Writers in the Storm

 Chuck Sambuchino

The time has come. Your novel or memoir or book proposal is now complete. Not only is it complete, you’ve revised it several times and incorporated the critical ideas of peers and editors to make it better. You’ve developed a list of agents to target and researched each one.

You’re ready. It’s time to start the submission process and send out your work. But before you formally e-mail your book out to agents and editors, go down this checklist of dos and don’ts to make sure you’ve giving yourself and your submission the best chance possible.

 (This article excerpted from Chuck's forthcoming book, GET AN AGENT (December 2014).

Submission Tip Checklist

1. Be formal. Although you’ll be sending most queries electronically and there is a tendency to be less formal over e-mail, address the agent as you would in a paper letter. Remember that elements like sarcasm and self-deprecating humor do not necessarily come across well in unsolicited correspondence.
2. Personalize your query to each agent or market. (No mass submissions to multiple people at the same time.) Make sure that you have the agent’s name spelled correctly. If their name is “Sam Johnson” and you are not positive of their gender, use neither “Mr. Johnson” nor “Mrs. Johnson,” but rather just address them using “Dear Sam Johnson.”
3. Double-check the agency or publisher guidelines to make sure you’re submitting the correct materials to the correct contact. This, obviously, is a huge point—so take your time with it.
4. Make the e-mail’s subject line specific if the market requests it. If not, simply writing “Query: (TITLE)” is a safe bet. If you’re sending your e-mail to a specific agent at an agency, but the agency only provides a generic e-mail address (e.g., query@xyzagency.com), then use the subject line “Query for (Agent Name): (TITLE).”
5. Keep your emotions in check: Submission e-mails should be professional and businesslike, so resist the temptation to say something off-putting like “Although you inexplicably did not respond to my last query, I am trying you again with a new project and hope you will at least get back to me on this one.”
6. Do not say “I welcome your feedback or comments on my work/pitch.” It’s not an agent’s job to critique the work for you, and they will see such a comment as a red flag.
7. Don’t type in all caps or all lowercase. Use proper punctuation and pay attention to grammar and spelling always. (You can write your book’s title in all caps in the query letter, but not anything else.)
8. Double check the mailing address or e-mail inbox you’re sending to. One wrong letter in an e-mail address is enough for your query to be lost in cyberspace forever.
9. Respect the importance of the query. A good query will open doors, so make sure others have seen and critiqued your letter before you send it out to dozens of markets. The same goes for your synopsis or nonfiction book proposal. Don’t go into battle with questionable weapons.
10. If querying by e-mail, make sure all your font and type size is the same. Since you will be cutting and pasting into e-mail, different sentences can appear different sizes. Send yourself or a friend a test e-mail to check for such an issue.
11. Make no demands. Anything that seems like a demand (“Respond to my letter within three weeks to respect my time”) is a major turn-off.
12. Act with humility when talking about yourself. No matter your current accomplishments, and no matter how much you think your novel is the best thing since “Breaking Bad,” you need to simply discuss the story. Even if your writing history is impressive, be sure to state your accomplishments quickly and humbly.
13. Unless you have a serious health concern that prevents you from using a computer, submit your own book yourself. In other words, don’t have a friend or relative submit your book for you. This kind of communication gets confusing and the agent may not know whom to address in correspondence. Plus, it can give an agent pause to wonder why the writer is not confident enough to submit his or her own work.
14. If you do use snail mail, don’t try to set yourself apart by using fancy stationery. Standard letterhead and envelopes are preferable. Don’t include any extraneous materials that were not requested.
15. Do a final check to make sure the agent (or market) in question is still open to submissions. For example, if an agent suddenly closed herself off to unsolicited queries this morning, she will usually say so on Twitter first, and also make a note of it on her official agency website. Those two online locations are good places to visit right before you hit “Send” to double-check that communication lines are still open.
16. And after you do send off the work, ensure that you noted the e-mail on your submissions spreadsheet, so you can effectively keep track of each agent you’ve submitted to and when.

 

(Hi, everyone. Chuck here chiming in for a second. I wanted to say I am now taking clients as a freelance editor. So if your query or manuscript needs some love, please check out my editing services. Thanks!)

If you missed Chuck's last post, Classifying Your Book: How to Research & Target Literary Agents, you can click here to read it.

Do you have a fun story to share about querying? Something a bit less than fun? A question about queries? a Seventeenth Tip?

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About Chuck

   Chuck Sambuchino of Writer’s Digest Books edits theGUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS and theCHILDREN’S     WRITER’S & ILLUSTRATOR’S MARKET. His Guide to Literary Agents Blog is one of the largest blogs in   publishing.

His 2010 humor book, HOW TO SURVIVE A GARDEN GNOME ATTACK, was optioned by Sony Pictures.   Chuck has also written the writing guidesFORMATTING & SUBMITTING YOUR MANUSCRIPT and CREATE YOUR WRITER PLATFORM.

Besides that, he is a freelance book & query editor, husband, sleep-deprived new father, and owner of a flabby-yet-lovable dog named Graham.

Find Chuck on Twitter and on Facebook.

 

 

Piper Bayard

We don't often discuss thrillers and spies here at Writers In The Storm because none of us has any experience writing them. We jumped at the chance to have Piper Bayard visit us. If you've ever been to the Bayard & Holmes blog, you'll know that she's well qualified to write on the topic.

James Bond vs. "The Spook"
by Piper Bayard

You could say I work with Bond. James Bond. The real one. But that wouldn’t be quite right. I work with a spook.

Please don’t ask me how a small town author/belly dancer/recovering attorney grew up to be the writing partner of a seasoned covert operative, because that is a story I can never tell. But I can tell you this . . . It’s nothing like fiction.

His name is Holmes. Jay Holmes. And unlike James Bond, that’s not his real name. That’s because when covert operatives reveal their identities – even decades after they are out of deep cover – people can die. Assets and loved ones alike can become targets.

So when a celebrity author shows up in an “I’m a Spook” T-shirt flaunting a “covert” career, it’s a dead giveaway that though she may have done some great and necessary work with an intelligence agency, she has never been a covert operative in the field. Covert operatives must forever keep a Chinese wall around their true identities.

So what’s this real covert spook writing partner of mine like? First off, Holmes and his ilk are “spooks,” not spies. As Holmes says, “Spying is seamy. It’s what the Russians do.”

Spooks refer to each other lightheartedly as “spooks.” That’s also what military personnel call them when military and intelligence operations overlap. For example, if an intelligence team is working in a secured area of a ship, the crew refers to them as “the spooks.”

There is no official Dictionary of Spook Terminology, but the proper terms for spooks are “intelligence operatives” and “intelligence agents.” By habit, “operative” is used by CIA personnel when they are talking among themselves or reviewing an operation, and “agent” refers to someone – usually a foreigner – who is collecting information in a foreign country. Intelligence personnel are the “operatives” who are managing the foreign “agents."

Comparing "James Bond" with a Real-Life Spook:

All of those wild car chases that happen in books and movies? Sure, they happen now and then in real life. Holmes has personally driven down the Spanish Steps and gone the wrong way up a narrow one-way street to get his man. But what you almost never see in fiction is that spooks wear seatbelts. Religiously. “Because you can’t finish the mission if you’re dead.”

There are also many things fictional spooks do that real spooks never do—or at least few live to tell if they do. How many times in fiction does a spook duck into a doorway and peek out of it to spy on someone he’s following? That’s a good way to get dead in real life.

One of the first things spooks must learn about following people is to not be followed themselves. It’s common for bad guys to have their own people tailing them to pick up any newcomers, so spooks can’t only focus on who’s in front of them. They have to be acutely aware of who is behind them, too.

That means that if a spook wants to watch someone from a doorway, she has to take her eyes off the target, go all the way inside a building, and only turn around once she’s out of sight of the street. Then she can come back out and stop in the doorway under some other pretense than watching someone. It also gives her the chance to handle the bad guy’s trailing entourage.

Another thing fiction almost invariably gets wrong is the spook’s relationship to room service. How many times has Bond ordered room service? And how has that worked out for him? You’d think he would have learned after Rosa Klebb’s stunt in From Russia with Love that this is a seriously bad idea. Even the spooks in the otherwise realistic movie Act of Valor ordered take out and paid the price.

This isn’t only because of the opportunity for an enemy to poison them, it’s also because it’s generally bad juju for spooks to invite strangers into their space when they are on a mission. In fact, Holmes won’t even have a pizza delivered to his home. The only food he actually enjoys is his own, his wife’s, or mine if it includes chocolate, and only then if he is eating at home or at the home of a trusted friend.

So back to my original question – what’s this real life spook like?

Unlike fiction, Holmes is incredibly mundane. While he has an incredibly charming boyish smile, he doesn’t look a thing like James Bond, Jason Bourne, or Jack Reacher. In fact, real spooks come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and abilities.

When they aren’t on a job, they might be working as Wal-Mart managers, secretaries, teachers, insurance salesmen, or corporate CEOs. And their days at home can look like anyone else’s, filled with gardening, grocery shopping, cleaning, and following behind their children turning off lights.

Holmes would say that spooks are ordinary people with a bit more than average commitment and dedication to their work.

Notice I said that Holmes would say that. He strongly objects to the notion that he and other covert operatives are special in any way.

However, speaking as a small town author/belly dancer/recovering attorney with a home in “normalville” and a window into the shadow world, I would suggest that from most people’s perspective, there is one thing fiction definitely gets right.

These folks are anything but ordinary.

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Do you ever write about spies? Who is your favorite spy in film or in fiction? Are there any questions you'd like to ask Bayard or Holmes about "spycraft?"

 

About Piper

Piper Bayard is an author and a recovering attorney with a college degree or two. She’s also a belly dancer from way back and a former hospice volunteer. She is currently the managing editor of Social In Worldwide, Inc., and she pens post-apocalyptic science fiction and spy thrillers. Her dystopian thriller, FIRELANDS, is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

Her spy thriller writing partner, Jay Holmes, is a veteran of field intelligence with experience spanning from the Cold War to the present Global War on Terror. He is still an anonymous senior member of the intelligence community and unwilling to admit to much more than that. Piper is the public face of their partnership.

To follow Bayard & Holmes, sign up for the Bayard & Holmes Newsletter, or find them at their site, Bayard & Holmes. You may contact with them in blog comments at their site, on Twitter at @piperbayard, on Facebook at Bayard & Holmes, or by email at BH@bayardandholmes.com.

by Susan Squires

The road to writing a successful romance always leads through good sexual tension. It doesn’t matter whether your characters are having actual sex every other scene, or indulge in nothing more than a chaste kiss during the course of the story. In romance, sexual tension is the name of the game. But in many books I’ve been reading recently, the sexual tension has seemed a little flat, so I’ve been doing some thinking about what makes good sexual tension. I think there are about six secrets.

1. Pulling your characters together sexually can start with physical attraction.

Remember the movie The Ugly Truth? It’s a guilty pleasure of mine. Gerard Butler’s character, a crass male talk show host, says, “ThighMaster, ladies. He can’t fall in love with your personality from across the room.” Fair enough. Physical characteristics attract. But how? Through the effect those physical characteristics have on your hero’s or heroine’s imagination and their psyche. So noticing physical details about each other is very important. It’s also a great way to get in a description of your characters, by the way.

The very act of paying very close attention is in itself a way to display sexual tension, especially if your character notices things about the object of their attentions that others might not see.

2. The physical traits characters notice about each other must be particular.

Just having your heroine think, “That’s the most handsome man I’ve ever met,” is not very effective at evoking sexual tension. Why? Because it’s a generic statement. When the heroine notices something particular, your tension is much more effective.

You know the concept of describing your setting with “telling detail?”

That means choosing details that will serve your story or your characters. The same thing is true of what your character notices about the object of attention. I happen to be partial to strong forearms and the vulnerable nape of the neck, but you’ll have your own favorites.

If the detail can tell you something about the character being described or the character doing the describing, so much the better. “Sure, his eyes were a gorgeous blue, but their expression was guarded somehow,” or “but a sadness lurked there that spoke of tragedy in his life.” Not great prose, but you get the idea.

Don’t: use clichés to describe your object of sexual attention. If I see one more description of a hero’s cheekbones or nose as anything related to a “blade,” I swear I will scream. Ditto for the heroine’s blond hair likened to any kind of a coin (especially in historicals.)

Don’t: describe your hero (or your heroine) by relating him (or her) to a current movie star. Using pictures to inspire you is fine. They stand still so you can think about how to describe that particular set of mouth or shape of eyes. But don’t name names or make the description too recognizable. Your movie star is going to get older or fall out of fashion. What if he turns out to be an alcoholic, or dumps America’s Sweetheart, or has a meltdown on Jimmy Kimmel Live? You want your book to be timeless.

3. Concentrate on the effects of physical attraction.

Never tell the reader the character is “hot.” Remember all that stuff about showing being more effective than telling. Plus, it’s a generic not a particular observation. Instead, show that a guy or girl is hot by the reactions of the observer of the “hotness.” Both physical and mental reactions include, flushing, feeling faint, sensations in parts of your body, an inability to speak, a stutter, or talking obsessively. Characters who are sexually attracted either 1) make up excuses to touch each other in casual interaction or 2) wouldn’t touch the other person on a bet because they’re afraid they might lose control. Either way, small intimacies, or the opportunity for same that aren’t taken, are ideal opportunities to show sexual tension.

The level of sensuality in your novel will dictate what the characters notice about each other. In a sweet romance, the heroine probably wouldn’t notice the bulge in the hero’s jeans and wonder how big he was in that department. If she did notice a “growing attraction” on the hero’s part, her mental reaction would be embarrassment, not, “Bring that on, honey.” In an erotic romance, however, all is fair. Your sexual tension details must fit the situation.

4. It doesn’t end with physical attraction.

I’ve seen a lot of “he has a cute butt,” in romances recently. That’s okay as far as it goes (though a bit of a cliché at this point). But there had better be more than physical attraction fast. Would we really want to spend time with a heroine who only thought about cute butts? Would we feel that such a relationship had much of a chance long term? What would happen when the heroine notices an even cuter butt?

Fortunately, people are also powerfully attracted by things they have in common, differences that fascinate, observations about the other’s character traits, interest in their history, etc. This is what shows us the characters are right for each other, even if they don’t think so. And these are the long-term attractors, the ones that make us believe they can stay together as a couple. Showing these things about your characters, not in an info dump or by telling us about them, but by constructing your scenes and incidents to show them, is a great way to create a force pulling the characters together mentally and emotionally. (Though please, no more hero saving a puppy scenes. See above, screaming.)

5. Pull them apart.

Tension means opposing forces pulling in opposite directions. So you have no tension if there aren’t things that pull your characters apart sexually as well as pull them together. Sexual tension is part of a dance, as readers watch the characters twirl together, twirl apart, coming ever closer until the relationship is resolved. Many books I’ve read recently start with characters that are very attracted to each other for reasons the reader doesn’t really understand. The ending seems inevitable and any barriers artificial.

So, carefully construct reasons why the characters won’t get together immediately. (If this is an erotic romance, they may actually have sex right away, but they still need something to pull them apart or the story is over, the tension released.)

Know their sexual and relationship histories—it’s often useful for pulling characters apart. Are there social pressures acting as barriers? What fears and internal resistors make getting together difficult? What internal dialogue are the characters having with themselves about their attraction? Why is this absolutely the wrong character, the wrong time, or the wrong circumstance for sexual attraction? Denial of a feeling can be as important a confirmation as giving in to it. Restraint, hard won, carries a lot of sexual tension. And it all happens in the character’s head.

6. Point of view is key.

If sexual tension happens in your head, then voice and maintaining a specific POV are essential. Obviously, your hero and your heroine have a very different slant on what’s happening, if for no other reason than that they are male and female. Getting that right can make your hero sound like a real guy, not a girl in drag. (Hint: he might not go on about his feelings at length and in great detail.) But the character’s individualized values, experience, fears, vulnerabilities and the walls they’ve built to make them seem invincible, all contribute in a very particular way to how they approach the opposite sex. By making that approach individual, you make your sexual tension feel real, compelling.

I think my favorite scenes in any romance are the “getting to know you” scenes: the surprises, the excitement, but also the reluctance and dismay. Like many readers, they’re the reason I want to take the journey over and over again. You want them to seem natural, like what would happen with real people. The way to do that takes some planning, and getting inside their head. But don’t worry, you can keep layering in more sexual tension in each draft. It’s worth the time and effort. Now, can you imagine how this might be applied to actual sex scenes?

Oh, yeah.

What are some of your 'go to' tricks to increase sexual tension?

About Susan

Susan Squires is New York Times bestselling author known for breaking the rules of romance writing. She has won multiple contests for published novels and reviewer’s choice awards. Publisher’s Weekly named Body Electric one of the most influential mass market books of 2003 and One with the Shadows, the fifth in her vampire Companion Series, a Best book of 2007.

Susan's latest book, a novella called Your Magic Touch (part of the Children of Merlin series), released last month. All of her books are available at Amazon and other booksellers.

Susan has a Masters in English literature from UCLA and once toiled as an executive for a Fortune 500 company. Now she lives at the beach in Southern California with her husband, Harry, a writer of supernatural thrillers, and three very active Belgian Sheepdogs, who like to help by putting their chins on the keyboarddddddddddddddddd.

 The lucky winner of Margie Lawson's online class is:  Ingrid Fletcher!