Why you don't get published.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Q & A 60 Premature Queries
After years of being a journalist and college newspaper adviser, I've decided to start writing a nonfiction book of essays about the lack of awareness among 18-25-year-olds in America today. Parts will be funny, parts will be very serious research, parts will be really interesting (hopefully all of it will be interesting, but I'm trying to be humble and self-deprecating). Question: The book will need to be published in a timely manner, as it will focus a lot on current trends and events. Is it OK to start sending out queries before the book is actually finished to get the ball rolling and to find out if anyone is interested? My students and I read you every day, and they appreciate me more and more because I'm not as evil as I could be.
Evil Editor commends you for realizing that finding a publisher could take a long time. He also commends you for forcing your students to visit his blog, and for spelling "adviser" with the preferred "e".
A timely book can present a problem. It may even require you to make periodic revisions with passing time if it hasn't sold. You wouldn't believe how many manuscripts I've received with titles like, Why the Berlin Wall Should Be Torn Down, or Surviving the Aftermath of the Spanish American War.
You'll be happy to know that while fictional works should be complete when querying (until you're a big shot, anyway), nonfiction books are often "proposed" before they've even been started. There should be no problem with sending off a description of the book, your qualifications to write it, and perhaps a couple sample essays. Hope your target audience isn't 18 -25-year-olds; they'll be unaware the book even exists.
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8 comments:
"I've decided to start writing a nonfiction book of essays about the lack of awareness among 18-25-year-olds in America today."
Lack of awareness about what? -JTC
Oh man, JTC, you're so unaware, you don't even know!
Since when is it new that 18-25 year olds are unaware? They are critically tuned into the cute person next to them, what else matters? That was true for the ancient Greeks, why should it be different today? :-)
Ok, I exaggerate a little, I wasn't really 18 when the ancient Greeks were building their temples, but I do remember reading something about one of them complaining about how clueless young people were.
I suppose it could sell though -- if the ancient Greeks liked to complain about it, it must be a timeless subject. [If I repeat 'ancient Greeks' often enough, might it become like 'brutal eunuch', classic in its own way?]
we don't vote, we don't watch the news or read newspapers, we don't care about the news, and since we get all our information from the internet, we only read what interests us.
we don't listen to the radio, we listen to our ipods. we don't go to cnn.com, we go to myspace and facebook. companies are changing their whole marketing strategies to cater (pander) to the patheticness that is starting to (and will continue to) hold all the purchasing power.
plus, my generation was raised by the "helicopter parents" who never told us we couldn't do something. we're of limited talent and limitless ego.
our generation has no great movements, everything is so fragmented. it's generation "me."
i hate us.
Ah yes, the kids today... in my day...
I would think that as long as there are 29- to 85-year-olds around, this book will have an audience.
My fourteen-year-old stepson just arrived for the summer, and ho boy, is he on his way to being a card-carrying, dues-in-arears member of generation me. I was a lazy kid. I'm a lazy adult. But this kid is SOMETHING, let me tell you. And until I filled him in, he didn't even know what nazis were, or what WWII was about or anything. Arghhh!
It's gonna be one FUUUUNNN summer.
My 14 year old son already knows how to break down and reassemble a Tommy gun, from information on the internet.
He knows what model of tanks the Allies used, he knows about the Blitz, he knows about the Holocaust, he knows about Anne Frank.
The little rotter knows everything. He should write a book. Probably will. He'll be published before me, I imagine.
But then again, he isn't 18 yet, is he? Maybe that's why he's so aware. Or perhaps he's really an alien.
Truthfully, he asks questions, and I give him the answers to the best of my ability, or I just tell him to look it up. He does.
"But this kid is SOMETHING, let me tell you. And until I filled him in, he didn't even know what nazis were, or what WWII was about or anything. Arghhh!"
And why should he know or care? These things happened half a century before he was born. How much do you know about the Boer War?
I recently overheard a middle-aged man on the bus complaining that his teenage niece had never heard of the Beatles! I'm not sure why he thought she should be interested in pop music made a generation before she was born, and I'm betting that he knew little or nothing about the music she listens to.
But I guess all this proves that there'll always be a healthy market for books about how ignorant the younger generation is.
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