The business of writing

I attended the Chicago North RWA Spring Fling Conference this weekend, and over the next day or two will post other bits and pieces of what I learned, particularly from a couple of seminars I went to. But first, I want to make a couple of general comments.

(It was an awesome conference, by the way. I really have no idea how they managed to do everything they did on what was really a fairly low amount of money.)



I actually had an appointment to pitch to an agent at this conference, but changed my mind, and here's why:

I follow a number of professional blogs, one of which is literary agent Kristin Nelson's:

http://pubrants.blogspot.com/

Kristin was going to be at the conference so I was particularly interested in her recent post about writing conferences. One of the things she said she dislikes the most is appointments with writers who are pitching an unfinished manuscript.

At one point, I'd hoped to have a first draft of my novel completed before the conference, but it hasn't quite worked out that way. I'm still in the process of figuring out what I'm doing, and when I hit a blank wall (or three) in March, at the same time my other life got busy, I wilted. I continued working on the novel in various ways, but it became clearer and clearer that it wasn't going to be finished in any sense by the conference.

So Kristin's post concerned me. Essentially, it came down to this: she gets lots of queries for finished manuscripts. Finished, supposedly polished manuscripts. Manuscripts that are theoretically ready to sell. Lots and lots of those kinds of queries. Sorting through those, responding, asking for (then reading and evaluating partials and fulls) takes more time than she has. So a query (whether emailed or pitched at a conference) for something which might or might not ever materialize into a salable novel is, from her perspective, a waste of time. It's particularly bad at conferences, when she sits there wondering if there are other people at the conference with finished manuscripts she's missing out on the opportunity to talk to.

She's not rude about it, but her standard response to such pitches is always, always, 'once you finish it, send me a query letter.'

I did some research, and discovered other agents saying similar things on their blogs. I posted a question to the conference email loop asking how many others were planning on pitching an incomplete manuscript, and started an intense discussion between published authors who quietly reported that their agents, too, prefer to not have unfinished work pitched to them, and a few unpublished writers who insisted it's their right to pitch and the agents should be willing to help them learn by letting them 'practice' pitching on them. Er...

In the end, I canceled my pitch appointment. Writing is a business, and I think a very good question to be asking is, 'what's the most professional way of approaching this?' In most other businesses, you wouldn't regularly try to sell an unfinished product. It's that simple.

The general consensus on the list is that if you're going to have a novel finished and completely polished within six weeks of the conference, it's fine to pitch it. But any longer than that, most agents aren't going to ask to see even a partial, and you're better off waiting and sending a query letter.

There are stories of agents being so impressed by an idea, or an outline of a novel, that they take it on immediately, even when it's not written. But I suspect those stories are few and far between, and I'd rather wait until I have a finished product than risk someone associating my name with 'wasted my time.'

In the meanwhile, I got to meet an editor and the agent I would have been pitching for. Neither asked for the particulars of my novel, but it's still a contact, and one I'm quite willing to follow up on when the book is finished.

I also attended Kristin's workshop on query letters, and now feel fairly confident that when the time comes, I can write a query letter which will get the right kind of attention from her and her staff. Plus, I can say not only that I follow her blog, but that I've attended her workshop -- both ways of personalizing the letter and demonstrating that I've taken the time to study her company and what she represents.

And I won't have to worry that she associates my name -- with its unusual spelling -- with someone who wasted her time.