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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I’m still seeking advance readers for Within the Box to give me feedback. The story 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.