Mike Scalise

On Sunday, the wife and I are leaving for a well-overdue honeymoon/graduation celebration/we-have-not-been-anywhere-together-in-years trip to Costa Rica. I’ve never been there, and though the dog-eared Fodor’s and Lonely Planet guides have been sitting at my bedside for a few months, I’ve never looked at them. I know we’ll be on the west coast beaches for a few days, then some resort in a rain forest, then in a volcano. I’m just going to let my wife drag me around, and it is going to be excellent.

I was going to bring the new laptop (a sweet MacBook which W.’s economic stimulus check completely covered, so enjoy that beat-down G4 you stole from me at Recessions two weeks ago, asshole), but one of the reasons we’re leaving the country is because of the Internet’s and technology’s amazing ability to make my wife work 70 hour weeks. So we’re unplugging, which means that it will still be tumbleweeds here for a while. But when I come back, I’ll report some semi-exciting news, and unveil one or maybe two new features to the blog that will no doubt titillate all five people who read this thing.

Before I leave though, I just wanted to post about a neat little resource I found via Practicing Writing, the Query Shark.

I don’t want this to turn into yet another blog about publishing, because there are many (too many?), and whether I like it or not, at this point publishing is more of an aggressive hobby for me. Like the first couple of times I had sex, all I know about the few times it happened to me is this: it happened. I’m not sure how, but it was excellent, and I spend most of my time now thinking about how I can somehow do it again. So I’m probably not the best person to talk about the P-word.

But I’ve just graduated from an MFA program that an alum once called a “crock of shit” for its reluctance to hand-hold its students through the nuts and bolts of publishing books. I think that attitude is a crock of shit, but nonetheless it seems to have legs. Due to popular demand, just weeks before I graduated one of our faculty had a “publishing meeting” with graduating students in my genre to discuss “how to get your work out there.” We talked submissions, pitching stories, agents, etc., and I was absolutely shocked at how little many of my fellow students knew about resources that, quite frankly, I thought were prerequisite bits of knowledge for attending a graduate writing program (NewPages, Duotrope, the LMP), let alone leaving one. Apparently not.

So maybe one post about Query Shark and some of the other wondrous online publishing resources–that don’t take three years and thousands of dollars of school loans–is probably right and necessary and helpful to someone somewhere.

On to the Shark, which fills the void left by the excellent and now-retired Miss Snark, giving down and dirty feedback to those pitching book ideas to agents. Janet Reid, an agent at Fine Print Literary Management, started the blog in April with the motto: “You can send a query letter to the Shark. It might get posted and critiqued. It might not. You’ll know either way. You can send a revised query letter after the critique. It will be posted and critiqued as well.”

So goes the Shark’s tone. Not nice, but not mean either. For instance, check out the comments about halfway through post #23 (none of the posts have titles, only the order in which they hit the site) a letter from someone with a “161300+ words” novel that is “multi-cultural/life story set in Iran and United States”:

And here it is: over written. The second paragraph already has Farrah meeting Hamid. Now you’re going back and explaining more. You don’t need all this stuff. What HAPPENS and why it MATTERS are the key things you need here.

Then later, when the letter claims that the novel “goes beneath the surface of social glamour and illustrates cultural prejudice, society’s expectations and judgments, fear and deception”:

This is so general as to be useless. This is a novel about what happens to people. Make us care about that first.

While she doesn’t match the all-out acerbic hilarity of Miss Snark, Reid makes up for it in the surgical detail with which she dispatches her feedback (check out the “Ok, I’ve stopped reading right here” in #28). Everything seems done on her lunch hour, and for that reason, its precise and immediate and manages to create the exact same get-to-the-point feel as an actual editorial meeting. (Trust me, I’ve been through a few.) But most importantly, it’s helpful. And 100% free.

But like I said earlier, the Shark is one of many resources out there that tackle the business aspects of publishing (up until about a year ago, The Magic Bullet at Identity Theory did kind of the same thing). If you’ve clicked on the links in the “WRITERLY” column on the left side of this blog, you know about these sites, but for the sake of consolidation, here’s a small round up of what I think are the best ones.

Jason Boog at The Publishing Spot does a fantastic job of talking with both industry professionals and authors in both book publishing and journalism about the unsung back end of things (recent posts have been interviews with Cheer!’s Kate Torgovnick about how to query nonfiction books, and with first-time memoirist Felicia Sullivan about how to write your book at work). There’s an almost Charle Rose-like, laid back, advice-by-quorum feel to Boog’s site. He and everyone he speaks with seem to know that there is no one way to publish, so Boog and his subjects attack all angles, then let the readers decide.

Erika Dreifus’ aforementioned Practicing Writing in some ways picks up where Boog leaves off, offering up day-to-day solutions so the working writer can survive until their book deal comes through. Dreifus has job listings every Monday that range from freelance to staff work at magazines and universities, and goes to the trouble of publishing primers (cheap ones, too) that list paying markets for essayists, book reviewers, as well as occasional book publishing-related material (it is, after all, where I found out about Query Shark). A faculty member at Lesley University’s MFA program as well as a notably published writer of all genres, Dreifus has a good grasp on what it means to write as a trade, and is generous with the help to those just like her.

And lastly–though I could go on for a long, long time about the online resources available–fifty bucks gets you an AvantGuild pass over at MediaBistro, at which point you can access the tremendous library of extremely specific How to Pitch articles for nearly every media outlet you can think of, as well as transcripts and discussions with influential staples of the publishing community about how you can best get your work out there, whether its a novel, memoir, children’s book, whatever. Yes, I’ve done some work for them in the past, but that was a long time ago, and they’ve of course gotten much better with their content since.

All that said, the number of books I have published by using these resources remains at zero. Its possible that the downside to having all of  these resources is that we can spend all of our time reading them and not actually writing anything. So that will be it for now. I’m heading off to the Central America for the next ten days. When I get back I’ll give myself a reason to start thinking seriously about the Shark and her friends.

Until then, I’m getting sunburned. Adios, folks.