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I'm still querying literary agents in hopes of hooking my book up with a commercial publisher. I don't blog very often because querying has been so dismal and discouraging. I mean, it always is -- I hated the querying process for my first book, GenderQueer -- but at least for GenderQueer I got some encouraging comments, and an occasional nibble.

It hasn't been that way for Within the Box. Nothing but a long string of form-letter rejections and one-sentence "not for me thanks" turndown replies.

Until this week.

Opened my email and found this:

Hi! First, let me apologize for taking SO long to get to your submission. Once I started reading, I couldn't put it down! That being said, I shared it with my interns as well. We had a few discussions about it and talked about the strengths and areas for improvement. Ultimately, I feel it's just not ready, and would need substantial work for me to find it ready to submit to publishers. Therefore, I'm afraid it's a pass for me. I'm so sorry it's not better news. But I want to share feedback, and hope you find it helpful.

First, I love the main character and his voice. You've done a wonderful job at drawing in the reader. It's a compelling story, but the beginning and end both felt too short and not fleshed out enough. The middle section felt too long. I had questions about the parents and their motivates, too. I'd want more closure with them. Your secondary characters were a great addition, the people in the hospital with him. However, I'd like more insight on the head of the hospital who really seemed to have it in for your protagonist. Was he just evil, or a narcissist, did he have any redeeming characteristics that would make him more 3-dimensional? Also, what is the ultimate point of the story? Is it primarily to show the journey of your protagonist, or perhaps a slice of life to show the problems with mental health facilities? I'm not clear as to the reason for the story, mainly because the ending was rushed. (I loved that he made his way in the world though. That made me so happy!)

I want you to know this pass was a very difficult decision. I'm a fan of your writing and welcome any future submissions from you! You're very talented, and I appreciate you letting me read this story. I hope my decision does not discourage you from continuing to work on it and send it out. It shows real promise!!! Take care and please keep in touch.

I really needed this. Some sign that what I wrote just might, maybe, have appeal within the mainstream book market. Some sign that it's worth continuing to fish and see if I can get a bite.

This came from Tina Schwartz of the Purcell Agency. I'd originally sent a query in to Bonnie Swanson there, and instead of receiving a reply from her, this came in from her colleague Tina Schwartz:

Dear Allan,
I have read your query for WITHIN THE BOX and found it interesting. Please follow the instructions below to upload your full manuscript. I'm looking forward to reading it.

That was encouraging at the time -- a request for the full manuscript is rare and always a hopeful sign -- but then time ticked on and I figured if she's seen something she liked I'd have heard about it. Many lit agents don't bother sending rejection letters at all. "If you haven't heard anything in a few months consider it a turndown". My assumption is 3 months.

I'd rather have someone take their time and get to my material when they can, if they engage with it like this!

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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. Hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.

My third book is in post-first-draft corrections and is being circulated to beta readers for feedback. Provisionally title Within the Box. 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.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

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?

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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. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

Blogging: A Self-Evaluation

communication, frustration, grandiosity, platform, literary agent, listening

I started blogging in earnest about 12 years ago, mostly because I kept running into the idea that all nonfiction authors have to have a "platform" if they want to snag a literary agent. By "platform" they mean a pre-existing audience already following what the author has to say whever it is that they say it.

But it was kind of contagious, this process of making these diaryesque entries, entries which rather quickly morphed into classroom lesson materials, with me playing Dr. Hunter, PhD in women's and gender studies, you know? I mean, that was the stuff I wanted to talk to the world about via the mechanism of my book, and presumably the lit agents not only want you to have a following, they want you to have a relevant following. Well, that was my thinking at the time at any rate. Besides, I wanted to put a lot of that stuff into words, to practice expressing it, to get it down. And ideally to reach out to people with it, share these concepts.

It turns out that people don't flock to a blog where they are lectured at, at least not unless they get a grade and some class credit for doing it. I had a handful of people originally, reading my blog posts, mostly other bloggers. But some of them drifted away from blogging and those who are still around have mostly stopped commenting and interacting.

Well, I'm also in a Facebook group someone set up, and the person who set it up keeps asking questions instead of providing lectures, and she gets much better interactive discussions going on.

I think it's been meaningful and appropriate that I've slowed my own blogging pace this last year. It's not that I'm giving up on this "communicate with other people" thing so much as thinking "this isn't working" and step enough back from what I've been doing to see what I'm doing wrong.

One thing I should try is asking questions. Creating space for the people who read what I've written to talk about what they think about various things.

I really am a self-immersed person, and here in this case I think it isn't so much that I haven't been caring what anyone else might think but that I somehow expected that me making a bunch of declarative expository intellectual content and flinging it out there was how you started a conversation. I thought people would talk back at me. But I didn't bother to invite anyone, just sort of assumed they'd show up!

I still have a lot to learn about this "communicate with other people" thing. I feel like I'm awful at it. Or I guess I'm reaching for a lot more than I'm able to grasp. Anyway, I've never been satisfied with how well I do it.

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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 am still querying my third book, Within the Box, and I'm still seeking readers for reviews and feedback. I think of it as a jam session at this point: sure I'd like to get it published, just like a musician wants to get their song recorded, but in the mean time the musician's still gonna want to play it for people. Same for me as an author! So come read what I've written! 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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Index of all Blog Posts

It's that time of evening when I open the email mailbox that's dedicated to querying, so I can mark a handful of lit agents as "Rejected" and the date I received the rejection.

I open the first one and the agent likes my query and wants to see the full manuscript!

This happened a couple times with my first book, GenderQueer, although it never resulted in being offered a contract.

But this is the first time it's happened for Within the Box.

—————

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.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

I've overhauled my nonfiction proposal somewhat -- mostly on my own, but I did finally, belatedly, receive comments from the nonfiction author's association, courtesy of lit agent Jennifer Chen Tran. Most of these were highlighter boxes around individual words and phrases with suggested changes, and I mostly didn't understand why the suggested versions were better than the original wording.

As with query letters and the entire querying process, it all comes across to me as paradoxical: "Please submit your description of your book in a format that exactly meets our expectations of how an author who writes successful books in today's market would do it, but we're not going to specify what our expectations are. Emphasize how your book is different from what's already out there, but show us how it fits conveniently into an existing niche in the established market. Be original. Don't try to hand us anything we don't already know how to market to publishers. Please take time to write us a personal query that shows you bothered to familiarize yourself with our interests and track record, and why you picked us as a literary agency, but also be aware that we look at hundreds of these things very rapidly and reject nearly every one of them, so strip it down to just the facts, ma'am."

I do not think I would enjoy being a literary agent. Maybe I'm wrong about that but it looks utterly dismal from the outside. I like finding a fascinating book that takes me somewhere unexpected, and it's no more likely to have been written in the last couple years than to have been written twenty or thirty years ago. I think I'd hate to have to plow through a gigantic slush pile of query letters and proposals and first three chapter excerpts, looking not merely for a gem that hits my sweet spot as a reader but also one that I can get some market-driven publisher to consider.

You familiar with Stephen King's book Misery? Where the main character is an author being held hostage by a demented fan of his own book series' main character, and she keeps him prisoner until he writes a sequel that she likes? Well, maybe there's a market for a horror tale in which a frustrated unpublished author kidnaps a literary agent and ties them to a chair and makes them read their manuscript...

ANYWAY, as of today, Within the Box now has been the subject of 265 query letters, of which 228 have resulted in rejections or 3-month timeouts. The remaining 37 are still outstanding and could theoretically result in some type of positive response. Nary a single nibble yet, not a request for additional chapters or a full or anything else.

For the sake of comparison, for my first book GenderQueer I sent forth 1474 query letters to lit agents before I switched to querying small independent presses and hybrid publishers instead. I did get some interested responses, although never got offered a lit agency contract.

For all the subscribers and fans and regular readers of my blog who wonder why my blogging pace has dropped off from the once-a-week schedule I maintained until around October of last year, I apologize. And to both of you, I should explain that I started this blog because of all the advice telling me that an author trying to get published, especially a nonfiction author, really needs a platform. Meaning a base of already-attentive audience members who would be likely to go out and purchase a book by that author if one were to be published. But I think I only have a certain threshold tolerance for how much I can write and push out into the world and watch it not being seen and read. And right now I'm querying and it is soul-destroying enough without also writing blog posts that nobody reads.

I left Twitter nearly a year ago, never was on TikTok or Instagram or any of those other social-media critters, and I'm increasingly tempted to leave Facebook. I just don't find the short-attention-span popup-notification world to overlap much with what I regard as communication.

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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. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

I've been postponing a full-on resumption of querying until it should seem I was no longer dipping in to make little edits to the manuscript. I guess I forgot that that never happens, really.

One reason for ~~procrastinating~~ postponing -- aside from the obvious sense that one should get one's book into final form and then query -- is that I keep an array of snippets of the sort that lit agents ask to receive: 50 sample pages, first 25 pages, a sample chapter, first 5 pages, etc. Any of which might be out of date if I'm continually editing the actual manuscript.

That's a bit of a headache, actually. For American lit agencies in particular, sample materials are nearly always requested to be either pasted into the body of the email or else pasted into a web form such as QueryTracker. Either way, you can't depend on anything but plain text to go through and land intact. No tab stops or first-paragraph indents, no bold or italic.

So periodically I have to refresh all my snippets. Open the actual manuscript, select the relevant chunks and copy, paste into a plain text editor (I use BBEdit), replace all returns with double returns so there'll be a white space between paragraphs (since there's no paragraph indent), then comb through that portion of the manuscript looking for italicized passages and setting them off in the plain text with *asterisks*.

I've switched to keeping the snippets in a database, so that I've got a modification date on each one. Version control!

I'm seldom doing "deep edits" these days; the manuscript really is pretty stable. I mean, it's rare at this point for me to insert a scene or append another paragraph to a dialogue.

My most common edits are individual sentences I'm reading for the ten zillionth time and realize that it sounds slightly awkward or unclear and that I reacted that way last time and the time before that, so yeah, how can this be improved?

I confess I woke up the other day sitting bolt-upright in bed, convinced I had kept the same nurses on continual shift for 24 hours. That's the kind of error that can bounce an alert reader out of the flow of the story, so that would be bad. (I hadn't, though -- the scenes in question are rather long scenes measured in words and pages but despite all that takes place, no nurse ends up being in the story for over 12 hours of chronological time -- whew!)

Those are the sort of errors I have to watch out for. Sequences of events that read well and feel plausible until some little discrepancy catches your attention and makes the whole scene unravel. Like having everyone sit down for supper on page 137 and then you get two characters discussing what they want for supper on page 139.

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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. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

I've paused querying my third book Within the Box.

As I've mentioned, I hate querying. Well, lately I've come to realize that when I have a task that I hate, my default way of handing it is to take a deep breath, scrunch my face up tight, and then go at it with single-minded determination, blocking out everything else, and just blast ahead it until it's done, thinking "let's get this over with!".

And that's often effective and efficient, but there's also a price tag. For example, one of the things I detest is getting rained on. I hate the feeling of cold wet clothes and wet feet in squishy socks and wet hair in front of my fogged-up glasses and the slipperiness of the wet ground and getting chilled from it and everything about it. But when my attention focuses so narrowly on just getting to a covered destination, I block out awareness of obstacles, the terrain, and other moving objects like cars and other pedestrians. My intense dislike for the sensations means I'm trying to not pay attention to how anything feels. So I have dashed out in front of cars on occasion, I've bowled over people with umbrellas. I once twisted the hell out of my ankle trying to round a corner on a wet cobblestone. I'm a menace to myself and other people when I'm being rained on.

So with that in mind, I've realized I shouldn't approach querying my book with that attitude. I have grudgingly sought feedback on my query letter from people in a forum I dislike almost as much as the rain, and before I got banned for not being sufficiently grateful and appreciative, I acquired enough comments and observations to let me (after I cooled off somewhat) shorten and tighten it.

They made me realize how inadequate and inappropriate my comparable literature list was -- it's nearly all fiction, and my book isn't! And the titles that weren't were mostly published over a decade ago. "None of that should matter", I mutter, annoyed with the industry. "My tale has more in common with these fiction books, and who cares when the damn book was published, that should tell them what my book is like!". Yeah. Uh huh. I dash through the rain because I don't like to be rained on and I'm just trying to get out of it. When it comes to querying, I don't like it that lit agents want titles that are in the same genre as the book being queried, and of recent publication. I don't like it that they expect me, the author, to tell them about where my book would fit into the current publishing market.

Meanwhile, I have also belatedly realized my book is weak in one area that it shouldn't be, an area I'd like to tout in my short descriptions of it as one of its feature strenghts: Derek is not just a patient being subjected to violations of patient self-determination in Elk Meadow facility, he's also specifically a genderqueer individual being viewed through a homophobic and sissyphobic lens. I need that tension to be there. But although I've got Derek's own internal musings about gender well-documented in the tale, he's keeping that so much to himself that the gender-identity tension between him and the institution isn't very well illustrated! So perhaps I will rewrite some of the internal dialog spots as conversational dialog, ideally within a group therapy scene and maybe followed by informal continuation with other patients around the cafetaria table. Or perhaps I will write entirely new scenes to handle this.

Also meanwhile, I continue to read from the book in its current form to my bi-monthly author's circle, and so I continue to make little changes in response to the feedback I get from the other authors.

All total, I need to stop approaching the selling of my book to a lit agent as a necessary chore to dash through. I need to wait until the book is in its best form, and I need to hone my querying tools patiently instead of trying to jam some words on a page and get it over and done with.

—————

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

Short version: We sort of need meta-agents that we turn to whose expertise lies in finding us agents. Because those of you who are agents are no easier for us to acquire than publishers are.

I mean, how would you go about picking an agent if you were an author? OK, you wouldn't. You don't get to do the picking. The market is not one in which authors get to choose from among available agents. But you agent folks, you kind of want to know why we sent you our query letter; you want to feel special among agents, not just wasting your time with the authors who send query letters to everybody, spamming up the place with form letters explaining why we're seeking a lit agent and a publisher. So let's say I really wanted to accommodate that, to pick from among you as if it were the kind of market that it isn't, to behave as if I get to pick.

If I get to pick, I want a lit agent who understands that I don't write for the literary market; I don't know enough about it to write for it, I read books, not markets. So I don't come in knowing how to package my book within the vocabulary of genres, at least not unless you let me discuss more than one of them and how my book is — and also in other senses isn't — a part of this one.

Or another way of going at it: can I find a literary agent who will work with an author who didn't sit down thinking "I am going to write a science fiction book" or "I am going to sit down and write a true crime story" or "I'm about to write a fast thriller spy novel" and instead had an idea for a book. "This would be a good story".

So how shall I, as the person (pretending) I get to pick, find the ones who match that description? Their querytracker profiles don't often answer these questions. Literarymarketplace doesn't provide the answers. The literary agency pages listing the agents and describing how to submit hint at it sometimes. But in general, you lit agent folks present outwardly as "Bring me this! I want to represent a book like this!", most often identifying the "this" by genre.

I had books prior to the current project, and I sought to get a literary agent, and I kept sending out query letters and eventually the criteria for who to send them too consisted of "is a lit agent accepting queries". I don't think that situation was serving any of us well. I'm sorry for spamming your mailboxes. With this new book I'd like to start over somehow.

—————

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

Lit agents and publishers often release (or make posts to) a Manuscript Wish List. I figure turnabout is fair play, don't you?

Let's start with the notion that we, as authors, are supposed to select the lit agents that we really want to work with, and not just spew query letters at random to anyone who appears to be a lit agent with a pulse.

You go to web sites that aggregate information about lit agents (such as querytracker or agentquery) and they'll tell you that an agent named (let's say) Susan Jones represents general fiction, sci fi, romances, suspense, thrillers, mysteries, other genre fiction, historical nonfiction, popular science nonfiction, memoirs, how-to guides, self-help health and therapy; and is accepting queries, prefers them via email.

You go to individual lit agents' own web sites such as susanjones.com to find out more about this lit agent and you learn that what she's really interested in are books that you can curl up in bed with and lose track of time, books that feature brave heroines or nontraditional heroes in quirky new settings, stories with a modern punchline that adds a new twist to old wisdom, or books that make her think. And she has two poodles and an aging cat and likes lasagna and wears flannel in the wintertime. And by the way, the Susan Jones Literary Agency had the privilege of representing THE CAGE AND THE KEY by Joe Johnson, MY PASSAGE THRU THE UMBILICAL CORD by Terry Truwrite, FIFTY KEY BILLS AND HOW THEY TIED UP THE SENATE by Senator C. D. Politician, RHODESIA SONNET by Jane Goodwriter, and nineteen other titles I haven't read or heard about by authors I haven't read or heard about, although some of these sound like books I should add to my reading list.

So...

Dear Susan Jones,

What I'd really like to know about you and all the other lit agents that would tell me whether I should query you soonest or only later as a last resort:

* Of the books you have taken on, what percent of them got placed with major publishing houses that invested in publicizing the book?

* Please describe the changes that you've requested authors to make to their manuscript. Have you tended to request the addition or subtraction of a character? The addition or subtraction of a major plot element or theme? Have you suggested extensive edits to improve readability and smoothness and continuity? Cleaned up typos, spelling errors, grammar errors, run-on sentences and the like? How often have you ended up in protracted arguments with your authors about the changes you've requested?

* What are the most annoying behaviors you've encountered from the authors you've worked with? Are there any attitudes or habits or tendencies that really drive you up the wall, such that you wish you'd known about them in advance and had avoided those authors? How did you handle it?

* What is your success rate at negotiating the details of the contracts with the publishers to the satisfaction of your authors? Are there things that authors tend to want (e.g. retention of film rights, subsidiary rights, foreign rights) that you've had difficulty obtaining? If so, from which types of publishers?

* How often have you contracted to represent an author and then were unable to place their book for publication for more than 5 years? 8 years? How often have you reverted the rights or rescinded the contractual arrangements due to inability to place the book (or the author's impatience with you doing so)?

—————

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

This is by far my least favorite part of the process. Yesterday I likened it to cleaning all the toilets in Grand Central Station with my tongue.

I'm not Don Draper or Darrin Stevens. Whatever talent I may have for writing 1600-word blog entries or 7000-word articles or 97,000-word novels, it does not translate well to writing one-page query letters. Or single-sentence pitches.

The insider advice is that the author is supposed to carefully research the lit agents -- find out who they've represented in the past and what specific kinds of books they're most interested in seeing; investigate their reputation and make sure their style of working with authors would be a good fit for you, be sure that they've got a proven track record for placing books like yours with solid mainstream publishers, verify that the kind of book that you wrote is fully up their alley so they'll know how to represent it successfully and will be enthusiastic about it and so on and so forth.

Uh huh. Sure. And all those teenage job seekers fresh out of high school should Google the companies they're considering applying to, research the personnel who run them. Look for local newspaper interviews to get their philosophy for how to run the workplace. Investigate how happy their employees are with their job situations. And custom-tailor your resume to each of your carefully chosen targets and only apply to the most perfect jobs, because you wouldn't want to work for anything less than your ideal employer, right?

I am trying to approach it with less urgency than in the past. I think I've got a good book that's entertaining and not just socially relevant this time. So I actually am spending more time putting focused attention on the material I send to each lit agent, and seeing if there's an opportunity to tailor the inquiry a bit to that recipient.

One thing that makes this book different from the previous two is that it is less relevant that it's a true story. I tried to make the other two books entertaining, but the topic and the story arc didn't make either of them a really great fit for any major fiction genre. "Kid grows up being made to feel weird and ultimately comes out genderqueer" isn't a genre. "Young LGBTQIA activist goes to college to major in women's studies to discuss gender" isn't a genre. But Within the Box is a pretty good suspense tale. I found it far easier to assemble a list of "comparable titles" than I did when querying the previous two books.

So I can query it as fiction or as nonfiction, and I plan on doing a bit of both.

—————

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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Thanks to my partner anais aka Cassandra, my synopsis has been whittled down to a tolerable size.

A lot of lit agents request a synopsis, so I needed to have one in order to be ready to begin querying. (Yes I could have deliberately chosen targets who dont' ask for a synopsis, but that would interfere with procrastination!)

And, on that front, folks: I have begun. The first tiny handful of lit agents are now in receipt of my query. I have begun the process of trying to sell my third book.

So...

SYNOPSIS

Prologue:

Derek, a 23 year old nursing student, is suspended for refusing to manipulate patients to take their medicines. Derek's parents worry that he will never finish any course of training. They're convinced that Derek's problem is drugs and alcohol, and they want him to check into a fancy private rehab facility. Derek doesn't believe that he abuses drugs or alcohol, but agrees to go because they also do other types of therapy.

Derek is genderqueer -- or that's what he'd call himself in 2023 -- but it's 1982. Derek thinks he has an important message, but finds it difficult to make people understand. So it's the promise of improving communication skills that lures Derek into trying rehab. He's told it's voluntary and if he doesn't like it, he can leave.

The First Six Days:

Derek goes through an exhausting intake and orientation, with residents and staff praising Elk Meadow Clinical Retreat. He quickly tires of the one-way flow and puts posters on his door defining himself as leader of his treatment team. This offends some residents. Dr. Barnes says Derek is intellectualizing, and a counselor says Derek is in denial. Derek tries to remain open-minded. He participates in psychodrama, and learns about his interaction patterns with his parents.

Dr. Barnes pushes Derek to turn his life over to the pros since he isn't running it well himself, and Derek pushes back by making a nameplate like the one on Dr. Barnes' door, angering Barnes. Derek goes AWOL through an improperly locked door, sees a movie, then drops in on colleagues of his Dad's who live nearby. They call his parents, who aren't pleased. Dr. Barnes calls and apologizes for Elk Meadow failing to meet Derek's needs, and Derek agrees to return.

Days Seven Through Eleven:

In psychodrama, Noelle takes the role of Derek and mimics him sounding intellectual but incoherent; this clears the air and Derek starts making friends with other residents. In group, Dr. Barnes says Derek should remove the materials from his door if he's "serious about a new start." Derek is cynical but complies. His counselor says Derek takes a "certain pride" in not caring what others think, and notes that this hinders others from connecting with him.

The recreational therapist tells Derek he can't go outside anymore because of his escape. On his own, Derek contemplates the link between being a feminine male and his difficulties getting and keeping blue-collar jobs among males. In group, Dr. Barnes baits Derek for acting femme. Derek asks to read his own chart, but is denied. While power-walking in the hallway to get exercise because he's being kept inside, Derek grabs his chart from the nurses' station. He finds he has been diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, and that his father authorized involuntary treatment if necessary.

Days Twelve Through Sixteen:

Gary says Derek should admit he shouldn't have read his chart; but Gary subsequently shows contempt for schizophrenics in a way that residents find inappropriate and offensive. Derek tries to crawl up above the acoustical tiles to escape, but gets caught. His therapist says "You know what you need to do to walk out of this place. Why don't you just do it?" Derek agrees, and asks to be discharged.

Dr. Barnes says he's preparing the discharge paperwork, but has orderlies restrain Derek in seclusion. Derek expresses his fears and vulnerability to the supportive night nurse, but the morning nurse treats him as a diagnosed psychotic. A mental hygiene attorney explains Derek's options and files a 72-hour letter of intent to leave, which Barnes says he'll challege in court. Dr. Barnes warns Derek that he plays golf with the judge. He tells Derek to cancel the 72-hour letter and take psychotropic drugs or Derek will never be outside of a mental hospital again. Derek agrees to take the medicine. He wakes up under the effect of the drugs, and decides he has to break out now. Derek escapes, walks all night in the rain, and eventually collapses crying.

Aftermath:

Derek hitches to his sister Jan's college. Jan offers him a bed for the night but calls their parents, who tell Derek to go back to Elk Meadow. He hangs up on them. Next morning he hitches to his girlfriend's home and she welcomes him.

—————

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.

My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and 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.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

"List some books that are similar to yours. (500 characters or less)" reads the query manager entry for both Kristin Nelson and Stephanie Rostan, two professional literary agents.

It's not explicitly required by all lit agents and publishers, but some folks advise including a "comp titles" section on any query letter.

I haven't tended to, but it was definitely in my formal proposal (which, in turn, is required by some lit agents and publishers for any nonficton queries, and memoirs are nonfiction), and I had a standalone Comparable Titles snippet I could include whenever it was a part of what was requested.

So now that I've generated at least a rough draft of my third book's query letter (see previous blog post), I've started work on assembling a list of other books that Within the Box has some important resemblance to.

"You may be intimidated or skeptical, thinking either that your idea has to be unique in order to pique their interest, or that your book needs to be similar to others, or else there won’t be an audience for it. The reality here, like with most things in life, is somewhere in the middle", says Kevin Anderson.

Yeah... I'm not aware of any other first-hand account of being in a rehab clinic that turns out to have similarly sinister overtones. Or a genderqueer person's narrative about having their inability to function well socially attributed to their drug-addled mental instabilities instead of pinned to marginalization and society's biases and attitudes. But let's see... books with a lot of internal thought-processing and which invoke a sense of a possibly unreliable narrator who may be more messed up than she thinks she is, in a place or in the care of people who are supposed to be taking care of folks but may be doing something a lot more evil...

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh looks promising. It's a first person narrative from an unguessably different individual, one who seems sharp but perhaps damaged goods in some not fully explained way. Definitely an outsider. She's not institutionalized but works in one (a juvenile reformatory prison). A facility that is at least officially and nominally about doing good but pretty evidently, from the narrator's observation, isn't. A narrator who cares about her interactions with others and is vulnerable on a number of parameters, but not in the usual manner; she's an interesting mixture of impervious and insecure. And Eileen is even more self-immersive than Within the Box -- very little action and events have occurred in the first 60 pages.

Dennis Lehand's Shutter Island takes place in a high security forensic psychiatric hospital. The main character and his companion are federal marshals brought in because one of the committed inmates has gone missing. But readers learn pretty early on that the main character has some hidden agenda of his own involving a murderer who killed someone in his own family, a murderer committed to this same facility. And he may not be wrapped as tightly as he likes people to think. Something's totally up with the shrinks running the place, too. They're not playing honestly with the agents; the marshals don't believe the inmate could have escaped without assistance from at least some staff members, perhaps highly placed ones. And now, 50 pages or so in, I'm seeing signs that they may be doing conscious and deliberate things to manipulate their federal guests... or is it the narrator's paranoid imaginings?

I'm also 45 pages into A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. The first person narrator is the younger sister of Natalie, a brilliant high school student who created entertaining stories but whose imaginings are going very dark and twisted. Natalie is clearly suffering -- she says so -- and her behaviors are impacting others in her family negatively, making her situation different from that of a person who may merely be perceived by others as deranged.

You get more of that from A. Mark Bedillion's Psychiatric Survivor. Or that's my expectation at any rate. I haven't started it yet, it just arrived in the mail. But it's billed as "from misdiagnosed mental patient to hospital director", and it clearly comes from the critical perspective that we call the psychiatric patients' liberation movement or the anti-psychiatric movement. So it is unlikely that the author will position himself as believing he needed to be in the facility, and equally unlikely that the people running it will be portrayed as agreeing with him.

Another couple books I picked out as prospects are Good as Gone by Amy Gentry, which a brief inside peek revealed itself to me as a suspense tale in which a daughter returns after years of being missing, but the mom actually isn't at all sure that this girl is really her. That creates the worry that the situation may be a dangerous one for her family. And An Anonymous Girl from Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, the first couple chapters of which shape up as a psychological chess game in which a girl swipes another girl's invite to a paid research project involving personal questions about moral choices, and in which the psychologist running it knows she was not being honest about how she came to acquire the invite.

Then there's The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins) -- unreliable narrator, substance abuse, questionable mental status, blackouts (so maybe she's hiding stuff from herself and us)... but I think there's a risk involved in comparing one's unpublished book to something that's sold quite that successfully. Still, I won't rule it out.

Oh, and I'm still waiting on the arrival of Upstairs in the Crazy House, another memoir from a psychiatric survivor.

If any of these titles or descriptions conjures up the names of other books you think I should take a look at, let me know!

—————

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.

My third book is deep in tertiary drafts, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and 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.

————————

Index of all Blog Posts

I started this blog in 2014. I'd recently finished my first book, the one eventually titled GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, at that time being pitched as The Story of Q: A GenderQueer Tale. Lit agents who gave personal responses to my queries often said "Your problem as a nonfiction author is that you have no platform. Nonfiction authors need a platform, a ready-made audience of people who are already listening to them".

So I started blogging, in an attempt to create that platform.

After a couple of years of random interval posting, I settled down to a more disciplined routine of cranking out a weekly blog post. And pretty early in, my blog posts began to resemble lesson plans and lecture presentation points.

TEACHER

I was supposed to be an academic, you know. A college professor somewhere, with a classroom of students, a professor who also wrote articles and made presentations at conferences and all that stuff. (My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, which should come out later this year, goes into how that didn't happen as planned). I guess the weekly blog posts became a type of make-believe exercise for me, of creating a curriculum, a weekly installment of professor Allan Hunter's course in genderqueer politics and experience.

I was supposed to be not only an academic but also a provocative social presence, a maker of big ripples. The kind of thing where people talking or writing about gender issues would respond in part to what I'd said. Where the things I'd said had become ideas that people would feel the need to react to, whether they agreed with me or not. Where the things I'd said changed the dialog. Modified the conversation and inserted new ideas into the discussion.

I wanted to provide a way of looking at these things that would make some things click into place for a lot of people, would make some things suddenly make a lot more sense to people. I've had people tell me that did happen, so I got to have some of that experience, if not quite as much of it as I'd hoped for.

I wanted to find my people, to be the person who created an IDENTITY that other folks would claim as their own, people for whom the things I said really clicked; I wanted to someday be in a room entirely filled with gender inverts, both male and female, heterosexual males who were femme, whose personae were like girls or women but who didn't wish to present as if they were female, and heterosexual female people who were masc or butch, where who they were as people make them 'one of the boys', but who didn't opt to wrap themselves as male. I daydreamed of conferences attended by gender inverts, and bars and other businesses that catered primarily to gender inverts, and even entire parts of town that were known to be the gender invert sections, you know? Well that didn't happen. To a limited extent I occasionally "found my people" -- where someone would comment that I had put into words some experiences and notions that they'd never seen in words before and that something I said totally captured how it was for them -- but not often enough or with enough people to make a movement like that.

More often, I got some likes on my posts and some dissents. I received replies and responses that gave me some indication that I had made sense, and other reactions that made it clear that I hadn't, that I was just confusing people, and overall a sense that most people had only understood a part of what I'd said.

Which is how it would have been if I'd been a college professor. I mean, that's pretty standard. You do your lectures, you provide some readings and you lead some discussions, and you see that some students get part of it and others are a lot less clear on it, and it's rare that a lot of students fully understand all of what you've presented.

THE RIPPLE MAKING THING

The way I view society, after decades of studying it pretty intensely and trying to inject my ideas into the social conversation, is that most people find a cluster of people where they're comfortable. A social environment. And they embrace and absorb the worldview that is shared as part of what defines that social environment.

If that sounds snotty, like I'm putting folks down for not doing their own thinking, well, even my most radical gender concepts and ideas are just a subtle departure from a body of thought that's already out there. I have some specific original content -- the specifics of being a gender invert and how that's different from being transgender, and how it's similar and yet different from feminist women's rejection of rigid sex roles and sexist expectations and all that -- but the original stuff fits on top of an established set of thoughts about gender and sex and identity and variation from the social norm. And that's a really good thing, because otherwise it would be impossible to explain.

We aren't just mindless puppets who passively soak up ideas from the social world around us and then parrot them. It often seems that way, to me and to other frustrated individuals, but new thinking does get stirred in, and those new notions and concepts get introduced somehow. Perhaps there are ideas "whose time has come" and a lot of people begin putting the same notions into words at the same time and that's when they get some traction.

I suspect there's a talent for being a ripple maker. I suspect it's akin to the talent some people have for being able to go to a party and make a splash, to be different and yet to have one's difference make one stand out all new and shiny and interesting, instead of one's difference making one not fit in and just look wrong and out of place to everyone else. It's the kind of talent that lets one person's YouTube channel or their tweets get millions of views. Whatever it is that comprises such talents, I don't appear to have them. I never have.

My second book will soon be out, but in contrast to the first one it's less centrally on-topic. It explains why my first book is wrapped and positioned as LGBTQ and not as a radical feminist male's political coming-out, but it was the first book that really sets out to explain being a heterosexual sissy, a gender inverted male. It could be that, nevertheless, the second book catches fire and draws attention to me as a person speaking important ideas that are worthy of social attention, but it seems unlikely.

MOVING FORWARD

I've been doing this for a long time, and it is crossing my mind (not for the first time by any means) that I don't have to keep doing this. I can put it down. I can move on to other interests and let my life have a different focus.

I may not do that -- when I've contemplated that in the past, I ended up circling back to it, unable to leave these issues alone for long. Still driven to push them, to speak up about them, because it needed to happen. And because I had a right to speak.

But it's personally important to me to remind myself that I don't have to do this any more. It's not an obligation. Even if it needs doing, I don't seem to be spectacularly talented at doing it, and I do get to live my own life, in whatever way seems likely to bring me satisfaction.

—————

My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback 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, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It's expected to be released in early 2022. Stay tuned for further details.

Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page

———————

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

Crossposts: https://ahunter3.livejournal.com/89990.html

The literary agency Redhammer is one I ran across awhile back; until recently, their page on submissions said they didn't accept unsolicited queries and then went on to say that if you're looking for a lit agency that does ... and then they supplied a rather long list of UK literary agencies.

It was a useful resource for me: the agencies that Redhammer listed on this page were agencies that I had not come across in AgentQuery or QueryTracker or the other sources I've relied on, for the most part.

Anyway, just recently the Redhammer folks changed tack and started accepting what they call "pop-up submissions": stating that most lit agents don't read much more than this much before making a decision anyhow, they ask for just 500 character's worth of query letter and the first 600 (now upped to 700) words as writing sample.

But they make their decisions live so you can listen to their evaluation and decision process.

So I opted to participate.

The whole August 5th program

Where they start reviewing my query and 1st 600 words

In general they said nice things about my writing — that it flowed easily with a natural looseness rarely found in unsolicited submissions; a couple of the participants complained that the main character wasn't as frightened (in particular) or otherwise reacting emotionally to what was happening as people began beating him up; and Pete, the primary honcho at Redhammer, said the main reason he could not represent my book is that it's not a type of book he has any experience representing and wouldn't know where to begin in trying to get a publisher for it.

I like the reassuring feedback about my writing, that's very nice to hear.

Derek's (i.e., my) reaction in the fight is a bit more complicated. The near absence of affect is realistic and intentional; years of unexpected out-of-nowhere hostility and violence is numbing, and early in the book I have Derek trying to turn to authorities for help and basically being told to just be a good sport and weather it. This is one of the tales within a tale in this book, that victims of this kind of alienating treatment learn to shut down. Obviously I can't explain that in the three pages' worth of intro, let alone in the 600 word sample that Redhammer permitted me, but I'm choosing to regard it as a feature, not a bug — that readers will see it (as one of the Redhammer reviewers suggested) as an aspect of the character, or will notice it and be curious about who this person is who experiences being beaten up in such a matter-of-fact manner. In the book as a whole, I don't explicitly say that Derek is shutting down emotionally or becoming stoic about other people being hostile, but in the best tradition of "show don't tell" I hope the sequence of events paints that for the observant reader.

And the notion that one main barrier to obtaining lit agents to represent my book is that this isn't the kind of book they're equipped to market to publishers is what I've been suspecting for quite some time now. I will continue to query lit agents but my main hopes lie with my queries to small publishers.

Incidentally, a couple people have suggested that I make YouTube videos of myself reading my blog posts. I'm seriously considering it. I could go back and do all the serious ones about gender and being a gender invert, and maybe some about writing and trying to market the book. I dont know if I'd get any more traffic on YouTube than I get here, but possibly I would.

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The Art of the Coming Out Story: Seeking the Sweet Point

positioning, literary agent, publisher, show don't tell, writing

A pair of somewhat-recent rejection slips:

It is written in what I will refer to as an "extreme" narrative, i.e. it reads like a diary. The promise of an interesting read on the subject of a young man's struggle to determine his sexuality is never realized because the author lapses into a commentary on his being bullied by those who prey on the "undecided" identity seekers. One thing that makes this interesting is that although the author identifies more as a female, his orientation is clearly heterosexual. Readers may well be inclined to 'slug' through the pity in order to see how his obvious conflicts are resolved. Three stars because it is at best a 'possible."

-- from Black Rose, a small independent publisher

You’ve struck on relevancy with your premise. The story of coming-of-age trans during the 1970’s while battling a prejudice environment is compelling, but there still needs to be a gripping arc to carry the narrative. The characters didn’t come to life for me. I felt more like I was being told events, rather than living them with Derek.

-- from Judith Weber of Sobol Weber, a literary agency

I'm not sure how I can do a better job of making the characters "come to life" and bringing the reader to the point of living events with my main character Derek while at the same time avoiding making it an even more "extreme narrative" that reads "like a diary" in which readers have to "slug through the pity".

Meanwhile, I'm continuing to participate in author's reading events at Amateur Writers of Long Island as described in this earlier blog post. I read a 1500-word excerpt from the 8th-grade chapter early in the book and the other authors gave me much more pleasant feedback than the publishers and lit agents:

Your ability to express your vulnerability is amazing! It flows with ease.

Well-written, strong emotions. Sad, powerful.

Very well written and effective. Keep at it, it's near perfect.

Still, among the rejection letters I've received over the years, there have been two main themes (aside from form letters and short choppy "not for me" replies): that I don't have enough of a platform and that the story doesn't sufficiently grab the reader and draw them in.

We were impressed by The Story of Q's holistic approach to the underwritten topic of growing up queer. However, we struggled to engage emotionally with Derek because of the lack of specificity in prose. For example, it was difficult to understand why, in middle school, Derek found boys' behavior to be "bad" (rather than merely displeasing or disruptive), when Derek had not expressed a desire to be "good" or why Derek was ostracized growing up without knowing how exactly he was teased in each school he attended.

-- Nora Long for / Susan Cohen at Writer's house

I read you query with interest. Your premise is unique and definitely stands out! Unfortunately, the writing style did not draw me into your story's world as much as I would have liked.

-- Johanna Hickle at Talcott Notch

Well, that kind of feedback tends to make me think of perhaps letting go of my self-imposed barriers on manuscript length. Because for any individual event, writing it as a vivid scene with dialog and main-character mental processes and feelings and sound and smells and colors and all that means taking up more words to do it. In a vintage-2014 blog post I explained why. I'm still sure that the story I'm telling is the story I want to tell (as opposed to trying to include less). So the price tag for punching it up further is, at a minimum, to stop worrying about manuscript length and just let it take as many pages (and words) as it takes, you know?

Many of the books I've enjoyed the most have been quite a bit longer than The Story of Q in its present incarnation: Marilyn French's The Women's Room at 135,700 words (526 pages), Marge Piercy's Small Changes at 171,400 words (562 pages), Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone which comes in at 116700 words (465 pages). Mine has hovered around 97,000 words which would probably take up somewhere between 320 and 375 pages. Hmm, I could include a lot more dialog in the scene where the girl from Boston comes to visit and she become the love interest I obsess about... and I could insert some scenes with Boy Scouts illustrating more about how I was sort of not fully merging and kind of holding myself back from them, maybe a scene where the other boys are telling dirty jokes or something, and maybe some scenes at pot parties where I get into philosophical conversations with some of the girls while we're stoned...

But I also looked at some of the classic coming-out stories, to compare for length within the same genre, and that's a bit scary.

Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle ("Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America--and living happily ever after") is only 246 pages (63,960 words).

The Best Little Boy in the World by Andrew Tobias ("The classic account of growing up gay in America. An autobiography in which he spoke of his experiences as a gay boy and young man. He published it under the pen name "John Reid" to avoid the repercussions of being openly gay") was 247 pages (64,220 words).

Jan Morris wrote Conundrum ("One of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality with honesty and without prurience, tells the story of James Morris’s hidden life and how he decided to bring it into the open, as he resolved first on a hormone treatment and, second, on risky experimental surgery that would turn him into the woman that he truly was.") in a mere 176 pages (45,760 words).

Mario Martino did Emergence ("The autobiography of a female-to-male transsexual, written as a cooperative effort by the author with a medical journalist. It is one individual's story of the transition from female to male") in 273 pages (70,890 words).

The Last Time I Wore a Dress ("At fifteen years old, Daphne Scholinski was committed to a mental institution and awarded the dubious diagnosis of "Gender Identity Disorder." She spent three years--and over a million dollars of insurance--"treating" the problem...with makeup lessons and instructions in how to walk like a girl.") was 224 pages (55,552 words).

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg ("Woman or man? This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall gay drag bars of a blue-collar town") was 308 pages (77,000 words).

And Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There ("The exuberant memoir of a man named James who became a woman named Jenny. She’s Not There is the story of a person changing genders, the story of a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret; above all, it is a love story") ran to 352 pages (91,520 words).

None of those is quite as long as The Story of Q. Is that worrisome? Relevant? I don't know for sure, but it doesn't make me very comfortable with the notion of making my book yet longer in pursuit of more vivid scenes and paragraphs.

I had two publishers sign contracts to publish this book; I need to remember that and not blame my writing for the rejection slips I get.

I'm looking for the sweet point, where I've laid down the trajectory of experiences I went through that culminated in me deciding I had a different kind of identity than the people around me, and explained that in enough detail and enough emotional vividness to convey that.

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I wrote a book about being genderqueer and I'm trying to get it published.

Those of you who've been reading my blog for awhile now are well aware of that, but I have recently joined several Facebook groups where I may not have mentioned that, and I'm now echoing my blog in more places in hopes of reaching a wider audience... and it's been awhile since I blogged about the book itself. Most of my recent posts have been about some aspect of gender or genderqueer experience.

Anyway, yeah, it's a memoir (nonfiction, my own story), a coming-of-age and coming-out story, about 97,000 words long (probably about 325 pages, give or take). And I've been querying literary agents since 2013 and small publishers (the sort that you can query directly) since 2015.

Here's where things are at at the moment:

THE REQUEST FOR A FULL

Every rare once in a while my queries to literary agents have resulted in a request to see and evaluate the full manuscript, an event known in the world of authors and author-aspirants as a "request for a full". It's akin to when sending in your resume results in an actual job interview. I've had six of those so far.

The most recent was from Lucinda Karter (or, more precisely, from her assistant Jadie Stillwell) of Jennifer Lyons Lit Agency, on November 17 of last year. I sent in the full manuscript and didn't hear a peep, so on December 8 I sent a follow-up inquiry, just asking for confirmation that they actually received it. They had; Stillwell apologized for being behind and said they hadn't had a chance to look at it but would get to it in due course.

At some point in the spring, I went back to querying lit agents, if only to distract myself from the waiting.

Eventually, the 8th of March rolled around, and it had now been three months since I'd heard anything from them and four months since I'd queried them, so I sent a follow-up email, inquiring if I had perhaps missed a critical piece of correspondence. On March 20th, still not hearing anything, I repeated that inquiry, and on March 30th I got a somewhat formletterish "thanks for the opportunity to read but unable to fully connect with the characters and will have to pass" rejection letter.

THE DOLDRUMS

One of the literary agents that I subsequently queried wrote back to say my proposal looks interesting but that they have a policy of only considering material submitted to them exclusively — so did anyone else have it? Of course they did. So in a back-and-forth exchange of emails we established that they'd be happy if I waited until any still-outstanding queries were rejected or else timed out with at least six weeks elapsing from the time I queried them, and then subsequently didn't send any other queries out until they'd had a chance to make their evaluation. That point will be on April the 12th, two days from now. I'll let them know on the 12th that they now have exlusivity and then an additional six weeks will tick by before their exclusivity-window expires.

It's a long shot but all inquiries to lit agents are long shots. I decided to go for it. But it's meant not doing anything as far as lit agents are concerned from week to week and (at this point) month to month.

It's hard to feel fired-up and like you're doing something towards getting a book published when you're just sitting around waiting for a calendar date to crawl by.

Meanwhile, with the publishers, I'm in the same damn situation: there was a publisher I wanted to query, one that was highly recommended on the queer / nonbinary / minority orientation and sexual orientation and intersex FaceBook groups as a good solid publisher for LGBTQIA titles. They, too, have a policy of exclusivity. So I had to wait until the previous publisher submission (to Kensington Books) expired from lack of activity and then sent them my query, which they've now had since January 23. They want 90 days to evaluate manuscripts, so they've got exclusivity until April 23, another thirteen days from now.

So I've been sitting on my thumb, metaphorically speaking, not sending anything to anyone and watching the damn calendar.

BROAD OVERVIEW / REVIEW OF THE SITUATION

I have twice had a publisher sign a contract with me to publish this book. Generally what happens when a publisher signs a contract with an author is that the book goes into print. In the first instance, the publisher, Ellora's Cave, went out of business and revoked all pending books. In the second instance, with NineStar Press, the editor wanted to cut the first third of the book entirely, and we were unable to establish a working relationship. (I experienced the editor as heavy-handed and insulting, and I gather that he found me arrogant and impossible to work with). So I asked them revert my rights back to me.

This is extremely frustrating, as you can probably imagine. The relief and excitement and joy of having a publisher pick up your book, the anticipation of seeing it listed on Amazon and perhaps on a book stand in a book store, the enthusiastic planning of promotional talks and book-signings and lecture tours and all that... ripped out from beneath me.

I was going to write that this isnt fun any more. That's misleading: it was never any fun, this process of trying to sell agents and publishers on the idea of publishing my book. I detest this entire process, just as I hate doing job searches. I have said in the past that trying to sell myself like this ranks right up there with cleaning all the toilets in Grand Central Station with my tongue. So "isn't fun any more" isn't the applicable phrase here. What's changed, I think, is that I won't be able to feel any of that relief, excitement, anticipation or joy when I finally do once again have a publishing contract. At this point I don't think it will seem real until the damn thing's actually in print and I am holding a copy in my hands. Maybe not even then.

"Well", you may be thinking, "why don't you just self-publish?"

It's an easy enough process to create a print run of my book. I even have a routine that allows me to print the whole book onto 5.5 x 8.5 format, two pages to a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, double-sided, so it can be whacked neatly in two with an industrial sheet cutter and bound. I could get bids and go with the cheapest bid, and that's before I even look into companies specifically geared to help authors self-publish.

Electronic printing is even more effortless, and free. I can generate a PDF at will, and Amazon (among others) will readily help me convert it to other standard eBook formats for paid download.

None of that is at all difficult. Most of that is not relevant.

The difficult, and relevant, part of what makes publishing different than mere printing is distribution and publicity. Running off five thousand copies of my book (and/or generating an eBook for electronic distribution) doesn't get it into people's hands. It doesn't get it reviewed. There are human activites that successfully overcome those barriers, promotional activities. I'm not good at them. If I were good at them, this would be a very popular blog with hundreds or thousands of weekly readers. It isn't. I'm not.

I'll still have to gear up to plan and execute a promotional campaign even with a traditional-model publisher, unless I get a large publisher on-board (unlikely); but even a small publisher makes the book "authentic" to the world of reviewers and opens up opportunities for distribution and consideration. I'm particularly interested in seeing it picked up as reading material for gender studies, LGBTQ studies, feminist theory, and other related academic course work, and hopefully also to find shelf space in LGBT community centers and support group meeting spaces and whatnot.

READINGS

One thing I have been doing more of lately is attending authors' groups where people bring samples of their work-in-progress and read from them and get feedback from the others there. I've been attending the Long Island Writers' Guild and the Amateur Writers of Long Island in recent weeks. Of the two, I like the format used by the latter somewhat better, as they allow up to 1800 word samples to be read and spend more time discussing each selection before moving on to the next. I've enjoyed them both, though.

The feedback I've received is encouraging. The people say my writing in general is vivid and effective, the characters and their behaviors and dialog strongly drawn, the paragraphs and phrases well-constructed. That's not to say I haven't received useful criticism, of the sort "you could do more of this up here before he says that" and "I found it a bit confusing when it jumped to this next scene, is that supposed to be later the same week or what?" and so on. But the overall takeaway is very good: my writing does what I want it to do, it works. At least in 1800-word chunks. (I still yearn for more feedback on the entire book as a satisfying or less-than-satisfying whole).

STATS

total queries to Lit Agents (counting requeries): 1171

Rejections: 1092
Outstanding: 79

As Nonfiction, total: 944

Rejections: 866
Outstanding: 78

As Fiction, total: 227

Rejections: 226
Outstanding: 1

total queries to Publishers: 30

Rejections: 22
Outstanding: 1
No Reply 3+ Months: 6
Pub Contract Signed, went out of business: 1
Pub Contract Signed, rights reverted: 1

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I've been on a 3-month hiatus from sending out query letters. On the publishers' front, I had an unanswered query ticking away waiting for the "allow 3 months for us to reply" window to expire, because the next publisher I wanted to query asks for exclusivity. Just sent them a query this morning. And now the clock resets again.

Meanwhile, queries to literary agents has also been suspended for awhile because I got a request for a full (in other words, a lit agent responded to my query letter with a request for me to send in the entire manuscript for their consideration) and I've been waiting on the verdict to that before querying other lit agents.

I'm mostly in a mode of not taking the lit-agent-querying very seriously. I mean, I've sent out over 1000 queries to lit agents and never gotten an offer to represent me. In contrast, I've only sent out 39 queries to publishers and that resulted in two publishing contracts. (One publisher, Ellora's Cave, went out of business, and the other, NineStar Press, assigned me an editor who wanted deep cuts to my book that I wasn't willing to make). Be that as it may, however, only 6 of those 1000+ queries to literary agents resulted in a request for a full, and this is one of those 6.

Wendy Sherman of Wendy Sherman Associates took one day in 2013 to examine my manuscript and decide not to pursue. I had been introduced to her at a paid pitch conference and I don't know if she would have requested to see the manuscript if that had not been the case.

Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli of Jet Literary had my manuscript from late April until early July in 2015 before deciding against representing my book.

Linda Loewenthal of David Black Lit Agency took only six days in August 2015 before declining with a very thoughtful analytical personally tailored rejection letter explaining what they did and did not like about the book.

Anjali Singh of Ayesha Pande Literary held onto it for a month in 2016 before also writing back with praise as well as analysis for what gave her misgivings about the book and deciding not to go forward with it.

Eric Ruben of The Ruben Agency had my manuscript in hand for a month last spring and then sent me back a cursory "not for me" email.

Hmm, it's helpful for me to have compiled that. I see that this current request-for-full has not been awaiting a reply for such an unusually long time after all. (Two months as of January 17th).

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I resumed querying after breaking up with my publisher last month. I tend to consider the practical side of that as being the querying of small publishers, but I also resumed the querying of literary agents.

The reason I think of the queries to publishers as being the practical querying is that I've sent out over 1000 query letters to lit agents, of whom exactly six have asked to see the full manuscript, none of whom then went on to offer me a contract; whereas I have sent 32 queries so far to small publishers who permit directly querying by authors, of whom three expressed interest, two of whom subsequently offered me a contract.

Be that as it may, I received a response earlier this week from one of the lit agents I'd queried, asking for a copy of the full manuscript for her to read.

As always, it guarantees nothing; the other five times this happened, the final outcome was a rejection.

And, as always, the additional awareness of someone else's eyeballs on my book soon prompted me to see things that needed changing! "Hmm, that paragraph has a couple sentences about having outgrown my previous naive ignorance, but I no longer have the section from early childhood where I discuss not knowing such things... that should be removed. Oh, and in this incident here, I go into a lot of details about what I explained to my date, that makes it read as if I tended to dwell on that a lot, like that conversation was a representative sample of many such conversations, let's lighten that up a bit..."

Anyway, stay tuned. I'll cross the requisite finger and maybe something will come of it this time, you never know.

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Yes, I'm officially being published by NineStar Press, with a release date of November 27 of this year. The final editing has yet to occur (I'm waiting to receive the first set of change requests from the editor assigned to me) but they're already ramping up in various ways, including creating an author's page for me on their site.

I'm doing some of my own ramping up, preparing a centralized mailing list for LGBTQetc centers, women's studies / gender studies programs at colleges, and independent and/or LGBT-centric book stores. My publicist will be back from vacation late this week and will help me craft a set of emails to pitch to them the idea of having me come speak and/or consider my book (to sell, in the case of bookstores; to have a copy or two on shelf in the case of LGBTQIA centers; to use as assigned reading in the case of gender studies / women's studies classes).

Meanwhile, I thought I'd celebrate the end of querying by posting some of my favorite rejection letters from lit agents and publishing house editors!

Most rejection letters are, of course, boring and have little to offer in the way of entertainment value. There are the genuine non-form-letter variety, which tend to be succinct and blunt little things:

Not for me-thanks anyway.

Paul S. Levine

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This is not for me, but thank you for the look.

Caitlin Blasdell

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... then there are the impersonal form letters which tend to have some generic reassurances (it's all subjective, keep querying other agents, etc) to all those authors like me who fill up the agents' slush piles:

Thank you for your query. Having considered it carefully, we have decided that LMQ is not the right fit for your project, and so we are going to pass at this time.

Tastes and specializations vary widely from agent to agent, and another agency may well feel differently. Thank you for thinking of our agency, and we wish you the best of luck in your search for representation.

Sincerely,

Lippincott Massie McQuilkin

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Dear Author,

I greatly appreciate the opportunity to consider your query—thanks for sending it.

Unfortunately, the query didn't appeal quite enough to my own tastes to inspire me to offer representation or further consideration of your project. I wish I had the time to respond to everyone with constructive criticism, but it would be overwhelming, hence this form response.

This business is highly subjective; many people whose work I haven't connected with have gone on to critical and commercial success. So, keep after it.

I am grateful that you have afforded me this opportunity to find out about you and your project, and wish you the best of success with your current and future creative work.

All best wishes,
Eddie Schneider

One variety of more personal rejection letter that would come in from time to time was where the agent said they couldn't take on my book because it was too much like one they already had in their lineup. That was always encouraging to read after getting so many generic rejections that I started to worry that the concept or topic just wasn't regarded as worthy of publication:

Dear Allan,

Strange as this may seem, I currently represent a project that is directly competitive with yours. In good conscience, I can't take on a project that competes with the property I am now pitching. I wish you well, but have to pass on this. Best, Maryann Karinch

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Hi Allan,

Thanks for thinking of us! I'm afraid, however, it is a little too close to something we have forthcoming and potentially forthcoming on our list, so I have to decline. I wish you the very best of luck.

Best,

Lauren MacLeod

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Allan: Thanks but I already did a similar book, BOTH SIDES NOW with Dylan
Khosla and my list is too small for another....Best of luck.

Sharlene Martin

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Then there were the "platform" rejection letters — the ones that basically said my writing was good and it sounded like a good story but that they'd have a hard time hooking me up with a mainstream commercial publisher because I wasn't a household name, a writer with a following, a celebrity, etc.

Incidentally, I ultimately ended up doing as Alice Speilburg suggests below — putting my energy into querying small independent publishers instead of querying literary agents — but it made sense to try the lit agents first, since many of them don't want to take on a manuscript that's already been seen by a bunch of publishers.

Dear Allan,

Thanks so much for sending your heartfelt memoir. The big issue standing in the way of my taking you on is not editorial, since you write cleanly and smoothly. It's a matter of platform, that built-in audience who knows the author through some form of media. With the comparisons you gave, it's the authors and their reach beyond the book world that distinguishes them. Feinberg has long been a rights advocate in the spotlight, Boyle had a successful writing career as a man, and the Scholinkski was a case that got media coverage that led to a book deal, not the other way around. Publishing is an industry that can ride a wave but is not so great at making them. It's a shame that a good book is no longer enough, but I see a tough road ahead without a really impressive platform. I appreciate the chance, though, and wish you luck connecting with an agent who doesn't share my reservations.

Christopher Schelling

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Dear Allan,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to consider The Story of Q. I do like the subject here, but I'm not convinced that you have the platform for this to reach a mainstream audience in the current market. Your background lends itself better to a university press, and if you want to go a more consumer/trade route, it would have to be through a niche publisher like Seal Press. I'm afraid it's not right for me, but please keep in mind that mine is a subjective opinion and others will feel differently. I wish you the best in finding a good home for your work.

Sincerely,

Alice Speilburg

Finally —— and these are my real favorites —— there were the rejections where the lit agent or publisher didn't feel that they could place it with a publisher but fundamentally liked my idea for the book and mostly liked my writing. Many of them made observations about my story arc or my character development that reassured me that readers will probably "get it"; and several told me that they wanted me to know that I had something fundamentally good here, which would serve a purpose, that the world needed more such books:

Dear Mr. Hunter,

Thank you for your query. It sounds like you have quite a story to tell. I'm afraid I will not be able to take you on as I work predominantly with our agency's existing clients taking care of all their subsidiary rights matters. I wish you luck with your publishing endeavors and thank you for taking the time to write me.

Sincerely,

Joan Rosen

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Hi Allan
Thank you for your submission. As a gay man myself (who grew up in the
70s/80s!!) I read it with a great deal of interest. Unfortunately I didn’t
love it enough to take it on. I don’t have any constructive criticism
because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your writing. I think
it’s just a matter of finding the right agent who will work with you to
present to the best editorial team. Given your theme and writing skills I
don’t doubt that you’ll find him or her. Thank you for thinking of me and
giving me a shot at it.
Best,

Kevin O'Connor

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Dear Mr. Hunter,

I wanted to commend you for your story and personal fortitude. It takes great strength for an individual to dare to be different. Unfortunately, we are not sure that Ross Yoon is the right match for you. As a four-person operation, we must limit ourselves to a very small client list, accepting a fraction of 1% of the manuscripts we review every year. In this ever-tightening market, the list of publishers we work with increasingly demands authors with broad, national media outreach and international bestselling potential, and I'm we afraid we don't see any of them biting on this.

This is by no means a final judgment on your work. The Supreme Court decision two weeks ago indicates that we are experiencing a different social climate in which LGBTQ issues no longer fall on deaf ears. Your memoir may find traction as we progress towards greater social change. I encourage you to look through recent deal listings on www.publishersmarketplace.com to find the agent that’s perfect for you.

Thank you again, and best of luck to you.

Elizabeth Smith

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Dear Allan,

Thank you for sending me your memoir "The Story of Q," and my apologies for not getting back to you sooner. I found much to admire, particularly the depth of character you convey and your clear and engaging writing. This memoir shines a unique light on how sexuality and gender develop and evolve, and the narrative you've crafted uses a more subtle approach that doesn't hit you in the face with the narrator's sexuality, just as a person's sexuality doesn't necessarily hit them in the face at any one moment.

Ultimately, however, while the story has the potential for exposing a truly unique perspective, the memoir is overloaded with extraneous development that makes it difficult to pick out what bits are going to be the most important when piecing together the whole. Given these reservations, I'm afraid I must decline offering representation.

Thank you for the opportunity to read your work and we wish you all the best in your writing endeavors.

Yours,

Serene Hakim

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Hi Allen

Thanks for the submission. While I totally get what you're doing, I just don't think I'm the right agent for it, so for that reason I'll be stepping aside.

I wish you much luck with the book and in your search for representation.

Best,

Renée C. Fountain

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Thank you for querying. I do very much believe you have the kind of story that should be heard, but I'm going to have to pass on this. Publishing is a subjective business, though, and I'm sure you'll hear many different opinions during the querying process.

Best of luck in your agent search,

Rachel Kory

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Dear Allan Hunter,

Thank you so much for sending us the query for your memoir The Story of Q, which we have read with interest. The narrative is compelling but we are taking very few new clients on at this time and therefore we must pass.

One of the challenges with writing memoir is keeping the story in scenes so that it flows narratively rather than as a series of told incidents (and then this, and then this). I wonder if you might find ways to write more scenes, like in the opening with the boys who are violent. I really connected with you (the character) in that scene.

I hope this is not too discouraging, as the writing is strong and we wish you all the best with your submissions and in securing representation for this project.

Thank you so much for sending this our way.

I hesitate to use the word "brave" when describing your story, because I know that word can be offensive to some in the LGBTQ(xyz) community, but please know you have all the love and support in the world and that the publishing industry is starting to open its eyes to the need for these kinds of stories.

I'm personally a huge fan of Caitlin Kiernan (though she writes sci-fi/fantasy) and I can't wait to see more diversity in literature.

All my very best, and please make sure you keep submitting, as I know this agent stuff can be slow and disheartening!

brandie coonis

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Oh, and here's how my statistics finally play out:

The Story of Q -- total queries to Lit Agents = 974
Rejections: 966
Outstanding: 8

As NonFiction— total queries = 748
Rejections: 741
Outstanding: 7

As Fiction— total queries = 226
Rejections: 225
Outstanding: 1

The Story of Q -- total queries to Publishers = 24
Rejections: 16
Outstanding: 7
Publisher Went out of Business after Making Offer: 1
Accepted for Publication (current): 1

(presumably those remaining 8 "outstanding" queries to lit agents and 7 to publishers will eventually be added to "rejections". I age them out as rejections at 3 months without a response if I don't get an explicit rejection letter)

I didn't quite make it to 1000 queries, but damn I came close!

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On October 18, Janet Rosen, assistant to Sheree Bykofsky, wrote back to me to say that she had completed her reading of my manuscript and that although it was not without merit, this was not a project that Sheree Bykofsky Associates could pursue.

This wasn't entirely surprising (the longer it became since Ellora's Cave folded and informed me that they would not be publishing my book, the less likely it seemed to me that Sheree Bykofsky Associates would continue to act as my literary agency and find me a new publisher). To review, I obtained their services to help me negotiate a favorable contract with the publisher AFTER the publisher had made their offer; they never took me on as a conventional client. Yes, I was hoping that some intellectual proximity, a bit of sympathetic loyalty, and a pleasant experience of me as a person to work with would make them more likely to represent me than if they had merely received my query letter in the large daily slush-pile stack that lit agents get every day. And maybe it did, just not sufficiently to cause them to embrace THE STORY OF Q, who knows?

So I am situationally back to that mythical drawing board, with neither publisher nor lit agent, and again taking up the querying process.

The experience has changed my attitude and approach somewhat, though, as well as having at least netted me a good solid editing job from EC's Susan Edwards as part of the process. Firstly, I now stand at nearly 800 queries to literary agents, culminating in my query to Sheree Bykofsky Associates post-EC, all of which have failed to land me a lit agent. In contrast, I've queried 12 small publishers and received one publication offer. It may be a mildly tainted offer insofar as it came from a publisher on its last legs and in its dying throes, but any way you cut it, the math speaks for itself. I will continue to query lit agents, mainly because publishers tend to want exclusive consideration while they look at one's manuscript, so I can query lit agents as a way of twiddling my thumbs. But my main effort will go towards querying publishers.

Meanwhile, since I have a publicist — John Sherman & Co, hired to promote my book — I'm diverting his focus towards getting me exposure, speaking gigs, media coverage. I've given some well-received presentations to the kink community, which has been wonderfully supportive of me so far, and I do not wish to denigrate that in any way, but it's a somewhat self-limiting audience: people are relatively unlikely to talk to folks outside the BDSM world about this interesting presentation they heard in a BDSM venue. It is still a world in which privacy is highly valued by most, where people know each other by their FetLife nicknames and may not know a participant's real name or, if they do, would by default assume it is NOT ok to mention it elsewhere. In short, although I apologize for the ingratitude that may attach to expressing it this way, I need to do some of my presentations outside of the BDSM ghetto in order to get more traction. Kinky folks have been extremely welcoming, not only to me but to other identity-marginalized people whose peculiarities are not really a form of erotic fetish — google up "pony play", "puppy play", and "littles" in conjunction with BDSM for instance — but yeah, genderqueerness isn't really a fetish and the people I really need to reach are only sprinkles in moderate levels at BDSM events.

Speaking of making presentations etc, I read a 10 minute segment adapted for outloud reading and venue purposes, at WORD: THE STORY TELLING SHOW on October 19. It was fun, was well-received and well-applauded, and came at a very good time for my frame of mind. I need to do more of this, and more of the drier more abstract material presentations such as I did at EPIC and Baltimore Playhouse and LIFE in Nassau, and perhaps more personal-anecdote of the non-humourous variety sharing, and so on, in order to build my platform and widen my exposure, and because doing so is communication, which is the end in itself, the entire reason for writing the book in the first place.

I am currently working with John Sherman to blanket the world of academic women's studies and gender studies programs, letting them know of my availability to do presentations. We will soon be expanding that to campus and non-campus LGBTetc organizations including student associations on campuses and non-university-affiliated groups.

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Entries tagged with literary agent

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My New Favorite Rejection Letter

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Blogging: A Self-Evaluation

Within the Box -- First Request for a Full

Status Update -- Querying WITHIN THE BOX

Author Notes, January 2024

Update -- Status of Within the Box

Dear "Ask the Literary Agent" Columnist:

Querying Author's Wish List

Querying

Synopsis of Within the Box / Querying has Begun!

The Comparable Titles Game

A Gender Blogger and Author Takes Stock

A Lit Agent Considers My Book — LIVE!

The Art of the Coming Out Story: Seeking the Sweet Point

Update on My Get-Book-Published Endeavors

Querying Again

A New Request for a Full

My Favorite Rejection Letters

The Other Shoe Drops

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