This isn’t a rule so much as it is a person pet peeve of mine:
If you’re submitting a proposal to a publishing house that accepts unsolicited proposals, please do not call the company two days later and ask why you haven’t heard about a decision yet. You’re not the only aspiring writer out there.
Odd, I spoke to one of these non-existent people at a writing conference a few years back. There are plenty of agents for sf, I suspect they’d be easy to find. An agent I heard speak a month ago had a good suggestion - find an author whose work is similar to yours, (in the same ballpark), look for an acknowledgement of the agent, and use that as a lead.
He also started his column nearly 30 years ago. The market has changed since then.
One of my interests is classic children’s books and I read somewhere that it was fairly common for men who were writing “girls books” to obscure their gender or even use a female pseudonym. It’s seems that Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars is an exception to this as it is was published with the author as “Robert” Heinlein, but it looks like he published short stories in Calling All Girls magazine as “R. A. Heinlein”. Podkayne might be an exception to the “girls books” rule because it’s SF and thus arguably has an immediate and palpable cultural relevance for those of the male gender even if the protagonist is a girl.
Personally, I don’t agree with the gender division in literature marketing but it’s a reality of publishing.
I just had to jump in to give a “+1” for McManus. Best read when you shouldn’t be laughing out loud. You will fail, though.
He became famous for reading an essay on the radio. I’m not sure that really breaks the rule: he needed a way to get “known” before anyone would publish his essays.
Everyone understood what was meant by “rules” in the OP.
Some unwritten rules:
The art of a book cover is dictated by its genre. Readers do just books by their covers, and art is chosen to match what’s currently used in the genre. Thus, for instance, “chick lit” has a cartoony drawing and title and author in a cursive font. Science fiction and fantasy are always representational (never abstract nor a photo). Literary fiction, OTOH, is often abstract, or goes with a photograph.
Books have a shelf life of about a month.
If your previous book sold poorly, chain bookstores will order fewer copies of your new book, which depresses sales, and then they’ll order fewer of your next until you’re squeezed out.
An unknown author is more likely to get into bookstores than one going through that downward spiral. Sometimes, authors choose a pen name to get ahead of the game (e.g., Robin Hobb).
I would consider the market for humorous memoirs told mostly in episodic form (which is basically what Rakoff and Sedaris write (or wrote, in Rakoff’s sense)) fairly close to the being in the same category and there have been a few good ones that many may not have read: “Foreskin’s Lament” by Shalom Auslander and “The Bill from my Father” by Bernard Cooper. Both interesting, well-written, and humorous books in the same mold.
Except for Angela’s Ashes, of course.
Well…you did. I’d say most people reading this did. But I’ve been amazed at how many people genuinely believe that the publishing industry sets arbitrary, esoteric rules just to stop aspiring writers from getting a foot in the door. Out of all the people reading, it’s pretty much a dead cert that at least a few believe that, and would take the mention of ‘publishing rules’ to reinforce that preconception (especially in connection with the OP’s reference to how ‘every person’ who tries to get published gets a response about how these rules disqualify then). So it was worth clarifying.
He became “well known” by appearing on the radio. He became “famous” after publishing a few books and continuing to appear on the radio.
That’s silly. They’re synonyms.
But here’s a write up describing his popularity on the radio that was published in the New York Times when his first collection of essays was still a year in the future. He was famous (or well known) before his first essays touched the shelves, and only got offers from publishers after his radio bit.
Ian Frazier gets along OK. The only person with two Thurber Awards.
Traditional publishers are typically unwilling to take a lot of risk, since it’s their money riding on the outcome. They want something they feel is a “sure thing” in terms of sales, which means there’s a lot of off-the-beaten-path stuff they won’t even consider, because the audience is likely to be a smaller niche audience, rather than broad-appeal mainstream best-seller type.
If you’re having trouble getting the trad publishers interested, what about starting your own publishing house? It’s dead easy to put ebooks out on the online marketplace, and Amazon’s CreateSpace makes it easy to make print books too. The only catch is you’ll have to do all the marketing yourself, which will involve some research into best practices for making your stuff discoverable. On the upside, your royalties will be at a much higher percentage of each sale than you could ever hope for with a trad publisher… on the order of 30% (in a few marketplaces) to 70% (most marketplaces) vs. 10-15% for traditional publishing.
Getting discovered and selling books through self-publishing isn’t easy, but neither is getting the interest of a traditional publishing house.