DFWCon word limit caution -- plus, the Gong Show

 I settled in the auditorium of the DFW Writers Conference  early Sunday morning for the annual query Gong Show. This is the event iin which writers submit their anonymous literary queries to a panel of agents and editors, who strike table-top gongs to signal the point at which they would stop the read if receiving such a query in their own emails.

As I hoped against hope not to hear a repeat of the usual agents' complaints, something new startled me. The word counts cited in some of the entries.

After several years of relentless gonging at this contest, canny writers know opening with a 135,000-ish word count is a nonstarter.

What startled me out of an insufficiently caffeinated daze was carping about a 70,000-word entry for middle grade readers. "Middle grade" is a publishing term for readers aged approximately 9-12 -- those old enough to read independently.

Novels aimed at adult readers can easily hover around 80,000 words -- higher for science fiction and fantasy works. Even classic middle grade novels such as the original Harry Potter clock in at over 75,000. 

How far out of bounds was a book of 70,000 words?

Ask a dozen agents, authors, and internet sites and you'll get two dozen answers. Writer's Digest, in a post updated in 2021, cites 20-55K for middle grade, with slightly higher word counts for science fiction and fantasy works.

Image: wikimedia

WD also states that middle grade word counts have been trending up lately.

But agents at DFW said otherwise. That the opposite, in fact, is the case.

The reason -- the pandemic shutdowns of many schools that hit when the middle graders of 2024 were barely beginning their journeys as fluent, independent readers.

Shutdowns of in-person learning, hopefully saved lives. But coupled with Zoom classes and other online learning venues, they hit younger readers at a uniquely vulnerable point in their development. Conference agents expected to see the lower-word-count issue follow into YA (young adult) books as readers who were in elementary school during the pandemic reach their teens.

Will the trend eventually age out? We're waiting to see. In the meantime, authors of books for young readers need to be particularly aware of their needs.

Oh, and those doorstop-sized Harry Potters? Besides getting extra word leeway for being a fantasy, it was first published nearly a quarter-century ago. To a readership who were only getting their first taste of the internet.

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Now, a return to the rest of the Gong Show results.

DFW reader George Goldthwaite zipped through 11 randomly chosen, rapidly gonged queries before hitting paydirt with number 12, whose breathless author rose to take a bow.

Otherwise, too many authors -- not paying attention to this blog's repeated warnings -- spent far too much of their query on synopsis-like plot descriptions.

One query made it almost to the end before being hopelessly gonged, but even that ran to a second page. (Repeat after me: one page, 300 words max.)

Aside from the middle grade hopeful, writers were generally good at stating the word count and genre of their stories. However, more than once queries failed to follow through on the expected tropes of their genre or leaned on generic descriptions. Other dislikes involved talking down to the agent (and potential readers): "I don't need time travel explained to me."

And the ultimate, never, ever -- an entry beginning, "This is the query you have been waiting for!" The author may well have intended this opening to be funny, but it triggered multiple simultaneous clanging of gongs.

(Host Russell C. Connor admitted he had once, no doubt long, long ago, submitted a query with a similar opening. And was gonged. Whoever the unlucky author was, they were not alone.)

Agents did offer positive suggestions such as:

• Color-coding words, allowing authors to visualize repeated ones and remove them
• Reading lots of back cover blurbs for suggestions on what works in a query -- remembering, "all we need is an effective hook and a pitch"
• Allowing the author's unique voice to shine

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Next: There's more to come from the DFW conference. But first, a chance to catch up on autumn literary events that didn't make it into earlier posts.

Gong show makes history at DFW Writers Conference

It’s been a week of historic events. Oh, yeah, there was the meeting in Singapore, but for writers at the 2018 DFW Writers Conference, the real news was winning the conference’s gong show. Twice.

For readers newly tuning in, the DFW conference’s gong show gives writers a chance to test their query letters against a panel of literary agents. Loosely based on the 1970’s reality show, it aims, however, to provide guidance as well as entertainment.

As agents, small gongs at their sides, face an eager audience, DFW Writers Workshop member George Goldthwaite draws random query letters from those submitted by hopeful, and anonymous, writers. As he reads, imagine the letters arriving in their inboxes and hit their gongs to indicate the point at which they would stop reading. If – as usually happens – three agents gong before the end of the letter, it figuratively ends in the “reject” pile. If Goldthwaite reaches the end of the letter before at least three gongs have sounded, well, that letter is a “winner.” 

Dramatic as the exercise is, its purpose is to allow agents who reject a query to explain their reasons, with an eye to improving real query letters. Occasionally, in the years I’ve attended the conference, a single letter may slip through without being gonged out. This year, there were two. Not to mention several which made it nearly to the end without suffering the dreaded third gong.

image: pixabay

This year’s agent panelists were Amy Bishop (Dystel, Goderich & Bourret LLC), Marisa Corvisiero (Marisa Corvisiero Literary Agency), Lucienne Diver (The Knight Agency), Patricia Nelson (Marsal Lyon Literary Agency), Kevin O’Connor (Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency), and Maximilian Ximenez (L. Perkins Agency). Agents were not allowed to gong a query simply because it was for a genre they don’t work with.

Were they simply more patient than past agent panelists? Or is it – perhaps – that the continual training offered by venues such as the conference is improving the quality of writers’ queries? I’ll hope it’s the latter. 

Goldthwaite read the first query as the audience – and even more, the author – waited. Did an agent move toward a gong? Did any of them shift in their chairs? Could it be possible? Yes, the reading ended. No gongs at all had been struck!

Urged on by gong show MC Russell Connor, the agents had things to say. (Don’t they always?) “I don’t think this is a thriller,” Corvisiero said. “More suspense/mystery.” Nelson disagreed. “It does everything a thriller should do (but) I think you could some up with a better title.” The thrilled writer of the thriller query stood up to take a bow.

Gongs rang out for the second letter. Then the third, a query for a young adult story about two teens with body image issues. Again, the gongs were silent. It was a moment for the conference history books.

“Have we ever had two winners?” MC Connor asked before turning the agents loose.

“It’s really topical,” Diver said, “but 55,000 words is a little on the short side for YA. I’d suggest seeing if you can bump on the word count. 

Corvisiero and Ximenez also had problems with the word count. And then there were concerns that the characters were a little flat and the plot a little thin – exactly the issues that another 10,000 words or so could address. But again, a writer rose to take a bow.

So what about the eight other letters that didn’t make it past the gong show’s gantlet? 

Often agents felt that writers were trying to do too much without providing the heart of the story. Typical responses included: “trying a bit too hard, too conscious of its own cleverness”; “felt like there were several different premises”; “too much going on”; “with a query letter you want me to be intrigued, not confused”; “a lack of focus.” 

A query that came close to its end before being gonged out, drove agents to say, “been done before” and “tell us why this is original.” 

Another complaint, heard year after year at gong shows, was “too long.” Too much world building, not enough character were heard more than once.

One complaint – and query tactic – I’d never heard before was for writing the query (not story) in first person.  Agents were uniformly repelled by use of first person in the body of the query. 

“If you’re writing first person, I don’t know who’s talking – the author or the character,” Corvisiero said. 

 Authors please note, however, that agents did want the biographical section of the query letter to be in first person. Otherwise, stick with third person for the body of the letter and leave first POV for your story.

Another year, another chance to strengthen those queries! I’ll be back later this week with more information from the conference, from how to write diverse characters, to (for indie authors) how to get a great book cover, to – yes, tips on query letters, and more.

Wordcraft – Here be dragons: er, agents with gongs

Another DFW Writers Conference has come and gone, and with it, another Gong Show, a retro nod to the long-gone TV talent show whose performers had to quit the stage when judges signaled their fed-upness by striking gongs. In the writers’ conference version, contestants submit anonymous sample query letters. A panel of literary agents hits gongs to signal when they would stop reading the query if it turned up in their email inboxes. Three gongs, and a contestant is out, left to learn from the experience with the rest of us before sending actual queries. It’s one of the best attended events of the conference.

Except for perhaps two or three science fiction presses, most publishers refuse even to consider accepting a book length manuscript from a writer who is not represented by a literary agent, transforming agents willy-nilly into the dragons guarding the gates to traditional publication.

And so, let me introduce this year’s Gong Show dragons by species, name and agency: the Long-Maned Allison Devereux of Wolf Literary Services, Crimson-Crested Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary, Tawny-Leonine Michelle Johnson of Inklings Literary Agency, Palomino-Maned Alice Speilburg of Speilburg Literary Agency, the Yellow-Crested Uwe Stender of Triada US Literary Agency, and the Far-Northern Carly Watters of the P.S. Literary Agency.

Do agents have some sort of pre-conference get together each year to decide what their pet peeves will be? Because the one that occurred over and over this year was “too long,” and its variants: “sounds interesting, but it goes on and on and on”; “you have to know when to pull the joke”; “we were just revisiting the same hook”; and perhaps most horribly, but said more than once, “I lost my train of thought.”

Agency websites usually list guidelines for query letters, and there are also plenty of websites with more general suggestions, such as limiting the query itself to a single page, including a “hook” or “logline”; title, genre and word count; and a 2-3 sentence long synopsis. A brief mention of the writer’s credentials and his/her reason for sending a letter to this particular agent (“enjoyed meeting you at the DFW Writers Conference” or “I’m a fan of such and such a client of yours”) are also typically included.

But writers of the 22 queries chosen for reading obviously saw the Gong Show as their only chance to get their novels on stage. Agents repeatedly had to say, “keep it simple,” in response to queries that over-anxious writers had turned into almost blow-by-blow synopses of their novels.

That said, the use of clichés were among the issues that have appeared in previous Gong Shows. This year a poison pill was “magic necklace” whose mention in a query immediately elicited a gong; when the writer added that the protagonist received it from her grandmother in a dream, the gongs went wild. And agents still felt that vampires and other supernatural/paranormal beings were clogging the publishing pipeline.

A problem I don’t recall hearing before regarded inappropriateness for genre or age of readership. One manuscript described by the author as having a 12-year-old protagonist used several explicitly sexual terms and was gonged out, as was a query that “sounds like women’s fiction but turns out to be an urban fantasy.”

Another was a manuscript of the wrong length. Confronted with 134,000 words, the unanimous decision was, too long. Agents wanted to see something closer to 100,000 words (although one agent was willing to consider 120,000.) There was also a 55,000 word manuscript deemed too short for an adult novel.

And finally, what you’re dying to know: did any queries survive the gongs? Yes, actually, there were two. One was for a mythic card game (although it received one gone from an agent who thought, again, “too long”. The second was for a YA science fiction novel, which, less illustriously, simply “had nothing glaring about it.” (Or maybe the agents were just tired by then.)

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I’ll post more next Tuesday about the 2015 conference, but in the meantime, consider the 2016 version in Fort Worth, April 23-24. Tickets are available at the super early bird rate of $190 through August 18 (or until sold out), at www.dfwcon2016.eventbrite.com.