How to Sell Your Novel, Part 1: Finding an Agent

Since my first novel was released last month, a lot of friends have asked me how it’s done. When you see a book in the bookstore and then think about the manuscript sitting on your hard drive, the road between the two can seem rather vague.

So how does a book go from sock drawer to bookstore? Here’s the Cliffnotes version:

• Author queries agents.
• Author signs contract with agent whose job is to market and sell manuscripts to publishers, and agent submits manuscript to editors at publishing houses.
• Publisher purchases rights to manuscript, and agent negotiates the contract.
• Publisher then edits, prints and distributes book.

I’ll write periodically in this column with more “From Sock Drawer to Bookstores” writing advice. This week, I’ll focus on getting an agent. Getting an agent is the first step toward publication. Publishers really don’t accept “unsolicited manuscripts,” which simply means those submitted directly by authors. (Full disclosure: my journey from sock drawer to bookshelf actually breaks many of these rules, but we’ll get to that at the end.) Agents work for authors, who are their clients, to sell their work to publishers. But before you can send your cover letter to agents to entice them with your story (a process called “querying”), you have to find out which agents would be best for you.

I owe pretty much everything I know about writing and publishing to my mom, author Libby Malin Sternberg, who in addition to being the writer of many highly entertaining novels also keeps a blog about her observations on writing, publishing, and life in general here.

First: Finding your agent…

Three Spine-Tingling Reads… For Adults Only

I asked my Twitter followers for their favorite childhood Halloween memories and all of them were the essence of innocent pleasure: mushing pumpkin pulp between their fingers, swapping candy with siblings, and my favorite contribution: “My dad came home with the original light sabers the first year they were out as a surprise.”

Tim Burton understands the childhood attraction to the macabre. He made a kid's musical about a corpse.

As little children, we believed in vampires, werewolves and ghosts. As adolescents, we pretended to believe. As adults, we grasp at the memories of how it felt to believe. And one of the most characteristic delights of childhood Halloween is the glee at being terrified by the unreal, and believing in ghosts.

I remember the years when I slept every night with the sheets pulled tight around my neck because of a Goosebumps book I’d read about vampires; but now the nighttime fear that haunts me most is of leaving the front door unlocked. These days I’m a sad Sherlock Holmes, discovering that behind every mystery are the same old human vices.

Maybe that’s why, as an adult, I reach for bone-chilling literature when I want to recapture that childhood feeling. In a uniquely adult way, the best horror writers pry open the neat machinery of the grown-up brain and activate the squirming illogical fears inside. We might not be able to believe in ghosts anymore, but we can believe in fiction. Dracula, Frankenstein, and the works of Edgar Allan Poe are old friends in this season, but below are a few fine works of horror that are less well-known. Each inspires a thrill of terror that opens like a chasm to the bottom of our most universal and mysterious fears.

Next: A Bone-Chilling Tale from an Unlikely Spookster…

Every Week Is Banned Books Week in Iran

Earlier this month, readers, writers and publishers commemorated the fight against censorship by using the #BannedBooksWeek hashtag on Twitter, part of the American Library Association’s 2011 Banned Books Week. By searching that tag, tweeters can find a list of readers’ favorite banned books, and links to homilies on banned books by The New York Review of Books and the Huffington Post.

Most of their ire is focused on the small-minded librarians and teachers who have tried to ban books in America, or on the travesties of an epoch of censorship that has passed in this country. Love of the principle of free speech makes Americans especially tenacious warriors against censorship. Censorship has been thwarted over and over again in America because America’s free speech protections ensure that those who object to the banning of books can make their voices heard.

However, in places controlled by radical Islamic regimes, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, books are banned and people living under the regimes have little or no power to object. Banned Books Week coincided with the convening of the UN General Assembly. Here’s a look at some of the books banned by the governments whose leaders gathered there:

Next: Who Banned Edward Said? It’s Not Who You Think It Is.

Literary B-Sides: Five of the Most Under-Rated Books from Famous Authors

“School ruined Catcher in the Rye for me.”

We’ve all heard it. You can replace the title with any other seminal book that’s been assigned in high school or college. Did you think you’d like Jane Eyre more if you hadn’t been required to write a monograph on “Birds as semiotic systems of delineating boundaries by transgression and submission”? Or that you might have enjoyed A Passage to India if it hadn’t been your rude introduction to the five-paragraph essay? Maybe you would have got more out of Moby Dick if it weren’t for that smelly kid next to you who kept raising his hand every frickin’ time the teacher asked a question.

I don't want to read that.

I’ve conducted my own experiments on whether school ruins books. (As a side note, there is a faction that contends that books ruin school.) My experiment took the form of never doing my homework in high school. After finishing (and mildly enjoying) Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, only to discover that my thoughts and observations on the book meant little in how I was graded, I resolved never to read another book assigned during advanced English class. Instead, I would just memorize what the teacher wanted us to write about the books in our five-paragraph essays, and I would regurgitate my way to the top. It worked, at least superficially – I passed the class with flying colors, and I think the teacher is still a little afraid of me. It wasn’t until I read Jane Eyre as a young adult that I realized I may have passed the class, but I hadn’t won anything.

Soon I started rediscovering the books I had skipped in high school, in all their beautiful complexity, grittiness, fervor, and enchantment. Perhaps skipping these books in high school saved them for me; perhaps my period of rebellion is what I needed to grow through to appreciate them fully.

Sometimes it takes a new perspective on an author to rehabilitate their famous works for a reader. “B-sides” by famous authors are more than hidden treasures that can prolong your enjoyment of that person’s writing; they are keys that can unlock their more famous works. I was missing something in my required-reading days. It wasn’t the books I was missing. It was the piece of me that could read and love those books. Some of these b-sides planted the seed for that part to grow. Keep reading to learn more about the five best literary b-sides to rehabilitate literature for any English class survivor.

First: Gay Dudes Are What It Took to Make Me Love Literature