Let me get this straight. An agent will see the author confused "than" and "then" a few times and reject it? Really? I know agents are busy, but that sort of thing is easily fixable. Even if it may be a sign that the grammer isn't where it needs to be, would they overlook that if the rest of the manuscript (or section thereof) is solid and salable? What I've been reading on this site about what agents do tells me that they are looking for the perfect salable manuscript, free of any grammar mistakes and hooks you in the frst paragraph, oh and this is only done by a reader who works for the agent besides.
These two contradict each other, or you're once again ignoring the fact that the reader is unlikely to read the whole thing. If it's not possible to tell how fabulous your book is without reading the whole thing, then the agent's screener is not going to know that it's fabulous, and therefore he is going to put it down when he finds errors. I think I've suggested this before: Go look at the website Author! Author! by AnneMini, and read several articles about manuscript formatting, reasons for rejecting a manuscript, and so on. Again, the agent's screener is likely to be sorting through _hundreds_ and _hundreds_ of manuscripts. If yours shows that you need to polish your work a litte more, they're going to let you polish it on your time, not their time. You see to be only accepting two possibilities: (1) that your book is the book of the century, so brilliant that little things like spelling and grammar errors and an evident lack of professionalism don't matter, so brilliant that a reader can tell _instantly_, in the first line or first paragraph how brilliant it is, and resolve to read every bit of it, or (2) your book is terrible and you should consign it to its self-published grave. What about the possibility that (3) your book is quite good and quite publishable, but not so good that an agent or his employees are going to fall uncontrollably in love with it and break all their own rules? What's wrong with polishing it? What's wrong with giving it a good, thorough chance at being published? Do you _only_ want to be published if you're so great that you can break the rules? ChickenFreak
Gah. Our first paragraph is terrible. It doesn't go with the rest of the book at all, but because of the way we organized the first two chapters we needed something like it at the beginning of the book. It's honestly BY FAR my least favorite part of the book. I would be fine with option three. But, self-publishing just seems much more instantly gratifying than taking years to get published and then waiting years for the book to be available. I know that everyone thinks self-published books are doomed to fail, and most of them are, but I think that's because most self-published books aren't very good. I don't know of many wildly successful self-published books/authors, but there must be plenty that have books that a few thousand people have read. Honestly, even with the great response we've had so far, it's still hard for either of us to believe that it would ever sell more than a few thousand copies. I mean, it could, but it's just so hard to believe. I don't think any author can just expect things like that. I'll post the first paragraph later today and then figure out with my friend which excerpt from the beginning I should post. Should I just post the first paragraph in here or should I make a thread in a review or should I wait and post it with the excerpt? Again, we appreciate all of your advice. Thank you.
Just post the first 500-1000 words. It concerns me that you think your first paragraph is terrible. When it comes to trying to hook an agent the first few pages are the most important. The first page is the hook. So if it's the worst part of your book then you've done yourself a disservice. Either start the story somewhere else or revise the beginning so it is at least on par with the rest of the manuscript. Ideally if anything it should be the best part of your book.
Well, the first paragraph is short -- less than 100 words -- not that that justifies it not being good. But, we felt like we had to put something like it at the beginning even though it is out of sync with the rest of the story. After that, I think it's fine. It's not like I think the whole first chapter is terrible. The first chapter is definitely our best written, although I like some of the other ones better (just a personal preference). Anyway, should I post it in here or should I post it in a review thread?
Screeners WILL judge your manuscript on the first paragaraph -- presuming the query letter was intriguing enough to get them that far. I have a relative who used to screen manuscripts for a literary agent -- and she felt bad about how quickly she needed to decide whether something someone had spent so much effort on deserved a closer look or not. But that was the reality she was forced to live in -- She would often reject a manuscript after 30 seconds looking at the query. If someone's judging it based on the first paragraph, it means the screener is reading FARTHER than they are with a lot of people. You need to get that first paragraph into something that you're happy with.
Yes, because they aren't just taking on a manuscript, but a client. Issues people think are easily fixable are, you're right, unfortunately the type of writers that send a manuscript with such basic errors aren't fixable, usually.
You really shouldn't be ok with that. In terms of selling, your first paragraph is the most important. It should be prioritized over almost any other part of the book, because it is what agents, publishers and, eventually, potential readers are going to read to see how good the book is. If the structure of the first two chapters means that the opening is bad, you restructure the first two chapters, you don't submit a manuscript with a terrible opening.
Well, yes. If the author doesn't yet know the difference between "than" and "then", he needs to learn before he's publishable. You could argue that an agent should take that author under his wing and teach him all about writing. But why didn't the author learn about writing before he got to that agent? Is it because he can't learn? In that case, the agent will be wasting his time. Is it because he's not willing to learn? Again, the agent will be wasting his time. Is it because he's not willing to put in the time and effort to learn? Same thing. Is it because he is willing to put in the time and effort, but he's a few thousand hours and a few million words away from being publishable? The agent doesn't have time to read and review those millions of words. I'm sure that his job involves a certain amount of teaching, but it also involves selling books, and there has to be a limit to the amount of time that he can dedicate to someone who is not going to produce anything salable anytime soon. There's a reason why writing teachers and workshops and review groups exist. It's not reasonable to expect agents to tutor writers from beginner to publication, or even from maybe-he's-halfway-there to publication. Maybe you'd argue that the author _does_ know all about writing, and these easily fixable errors aren't significant. If the errors are so easily fixable and the author really, truly can't see them, then the author should probably hire someone to "easily fix" them. If that's too expensive for the author, it's too expensive for the agent, too. The agent doesn't have unlimited hours for editing, or free-of-charge access to unlimited personnel who are skilled enough writers to correct the writer's mistakes. Editing costs money. Books make only so much money, and very few books become million-dollar best sellers. If the editing costs more than the book will earn, then that's not going to work. It's not as if an agent is sitting around, nothing to do, wishing and wishing that someone would submit a manuscript, wishing and wishing that he had something to try to sell. The agent is likely sitting in an office flooded with manuscripts, forced to make heartbreaking choices between far too many promising candidates - promising candidates that happen to be in the form of professionally formatted manuscripts with almost zero errors. If that agent has a stack of two hundred manuscripts that all have lots of "easily fixable" errors, and a stack of two dozen manuscripts that don't have those errors _and_ appear to be quite good books, and he can only take on two new clients, why shouldn't he focus on the two dozen? Yes, each author has spent hundreds or thousands of hours on his manuscript. Each author has an argument for why _his_ manuscript is special, and _his_ manuscript should be in the company of the two dozen, or even above that two dozen, in spite of any errors. But that's really the author's problem, not the agent's. There's no way for the agent to read every single submission from beginning to end and make sure, absolutely sure, that he's found the best book in the teetering stacks of submissions that flood his office. He doesn't have time. He has to go with the odds, do triage. And the odds suggest that an author who takes his craft and his writing seriously enough to produce a clean manuscript in a standard professional format, also takes his craft and his writing seriously enough to write a better book than the author who doesn't bother with proofreading or correct grammer or presentation. Plus, that author is likely be less expensive to work with, to edit, to publish. And he's shown a dedication and seriousness of purpose that's likely to be valuable in an author and a client. Yes, there are sloppy geniuses, and I'm sure that an agent who missed one will regret it. But he probably won't regret it as much as he'll regret going bankrupt if he hires enough readers to read every submission from beginning to end, and spends all his time tutoring authors who never produce a salable product. If an author wants an agent to take their work seriously, they need to demonstrate that they take it seriously themselves. And that includes, at a minimum, taking the time and effort and self-education and, if necessary, expense, to produce a clean and professionally formatted manuscript. If that's too much trouble for the author, it's also too much trouble for an agent who no doubt has several submissions from authors who _did_ take the trouble, right on his desk. ChickenFreak
^Dude, relax. I understand agents need to make money and they don't have time, blah, blah, blah, I've read all that. What I am saying is that everything that's been published, nay everything that's ever been accepted by an agent is free of errors when the author submitted his/her work? Really? Why do writers need editors then once they've been accepted by a publishing house then? How is it that an editor for Twilight made it "better than I could have made it" (by SM own words in the acknowledgement section)?
Ummm, exactly. Because editors aren't there to fix the easy, mundane crap you haven't figured out how to fix yourself. Do you know how few professional editors there are? Do you know how expensive they are? Do you know that even the most pristine, polished worked you manage as a writer is going to be eviscerated by most top editors? Editors are there to take your work to the next level, hopefully with you along with it, not to fix lazy typos.
No, I'm sure that every manuscript has a few errors - I doubt that it's realistically possible to scrub _every single error_ out of several hundred pages. But you should, frankly, try. And mistaking "than" and "then", especially repeatedly so that it's clear that the author doesn't know the difference, is a mighty _big_ error. If the author has a number of errors of this type, and if they appear early in the reading of the manuscript, and the author is a brand new author with no reputation and therefore a big gamble in the first place... that's a problem. And as I understand it, an editor's job is not primarily to find basic things like misspellings, misused words, and grammar errors. It's to take clean, correct writing and make it _better_ clean, correct writing. A clean manuscript free of almost all errors should be the starting point, not the end. ChickenFreak
