I Don't Get It!

[Paul Whybrow]

There are various things about the book world that I don't understand:

1) Are literary agents editors? The terms are often used interchangeably. I know that agents do editing, but is this at small agencies who don't employ a dedicated editor? What do editorial assistants do?

2) As debut writers, we're advised to stick to established word counts. Crime novels at 80,000-90,000 words are typically 300-350 pages long, depending on page and print size.

Yet, some first novels are immense! House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, is 709 pages long, some 200,000 words and is filled with second and third appendices, coloured words, and vertical footnotes. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clark, is 1,024 pages long with a word count of 317,440! Jonathan Frantzen's debut novel The Twenty-Seventh City came in at 544 pages and 168,640 words.

Were their debuts so wordy because they'd already ingratiated themselves in the publishing world through writing short stories, articles for literary journals and reviews? It appears to be part of the etiquette of a book being deemed 'literary' that it's at least 400 pages long.

3) Book covers that have designs that are nothing to do with the plot drive me nuts! Initially, I naively thought that the artist would have read the book, or at least been given an accurate synopsis of the plot, including key details such as the protagonist's appearance, make of vehicle and the location of the story. But, apparently, they don't get even that to work on, and instead the designs are targetted at eliciting an emotional response from the reader—forget accuracy!

It's bad enough that designs are often cobbled together from several bought-in stock images, but some of them amount to flagrant false advertising—as bad as processed food packaging. One of the worst examples of the 250 novels I read this year, was A Promise to Kill, by Erik Storey, whose cover shows a man watching a 4×4 approaching along what looks like a dusty mountain trail. There weren't any such vehicles in the plot, which took place largely in the desert, and the protagonist wasn't dressed like the figure—which looks like it was lifted from a catalogue for raincoats!

But then, the cover is adorned with two endorsements by heavy hitters in the crime genre, Lee Child and Jeffery Deaver, who both appear to have a sideline in providing book blurb, so perhaps the design is irrelevant. While I'm being bitchy, the story was riddled with errors about guns and vehicles, so maybe the cover is appropriate after all.

These are three of my pet peeves.

What bothers you about the book world?

 

[Amber]

House of Leaves is experimental fiction and if I remember correctly, started out as random bits and pieces until it was all eventually compiled. I will look it up. We'll call this an interactive post. Here we go:

Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth—musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies—the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.
Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.

The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.​

I honestly don't know if this is the book blurb or the true story of the book. At any rate, I'd call it metafiction -- fiction that is aware of itself -- rather than any sort of genre or traditional fiction and so the normal rules wouldn't apply. I have the book but have to admit I haven't read it.

I'm going to look up the distressing book. The US has a different cover. https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=a+promise+to+kill

The book is 288 pages. Are you wondering why it's so short? 288 pages is close to 80k. I really think our attention span as a society is growing shorter and shorter. I don't find the word count unusual or even a drawback. Also, it looks like this isn't a regular sized paperback which means there maybe be as many as 20 more words per page which would add roughly 5k more to the word count.

I'm not 100% sure but I think authors give out book blurbs as favors or in exchange for something. I've never thought much of them.

But a cover where the book doesn't deliver on its promise, that would piss me off. The US cover sort of looks sci-fi like. But now I see it's more of a desert motif. The other cover has a lone man with his hands in his pockets. The story is supposed to be about a drifter. He has a nice jacket for a drifter but drifter doesn't mean homeless. Is the book not about what the blurb says it's about?

 

[Rich.]

Hi Paul, you seem to be putting yourself through the wringer a bit of late. I feel for you, buddy, I really do. It's a tough old business, it really is.

There are various things about the book world that I don't understand:

1) Are literary agents editors? The terms are often used interchangeably. I know that agents do editing, but is this at small agencies who don't employ a dedicated editor? What do editorial assistants do?

Literary agents are not editors in the sense of the job title, but they are editors in the sense of the activity. In general, once you sign with a literary agent, you will go through a round of editing with the agent before the agent starts pitching to publishers (this round of edits will almost certainly include a structural edit, a line edit and a copy edit). The purpose of this is to maximise the agent's chance of selling the book (they know what the publishers are after and how to shape your book to that end – that's one of the things you are paying them for, right?). Once your book is as saleable as it can be, your agent will start pitching. Once your book is purchased by a publisher, another round of edits will ensue with the publisher's editor (or one of their editors if it's a big publisher). This editor is an editor by title as well as activity. An editorial assistant is someone who works with an editor at a publishing house, assisting them with, primarily, administrative and procedural tasks.

The above is generally true at all levels of the business (at least in the UK – I can't speak for anywhere else).

2) As debut writers, we're advised to stick to established word counts. Crime novels at 80,000-90,000 words are typically 300-350 pages long, depending on page and print size.

Yet, some first novels are immense! ...

The immense ones are very much the exception to the rule. For every 1000-page debut, there are thousands – let me say that again, THOUSANDS – of overlong novels that fall by the wayside.

Were their debuts so wordy because they'd already ingratiated themselves in the publishing world through writing short stories, articles for literary journals and reviews?

In general, no. In general, their debuts were so lengthy because they were spot on for their markets at the moment they were sold – the opinions of agents, editors and acquisition departments all aligned in ignoring standard practice, a rare thing indeed.

3) Book covers that have designs that are nothing to do with the plot drive me nuts! Initially, I naively thought that the artist would have read the book, or at least been given an accurate synopsis of the plot, including key details such as the protagonist's appearance, make of vehicle and the location of the story. But, apparently, they don't get even that to work on, and instead the designs are targetted at eliciting an emotional response from the reader—forget accuracy!

This one I don't know, and I'll refrain from guessing.


And finally...

What bothers you about the book world?

That I'm not yet published in it.

But then, I reckon that's because I haven't yet written a good enough book*.


[*good in the sense of that nebulous balance of personal standards, literary quality and commercial appropriateness]

 

[Carol Rose]

@Rich nailed it @Paul Whybrow, and I agree with him you do seem very down on yourself lately. ((HUGS)) I wish I had the magic words to make you forget about Angela What's Her Name, because that book really seemed to set you off.

I get it. I really do. I felt the same way about Fifty Shades of Shite ... excuse me ... Grey when I finally got around to reading the trilogy so I could make an informed decision about the hype and the controversies. Really couldn't believe what I was reading, or that it had been published by one of the Big Five, and made the author a gazillionnaire. Utter crap. But there you have it.

BUT she struck the right chord, at the right time, in the right place. It happens. Look at all the negative comments about Harry Potter, and yet they sold like crazy and still do. I read them all, more than once, and loved them. Are they the best-written books ever? No. Of course not. But they draw you in and make you care about the characters. That is the goal of genre fiction, right there. That's the golden ticket. You do that, and you have yourself a winner.

Okay so HOW do you do it? Hell if I know. You just do. You read like crazy. Everything. All the stuff you don't like, even. The stuff that's selling well. You pick it apart. You study it. How does she do this? How does he do that? You get feedback on your own work. And yeah, sorry, but you absolutely, positively CANNOT hope to succeed at this without an objective look at your work BEFORE you start sending it out there. It's a crucial step I watch most unpublished authors fail at. It's a crucial step I failed at many moons ago.

The covers? Meh. Whatever. Authors don't get much say-so on them. Even with a small digital press like Evernight. I love their cover artist and she usually nails it, but Evernight has a brand just like all publishers, and they are going to choose a cover that stays within that brand. That look, if you will. Whether it makes sense for the book or not is hit and miss. Read the blurb. That's going to tell you what the book is about. Read the sample on Amazon. Read the excerpt. Forget the cover.

Word count? Forget what you've been taught and stick to submission guidelines on the publishers' websites. If you need a ballpark, look at all of them and choose an average. It is possible general word counts for certain genres have been lowered because people are busy and don't like to relax with a long book anymore. A shame, but that's the world we live in. I've been told to stick to lower word counts for what I write. Readers like to blow through a book in less than an hour. *SIGH*