Of small presses and agents

At Litquake Palo Alto last Sunday, where I was on the Breakthrough Novelists panel, an audience member asked each of us how we got our agents. When it came to my turn, I said, "I don't have an agent," and was passing the mic along when several people shouted, "Wait! Then how did you get published?"

The answer: a small press. Many people don't realize that small presses, including my publisher, Bona Fide Books, will often accept unagented submissions. Small presses are also awesome because they exist to take chances that larger publishers can't afford--on unknown authors and odd, hard-to-categorize books (like mine). The publishers are almost always writers themselves, and they love literature. They're not in it for the money, but to keep what they love alive.

Poets and Writers has a small press database, which is a good place to start looking. Another fun way to get acquainted with small presses is to play Small Press Roulette. You send them money, and they send you a grab-bag of small press publications, including books and zines. Look what I got!

All that said, however, I do plan on querying agents for my new novel, starting this fall. This book is a tad more mainstream, I think, and I certainly would like to reach a larger audience. At the same time, though, I'm going to keep the small press option on the front burner, because I've loved the whole experience, and I believe in the mission.

Think of it this way: if you like independent films, you'll like small presses, too.

How to network and not to network (by a bad networker)

I am a bad networker.

Well, I'm probably not as bad as I used to be. The need to "network" was first impressed upon me rather late in life, because I was particularly resistant to having that sort of impression made upon me in the first place. It was toward the end of graduate school, when it became apparent that simply sending out CVs and writing samples and waiting for the interview invitations to roll in was not going to work. (I can't quite convey how shocking this news really was to me. I was that naive--and that resistant to networking.) My adviser suggested going to conferences, even ones I was not presenting at (which constituted the almost infinitely greater majority), and--get this--hand out business cards.

How the hell was I supposed to actually accomplish this was not clear. This particular culture did not seem to come with a ritual of exchanging cards upon introduction. Let's just skip ahead now and say I at the first and only conference where I attempted this, I managed to rid myself of precisely one card. I did it by interrupting the conversation of someone I had talked to on the shuttle, saying "Do you want a card?," thrusting it at her, and then racing off, my face hot with shame.

That was the last networking I did for about a decade.

For some people, networking seems to come quite a bit more naturally. Not (as I was taught) because they are cynical users of others, always alert for opportunities to advance their own interests and equally blind to the pain their self-advancement inflicts on those they use and then cast aside like so many used tissues--but because they understand that people need other people just to get through life. Professional life (and related stuff like, you know, promoting your novel) is part of the life that we need help with. Asking for help is not the same as using.

This is especially--and, in fact only--true if you approach the whole networking process with the mindset of trying to help others. Of course one can never set one's mind purely on this goal (by "one," I mean myself, anyway)--but I think it's worth trying to focus on opportunities to assist others, particularly at first. To piggyback on my last post, let's say you want to join a writing group. If you only want to join so that others will help you with your work, you'll have a problem. People will notice that you show up only when you have a story under review. They may not kick you out, but they won't feel like you're fully part of the group.

To network effectively, you must sincerely want to be part of something larger than yourself, to do your part in meeting the group's goals--even if those goals include each individual's desire to advance. We all want to succeed, and we don't have to help others succeed at our own expense. In the same way, we don't have to succeed at others' expense.

Networking, done sincerely, just means helping each other. It's really that simple. I wish I'd figured that out a lot earlier.

Why you really, really need a writing community

Several years ago, I was in a writing group that I adored. But that group gradually fell away, as these things sometimes do, and so for a number of years I didn't have a group. That seemed fine; I was writing a novel, and I didn't necessarily want anyone reading it piecemeal as I went. I thought I should just stay by myself and plug away till it was finished. Then we'd see.

Of course, what I didn't realize--and what I now understand, thanks to several new groups I've joined lately--is that the community doesn't just exist to give critiques. (And it certainly shouldn't exist just to give critiques to me.) Apart from the amorphous though extremely important function of offering moral support, a community can:

• Go to events together
• Create events and invite speakers
• Join together to give readings where individual speakers might not draw a big enough crowd
• Help publicize each other's work
• Recommend (or warn you away from) agents, publishers, publicists, etc.
• Advocate for one another and for fellow authors worldwide
• Eat good food and drink good wine 
• Pull each other out of literary and personal ruts

This is only a small sample of what writing communities can do. So even if you have no work you want to share at the moment, I strongly recommend joining one or more groups, in person and/or online. It makes a remarkable difference, believe me.

Here I am with some of my writing buddies, at our party yesterday ...