It was one year ago, yesterday, that the (still) most famous of literary agent bloggers decided to hang up her stilettos and retire, ending a three-year run of advice, rebuke, clarification and consternation. (Granted, in the first year she only made a couple of posts, but the last two years were much more fruitful.)

At the time, I posted a farewell message, which had the distinction of being one of the last outgoing links on her blog, before the lights went out and the dynamically-generated archives were cached for the last time. The sentiments I expressed are still true.

Patricia Wood’s blog yesterday hosted a virtual get-together of old Snarklings, which was virtually attended by Miss Snark herself, in the comments.

While the “Snarkives” are still of immeasurable value, both to unpublished writers looking to understand the submission process, and to social researchers looking for a corpus of whiny protestations from hapless rubes convinced that the process will magically alter itself to accommodate them, Miss Snark’s voluminous advice can essentially be reduced to two simple principles:

• Follow the damn directions
• Don’t be a nitwit

It was the general inability of the unpublished writers of the world to understand and apply these principles that drove most of the content on Miss Snark’s blog, and ultimately led to its abrupt conclusion.

With the glorious advantage of hindsight, it’s clear that Miss Snark fell victim to what should be known as Blogger’s Ennui — the tipping point where the demands of maintaining a blog outweigh the pleasure of it. In Miss Snark’s case, though, she was essentially a victim of her audience, and the narrowness of her topic. There are only so many issues relating to queries and submissions that can be discussed in general terms, and as her audience grew, so did the number of nitwits (a proportional constant in any population) — who would ask either the same questions again, demonstrating their inability to grasp the simple concept of search, or ask essentially the same questions frustratingly modulated from the original by some absurdly trivial point of contention.

It takes a lot to crush the spirit of someone who purposefully armors themselves with sarcasm, but the hapless rubes managed it. I imagine that by the end, her gmail account must have become a slushpile in itself, yet another accumulation of inane and unremarkable queries to sift through looking for a question worth answering — for no pay, no commission, no hope of reward other than the dwindling, and eventually non-existent fun of it.

It’s fitting (though entirely coincidental) that the anniversary of her blog’s closure falls in International Slushpile Awareness Month. If the divine Miss S had managed to hang on until the comforting catharsis of International Slushpile Bonfire Day (May 31st), she might still be blogging.

Are they trying to augment or overhaul the existing book distribution system? Are they trying to find audiences for the nearly 300,000 books published every year? Are they trying to prepare for the nearly inevitable collapse of Borders Books and Music chain by constructing alternatives to the ever-decreasing number of Frumpy Fiftysomething’s Used Books and Quiet Desperation Emporium franchises? (And has anyone noticed that the same people who bitch up a storm about how terrible it is that the big chain bookstores have driven Frumpy Fiftysomething’s to near-extinction are the same ones who’d set fire to a bus full of paraplegic nuns for the opportunity to have their books carried by those same chain stores?) Could they be focusing how bookselling is a business and not a workfare program for otherwise unemployable English and journalism majors, and that small publishers and bookstores alike might want to stop waiting for angel investors to swoop in and save them from their fiscal and promotional incompetence?

Naah. The real concern is that Amazon.com won’t allow POD publishers print their books through any printer other than Booksurge. And since PublishAmerica and other such vaunted and highly respected publishers of high-quality reading material want to maximize their return by printing the books bought by these writers by the long ton for “promotional purposes,” it’s not in the vanity publishers’ interests to give Amazon their business. Oh, woe, the whole of the publishing world is about to collapse!

To take a quote from one of the champions of the POD industry and put it very slightly out of context, “Authors slap books up on Amazon.com all the time, don’t market them, and sell zero copies.” Yet somehow they look surprised when someone at Amazon decided to take the POD money sink (in server space, in moderation of comment boards, and responding to the paranoiacs who are certain that Amazon is keeping their works of genius from bestseller status) and find the only way to turn it into a source of revenue, however small. A word to the wise: if your book sells so poorly that the lack of a “Buy” button on an Amazon.com page makes that much of an impact upon your sales, you might want to consider your place in the publishing food chain and stop writing.

– Paul Riddell has advocated stopping writing for the last six years, and tries his best to practice what he preaches. This is why his blog is shutting down in June.

– Paul Riddell once stole from Mike Royko in stating that Tor publisher Tom Doherty “has the habit of smiling as if he just evicted a widow.” He doesn’t think Tommy’s going to be doing much smiling in the next few months.

In the two years that Miss Snark has been pseudonymously writing about the life of a literary agent, the public perception of agents and the publishing industry has been irrevocably changed. Sure, there were blogs by publishing professionals before, and will be after, but her contribution is difficult to overestimate.

Gone is the illusion of agents as stuffy guardians of literary elitism, and the contradictory illusion of talent-blind failed writers conspiring to undermine creativity. We now know that agents are human, have educated and informed but necessarily subjective tastes, genuinely love reading, have a job to do that goes well beyond reading unsolicited submissions and only so many hours in the day, and have a virtually bottomless well of patience and respect for writers and their sensitivities. (The good ones, at least.)

Miss Snark’s blog set a high standard for what could be achieved with a (free and ad-free) blog about publishing. From amusing rants on publishing in general, and nitwit slushdwellers in particular, the blog grew to become a major destination for writers looking for advice on seeking representation, and demystifying the publishing process. Many stayed, forming an impromptu community in the comments section of each post, where her advice was argued, clarified, expanded upon and sometimes refuted. Successful writers, industry professionals and passionate readers mingled with hacks, ne’er-do-wells, nitwits and wannabes, mostly with the shared goal of making publishing seem less daunting, confusing and capricious.

But it was her combination of humour (from the sublime to the cynical), deep understanding of how publishing really works, unpolished tell-it-like-it-is bluntness, sheer frequency of updates, and astonishing dedication to providing opportunities for unpublished writers to learn from their and other’s mistakes that kept us readers coming back.

In her pithy posts, a dose of publishing reality became our drug of addiction, and the writing blogosphere is waking up today to some heavy withdrawals.

Thankfully Miss Snark’s blog will remain, so if you still have a question for her, search the Snarkives.

And please remember to always FOLLOW THE DAMN DIRECTIONS.

I love Miss Snark. You probably love Miss Snark, unless you’re a nitwit. Time to show her a little of that love.

Here are some web badges I’ve whipped up so you can let Miss Snark know that you miss her, without seeming like an email stalker. Feel free to use them on your blog. You can copy and paste the code below each image into a post, or your blog template.

<a href=”http://misssnark.blogspot.com”><img src=”http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/6506/ilovemisssnarkjj5.png” width=”80″ height=”15″ alt=”I Love Miss Snark!” border=”0″ /></a>

<a href=”http://misssnark.blogspot.com”><img src=”http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/3562/ilovemisssnark2nj0.png” width=”80″ height=”15″ alt=”I Love Miss Snark!” border=”0″ /></a>

<a href=”http://misssnark.blogspot.com”><img src=”http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/791/ilovekilleryappop4.png” width=”80″ height=”15″ alt=”I Love Killer Yapp!” border=”0″ /></a>

Please Note:

• The link goes directly to Miss Snark, so this isn’t some sneaky exercise in linkbait. If you want, you can link to this post so other bloggers can get the code.
• If you use one of these image, please leave a link to your blog in the comments, so you’ll get a little linklove from me.
• If you’d like to contribute an image, email me and I’ll add it to this page.

Images are hosted by ImageShack.us.

The “slushpile” is a necessary evil in the publishing industry. Depending on your role, it may be more necessary than evil. To misquote Winston Churchill, “it may be the worst form of [submission process], except all those others that have been tried from time to time.”

Agents, editors and other slush readers regularly claim that the thrill of finding that one quality submission makes up for the slog through thousands of sub-literate cookie-cutter knockoffs, in the same way that telemarketers claim that the one person who says “why yes, I am interested in changing my long-distance carrier” makes up for the thousands of hangups, death threats and “why don’t you get a real job, you cold-calling motherfscker”. But you know if it really was that exciting, they’d read through it faster.

Writers, of course, hate the slushpile, but at the same time they hope to float to the top of it. They want the slushpile to work (for them), mostly because they’re too lazy to self-publish, and they just want to win the Next Big Thing lottery. But they hate the whole submission process, because it forces them to accept that people cannot see between the words on the page to what they “really meant”.

The problem with the slushpile isn’t the capriciousness of editors, the sadism of agents or the philistinism of slush readers — it’s the incapacity of the bottom 99% to realise that they are nowhere near the top 0.1%.

I’m calling for a Slushpile Armistice, an end to the partisan bitterness which prevents people on both sides from properly accepting blame for their part in the slow downfall of publishing.

Here’s what you can do.

Writers

1. Remember, and repeat as necessary: The slushpile is not the enemy. You are. What’s keeping you in the slushpile is your inability to detect the flaws in your execution.
2. Stop submitting. At least, give your work the redraft you know it needs.
3. Go through the list of agents and editors you routinely submit to, and delete the ones that don’t take the genre you write.
4. Read and follow the submission guidelines.
5. Just stop submitting.

Agents/Editors/Slush Readers

1. Before you open the next query or submission, take a moment to reflect that this represents the hopes and dreams of another human being. Perhaps this is their first submission, and there’s an actual piece of their soul embedded in the words. Perhaps they’ve been down this road enough times to have their own postal worker, and they’re only one “Not right for us” away from seeing if the nearest emergency room takes unsolicited submissions. Whoever they are, they’re somewhere on the continuum between youthful naïveté and paranoiac despair, and no matter how carefully you word your response, it’s going to push them a little further toward the latter.
   Fsck ‘em. Your listing in Writer’s Market might say “accepts unsolicited submissions”, but that wasn’t meant as an invitation to shred a Harry Potter hardcover and randomly glue the pieces together. You shouldn’t have to waste time putting a form rejection into an SASE to let the same writer know for the fourth time that your company publishes peer-reviewed psychology articles and has no plans to expand into young adult SF erotica. You shouldn’t have to deal with the health implications of submissions written in human blood, not always belonging to the writer.
2. Blog frequently about the downside of working the slushpile. Maybe some of them will take the fscking hint.
3. Work with your peers to develop a form rejection letter completely bereft of emotion or subtext. I’m sure you know a few writers who could help.
4. Insist on a signed disclaimer, available on your website, indicating the writer has read and adhered to the submission guidelines. Change the date on it every month.
5. Stop publishing the mediocre junk that makes each new generation of bad writers think they have a shot

Our target this year: to reduce the average slushpile by 25%. Let’s put aside our differences and fight the good fight, people.

One of the many marvels of the Internet is the sharing of anecdotes about the actions of persons so clueless, so utterly bereft of the commodity we call common sense, that you begin to wonder if Rod Serling (before or perhaps by his death) somehow distorted the basic principles of television signal distribution and turned the world itself into one unending Twilight Zone episode; one in which you are both audience and main character, slowly realizing that the world you thought you knew has so thoroughly ceased to exist that you suspect your life up to that point has been a dream.

In the midst of your Serlingian journey, comes a man for whom the normal rules of writing, submission and physics seem not to apply. A man so confident in his principles that the rules can, nay should, be broken, that he shakes you to the core of your beliefs. Is he a prophet of the end times, heralding the last days of the tyranny of qualitative judgement, or a messiah come to teach us the New Path to Publication, or is he, in fact, a nutbag?

Such a man is the author of Space Ark.

With a few exceptions, I have avoided specific criticism of individual writers on 101 Reasons. If I say that so-and-so’s writing sucks so much it seems like he originally wrote in German and translated to English via German-Spanish, Spanish-French and French-English phrasebooks, that’s just subjective opinion; but if I say that he will almost certainly never see a document printed on Random House letterhead with the word “yes” on it, that’s statistics. It’s also because I fear if I take the time to actually read more than a couple of paragraphs, my critical faculties may be permanently damaged, like a colour timer in a film lab who must frequently look at pure red, green and blue lights to avoid developing colour blindness from processing raw footage of American Pie: The Revenge (I’m told that agents must keep a reference copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and Fowler’s Modern English Usage for the same reason). Not to mention that time spent reading crappy fiction, for review or personal displeasure, is time not spent dissuading writers of crappy fiction. 

Please allow me a brief exception for Space Ark, just to say this: In a four-paragraph excerpt, just over 550 words (no dialogue, just backstory), there are nine exclamation points. Nine. After that, do I need to mention the telepathic dolphins?

Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother with this, because there’s only so much you can achieve by shouting into the Grand Canyon. But this guy isn’t content with spending fifteen years writing one bad novel, then years marketing it via a terrible website. He’s found a remarkable, if not entirely new, way to submit his book for representation.

Miss Snark, bless her, reprints his query email in full. (I suspect that Lit Agent X received the same query.)

Unlike Space Ark, his query may have lasting value — as an educational tool for prospective writers (who refuse to take all my other advice). If and when a Master’s Degree in Publishing Science is presented by a major university, one student is going to write a thesis just on this query. With the exception of managing to write in mostly coherent English, everything he does in this query is so spectacularly bad that if you divided the blunders individually over a hundred otherwise pitch-perfect queries, they would all be rejected without reaching the Maybe pile. From the opening address “To whom it may concern” to the gargantuan stupidity of insisting agents pay for a self-published copy of the book, this is a handbook on how not to get considered.

This is required reading if you’re stuck in the query loop. If you don’t see the problems, or find that you’re employing one of these techniques, you might as well just stop writing. If you can’t understand how your query comes across to an agent, what makes you think you can write character?

(Thanks Heather for the link.)

Caught just in time: OneMinuteBookReviews is hosting the first annual Delete Key Awards, which honour “the worst writing in hardcover or paperback books published in the past year”. The awards are compiled by author, journalist and reviewer Janice Harayda. For more info, read the Delete Key Awards FAQ, so you don’t have to ask me.

This should be televised, with the finalists and winners forced to read aloud passages selected by the judge(s), and any future royalties surrendered to fund literacy programs.

The awards are (apparently) presented in two categories, Novels/Memoir and How-To [Update: categories for convenience only, not separate awards]. The finalists, and honourable mentions, are listed below. Links go to their nominations:

Novels/Memoir:

• For One More Day by Mitch Albom (Hyperion)
• The Handmaid and the Carpenter by Elizabeth Berg (Random House)
• Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris (Delacorte)
• The Confession by James McGreevey with David France (HarperCollins/Regan)
• The Interruption of Everything by Terry McMillan (Signet)
• The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud (Knopf)
• Toxic Bachelors by Danielle Steel (Dell)

Honourable Mention: Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier

How-To:

• The Book Club Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to the Reading Group Experience by Diana Loevy (Berkley)
• Love Smart: Find the One You Want – Fix the One You Got by Dr. Phil McGraw (Free Press)
• The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World With Kindness by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval

Honourable Mention: Your Management Sucks: Why You Have to Declare War on Yourself and Your Business, by Mark Stevens

Update — winners announced, Miss America style: Second Runner-Up, First Runner-Up (who will take the crown if the winner cannot fulfill its duties), and the Winner is …

Did you pick it? Who was robbed? What should the statue look like? Can you believe a single human read all these books without buying a ticket to Happy Town on the Prozac Express?

And I always answer them, Not at all and Never.

Making backups or copies of your writing is a complete waste of time, and resources. It’s also arrogant, but I’ll get to that.

Back in the old days, when PCs were the size of your grandma’s suitcase, and a laptop was something the secretaries in the office gave you when you showed them how to “connect the printer”, backing up meant sitting in front of the computer for hours with hundreds of floppy disks, swapping them through the drive one by one, waiting for the disk with the read/write error that would wreck the whole backup process, often crashing the 10MB hard drive you were trying to back up. Like your college roommate’s ideas on sexual experimentation, “backing up to floppy” was something you only tried once. Unfortunately, hard drives at that time were made from recycled Ford Pintos, and crashed like a drunken teenager trying to drift in mom’s minivan. So from time to time you lost data, and quietly put the blame on middle management trying to mirror the New York Stock Exchange in VisiCalc.

Nowadays, an entire industry serves the needs of the redundancy-obsessed, proving that you can back up your data, but you can’t restore your cash. Let’s look at some of these options:

• External drives and network storage can store hundreds of gigabytes of data, and can back up your hard drive automatically. Why on earth would you want to back up your entire drive? Part of the karma of the occasional drive crash is the opportunity to reformat and start again, without all the dinky little evaluation software you have cluttering up the program menu. You know you’ll end up using it to make “backups” of rented NetFlix DVDs. These drives cost hundreds of dollars, money that could be spent on writer’s conferences, and take up valuable desk space, reducing the number of writing how-to books you have on hand.
• USB thumbdrives and memory cards are just another thing to lose, which is why you end up leaving them plugged in all the time. Sure, you can keep them on a keyring, just like you can get NERD tattooed across your knuckles. Plus their capacity is limited, forcing you to think about what to copy, and how often. Anything that small that isn’t made by Apple just isn’t cool. Do you really want to trust your super-precious backup data to something you can buy for $19.95?
• CD and DVD burners, standard equipment in computers since around 2000, are just factories for drink coasters. You burn a disc, write the date and the word “backup” on it, leave it in a drawer for a year, then one extra guest shows up for your Superbowl party. Apparently beer, salsa and urine can really degrade the optical properties of the outer layers.
• And don’t get me started on paper. They kill trees to make paper. Then they trawl the ocean floor for baby octopi, playing the audiobook edition of Nicole Ritchie’s autobiography on massive underwater speakers until they release their ink – that’s why printer cartridges cost more than the printer. You then fill your basement or garage with reams of undated, unfinished drafts that will only ever be read by the most gullible of your next of kin.

Backup software is another way the computer industry tries to reach into your wallet, while telling you it’s a handjob you’ll thank them for later. A program that routinely makes copies of updated files, storing them on a separate drive, allowing you to easily restore everything in the event of failure? I suppose you need MS Word to capitalize the first letter of each sentence for you, too. If you can’t occasionally open a directory program, select My Documents, hit Ctrl+A and drag to another drive folder, chances are you’re not doing much editing on that first draft either.

Which brings me to my next point. There are only two reasons you make backups:

• You’re so paranoid, you think your computer is out to get you — waiting for that perfect moment, when you think you’ve written something genuinely extraordinary, before blue-screening and taking out the last few thousands words that you thought you’d saved; or
• You think everything you write is worth keeping — even the half-baked ideas, the false starts, the early drafts when the main character was an amoeba, the repository of edited passages you couldn’t just delete because you’re convinced there’s still a little shinola amongst the shit. It’s as if you think your talent is a big jigsaw puzzle, where all the pieces will eventually fit if you write enough of them.

Forget backups, I say. If your work was any good at all, it would already be backed up, in a library.

Sometimes, as in the case of this guy, a total hard drive failure is just the catalyst you need to take a brave new step forward with your writing. Either that, or the perfect opportunity not only to stop writing, but to pretend you never did.

Rejecter, literary agent’s assistant, slushpile marauder and 101 Reasons interviewee, told an aspiring POD author to stop writing.

Not “slow down”, not “revise and resubmit”, not “not for us”. Stop writing.

‘Twas a beautiful thing, to see those words together on the blog of a publishing professional.

Hopefully this is not an anomaly, not simply the frayed nerves of someone pushed a POD too far. I see this as a new backlash, a trend towards blunt honesty, the emergence of the Stop Writing movement.

(The admonition came as a result of a POD author appearing in the comments of another post, exhorting that traditional publishing was an “old nag” and that in the new world order, “there’s going to be no pre-press filters, only post-publishing, so get used to it”, and then posted a link to his PDF, which in this case stand for “Pile of Dog Faeces”. Rejecter, and many other commenters, examined the finished product minutely, and pronounced it shit. Not shitty, but just plain shit, incomprehensibly awful navel-gazing prose poetry. Said author proceeded to chew through seventeen flavours of huffy, while comparing himself to Joyce, TS Eliot and e.e. cummings. Sound familiar?)

“Sexuality is all too often the territory of the sentimentalist or the pornographer, too seldom that of the visionary.”

The closest the publishing industry comes to formally acknowledging the existence of crappy novels is the annual “Bad Sex in Fiction” award, given by Literary Review each year. It’s mission:

to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.

Many highly regarded literary wankers have been nominated for this award. Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Theroux were nominated just last year. Tom Wolfe won in 2004, and got huffy and declined to accept it.

This year, the early money was on Tim Willocks (“fast-engorging privities” and “the folds of her matrix”) and Thomas Pynchon, the only nominee to have appeared in the Simpsons (I can’t in good conscience quote from the Pynch’s bestial love scene). The Sun has more extracts, and an obligatory picture of a woman in lingerie acting disinterested while a man with fast-engorging privities seeks the folds of her matrix.

However it was the “bulging trousers” of first-time writer, Iain Hollingshead, that won the day. Squeezing the victory for all possible publicity value, Hollingshead wrote an article about how fscking proud of himself he is, while blaming his awfulness on England. He says:

Writing about sex is rather more technical, and less fun, than doing it. Either you descend into flowery metaphor or you indulge in the “naming of parts”.

The sentimentalist or the pornographer, indeed. Hollingshead is incapable of doing either well, because in his winning extract he does it both ways.

Clearly, the pop-culture amusement of the award has overshadowed the seriousness of its mission, to the point where it’s become cool to win it.

They really need a “Your Book Is Utter Shit” award, with the prize being the immediate cancellation of the book and a ten-year ban on future publication of any work. Then, we all win.