where it's a well-told story that just happens to be nonfiction, it's a person's actual experience, but it's entertaining whether despite or because it's true. I mean, that's how I'd divide Memoir up, but of course I'm not a lit agent.


My book falls into Representative Memoirs, using my system, because I write as a genderqueer sissy male coming out in the early 1980s. It's not about Allan Hunter, it's about the social experiences that eventually yielded words like "genderqueer". But it's also a Memoir That Entertains. It's a fun story, it's as good as a movie, it has drama and tension and characters and dialog and concepts and danger and escape and an unreliable narrator and a reason to question what is or is not actually happening here.




So...::coughs:: the query that elicited this reply was the FICTION version of my query letter, pitching it as a psychological suspense tale, to a lit agent who doesn't handle any nonfiction.

"I really like your premise, but the writing didn't send me quite as much as I'd hoped. I can't offer you representation but please feel welcome to requery me if you revise it". ——> as a work of fiction; she's saying that about it as if it were a work of fiction. The nonfiction agents have shown no interest. Oh, and I would guess that 90% of my queries describe the book as memoir, nonfiction.


The thing about positioning this book as a work of fiction is that it puts me up against fiction authors. They get to structure plot for the purpose of making a good story. I'm competing with them while trying to relay what actually happened when I was in the hospital that I alias as Elk Meadow in the book. I'm not going to say that I didn't take any liberties when writing Within the Box. I'm describing hour-to-hour events that actually took place in 1982. Of course I'm painting specific renderings of things I only remember in the general, same as when we're in conversation and I'm telling you what I said to someone yesterday in the drug store or the supermarket, we all know I'm not claiming to recall each literal word of each sentence, but I was like this, yeah? It's an honest memoir in that sense. I did move a couple of events because they helped paint people's character even if that's not when (or even to whom) they happened.

A lot of fiction authors are drawing from real-life events. "Write what you know", we're advised, and so of course fiction authors are people who draw inspiration from events and experiences they've been there for.

We could dive into a whole philosophical treatise about what is fiction and what is nonfiction, but that's actually not my focus — I'd be happy to market it either way. Rubyfruit Jungle didn't lose any impact because it was positioned as a work of fiction.

Third major observation: the lit agent's instructions for querying had said to upload a query letter, the first ten pages, your "about the author" self-summary, word count, ever been repped by an agent before, have you ever been published, synopsis, one sentence pitch, descrip of potential audience, and a short list of comparable books. Most of those I have a limited ability to modify, especially given that I'm not a great author of short little "bumper sticker" summaries. But it says that "the writing didn't send me quite as much as I'd hoped" is after reading ten pages.

I have reached out to three different significant contacts to ask for recommendations for an editor. I want to consult someone who can help me shape it as a work of fiction. Especially the first 50 pages (the max that they tend to request shorter than the whole manuscript), the first 30 within that, the first 20, first 15, first 10. First 5, god help me, and lately a tiny handful of them only want to see the first 3.

I'm nervous about going up against fiction authors. This is their craft, and I just picked it up the best I could because I think I have stuff to tell. I just have to hope that I've told my own story really well.

And I'm off to get some help with that.


Those of you who write: do you spend a lot of time wondering how to position what you've written? What to call it?

Do you like selling it, the experience of marketing what you've written, however you go about it? I'm thinking more in terms of "do you feel utterly inept at it and have no sense of how to go about doing it", rather than "do you feel like you've prostituted your skillset and you feel exploited" but really however your thinking is on it, the experience of getting the publication world to opt in?


—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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In last week's blog post, I noted that I need to rework portions of Within the Box to include more tension between me and the staff of Elk Meadow around being gender-atypical. As it stands, I've got Derek thinking a lot about gender inside his own head, but you really have to read between the lines a lot to get any sense of Elk Meadow as sexist or heterocentric or transphobic.

This kind of falls between the cracks between nonfiction and fiction. There's a lot that I recall from the actual events of 1982 without recalling the granular details, and mostly that hasn't mattered much, but in this case I remember the folks running the place being very sure of themselves in their conventional gendered attitudes, and I need to convey that better. So although this specific conversation didn't take place, I think it's not a dishonest insertion. Things sufficiently like this occurred.

This is the start of Day Seven, which is one of the shortest chapters in the book, so it's a good target for expansion. (As originaly written, this entire scene ends with "Well, it’s better than being sneered at in derision or being informed that I’m intellectualizing"; the rest is new.

(This isn't the only insert I'm planning. Just the limits of what I've actually done so far)

-----

Day Seven

A less apologetic Dr. Barnes shows up at our unit’s morning meeting. “Derek, it is good to see your face here among us this morning. Derek has come to some important conclusions about us here at Elk Meadow, has decided he’s in the right place after all. I think we’ve all seen how someone can come to recognize important truths that may not have been apparent to them when they first arrived. So let’s all go forward with a fresh start attitude.”

I guess that’s better than being sneered at in derision or being informed that I’m intellectualizing.

“Our Mark Raybourne tells me that you don’t care if other people don’t see you as a real man”, Barnes continues. “That’s actually a healthy attitude.” He glances around the room, gathering everyone’s focused attention. “For all of us, sooner or later we have to look into the mirror and deal with the person whose opinions matter: ourself! And I think Derek has been trying to tell us that, that it’s not your opinion of him that counts, and it’s not mine, or the opinion of any of the Elk Meadow staff that counts...”

Barnes crouches down slightly, resting his hands on his knees, narrowing the focus back to me. “A real man has to live up to his own standards. He has to put down the excuses and the avoidance strategies and face up to his mistakes and his errors of judgment, and examine any patterns of self-destruction he might be stuck in. A real man can’t be satisfied with being less than what he can be, what he was born to be, and you’re right, Derek, it’s his own opinion of himself that he has to live with.”

Barnes straightens up and opens his hands, palms upward. Benign kind fatherly face in place, waiting.

“I agree with you about being honest with yourself and living up to your own standards”, I say, “but what I was talking with Mark about the other day is that I’m not into all that ‘be a man’ stuff, the standards I have for myself aren’t centered around masculinity. I do have standards and sometimes I don’t meet them and have to work on myself or, you know, try to deal somehow with my faults, but I don’t aspire to a lot of the things that were pushed at me in the name of proving I’m a man”.

“Well now, one thing I think you should examine, since you’re being honest with yourself as much as possible, is whether you’re using that as an excuse...”

Barnes steps back slightly and holds up one open palm, a stop sign. I don’t think I was reacting visibly, but it’s possible that I did. Or maybe Barnes just finds it expedient to act as if I was about to argue. “I’m not saying you are”, he continues, “but what if you’re using that as a way to set your aspirations in a way that doesn’t leave you open to failure. Just consider that. I mean, anyone could redefine their failures and disappointments as their goals, hey look, everybody, I always wanted to be an unemployed homeless guy with a drug habit, I’m a rolling stone, I’m a tumbleweed and I’m free, never wanted to pay income tax and live behind a picket fence. See how that works?”

“Well, I don’t think I conjured this attitude up to excuse what some people regard as my failures. I was a university student a couple years ago and doing okay in my courses, but I was keeping a scrapbook in my dorm room, I wrote ‘Militant Heterosexual Sissy’ on the first page, and the more I took those ideas seriously, the happier I felt about myself. I was never like the other boys and I never wanted to be. It’s not that I didn’t think I was as good as other boys. I used to think I was better than them. I don’t really think that way now, but I do think I’m different. And always have been. But to your other point, yes, I think I have things to work on, ways in which I don’t measure up to what I want of myself, and that’s why I’m here”.

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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

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Index of all Blog Posts

There is definitely a personal emotional stake when you write about yourself, about what happened to you, and then make it available to others. It's different from writing fiction. I mean, you can have a significant ego investment in being the author of a work of fiction, and it can leave you vulnerable to dismissive or hostile opinions of readers and potential publishers and whatnot, but at least what's being rejected is your creation, your art. When it's autobiographical, it can also come across as a rejection of you personally: that what happened to you, what you went through, isn't interesting or important. Or that you, as the main character, are not interesting to read about.

That vulnerability is heightened when the specific portion of your own story that you're trying to share is a segment involving psychiatric hospitalization and diagnosis. There's the general shadow of being examined and found to be mentally out of order, to be not processing things as a healthy stable person should. That sort of raises the stakes -- or at least it can, depending on whether you agree that you were indeed in a deteriorated state of mind during that segment. I don't. So in Book #3, Within the Box, I'm inviting the reader to weigh the evidence and think about whether I was the person in the story whose mental processes were worrisome or if, instead, I'm the person in the tale who makes the most sense, whose reactions and behaviors were the healthy ones.

Querying a book -- trying to get a literary agent interested in it, so that it could perhaps get placed with a mainstream publisher and end up being read by a lot of people -- is by its very nature a vulnerability-making prospect. No matter what you've written, putting it out there in hopes of getting a rare thumbs-up isn't a particularly pleasant experience. It isn't a seller's market, at least not for unproven / unknown authors. Your query goes in a big pile and the people to whom you sent it will accept only the tiniest handful of prospects and reject the rest.


I am out at work. Both as a genderqueer person and as a person with a history of psychiatric diagnosis. I've nearly always been so, wherever I've worked, refusing to be silenced or shamed. Since I was out in my private life (which was as public as I could make it), there was always the risk that an employer or colleague or coworker would encounter that, so I preferred that they know in advance. It was my litmus test for whether the venue was a place I'd want to work: if you can't deal with it, hire someone else!

My current employer is the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which is actually involved in psychiatric intervention and treatment of people, which makes it a little trickier if someone were to develop the opinion that I'd been quite rightly diagnosed and perhaps have a brain that processes things in a less than ideal fashion.

I'm seeking early-reader opinions and feedback on the book, and among the other places I've sought them, I have made such an announcement at work. Three colleagues I know fairly well from ongoing interactions asked for a copy of Within the box. That was in December. Having not heard a peep, I sent a follow-through email to the three of them on July 6, "Checking in with folks who requested a copy of Within the Box...If any of you would like to discuss the book, shoot me an email!". No reply so far. It's a bit hard not to imagine them reading and going "holy shit" and developing a rather worrisome new view of their coworker Allan. I mean, I am kind of putting them in a position where they either need to set aside some conventional assumptions about institutional behaviors and professional behaviors or else reconsider whatever opinions they'd previously developed about me. What if that went the wrong way?


All of this vulnerability is quite predictable, very much "you opted for this situation going in" stuff. Including the likelihood that if I get upset about any of this, or depressed about any of this, or worried or angry about any of this, that my less-than-cheerfully-stable response to it could get interpreted in a light that other people's behavior generally doesn't. Yes, I did know all that going in. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe it needs doing, and I also wouldn't be doing it if I didn't have a lot of confidence in my ability to cope with it.

In fact, to be honest, I'm actually a bit too close to arrogant about it. Picture me staring at you sardonically and laughing and telling you, "After what I've been through in my life -- including the events from the tale I'm hawking in the form of this book -- there's not much that the world is likely to dish out to me that doesn't leave me saying 'I've survived worse', ya know?', so bring it on!"

Maybe that arrogance needs to get reined in now and then. I'll admit, it does occasionally get intense for me.



—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.

I have started querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.






Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. I was going to start echoing it on Substack as well but we're not off to a good start. Anyway, please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I made one major structural change in my WIP (book three, In the Box): I converted it all from first person past tense to first person present tense.

The precipitating reason was that the internal monologues, the main character Derek's stream-of-consciousness stuff, was awkward to write. Obviously Derek isn't thinking in the past tense. I had written some of it in this kind of format:

Derek thought to himself, "Seriously, do I need this? It's been a long day"

In other places, I used italics instead:

The administrative staffer handed me another stack of forms and said, "Fill this out".

Whoa. The name of every prescription drug and when it was prescribed, going back ten years?? I'm supposed to just rattle that shit off from the top of my head?

Then there was the author's voice, narrator's voice. The book is autobiographical (I am the "Derek" character from my books; I change all the names but it's nonfiction memoir through and through). That meant I was sometimes writing some thoughts about the events being described but doing so as Allan Hunter, author, and that was being rendered in past tense along with the rest of the narrative. But distinguishing between that voice and the internal monologue of character Derek, my 23-year-old self who was in the situation at the time, was often complicated and challenging. Or arbitrary and random.

I realized this would all be so much smoother and integrated if it were written in present tense. I experimented and quickly found that I liked not distinguishing between Allan-author's voice and Derek-character's internal thoughts. It felt more intimate, with a single unified me telling you this story about what happened to me.

The other thing it did was enhance the sense of immediacy.

The goal with this story from the start was to immerse the reader in a rather claustrophobic suspenseful environment and convey as visceral a sense as I can of what it was like.

Is like. Be here now with me, hop on board and fasten your seat belt. The sections I did the experimental rewrite on did feel more immersive.

So I plowed through rewriting it up to the point I'd gotten to, casting it all in present tense.

For the first three or four days after that, as I went on to write new sections, I kept accidentally reverting back to the more conventional past tense narrative. He said, she said, bell rang, I walked down the corridor.

But it's been happening less and less often.

It's not that I've never written present tense before, but I've mostly done so in short stories. I've done a lot of interesting things in short stories. I once wrote a science fiction short that was all in second person: You wake up in an almost featureless room. You rub your eyes...

Novel-sized endeavors, though, for me at least, involve a lot of contemplation of the next chunk I intend to write, jotting down notes for the next few sequences, imagining the dialog or the descriptive narrative in my head while walking or cooking or whatever, then sitting down to it and pouring it into the word processor screen. So that makes it different from a short story, where I would most typically sit down and write the whole thing all in one shot.

All those broken-up writing intervals, different sessions at the computer, mean my regular habits tend to reassert themselves and knock me out of any variant groove I'm attempting. (This has also been a challenge for me with regards to my attempt to write the entire day, each day, instead of hopping out of a scene after making a plot-propelling point and skipping ahead to the next example situation or meaningful event. Part of the desire for immediacy and claustrophobia, but so hard to stick to it. (No, wait, that last conversation would have ended around two. I need to fill the rest of the afternoon before ending up in the dining room).


Anyway, it all seems to be working. I'm spewing a respectable amount of text onto screen and it's adding up.

Please tell me I'm not going to decide to write my next one in second person plural future tense or something...


—————


My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.


My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.



Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both books.

———————

This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————


Index of all Blog Posts

I was going to send out some query letters but Optimum Online was having an outage, so I thought I'd compose a blog post about the querying process instead.

The core piece of the process is the pitch or query letter, which is going to be the leadoff part of nearly every query that gets sent out. Authors interested in getting their books published are encouraged to work long and hard on their query letters, honing them and perfecting them in order to hook the interest of the literary agents or publishers who will be reading them. They're supposed to be short, they need to grab the reader from the first sentence, they should make the reader want to hear more. On the more mechanical and utilitarian level, the query letter is supposed to provide the title of the book, the genre it fits into, its length in words, and a sense of what the core conflicts or plot trajectory or story line is about.

Obviously, given those requirements, the crafting of a query letter requires a skill, it's an art. I often wonder why having the ability to write what amounts to effective ad copy should be used as a measure of one's ability to write good-quality novel-length tomes. I mean, it's not the same process and doesn't necessarily involve the same skills, although it's reasonable to suppose there'd be some overlap. It's a bit like requiring that composers of symphonies submit a 90 second commercial jingle if they want to have the orchestra consider performing their work, and deciding on the basis of the jingle whether to look at the symphony itself. But that's how the game is played.

Some lit agents don't want anything except the query letter--just send that and if we're interested in seeing more, we'll ask. But more often, they want auxiliary accompanying documents.

The writing sample, an excerpt from the book that's being pitched, is commonly requested. The length of the excerpt varies all over the map, with some people wanting to see your first three pages and others asking you to provide your first four chapters. The most common specific requests that I've encountered are the first three pages, first five pages, first ten pages, first fifteen pages, first twenty pages, first twenty five, and first fifty; first chapter, first two chapters, first three, and first four. Given the possible variations of what constitutes chapter length, these requests are often expressed in hybrid form: "Paste the first three chapters or fifty pages", or "Send me 25 pages or first two chapters", or "Please provide your first three chapters (not to exceed 35 pages)".

You'll notice a word recurrently repeated in all of those variations. However much of it they wish to see, they nearly always want that much of the start of your book. That puts a pressure on authors to frontload their book so that things are happening rapidly on the first pages. It works against an author who prefers to set the stage and develop the characters before springing the book's primary situation on the reader, and perhaps explains Dan Brown. I suppose I do see the point to this: if a person picks up a book and it doesn't hold their attention in the early portions, they won't keep reading long enough to get to whatever may be in the book farther in. I do have my doubts about what anyone can tell about a book from reading the first five pages though, aside from "yes this writer can string sentences together in a tolerably pleasant style".

The synopsis is another thing that people often ask for. A synopsis is more or less what we used to think of as a "book report" back when we were in fourth grade. It's a summary of what happens in the book, in the order that it occurs in the book, often chapter by chapter. For fiction and memoirs and other narrative forms that have storylines, the synopsis is a description of the plot. A synopsis is usually a single page's worth, and unlike the query letter is not supposed to be a teaser but instead should reveal what's in the story, to the extent that that can be summarized in a page's worth of description.

It is also common for the description for how to submit to include a blurb about the author, providing a list of any prior books or other publications that the author has to their name, giving the author's credentials or otherwise explaining why this author is a good person to have written this tale, and giving any additional background. A request for some information about the author is particular prevalent for nonfiction titles, and often specifically includes questions about the authors platform, the existing audience of people who are already paying attention to what this authors says and writes, the folks who already follow this author on Twitter or subscribe to the author's YouTube channel and so forth.

A memoir is nonfiction and unfortunately that means authors of memoirs are expected to have a platform in a way that authors of novels are not. I wish more lit agents and publishers were inclined to recognize that memoirs have more in common with fiction than they do with How To Make Your Fortune By Investing Shrewdly in the Stock Market or The Making of the Governor: Gubernatorial Politics in the Instagram Era or Authentic Spectacular Creole Recipes For a Limited Budget.

Speaking of nonfiction, a lot of times the instructions on "how to submit" specify that people who are pitching nonfiction manuscripts should include a proposal. A proposal is a complex multi-part document designed to make the case for why this nonfiction book should be published; it typically kicks off with an extended argument for the need for such a book, then delves into the qualifications of the author to write it (this part being more or less interchangeable with the about the author piece described above), a description of the market for the book (who will be likely to consider reading it if they're made aware of it, and why), a list of comparable titles and how this book is different from what's already out there, a chapter by chapter breakdown of the material that the book will cover (this part, for a memoir, is loosely identical to a synopsis; for The Making of the Governor and other more conventional nonfiction books, it would be more like an outline of topics and subtopics that the book will address and how those topics are organized), and, finally, a marketing plan, a proposed course of action for publicizing the book and bringing it to the attention of people likely to purchase it.

Oh, and proposals will typically contain sample chapters. For once, though, the tendency is not to concentrate on the material most direct adjacent to the front cover. In a proposal, a sample chapter may be from any part of the book. Some proposals may contain two or three sample chapters, and in keeping with that, the instructions for submitting material may specify that one should send a proposal with a specified number of sample chapters.

Less commonly, lit agents and publishers may request a list and/or discussion of comparable titles as a standalone alternative to a formal proposal, or may request a discussion of the likely market for the book.



In the United States (although not so much in the UK), literary agents typically do not want to mess with file attachments, at least at the initial-query stage, and so all of the above components are to be pasted into the body of the email. More often than not, submission procedures will specifically say that no file attachments will be opened or even that no emails containing file attachments will be read.

Email has limited capacities for text formatting; despite the occasional instruction from a literary agent to include everything in the body of the email and yet to "be sure to indent every paragraph, use one inch margins on all sides, and set the text to double spaced throughout", email doesn't handle indentation of a paragraph's first lines, doesn't do double spacing, and can't be relied upon to format the text in a specific font or point size. Even italics and boldface are pretty iffy. I've found it useful to maintain separate text copies of all of these query components, one with an extra line of white space to offset divisions between paragraphs so that it works reliably as part of an email body.


I have a querying engine that lets me quickly assemble an outbound email:



As you can see from the dropdown menu, I can append a synopsis, a full fledged proposal, writing samples of various sizes, an about-the-author blurb, and other components of a query to the current email body and then send it in that format. (I can also send any one of those pieces as a file attachment for the occasional agent or publisher who wants to receive the proposal or sample chapters as a Word or PDF document instead).


You may be thinking that this doesn't seem very personalized, and indeed some lit agents' instructions say we should "please tell me why you selected me as the agent that you want on this project" and indicate that they prefer to receive letters that don't make them feel like they're receiving spam that has gone out to all the other lit agents out there. I do sometimes customize my query letters, editing them with an additional note to say "I thought this would be of particular appeal to you because of what you said in your 2017 interview with Writer's World about wanting more LGBTQ material written in our own voices" or whatever. But writers' workshops on crafting and perfecting the ideal query letter abound, as do online forums such as "Query Letter Hell" on Absolute Write, all of which are oriented around the notion that one hones and polishes a query letter and then sends it out to the various people that one wishes to query, not that one starts from scratch writing a query letter with one individual recipient in mind. And in my situation in particular, there are seldom a lot of legitimately good reasons to query this lit agent instead of that lit agent. It's not like any of them have a track record of representing genderqueer coming-out and coming-of-age stories and therefore would be a good choice for representing mine as well. There are those who have indicated an interest in handling "lesbian/gay" material and there are those who say that they represent memoirs or narrative nonfiction, but very few who have any kind of track record with coming-out stories or anything else that readily compares to what I wrote. So the honest answer in most cases to "why did you decide to query me on this project?" is along the lines of "you are in the business and open to queries and you are alive and breathe air".



As of today, I have sent 1,424 queries out to literary agents and an additional 64 to small publishers that allow authors to query them directly. From the lit agents I have received 1,292 rejections; 132 queries are currently outstanding. On five or six occasions, lit agents have requested more material before ultimately saying they were not interested in representing my book, but none have ever offered me a business arrangement. From the publishers, I twice had signed contracts to have my book published, once with a publisher that went bankrupt and once with a publisher who assigned an editor to me who wanted to discard the first 33% of the book, which I was unwilling to do; I've had 62 rejections and none are currently outstanding because I was complying with a publisher's policy of exclusivity, and only got the rejection letter the other day.


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Waldell, aka Pricess WaWa, is a bitter black gay femme, or so he would like to have us believe. Queen Called Bitch is his story.

It is a story told to us by a most erudite and expansively loquacious narrator, delivered in elegant but not particularly linear style. Waldell often begins in the middle with an excursion into his attitudes and feelings about a character before looping back to describe his history with that person. This is not a narrative of consecutive events arranged along a plot line, but more akin to what you might hear if you found Waldell at the bar and plied him with a couple shots (no more, please, he's a lightweight) and bribed the bartender to cue up Reba on the sound system for atmosphere and encouraged him to unload his tale.

An identity that includes being both gay and femme tends to be complicated: our society prefers to subsume them into each other, equivocating between gender factors and sexual orientation. Waldell doesn't specifically write as a feminine person without reference to being gay -- indeed, I'm not sure any gay male who is feminine can easily untangle that knot -- but he snarks a bit about meeting people on Grindr, "guys who think I'm a woman or beg me to be more masculine. Guys who are interested in a part time 'tranny' for play. I am neither of those things" -- writing from a feminine but not trans vantage point. "I pee standing up", he confirms.

He was a pariah in school, surviving the typical harassment doled out to sissy gay guys, but found some supportive teachers and eventually a road to connection and acceptance via the theatrical department at nearby Longwood University. He'd long since gotten in the habit of finding validation and voltage in music, television soap operas, dramatic movies, and God.

An easy and confident spirituality without shame was his to hold onto. As soon as he became old enough to notice church-based condemnation of gay people, he relegated that, along with its moldy misogynistic ideas about women, to the discard pile. The God stuff was about the inner feeling, and he had no significant doubts about that.

Queen Called Bitch is billed on the frontispiece of the manuscript as a work of fiction, complete with disclaimers about the coincidental nature of any resemblance to real people -- a time-honored confabulation used by many writers who choose to write about themselves and their own lives. But of course my own source of information about the author /character is this book, so I can't really know that, can I? And yet, I can't help thinking I do, and because of that I also find myself projecting and psychologically assessing him, making of his story something other than what he asserts of it. I don't find the cynical darkness to which he aspires, but instead see bitterness embraced as a protection, an attempt to avoid setting himself up for disappointment and heartbreak.

He's not so alone in this world: a good portion of the story revolves around the foursome of friends, the beforementioned Carol (Cann), Karen, Waldell himself, and Derek Island, and the everyday soap operas of their lives and their connections with each other.

The centerpiece is the delicately vulnerable romance between Waldell and Derek. Waldell the author shares this tale of romantic misery and thwarted love and would have us believe it was unrequited, this being the core of his broken-hearted bitterness. But as reader, I kept perceiving Waldell the character as wanting but being unwilling to believe it could be had, and second-guessing his opportunities in favor of reconciling himself in sporadic bursts of self-protective hesitation. Hence, this kind of exchange on the cellphone screen:

Me: You know I have feelings for you

Derek: I have some for you, was that not clear?

Me: I can't believe you have feelings for me. I never would have guessed. Honestly.

Derek: I've told you

Derek Island is leaving town and Waldell plots and schemes about how he is going to take the risk -- now or never -- of collecting on his first and most-wanted kiss, but he gets cold feet and a non-kiss ensues.

He's more inclined to air his grievances to Derek about how Derek does not reciprocate his feelings, building the narrative between the two of them to the effect that Derek mistreats Waldell, that Waldell is the person with the feelings. But he finds the feelings easiest to express in a forlorn mode:

Derek: I miss you my friend

Me: I can't talk to you

It is one of the minor passing characters in the story, Latesha, who gets to voice what seems apparent to me about these star-crossed novice lovers: she, who, Waldell notes, had witnessed the Derek saga firsthand, predicts to him that "one day the stars will align for you and Derek".

Queen Called Bitch, a coming-of-age and coming-of-want tale from NineStar Press. Waldell Abraham Goode

(cc: GoodReads)

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I see another email in my inbox with subject "re: QUERY--From a Differently Gendered Closet: The Story of Q".

I double-click it to see who the rejection is from so I can dutifully record it in my database of queries.

It starts off:


I really like what I've read so far of your manuscript and would like to offer you a publishing contract if it's still available. We are a digital-first publisher, so first publication would be in ebook form. Our terms are quite generous.

Let me know if you're interested.

Pretty much everything in our contract is negotiable...


I blink a lot.




I have a weary and wary and cynical outlook at this point. I was querying publishers back in 1982 and got an offer to publish and only after reading the fine print realized it was what is called a "vanity press".

This publisher is not a vanity press, I know that much at least. But that doesn't mean this is a done deal and that there aren't any dealbreaker-type "gotchas". But I'm sipping tequila at the moment, oh yes I am.



If it should turn out that this really and truly is IT and I'm going to be published (in a way that counts, etc) then for the record I just crossed the 800-query mark:


Current Stats:


The Story of Q--Total Queries = 800
Rejections: 735
Outstanding: 65

As NonFiction--total queries = 579
Rejections: 516
Outstanding: 63

As Fiction--total queries = 221
Rejections: 219
Outstanding: 2



The query that landed this response was sent directly to publisher and billed it as fiction (LGBTQ-Feminist), specifically as a coming-out story, "a 97,000-word coming-of-age (and coming-out) story - set in the 1970s but aimed at today's gender-questioning world."

Further info will be forthcoming. I'll keep you informed.


In other news, I will be presenting my talk again at the EPIC lifestyle conference this weekend! I'll post about that too.

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Janet Reid — one of the literary agents who blog — was once asked whether it is ever OK to requery a literary agent who has already sent a rejection. She replied that you can, if it's after a major revision; but that you should inform the agent, and gave this mockup as an example:




> Dear Snookums,
>
> I've revamped my novel SharquesGoneWild from an adult to a YA
> thriller. It's a lot better now. I hope you'll want to take a second
> look.
>
> Obviously of course, not those exact words but you get the idea.



Thanks to Janet Reid, notes of this nature are noted in my database and in my head forevermore as "snookums" notes.


Yes, I do requery.

• If I sent a query letter to an agent and get no reply, I may requery a year later especially if my standard query letter is quite different by then.

• If I sent a query letter positioning my book in one way (memoir nonfiction) and it was rejected, I may requery at a later point pitching the book within a different category (YA fiction for example).

• If the lit agent was one of those who request a partial (first 10, 25, 30, 50 pgs, first two chapters, etc) and rejected or did not reply, and it has indeed been rewritten since they saw that material, I may requery with a 'snookums' note acknowledging that they've received a query on this book before, but that it's been substantially revised.


You should not take this as a stated opinion that requerying literary agents is a perfectly acceptable practice. It's a practice that probably does annoy some of them. I've thought about it and concluded that my situation is somewhat different from that of an author who expects to write several books over the course of the next dozen years. They need to get published periodically. I need to get this book published. Authors who tailor their work to the market in order to get a book (or another book) into print learn to recognize when it's time to put one in the trunk and move on, and can't afford to annoy literary agents who might otherwise represent one of their future offerings. Me, I'm pushier. I have one book to find a home for and less to lose if some lit agents blacklist me for requerying.


• I don't want to descend to the status of "spammer" though. If I've requeried and received a second rejection, I won't keep pestering them about it. At least for now. (Ask me in 3 years if I'm still unrepresented and unpublished. In fact, check the web for stories about a crazed author in prison for kidnapping agents and tying them to chairs and forcing them to listen to him read his book out loud... that's not in my plans either, but...)


Anyway, I've made some modifications to how my system collects stats. Requeries were not being counted in the totals. Now I can optionally include those to get a better sense of how many queries I've actually sent (as opposed to how many agents I've queried).


NOT COUNTING REQUERIES (hence comparable to prior stats reports):


The Story of Q, total queries: 572
Rejections: 537
Outstanding: 54
Under Consideration: 1

As Nonfiction, specifically: 383
Rejections: 354
Outstanding: 49

As Fiction: 189
Rejections: 183
Outstanding: 5
Under Consideration: 1

----

COUNTING REQUERIES:

The Story of Q, total queries: 623
Rejections: 568
Outstanding: 54
Under Consideration: 1

As Nonfiction, specifically: 433
Rejections: 384
Outstanding: 49

As Fiction: 190
Rejections: 184
Outstanding: 5
Under Consideration: 1

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Revision project is successfully completed!

This thing was written, originally, as a nonfiction memoir, but since I'm currently hawking it mainly as a work of fiction, and because I've gotten enough feedback over the last couple years that the writing is a little "disappointing", it made sense to me to go back in and translate generic descriptions of how things were into individual representative scenes, complete with dialog and action and so forth.

That tends to create much longer, wordier blocks of text. One doesn't need to lay down a lot of words in order to say something like "I had tapered off and then quit spending time with the flagpole folks who sang the religious songs. I'd attended some evening sessions in various folks' houses and one day was riding back to White Rock with one of the guys when his VW bus ran out of gas coming down the hill. He cheerfully 'put it in the hands of the Lord' and managed to coast to the traffic light then creep through a left turn and then pick up speed down the next hill and into the service station, and he praised Jesus for making sure we got where we were going without any fuel. I became aware that I simply did not believe what they believed and even though they were not at all confrontational about it I felt less and less comfortable, as if I were faking it just to be singing the songs, so I dropped out of that scene."

But if you were going to do that like a screenplay, well, let's see, let's have me arrive and greet some people, come up with some names, specify 3-4 characters standing around the piano, try to recapture the feel of their friendly but treacly way of interacting, put some private thoughts in my head, a line or two of a song, some more dialog, get into the VW bus, some dialog taking place in the van before it runs out of gas, hmm better describe how we're going down this steep hill, NOW run out of gas, now have the driver comment on putting it in the hands of the lord... OK now describe coasting through the traffic light and slowly making the corner then picking up speed down the hill, and the guys in the van doing the Praise Jesus thing, and more internal dialog, then me getting out of the van, some more contemplation, elaborating on me not feeling comfy with those folks any more, then a wrapup sentence or two indicating that this event among others led to me tapering off and dropping out of the folk-religious singers group.

Guess what, we've sprawled out into several pages to cover a scene that used to be described in a paragraph!


So alongside of that, I streamlined and trimmed and hacked off subplots, condensed some characters into one character, and ended up with a narrative that sticks a lot tighter to the central story line, and that seems like a good thing too.

Overall, the manuscript has gained weight, but not too badly.

Old: 302 pages, 95,900 words
New: 318 pages, 96,800 words

With the revision finished, I've gone back to querying. Another 17 went out via email or are queued up for delivery to the post office for snailmailing.

Stats:

Total Queries: 470
Rejections: 380
Outstanding: 90

As NonFiction: total queries = 332
Rejections: 320
Outstanding: 12

As Fiction: total queries = 138
Rejections: 60
Outstanding: 78


Since it's a new edition, I'm again interested in beta readers. If you'd like to stick your nose into this tome, email me backchannel: ahunter3@earthlink.net


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Here's the query letter (aka pitch letter) I'm using for agents who handle literary fiction:

-------------

Derek is a girl. He wasn't one of the boys as a kid; he admired, befriended, and socialized with the girls and always knew he was one of them, despite being male. That wasn't always accepted or understood, but he didn't care: he knew who he was.

Now he's a teenager and boys and girls are flirting and dating and his identity has become a lot more complicated: he's attracted to the girls. The OTHER girls. The female ones.

FROM A QUEERLY DIFFERENT CLOSET: THE STORY OF Q is a 95,000-word literary fiction tale set in the 1970s but aimed at today's gender-questioning world.

Junior high to college, the stage on which Derek's adolescence and early adulthood takes place, is mostly hostile to gay people; transgender isn't a word in common use yet; and against this backdrop, Derek seeks friends and companions and someone to love in a world that has no name or concept for who he is. Years of painful questioning, vulnerability and confusion are interspersed with fragile optimism and hope and a willful determination to survive.

In 1980, 20 years before the word "genderqueer" would roll off anyone's tongues, Derek attempts to come out. He's confident, excited about the social and political implications of this gender identity, and eager to find out if these ideas are as powerful to other people as they are to him. The result is incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.

Undaunted, he starts a mental patients' liberation movement within the locked ward and gets kicked out for disrupting the facility. He goes on to fall in love, to succeed in college as a women's studies major, and gets his controversial gender ideas into print as feminist theory.


This story will appeal to fans of Alex Sánchez's RAINBOW BOYS and Julie Anne Peters' LUNA, as well as to readers of nonfiction works such as Daphne Scholinski's THE LAST TIME I WORE A DRESS and Jennifer Boylan's SHE'S NOT THERE; like these titles, my book will be a resource for anyone exploring questions of identity and questioning their own sexuality.


----------------

Authors' agents often ask NONFICTION authors to submit a formal proposal, which presents the premise of the book in a longer wordier version than the query letter, explains why the author is the best person to write it and why these ideas or concepts will work well as a published book; provides a list of similar titles and how this book is different; and how the book might best be marketed and publicized.

They don't ask that of FICTION authors, apparently; instead, what is most requested (aside from the ubiquitous query letter) is a synopsis, explaining the plot trajectory on a chapter by chapter basis. I never posted my nonfiction proposal here (too long and stultifying) but I like the way the synopsis came out so without further ado...



=== SYNOPSIS ===

(page numbers based on double spaced Times New Roman 12 pt)


1) PROLOGUE starts page 1

A short 3-page teaser in which the main character Derek is beaten up at a party on very little provocation, prompting him to ponder his differences, his now-questionable sense of being accepted, and how things had led to this.


2) CHILDHOOD starts page 4

Derek in first/second grade in Los Alamos New Mexico begins to compete with the girls, aspires to do well in school in deportment as well as subject areas. Makes one close male friend. Family moves to Georgia. Polarization increases: hostility from other boys, close friends with other girls, epithets including "queer" from other children, hostility from some adults for not being a normal boy. As he gets older, girls cease to be friend with him, he is increasingly isolated and lonely. Awareness of sexual attraction towards girls takes place before he knows what it means. Derek looks forward optimistically to adolescence, thinking he will again have girls as friends and as romantic girlfriends.


3) JUNIOR HIGH AND HIGH SCHOOL starts page 19

The family moves back to Los Alamos. Day to day life over the five years from 8th grade to high school graduation, beginning with Derek being ostracized not just for being the new kid but for being a "faggot", subjected to extensive harassment and horrified as he discovers that sexuality is not going to bring him closer to the girls, who link up with masculine boys. Derek makes a significant effort to discard his own prim judgmental standoffishness, make friends and fit in: he joins Boy Scouts, plays in the band and sings in the choir, re-establishes contact with his boyhood friend and somewhat belatedly rebels against adult authority like the other kids. His hopes of falling in love and having a girlfriend don't quite pan out but he hopes getting out of the fairly small town and into a college environment will let his life truly begin.


4) THE LIMBO YEARS starts page 131

Derek hates the conservative southern Mississippi college and daydreams about joining the hippies and flower children he's read about, not fully realizing the people and ideas described in the library books are not culturally ascendant any more by 1977. He drops out of school and seeks to become economically self-sufficient as soon as possible by taking vocational school courses in auto mechanics. The all-male environment isolates him, dating or even meeting girls seems impossible, and he wonders if maybe people who've called him gay knew him better than he knows himself; he tries gay sex, first with the boy he's been friends with since 1st grade; then, when that wasn't very pleasant, he decides maybe it was too much like incest but gay sex with a kind and friendly stranger is even worse. Still horribly lonely, Derek is becoming increasingly confident and self-reliant until he narrowly escapes being raped and then later is assaulted at a party (the incident in the PROLOGUE). He'd had one good connection with a girl who seemed to want him as a girlfriend in all this time but he'd met her while her family was on vacation and she lives across the country in Boston. But now he's desperate for something to work out with girls so he goes to visit her there. It doesn't go well: she's amenable to making out in the basement but is not interested in him personally, and he's devastated.


5) BACK TO UNIVERSITY starts page 206

Unable to make a go of it as an auto mechanic, Derek lets his family talk him into trying college again, this time in Albuquerque at a far less conservative institution. The University of New Mexico's student body is indeed far more socially liberal and tolerant than anywhere else he's been: people who think he is gay go out of their way to let him know it's cool with them, instead of being hostile and violent. Derek tries to focus on just having a good time and maybe losing his virginity, and putting his bad experience with the girl from Boston behind him. But casual sex and flirting and dating are impersonal and the assumptions roles and attitudes are very sex-specific and don't fit him at all. He finally acknowledges to himself that he's always thought of himself as one of the girls and now realizes that this may make him incompatibly different from what's expected of males in heterosexuality. He reads about transsexualism and it resonates but he realizes he doesn't think his body is wrong... just what people think it means to have that body. Other college students keep urging him to come out and accept himself. Finally something clicks: he sees the parallel between what he's going through and what feminists have said about sexism and sex roles. He begins writing manifestos about his gender identity and sexual orientation and circulating them to other students and to his professors and to others on campus. People worry about him: they don't understand what he's driving at and he disturbs them by being so excited about it. He is asked if he'll talk to a psychiatrist and he agrees, not realizing that the "permission slip" they have him sign will result in being locked up on a locked psychiatric ward and not allowed to leave. Derek, however, is for the first time certain that there ISN'T something wrong with him, and he talks and listens to the other patients and organizes a patients' rights movement that disrupts the facility, which discharges him abruptly.


POSTLOGUE starts page 288

Derek goes to California seeking the hippies and flower children he read about, and actually finds a commune, lives there for awhile, and loses his virginity without having to take on the unwanted male sexual-initiator / sexual-aggressor role. Later, in the library, he reads about a women's studies department at a college and realizes that if he were a student there, the kinds of things he wants to talk about would be typical subject matter in the classrooms. His parents are understandably relucant to send him to college a third time so he hitches to New York and endures a period of homelessness before establishing himself and getting into the school, at which point he gets solid A grades and an enthusiastic reception by his feminist professors. He goes on to graduate school and publishes his theories about gender and sexual orientation in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Over the years that follow he gets into relationships with women, learning from each, culminating in solid yet nontraditional relationships in which he is accepted and understood as a male girl.





Total Pages: 301

Word Count: 95,993


{optional bit if writing sample is requested:}

*****

Your contact information at YOURLITERARYAGENCY.com/submissions indicated that I should include the first 5 pages / 10 pages / 20 pages / one chapter / two chapters / whatever, as a writing sample. Pasted inline below this line:


=======================

{appropriate writing sample goes here, if requested}


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