North of Autumn | Query

After all my talk of querying, I thought some readers might be interested to see an example of a query I just recently submitted. If you’re an aspiring author and also sending out queries, don’t take my examples as models of success. So far I have an unblemished record of rejection. That said, if the query makes you want to read the book, then that’s probably the best measure of its success or failure.

I continue to hone my query, but the latest strategy is to personalize the first paragraph (because I do try to research what interests an agent) and then lightly edit the following paragraphs based on the agent.

Query

Dear [Agent], 

You listed among your favorite subgenres magical realism, relationships, upmarket women’s fiction and contemporary. North of Autumn touches on all those subgenres. You also mentioned The House in the Cerulean Sea. Klune’s novel is, in a sense, a feel good novel, and it’s in that spirit that I wrote North of Autumn. I consider it my Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I don’t write that lightly. The novel is not just a story but an ebullient walk through storytelling craft and the written language, poetic, Aesopian, Joycean and descriptively lush.

Zoē is a name that must be spelled correctly. The 16 year old girl to whom the name belongs is precise, lonely, obsessive compulsive and sees the magic and spiritual in the world’s hidden corners. Her adoptive Uncle Sean is an engineer, who sees none of it, and has one goal in mind—to drive them from Maine to Michigan, where he hopes to start a new business. Sean only has to get through Vermont, repair the house that he almost destroys, give up his budding love with Fiona (the owner of the house) and persuade a reluctant Zoē and their 1960 El Camino. This is a novel that’s full of magic in a real world setting, namely Vermont.  It offers poetry, original fables, a field where one sits next to ones soul, and an Odyssean journey through a Vermont country store with its own Cyclops, witch and underworld where Zoē briefly glimpses her recently deceased mother. The novel asks what our real goals should be, where to find them and how falling in love can seem like both an obstacle and an opportunity—something misplaced and something found. 

I’ve been writing my entire life. Up until now, that’s been primarily poetry. I have a Master’s Degree in Children’s Literature and a blog that’s had over four million visits since its inception. I’m read around the world. My first novel, Tiny House, Big Mountain is under contract with an independent publisher. Murder Most Monstrous is my third novel in two years, and I’ve already started my fourth, Writer Writer, and hope to finish that by year’s end. I’ve retired from Vermont carpentry to finally write full time and to write the poems, short stories, fables and novels I’ve always wanted to write.

The Pitch is something some agents ask authors to write as part of the query. The ‘Pitch’, as I understand it, is essentially what you might find on the back matter of a book. In other words, it’s what you read when you turn the book around and read the back cover. The Back Matter is meant to entice you . A useful site I visited broke down the Pitch this way: The first sentence states how the story begins. The second sentence conveys the main story’s concept, and the final sentence is the hook or plot twist. Often, it captures the principle choice or dilemma that will confront the main character. Even while pasting it here, I edited it and continue (I think) to improve it. It’s a snapshot in time.

Pitch

After spreading the ashes of Zoē’s grandmother and Sean’s mother, Sean sets off from Maine to Michigan to start a new life and business, his niece in tow. Zoē wants to drive through Vermont, to see the Green Mountains, and Sean reluctantly agrees. Once in Vermont, everything conspires against him, seeming to prevent him from leaving, the 1960 El Camino that keeps breaking down, Zoē’s increasing skepticism of his plans, and most of all the burgeoning love between himself and Fiona, the woman whose house he nearly ruins. It’s for the 16 year old Zoē—precise, lonely, obsessive compulsive and able to perceive the magical and spiritual in the world’s hidden corners—to recognize the bonds that tie her to her Uncle; and how her choices have influenced him even before her own birth.

I won’t post the synopsis. That’s just one big spoiler. Agents also frequently request that the author describe their “potential target audience” and what other novels ones book compares to. This request always trips me up because I didn’t write my novels to be like other books. The best that can be said is that I wrote books that fit in a given genre, like other books. I’ve seen agents interviewed and questioned about this, and they defend the question by saying they want to know if the author has “done their homework”. Have author’s read other books in the genre in which they’re writing? Obviously, if an author is going to write science fiction, then they should be familiar with the genre; but at some point (to draw an analogy) the chef needs to get into the kitchen and cook. My job is to write, not read somebody else’s writing. And to be completely honest, I sometimes don’t want to read books by authors writing in the same genre because I don’t want to be influenced or dissuaded by their ideas. It’s a double-edged sword. A contemporary author can be inspiring but also disruptive.

Similar Books

Bantam Discover Books has been publishing a series of books by Sarah Addison Allen: Garden Spells, The Sugar Queen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon, Lost Lake, First Frost and Other Birds. The Keeper of Happy Endings by Barbara David, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.

Potential Target Audience

Fans of Magical Realism, of which there is an ever increasing number, who are eager for books that are less like fantasy-lite, but more firmly grounded in the real world with the magical and the spiritual lapping at the fringes of our perception. Readers of The House in the Cerulean Sea, Piranesi, The Keeper of Happy Endings, or Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen. With so many recent books, Magical Realism is developing into a wonderful genre of its own and “North of Autumn” would make a beautiful addition to these wonderful and unusual stories.

And that’s that. I continue to submit queries and to refine them as I go along. And at the rate I’m going, I might run out of agents before I perfect my queries.

up in Vermont | May 27 2024

This and that…

The Diminishing wage of Authors and Traditional vs. Self-publishing

Having finished North of Autumn, my second novel, I’ve begun another round of submissions to agents. I chose three this time, one of whom is in Berlin and who I’m hoping will actually want to read the novel. But the waiting game begins again. Based on submitting my first novel, about half of agents simply don’t respond if they’re not interested. So be it. Since I only have so long to live, however, I’ll be giving agents 4 weeks to respond, then move one.

On the other hand, I go back and forth as concerns traditional publishing. There’s very little money in traditional publishing for the vast majority of novelists. Don’t even ask about poetry. Agents are largely allergic to contemporary poetry (and for good reason). I was reviewing some other websites so I could write a minimally informed post, and stumbled across some interesting percentages. The most striking was a site claiming that 97% of writers don’t finish their novels. No source was given for this figure and so it may be click bait. I’m not even sure how such a figure would be calculated, so be skeptical. Less skeptically, another site offers some interesting figures on the percentage of authors who earn a living wage. The site reported that “63 percent of authors who reported receiving book-related income in 2017, the average total income was $43,247“. Alternatively, of course, that means that 37% of authors received no income at all. If I were to earn the average, that would be a step down from what I could make as a builder but a hell of a triumph given what I’ve made by writing so far. The site also notes that “three-sevenths of full-time authors with any earnings were making over $50,000″—the proviso being “full time”. If one is earning enough to be a full time writer, then it stands to reason that one is making something like $50,000 or more.

If you’re a writer like me, with ambitions to be published, there’s an interesting article at the Atlantic you might enjoy—entitled “Now Do Amazon“. The author, Franklin Foer, begins the article by stating a fact I did not know:

~ One of the great literary hoaxes of our time is the book spine. A staggering number of logos stare out from dust jackets, celebrating names including Crown, Vintage, Ballantine, Knopf, and Dial. But the pluralism implied by this diversity of monikers is a sham. In the U.S., nearly 100 of them belong to a single company: Penguin Random House. The rest are owned by a small handful of competitors, one of which is Simon & Schuster.

Foer’s main concern, however, aren’t the mergers and acquisitions (blocked by the Justice Department) that have largely turned publishing into a monopoly (to the detriment of authorial income) but Amazon, which he rightly labels a monopsony.

~ Amazon is arguably the ultimate embodiment of monopsony power. It has, in the past, used its dominance to demand a large cut of publishers’ sales, according to industry insiders. And companies such as PRH have had little choice but to accept—or become bigger, so that they can bargain harder. Amazon’s pressure on publishers has sometimes come out of authors’ pockets in the form of reduced advances.

In other words, not only is Amazon making its billions by squeezing publishers (who are/were themselves hardly saints) but is greatly contributing to the long-term decline in authorial income.

Meanwhile, the website Reedsy argues, in an article entitled “How Much Do Authors Make? The Truth about Money in Publishing“, that Indie Authors (authors who self-publish) fare much better than traditionally published authors—all else being equal. They write:

~ …many more self-published authors make a living than traditionally published authors, with self-publishing royalty earnings outpacing trad pub’s advance plus subsequent royalties. This was proven by several years of Author Earnings reports — most notably, one study that divided authors into groups earning more than $10k, $25k, $50k, and $100k. The study found that the number of indie authors earning 5-6 figures/year from book sales was much higher than the number of Big 5 authors earning the same.

This is almost solely, from what I can tell, because of the difference in royalty. While a self-published author won’t get an advance, they can expect to earn 50% to 70% on each book sold while the average royalty for the traditionally published author is 7.5%, and that doesn’t include any agent’s cut.

And so I’m torn, and it’s not necessarily about the money. I probably have another 25 to 30 years to live, so what does a million dollars mean to me? A traditional publisher can market and promote my book and get it on shelves. I don’t have that skillset. On the other hand, a traditional publisher could also sit on the book and decline to market or promote it. That happens. Then all I’m left with, best and worst case, is a small advance and a book that will never see a readership. In that case, I would have been better off self-publishing. Even a small readership is better than none, and with a greater share of the royalty, I would still be apt to come out ahead.

If I’m disappointed by the results of shopping both my books this winter, then I am definitely open to self-publishing and/or looking for an Indie publishing.

Literary Revelations Publishing House

Speaking of Indie Publishers, I recently submitted a Shakespearean sonnet to Literary Revelations Publishing House. I haven’t submitted any of my poetry anywhere for years, not since founding this blog, but, you know, if I’m going to stop being a hermit… Their home page states that they are “an independent publishing house dedicated to showcasing the best literary and art work. We publish poetry, short stories, interviews, art, and novels.” Their website is really quite professional. My sonnet was in answer to their call for poems on the theme of childhood: “Hidden in Childhood: A Poetry Anthology – Call for Submissions“. If you have written poems on childhood, or have one to write, then consider submitting something and supporting your local, Indie publisher.

Chaucer was not a Rapist

Unfortunately, this article, entitled “Chaucer the Rapist? Newly Discovered Documents Suggest Not” is behind a paywall, but the gist is this: “A court document discovered in 1873 suggested that around 1380, Chaucer had been charged with raping Cecily Chaumpaigne, the daughter of a London baker. In the document, Chaumpaigne released Chaucer from ‘all manner of actions related to my raptus’— a word commonly translated as rape or abduction.” Apparently, two scholars discovered a second copy of the document in which the word “raptus” had either been removed or omitted as a result of Chaucer possibly having hired a new lawyer. The suspicion, that this was Chaucer whitewashing, led the scholars to the original writ of the case (previously unknown). It turns out that Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne were both the defendants and were being sued by a Thomas Staundon who accused Chaucer of poaching Cecily from Staundon’s service. In that case, the scholars argue, raptus refers to ““the physical act of Chaumpaigne leaving Staundon’s service.” So, Staundon was not suing Chaucer for raping Cecily Chaumpaigne but suing both of them—she for leaving his service and Chaucer for poaching her. According to the article, this discovery landed like a bomb. Needless to say, there is considerable resistance from scholars, especially among feminist critics, who have produced criticism predicated on Chaucer’s having raped Chaumpaigne. That’s a tough spot for them, but it’s daily life for any scientist. One day you’re working on your unified field theory and the next some new scientific discovery invalidates the entirety of your corpus. I personally am just as happy to see Chaucer’s good name restored. Judging an artist by their art is fraught with self-deception, but the kind of man who could write Chaucer’s stories, with their humor and wisdom, doesn’t mesh with a man accused of rape.

The first Poet & Writer

There’s a lovely article in the New Yorker about the Priestess Enheduanna. I first ran across her poetry about a decade ago and fell in love with it. It’s truly powerful and beautiful verse. The article is entitled “The Struggle to Unearth the World’s First Author“. The article primarily addresses the strange reluctance of scholarship to acknowledge and celebrate Enheduanna’s primacy or that she even existed—emphasis on ‘she’. The author, Elizabeth Winkler, writes:

~ But since their discovery, in the mid-twentieth century, scholars have fiercely debated Enheduanna’s authorship. Did the priestess really write these works? Is the idea of a woman at the beginning of the written tradition—two thousand years before the golden age of Greece—too good to be true? This winter, an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia,” will try to give the priestess her due.

Winkler later in the article elaborates on the apparently male-centric biases that have resisted Enheduanna’s identity not just as a writer/poet but as a female:

~ Of particular note is a statue of a woman with a tablet in her lap—evidence of women’s literacy and engagement with writing. (When it was first discovered, in the early twentieth century, the German scholar Otto Weber reported, “Our specimen carries a tablet on her knees. Its meaning is not clear to me.”) The statue and others like it have been ignored in the academic literature, Babcock told me. “If this was a man with a tablet in his lap, there would be twenty articles about it.” Such artifacts upend long-held assumptions—about literacy as the preserve of élite male scribes, and about Middle Eastern women as being confined to the domestic sphere.

What I didn’t realize, until reading the article, is just how much of her writing has survived (which is astonishing given how many thousands of years ago she wrote) and the extent to which her writing was kept alive by later generations, even to 500 years after her death. My own opinion is that when reading the poetry of Enheduanna we read the work of a literary genius—the Shakespeare of her age. To think that her voice could survive for thousands of years! It bespeaks a woman, star-gazer and poet who, in her suffering, was capable of communicating our common humanity with a language, symbol, metaphor and archetype that still holds meaning thousands of years later.

And that’s all for today, November 23rd, 2022.

Taste of Sorrow | Audio

Since I made the audio for Ellie’s hymn, I thought I might record the hymn before.

Taste of Sorrow from North of Autumn

North of Autumn | Ellie’s Hymn

I thought that “the final hymn” would be the last hymn I would write for North of Autumn, but it wasn’t five minutes after I posted the hymn that the current poem began to write itself out of my imagination. I call it Ellie’s Hymn because Ellie is Zoē’s deceased mother and the author of the hymns that appear in the book. These are the final words of the book and are as much a farewell to the reader.

I know better than to say:
  Give no thought to when.
There’s nothing to wish the ache away
  But that we’ll meet again.

Give to the intervening hours
  As much as absence takes
But nothing more—our love is ours;
  And the bonds affection makes.

To you alone the keys
  Who, friend and lover, part;
To you the secret codices
  And chambers of my heart.

Ellie's Hymn from North of Autumn

North of Autumn | The final hymn…

Sorry I’ve been away. Between trying to lace up all the jobs delayed over the summer and finishing the novel, North of Autumn, I haven’t felt much like taking the time to write a post. This last hymn in the novel took me quite a bit longer to write than the others. And maybe not longer, but I never felt myself in the right creative space. There is no S-Bahn or U-Bahn to ride in middle Vermont. I can’t explain it, but European public transportation really makes me a happy and productive poet. The good news is that I’m within pages of finishing my second novel. I’m winding down my carpentry now and will be spending still more time writing. I’m already planning my next poems and am eager to start my next novel.

I’ve seen them sometimes out alone,
  Out walking roads too late
For any business but their own—
  Lost to what they contemplate.

I’ve seen as they have seen: the grim,
  The few remaining rags
Of autumn strung from the black limb,
  How every hour lags.

I too, without a place to go
  And nothing to my name,
Have wandered through the rain and snow
  And would have said the same:

There’s only guessing at what may
  Or may not come tomorrow,
But I have seen enough today
  To know the taste of sorrow.

    by me, 
    October 29th 2022