A smorgasbord of info from 2018 DFW Writers Conference

Hungry for the feast of information from this year’s DFW Writers Conference? Here’s sampling, starting with YA author Scott Westerfeld’s keynote address.

“Teenagers are the strangers among us. A couple of hundred years ago the term did not exist. In the U.S. Civil War, an 11-year-old got the Medal of Honor. A 13-year-old commanded a ship at Trafalgar.” Although the word “teen” didn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1921, and “teenager” until 1941,” during the 19^th century, partly sparked by the Industrial Revolution, “a space expanded between being a little kid and being an adult.”

Co-existent with the evolution of teendom was the emergence of novels as “the supreme methods of storytelling.” The superpower of novels is their ability to lay out “agony, limits, feelings, beliefs, fears and hatred on the page.” Humans also have a superpower – empathy.

image: pixabay

“The novel is the outgrowth of this ability. Readers don’t just bond with our characters, they become those characters.” And the supreme time for that becoming, that trying on of different ways of thinking and being is during the teen years. “Novels exercise our empathy and strengthen it.” Is this a scary process? Yes, “and scarier for teens because they are the strangers among us. So I hope you keep making more books – and more readers!”

***

Or maybe you wanted to know what agents really like (or not)? Try this discussion from the "Ask An Agent Anything" panel with agents Malaga Baldi, Amy Bishop, Uwe Stender and Maximilian Ximenez.

Q. Is it OK to resubmit to an agent after a rejection?
A. Absolutely, kind of, depends.

“The agents are rejecting the book, never you,” said Uwe Stender of Triada US Literary Agency. “Feel free to offer another work.”

Maximilian Ximenez of the L. Perkins Agency noted he’s even OK with resubmitting the same work after extensive revision. 

Q. What are you looking for in a query letter?
A. That depends. . . 

“Really know your enemy,” said Malaga Baldi of the Baldi Agency. “Know what they represent. We all have our own bugaboos and our own strong points. (However, note that she hates letters addressing her as Mr. Baldi!) 

And on the “knowing the enemy” front, “Please be upfront with relevant data, genre, word counts, etc.,” Ximenez said. “I don’t want to read the whole query before realizing it’s not something I can represent.”

“Do your research, like everyone says,” was the advice of Amy Bishop of Dystel, Goderich & Bourrett LLC. (Among the things she looks for are comparison titles.)

Q. What turns you off from a (potential) writer client?
A. Forgetting we’re in a business!

“If I get the feeling that you’re unreasonable,” Stender said. “What I want from you is someone smart and professional.”

“I really want your relationship with your agent to be a long-lasting one,” Bishop said.

“I have had to, unfortunately, drop a lot of clients because of their rejection of what I suggest. It’s like a job interview. You need to know what you’re willing to compromise about.”

Baldi agreed. “I’m not your best friend. It’s a business relationship.”

Q. What’s the current market zeitgeist?
A. Do you really want to ask?

“It’s scary,” Baldi said, claiming she loves fiction but finds it a hard sell. “My bread and butter is nonfiction.”

“The word that’s been rising lately is platform,” Ximenez said. “Generally, it’s social messages but also the bonafides of the writer, especially in YA (young adult literature), themes of social justice and deconstruction (a method of questioning and revising received ideas). There’s deconstructionist cycle in all genres about every 15 years.”

“A lot of fantasy in a non-Western setting,” Bishop noted. 

And then there was Stender’s take. “I really don’t pay any attention to the market currently. I’m fully aware of what people want, but I will not respond to that when I get the book. The U.S. is always decades behind everybody else. It’s not like I’m ignorant of (the current market). I just don’t care.”

***

And if that doesn’t explain everything, agent Patricia Nelson’s workshop, “Avoid Rookie Submission Mistakes,” dealt with some definite no-nos. 

·       Targeting the wrong audience. Think middle grade, young adult, or adult. Nothing is one size fits all! (See the next no-no also – where is it shelved?)

·       Wrong genre. Think – where would the book be shelves in a bookstore?

·       Wrong agent. Research sites such as Agent Query, Query Tracker, and Literary Rambles (for YA and MG client lists).

·       Wrong comp titles. These can include comparison titles that are too old, too famous, outliers of your genre, or just plain from the wrong genre. Comp titles preferably should have been published within the last 3-5 years, be well-known but not necessarily long-time New York Times best sellers. Comparisons, for instance, to the Harry Potter series simply can’t be taken seriously. Nelson’s rule of thumb: If it was made into a TV show or a movie, it’s probably too big.

·       Query is not about the book. “A query should be about the book, rather than about why you decided to become a writer.”

·       First page cliches. Automatic turnoffs include opening with dream sequences, waking up, and prologues about something that happened a long time ago.

·       First chapter information dumps. “Remember you have a limited time to catch an agent’s attention. Your work must be engaging on page one.”

·       Unprofessional communication. Think of a query as a cover letter for a job. “Every piece of communication with an author tells me something about what it would be like to work with her,” Nelson said. (And for more tips, see the Ask An Agent Anything discussion above.)

***

Next up: More from the DFW Writers Conference, including agent Kristin Nelson’s Master Class: “Write the Perfect Query Letter for Your Novel”; “How to Land a Literary Agent,” with Malaga Baldi and A. Lee Martinez; author Richard Gonzales on “Writing Past Cliché: Real Diversity in Literature” and “Cover to Cover,” indie horror author Russell C. Connor’s show and tell on the evolution of the perfect cover art.