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Unsolicited: In Defense Of Big Dumb Deals
I think we can all agree, stupid people are everywhere. Even in publishing. Especially in publishing! And nothing makes putative authors' blood boil more than hearing about a six-figure deal based on a gimmick, a movie, a (god forbid) blog, or something else that doesn't smack of years and years workshop-attending, literary-magazine courting, and MFA-garnering. What are these publishers thinking, doling out (comparatively) measly advances to mid-career writers who've spent years honing their craft and then shelling out the big bucks to whatever corporation is putting together BoratSecret? More »
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Bad bosses. They're everywhere. Even in publishing. Especially in
publishing! Publishing serfs might be safe from the likes of Judith
Regan for the time being (Jewish lawyers, not so much), but there are
plenty of other crazies and scaries out there. Trust me, I'm a hoary old publishing troll, and I've worked for all of them. (Side note to the slow to catch on: I'm not Emily. She hasn't written this column since she started at Gawker; how would she have time?) Anyway, bad bosses. Here are the basic types: More »
Unsolicited: You're Not The Boss of Me Now
Bad bosses. They're everywhere. Even in publishing. Especially inpublishing! Publishing serfs might be safe from the likes of Judith
Regan for the time being (Jewish lawyers, not so much), but there are
plenty of other crazies and scaries out there. Trust me, I'm a hoary old publishing troll, and I've worked for all of them. (Side note to the slow to catch on: I'm not Emily. She hasn't written this column since she started at Gawker; how would she have time?) Anyway, bad bosses. Here are the basic types: More »
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At some publishing office Xmas bashes, they serve chili from crockpots in the conference room. At others, they serve caviar at the Four Seasons. But no matter how posh or pedestrian the surroundings, there's one constant in this geekiest of industries: everyone becomes a fucking teenager once they get a little booze in them. The question, though, is what kind of high school style role will everyone fall into?
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Unsolicited: Everything I Needed To Know About Office Parties, I Learned In High School
At some publishing office Xmas bashes, they serve chili from crockpots in the conference room. At others, they serve caviar at the Four Seasons. But no matter how posh or pedestrian the surroundings, there's one constant in this geekiest of industries: everyone becomes a fucking teenager once they get a little booze in them. The question, though, is what kind of high school style role will everyone fall into?
More »
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Unsolicited: What Color Is Your Xanax? More Flavors of Author Crazy
Here at Unsolicited, we're all about the gross generalizations. Stereotypes are fun! (And, you know, usually pretty much true). Besides, no one reads this column anymore. Doesn't matter what I write. Blah, blah, blah. Editors are dumb! Authors are lazy drunks! Anywho, for the two people (hi guys) who care, here are some character assassinations of authors based on book genre: More »
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Unsolicited: Why We Can't Be Friends
Ok, authors, I admit it — the editor/author relationship is a weird one. I mean, there is something inherently . . . intimate about working together closely on a book, especially when it's a novel or a memoir. In a way, it seems natural for us to be pals. Maybe we even have some things in common! I mean, we both sure like words. But there's a thin but absolutely necessary line between professional and personal. And the thing is, editors and their authors should pretty much NEVER be Real Friends.More »
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I know that assistants are the underdogs who are often asked to perform ridiculous task after ridiculous task, work with master manipulators and certifiable sociopaths, and I totally feel for those of you who do all this while maintaining a sense of humor and a lick of sense. Sadly, those assistants are in the minority. And I should know — I've burned few through — see, that's why I need an assistant! — quite a few of them during the course of my career. Hey young'uns: read on to find out who you shouldn't be if you actually, for some reason, want to forge a future in this crazy business.
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Unsolicited: So Hard To Find Good Editorial Assisting Help These Days
I know that assistants are the underdogs who are often asked to perform ridiculous task after ridiculous task, work with master manipulators and certifiable sociopaths, and I totally feel for those of you who do all this while maintaining a sense of humor and a lick of sense. Sadly, those assistants are in the minority. And I should know — I've burned
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When I was a wide-eyed assistant, I used to hear editors mention submissions that scouts were "buzzing about" or were "high on." And I would think to myself: what the hell is a scout? They seemed to be everywhere and nowhere all at once, like some kind of magical gossip elves. And who, exactly, did they work for? A scout would call my boss after our editorial meetings and within moments, I'd be covertly messengering over some proposal or manuscript to said scout's offices, making extra certain that it could not be traced back to my boss. (Who said publishing isn't exciting?!)
Now that I'm an old publishing troll, I've gotten a (modestly better) handle on the whole scout fandango: More »
Unsolicited: Mommy, What's A Scout?
When I was a wide-eyed assistant, I used to hear editors mention submissions that scouts were "buzzing about" or were "high on." And I would think to myself: what the hell is a scout? They seemed to be everywhere and nowhere all at once, like some kind of magical gossip elves. And who, exactly, did they work for? A scout would call my boss after our editorial meetings and within moments, I'd be covertly messengering over some proposal or manuscript to said scout's offices, making extra certain that it could not be traced back to my boss. (Who said publishing isn't exciting?!)Now that I'm an old publishing troll, I've gotten a (modestly better) handle on the whole scout fandango: More »
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Scary fact: there are more literary agents operating today than ever before. You'd think that this would be a boon to editors: better submissions, and more of them. Well, hahahaha. NO. While I'm all for finding a diamond in the rough, the crap-to-good ratio feels like it's reached a crisis point. Call me crazy (I'm sure you'll call me worse), but aren't agents supposed to be an anti-really-bad-crap tool? I guess some of them just get the 'tool' part right. And now that many submissions are emailed, even the quality of cover letters has gone downhill. Authors, you might want to ask to see your agent's cover letter before s/he sends out your project — the number I've seen where the main character's/author's/agent's own names are misspelled is pretty staggering. Being incredibly fair-minded, I always try to look past superficial flaws and give every submission the benefit of the doubt. Psych!
After the jump, some advice for agents who want to suck less. More »
Unsolicited: Spell My Damn Name Right, And Other Hot Tips For Agents
Scary fact: there are more literary agents operating today than ever before. You'd think that this would be a boon to editors: better submissions, and more of them. Well, hahahaha. NO. While I'm all for finding a diamond in the rough, the crap-to-good ratio feels like it's reached a crisis point. Call me crazy (I'm sure you'll call me worse), but aren't agents supposed to be an anti-really-bad-crap tool? I guess some of them just get the 'tool' part right. And now that many submissions are emailed, even the quality of cover letters has gone downhill. Authors, you might want to ask to see your agent's cover letter before s/he sends out your project — the number I've seen where the main character's/author's/agent's own names are misspelled is pretty staggering. Being incredibly fair-minded, I always try to look past superficial flaws and give every submission the benefit of the doubt. Psych!After the jump, some advice for agents who want to suck less. More »
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Unsolicited: A Taxonomy of Book Publicists
If there's one thing that about 96 percent of authors can agree on, it's that their in-house publicist sucks, and often, editors tend to sympathize - especially when they end up fielding the disgruntled calls from their authors who've trooped out to East Buttfuck to give an impassioned reading to three people. But is it possible that publicists are unfairly maligned? On the one hand, it's a publicist's job to make people care about a book. On the other hand, is it a publicist's fault that an author wrote a book no one cares about? Besides, working in publicity is no treat. On any given day, a publicist might go from harried travel agent to ill-prepared baby-sitter for truly awful authors, all for the same shit wages that editors bitch about. People who can pull this off with grace and panache deserve just as much credit as editors do, believe me. Unfortunately, the sad reality is that too many publicists do, in fact, suck at their admittedly difficult and repugnant jobs. But they certainly don't all suck in the same way. More »
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Unsolicited: A Totally Unironic Call To Arms
So yeah, I've been sipping deeply from my stained, rapidly-cooling mug of Haterade when writing these columns, ranting about the dumb things authors do, the dumb things agents do, and the dumb (but slightly more defensible) things editors do. But this week, I thought I'd cut out the petty shit, pull back, and look at the big picture. I don't often find myself thinking deep thoughts about the state of the book biz as a whole, and I never thought this was an appropriate venue for discussing it - I mean, seriously, that's what Sara Nelson's letter from the editor is for. But recently, my thoughts turned to the sentiments voiced by a certain RPMCESTMOI, who had this to say in response to one of my columns: More »
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People (putative authors especially) tend to have a lot of misconceptions about what editors do - and, more importantly, don't do. The one that tickles my funny bone the hardest is the misconception that editors sit at their desks during the day and, like, edit books. HA! As fucking if. More likely, editors are answering a phone that never stops ringing while trying to answer emails, coordinate schedules, put out fires, amateur-therapize authors, actually sort of skim some small percentage of their submissions, and make sure all the other departments are actually doing what they're supposed to be doing on behalf of the editor's books (they're usually not). Okay, I caught that yawn. On to the more digestible Unsolisticle portion of the column, where we'll explore what an editor isn't in more detail.
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Unsolicited: Mommy, What's An Editor?
People (putative authors especially) tend to have a lot of misconceptions about what editors do - and, more importantly, don't do. The one that tickles my funny bone the hardest is the misconception that editors sit at their desks during the day and, like, edit books. HA! As fucking if. More likely, editors are answering a phone that never stops ringing while trying to answer emails, coordinate schedules, put out fires, amateur-therapize authors, actually sort of skim some small percentage of their submissions, and make sure all the other departments are actually doing what they're supposed to be doing on behalf of the editor's books (they're usually not). Okay, I caught that yawn. On to the more digestible Unsolisticle portion of the column, where we'll explore what an editor isn't in more detail. More »
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Last week, when I explained to authors how to keep their editors from hating them, I got some interesting feedback. In case you are dense: in this context, 'interesting feedback' means 'flame-tipped poison arrows of hatred' the same way that, in a rejection letter, 'I read with interest' means 'I basically did not read, and that which I read I did not read with anything remotely resembling interest.' But because I know that many of these authors' complaints are totally valid, and also because I'm a better, fairer person than any of my detractors (especially the commenter who complained about the freshly minted, "probably female" English lit grads who are too stupid to understand his genius - fuck you, asshole!), I decided to use this week's column as a venue for some of these complainy authors to vent their grievances. So read on for some Dos and Don'ts for editors that I'm sure we can all learn from.
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Unsolicited: Some Gentle Advice for Editors
Last week, when I explained to authors how to keep their editors from hating them, I got some interesting feedback. In case you are dense: in this context, 'interesting feedback' means 'flame-tipped poison arrows of hatred' the same way that, in a rejection letter, 'I read with interest' means 'I basically did not read, and that which I read I did not read with anything remotely resembling interest.' But because I know that many of these authors' complaints are totally valid, and also because I'm a better, fairer person than any of my detractors (especially the commenter who complained about the freshly minted, "probably female" English lit grads who are too stupid to understand his genius - fuck you, asshole!), I decided to use this week's column as a venue for some of these complainy authors to vent their grievances. So read on for some Dos and Don'ts for editors that I'm sure we can all learn from.
More »
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Unsolicited: Some Gentle Advice for Authors
Why do editors do it, anyway? They make less money than any other college graduates they know, their jobs are backbreaking and stressful and impossible to leave at the office, and their career trajectories tend to involve lingering on (or clinging to) the same rung of the corporate ladder for year after frustrating year. And even though teaching a retarded child how to write her own name isn't really so different from working on your average celebrity memoir, that doesn't mean editing qualifies for 'noble calling' status. There must be something that keeps editors from throwing in their red (actually, often blue) pencils, and it can't be the office camaraderie. More »
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Unsolicited: Why You Don't Want a Big Advance
You know the little acidic twinge you get in your gut when you read a Gawker post about the latest underqualified-seeming asshole who just sold her first book for six figures? What if I told you that you never need to feel that way again? More »
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Absurd as this might sound, having lunches and drinks with literary agents is an important part of an editor's job. But while fancy expense account food and booze is great in theory (especially since it takes about three years for your average editor to start raking in a public schoolteacher's starting salary), it's a double-edged perk when you consider the motley assortment of semi-strangers that editors can end up trapped at a table with. Here's a random sampling of the type of agents whose lunches with me tend to get scheduled, rescheduled, and then postponed again — indefinitely:
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Unsolicited: A Taxonomy of Literary Agents
Absurd as this might sound, having lunches and drinks with literary agents is an important part of an editor's job. But while fancy expense account food and booze is great in theory (especially since it takes about three years for your average editor to start raking in a public schoolteacher's starting salary), it's a double-edged perk when you consider the motley assortment of semi-strangers that editors can end up trapped at a table with. Here's a random sampling of the type of agents whose lunches with me tend to get scheduled, rescheduled, and then postponed again — indefinitely:
More »
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