Selling a novel

steveglines
Aug 8, 2017 · 14 min read
Kitty Stevenson’s 1937 passport photo

I began a novel, variously called Poplar Hill or Old Money, in January 2009. It took me about 8 months to get a first draft. That was a disaster: spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and punctuation, forgetaboutit. Eleven drafts and ten different readers later, in 2015, I had a pretty good but still rough novel.

What’s it about? It doesn’t matter right now. Everyone perceives it a little differently and everyone expects something different. I’ve tried to rewrite my query a hundred times according to advice from “experts.” It was harder than writing the damned novel in the first place.

First round: subscribed to Publishers Marketplace at $20 a month. The good news is that you can discover who actually sold something. It’s astonishing how many “agents” have never sold a thing in their lives. I collected a list of about 200 viable agents. I sent out batches of ten email queries and ten physical query letters by mail. No response. Repeat. Eventually I collected a pile of about 100 rejections that represented about ten different query letters. That’s less than a fifty percent reply rate. No one nibbled.

Round two: I tried to raise $5,000 via KickStarter for an editor. It didn’t work but a patron (someone who likes my writing — Thanks Doug) gave me $2000. That was enough to hire an editor from Nova Scotia to work through the manuscript to get the accents and local dialect correct. Repeat first round again, on the assumption that the interns that rejected me the first time had moved on and there was little or no institutional memory of who I was. I got another fifty rejections but a few wanted to see the manuscript. No takers but a few good comments, very few. One agent rejected me four times.

Round three: Workshop the hell out of the manuscript. I joined a novel workshopping group that met weekly on Thursday night and another one that met Wednesday noon. Thursday night was the more intense of the workshops but given the nature of it I could only get one chapter a month “processed,” there were 18 chapters. Before getting down to business we had to endure the self congratulations of those who managed to acquire MFA degrees from third rate colleges. It wasn’t very helpful in the long run. The Wednesday critique sessions were a lot more helpful. There were only four of us: a poet, a budding novelist, a trainer, for lack of a better title, and me. We got through a chapter every two weeks.

While I was workshopping the manuscript I realized that my query letter was largely at fault. It hadn’t inspired many agents to take a look at the rest of the package. So I took a Query Letter How-to class at Grub Street. A hundred bucks got samples of working query letters and a critique of what had been handed in before the class. As far as I could tell the only real difference between those that succeed and those that didn’t was an endorsement by someone already under contract to a particular agent. A year or so later I took another seminar on writing query letters with a handful of agents on the panel. They said I aced the query letter seminar. My query was simple: “Before she died, Kitty felt the need to tell her story of death and depravity in pre-war Nazi Germany.” Two of the three agents declined the novel without asking for the manuscript. I never heard back from the third. Literary agency is the only profession where the salesmen spend the majority of their time thinking about why they can’t sell a product. I’d do better with a Fuller Brush salesman.

Round three point five: Workshop and conference yourself into bankruptcy. I know there are writers out there that swear by conferences. I’ve been to AWP, Grub Street and the Cape Cod Writers Conference. I enjoy the latter for its location and friendly atmosphere. Still, I didn’t walk away from any of those conferences with an agent or with any particularly useful information. I did learn one important fact: The agents that attend these conferences don’t sell many books. I’m not sure why they attend but when I looked them up in Publishers Marketplace they are at the bottom of the lists, often not selling a book for years. I don’t know why they attend, ego perhaps, or perhaps they are waiting for the super blockbuster that will fund their retirement.

At one very expensive conference ($500 to get in the door and $150 per agent) where many of my friends were paid to quack, I could only afford one agent. Really. $750 to pitch to one agent not of my choosing. I should have known better. The agent said she was looking for YA manuscripts. My novel is not a Young Adult story. Still better to pitch so someone than to no one at all I told myself.

The agent (I’ve deliberately forgotten her name for fear of slandering her) read my query and the first fifty pages. She said she couldn’t sell it because the story was too “Canadian,” (Well, yes, most of the story takes place in Canada.) and the characters were too quirky.

Wow, I wasn’t expecting that. You’ve never heard of Annie Piroux’s “The Shipping News” I protested.

“Old news,” she replied.

How about Farley Mowatt, I asked.

“Who?” she replied.

I got up and staggered away muttering invectives about the state of literature in the United States.

Round four: Take a break. Old Money is a series of parallel stories. First and foremost it’s the story of an old woman who is dying, its a character study (like Tinkers by Paul Harding). She examines her life and tries to understand what it means to die. It begins with her massive heart attack and ends with her death. In between she engages her rural Nova Scotian neighbors in a dialog about her youth, about life and death, and her sanguine view of the world. She grew up a wealthy socialite but was placed in a French boarding school when she was six, returning to America and the Great Depression when she was 13. Later, when she was 18, she hob-hobnobbed with the rich and powerful in pre-war Nazi Germany where she saw a lot of horrible things and spent a fortune that had been embargoed there.

The protagonist and her neighbors are indeed quirky characters. Over the intervening years and fifteen or so revisions, I’ve been pressured to make the story more about Nazi Germany and less about the characters. I think I’ve managed that without taking away the stories power. Still, I put it aside and worked on three other larger than life stories.

If Old Money is the retrospective story of a strong character’s formative years in Germany, then The Social Register is the same story told in present tense 1937–9 Germany. If the protagonist in Old Money thinks some of her friends in Germany might have been spies, then in The Social Register, they all are, even the 18 year old protagonist who has the dubious honor of shooting, and killing a Nazi spy that’s on to them. I finished an outline and the first few chapters. The rough draft is about 50% done. I started reading a lot of novels that take place in that era to get a better flavor of the period.

While I backed off on The Social Register to do some research, I sat down and recorded, with fictional embellishments, stories I have collected of combat in Vietnam. War Stories is about a character who really, really doesn’t want to be there but, to keep his sanity and stay safe, becomes a combination of “Radar” O’Reiley (MASH) and Rambo. He gets five Purple Hearts, three combat Bronze Stars, a Silver Star and is nominated for a Medal of Honor before finally escaping Vietnam by blowing opium smoke in the face of a colonel tasked with getting him to reenlist. It’s mostly finished but I also wanted to get the historical flow right so I stopped while I researched the history. I want to get the chronology right and I’m missing some periods in the real history. War Stories is about 80% complete.

I’ve got a lot of research to do (and I love reading about the periods) but I love writing so I decided to do a fictionalized autobiography. Fenwick is based on my senior year in High School in 1969 and 70. Everything that could go wrong did. Not in my real life but in the fictionalized life. In real life a minor encounter with a drug dealer or policeman didn’t result in chaos or much drama but in Fenwick all hell breaks loose. It’s a lot of fun to write. I remember small events that either could have gone massively wrong or other events that could have gone delightfully sweet if I had let them. Fenwick is almost done as far as a rough draft. I’ll finish that next.

Round five: Damn it, Old Money is a good, well written story. I let it sit for a year and a half while slowly working the manuscript through the Wednesday morning critique sessions. It’s about as good as it’s going to get without a professional editor (that is an editor at a publishing house). I signed up, again, to Publishers Marketplace and again sent out, a bit more haphazard this time, and got the same results from a small sample of twenty five agents. Then something interesting happened.

The Northumberland Straight from Tony River Nova Scotia Canaca

Old Money takes place in the small hamlet of Poplar Hill in west Pictou county, Nova Scotia, Canada, roughly one hundred miles north of Halifax on the Northumberland Straight. It’s a very rural county with a mixture of farmers, fishermen and mechanics. It’s also a very literate place. People read books, a lot of books. Five miles down the road from Poplar Hill is the small town of River John. For the past seventeen years they have had a literary festival called “Read by the Sea.” I’ve always assumed that if I got Old Money (or Poplar Hill) published that I’d end up reading at the “Read by the Sea.” I had, after all, had the editor of the local newspaper edit the manuscript so “Read by the Sea” was a natural place to launch the book. It hasn’t worked out that way, yet.

I’m active on Facebook. I have thousands of friends that I’ve never met and I comment about everything that interests me. A lot of people know who I am so imagine my surprise when I got a message from a woman named Monica asking me if I knew Catherine Glines from Poplar Hill.

Yes, I answered, she was my mother.

Monica said that she had been a neighbor.

I asked if she knew Barb and Vince (The real Barb and Vince are the prototype for characters in Old Money, if you didn’t guess it, my Mother served as the prototype for Kitty, the protagonist in Old Money).

Of course came the reply, my daughter used to babysit for Barb and Vince’s children.

Did you know I wrote a novel based on the characters in Poplar Hill?

WOW! She exclaimed, you should apply for our “Pitch to the Publishers” during the “Read by the Sea” festival.

I applied then had to wait, and wait, and wait. There were only eight slots and we had only four minutes each I was told. A week and a half before the event I got the email I was hoping for: “You’ve got a slot.” Bring at least two copies of the manuscript. Yes! I’d be finally pitching my novel where I should have been pitching all along. I ordered five copies of the manuscript from a cheap mail-order printing house.

Slight problem: I’m broke, I can’t afford a real hotel. “Read by the Sea” is 700 miles north of where I am and I’ve got a car with almost 250,000 miles on it that doesn’t work very well. (Hey, at least it’s paid for.) The day before I had to leave I didn’t have any printed copies of the manuscript, I didn’t have a place to stay once I got there (I did have an airBnB at the halfway point in St. John, New Brunswick both coming and going) and my mechanic said my brakes were about to fail, at least the rear ones were. An emergency print job at Staples and a quickie break job and I was ready to roll.

It’s six hours of non-stop driving to St. John from Boston. The last time I drove this route I took my daughter with me. That was over 20 years ago, before my mother died. I had someone to talk to. This time I was alone. Fortunately, I’m a writer. Where my daughters voice kept me awake 20 years ago, the voices in my head did the same this time around. I left around ten in the morning and got to St. John around six in the evening. Boston is on Eastern Daylight time while New Brunswick is on Atlantic Daylight time, an hour later.

It’s another five hours from St. John New Brunswick to River John, Nova Scotia. I got there in the early afternoon. Nothing had changed. It looked the same after twenty years. I still didn’t have a place to sleep. I figured I could sleep in my car if I had to. I drove further up the road to the Seafoam campground and asked I could use their shower for a price (I could).

Then I called Monica and begged to sleep on her couch. Sure, she said, but only for one night. The next day I found Barb and Vince and imposed myself on them, sort of. They have always been the salt of the earth which is why I modeled the characters Barb and Vince in Old Money after them. Most of Old Money is a dialogue between Barb and Kitty. In the story Vince is the one that fixes everything that’s broken. When I was ready to head home and my car wouldn’t start, it was Vince who charged my battery, cleaned off the belts that were covered in dust, and slipping (the alternator wasn’t charging the battery) and sprayed something on the belts that made them stick. My alternator worked, my air conditioner worked, the starter worked, and I made it home. Thanks Vince. I think he was happy to get rid of me. He’s retired, really retired. Work consists of looking out over his fifteen or twenty acres of manicured lawn that take him six or more hours to mow. The rest of the time he kicks back and admires his handwork. Barb manages the Legion hall where I was going to make my pitch.

I got to the Legion hall at 8:00 am after finding a gas station that had coffee. The first writer up had a manuscript that was thirty years old and 200,000 words. It was the only thing he had ever written, a typical dystopian science fiction universe. I’m sure that went no where. The second one up was a young lady that wanted to do a calendar with her paintings. I was up next. I had written my pitch before hand and practiced it while sitting on a jetty at Tony River, eating a sandwich, while sea gulls dive bombed me. I think I stumbled a bit but this is roughly what I said:

My name is Steve Glines. My novel “Old Money” takes place in Poplar Hill, which is just a few kilometers down the road towards Pictou. The story is simple: Before she died, Kitty Stevenson decided that she needed to tell her story of death and depravity in pre-war Nazi Germany. It’s the story of a remarkable young woman who learned from her experiences to be a powerful character.

Kitty Stevenson, was a New Yorker who moved to Poplar Hill in 1968, became a Canadian citizen, ran the Hector Society, cooked at the Oddfellows home, became a Master Chef (no small feat in itself), and had an opinion on just about everything. Most people knew her as a delightful, hard-working, eccentric.

What you don’t know is the rest of the story. In 1998, during the ice storm of the century, Kitty had a major heart attack. It eventually killed her. While she was in hospital she began to tell her life story to Barb, her neighbor and best friend. She developed the theory that as long as she had a story to tell she wouldn’t die.

Kitty was born into a fabulously wealthy family. But in the 1920’s, children of the New York social elite were sent to French boarding schools. Kitty was sent to a convent school in Grenoble France when she was six years old. Seven years later, when she was thirteen, she was sent home when the Depression nearly bankrupted the family. Kitty graduated from the local public high school.

However, her father had made some investments in post-WWI Germany. It had grown into a substantial sum after Hitler began rearming but it could not be taken out of the country so Kitty, at the age of 18, went there to spend it … and it was a considerable sum, several million dollars in today’s money.

She went to Munich to study opera. While she was there, she hobnobbed with German society, met Hitler, photographed a concentration camp, witnessed Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass, and saw murdered Jewish corpse lying near burned out synagogues. When things got too hot, she escaped down the Adriatic Sea on a Jewish refugee steamer headed for Palestine. She returned to Munich only to book the last passage to America on a German registered ship, the SS Bremen, with the little money she had left. She got back to New York just days before Hitler invaded Poland, starting the second world war.

While she was in hospice, a never ending stream of Pentecostal preachers attempted to convert an agnostic Kitty. After she died they held a service for her. The last preacher to get up said, in his Cape Breton accent, “I was the last one here to see Catherine alive, and I asked her, ‘Do you have any religious stirrings?’ and she replied, ‘Yes Reverend, I do. I considered myself a lapsed Unitarian.’” Bazinga!

In closing, I’d like to tell you how I got here. I went to a “pitch to an agent” event in Boston last year and pitched this novel to a woman who had a very, “American attitude.” She said the characters were too quirky and the story was too “Canadian.” I asked her if she had ever heard of Annie Proulx’s “The Shipping News?” She said that was old news. “How about Farley Mowatt?” I asked. Who’s he, she replied. So here I am pitching my story where it belongs, in Canada.

I had the crowd with me. Many in the audience knew me and the real Kitty, and had heard at least some of her stories.

There was an editor from a small publisher I never heard of that asked me about my background. I think I stumbled there too, blithering something about the books I’ve written (5 trade textbooks), the general assignment reporting I’ve done, and the fact that my original agent wouldn’t sell fiction. He asked for a copy of the manuscript. He asked me if the protagonist was based on a relative. I told him it was my mother. He looked askance and asked if it was difficult writing about her. I told him that once I decided to make the story fiction it was very easy. Her character flaws and eccentric behavior became gems in the story. I think he was satisfied.

Then there was a woman from a larger better known publisher (at least in Canada) who said casually, when I walked up to her after the event, “email the manuscript to me.” I don’t know if she was being polite or had a genuine interest. I haven’t heard from either of them … but it’s only been three weeks. …

Round six (if I need it): Self Publish, and walk away.

steveglines

Written by

Writer/Editor/Publisher, Web & Publication Designer http://www.whlreview.com

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