Getting a higher degree for the sake of a book

Hello -

I have a question about the kind of experience, academic background, etc. required for book-length nonfiction writing. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on post-apocalyptic literature and recently wrote an article for a popular sci-fi blog on why we like the apocalypse, which got something like 20,000 views and has helped make my blog (which has other nerdy apocalypse stuff) pretty popular. A lot of commenters have been asking for my thesis and encouraging me to publish it, which is flattering, of course, but who wants to read a book by someone who only has a B.A.? As a reader, I would definitely be suspicious of the author's credibility. Obviously, if I went off for 8 years, got a PhD, and came back to the topic, anything I'd write would be much better, but I don't think what I have to say now is valueless, either - I think it's pretty cool, actually, and I know that there are some science-y writers (like Mary Roach) who've successfully built a career without an advanced degree. So my question to you is: would any publisher look twice at a proposal by someone like me who's armed with such a short (but focused) resume?

Here's how I look at a query in terms of higher education credentials:

(1) Fiction - no credentials needed if book is good

(2) Memoir, "learn from experience"-type non-fiction - no credentials needed if book is good, but probably shouldn't come out of nowhere (i.e. you should have some real-world credentials of some kind, even if they're not academic)

(3) An academic book - requires some credentials. These are not necessarily "PhD in your area." You don't need a PhD in international relations to write about international relations; you need some experience in the IR field, maybe a posting or a job or field work combined with publications in journals. If you're writing about an area of medicine and it's not your medical memoirs, you should have some kind of medical credentials, preferably an MD in your field, but we do get a lot of submissions by social workers, nurses, and medical professionals who did not attend a full course of medical school. In other words, if it's a highly technical book, you need some excuse to have the authority to write it.

If your thesis is good, and you felt compelled to turn it into a book, I would look at it if the query letter was good. I'm not clear on your field here, but I'm not even sure you can major in the apocalypse, much less get a PhD in it, but I guess my answer is yes, I would look at your query and not toss it because you don't have a master's.

One area where people generally do not have academic credentials is historical fiction. I have a BA in history but decided not to pursue a masters or PhD because of the nature of academia. Though many writers have some sort of "background" like the one I've described, the majority of their material is derived from private research, scouring libraries and interviewing experts, not sitting in a PhD program preparing a thesis that by definition has to be as boring as possible (I was once graded down for my paper being "too dramatic). If it sounds like they know what they're talking about, I don't look for historical fiction authors' credentials at all.

Yes, yes, I know you mean Twilight

Also, I am deeply sorry, I feel as though I am pestering you, yet, since you are an agent...what do you see in this paranormal trend for young adult novels? That is the manuscript I have been sending out since April.

I would think it would be easier now, considering the fame of a certain book. Yet, almost all the rejections are automatic. I know, certain agents have their areas, but even to agents who have represented young adult/paranormal, I received form rejections. (And I am not even writing about vampires, werewolves, ghosts, or faeries!)

Do you think that agents automatically reject these queries because they hate the trend?

Just to clear things up, I'm an agent's assistant, not an agent. I don't represent any clients or make any deals.

As to the paranormal YA trend, it's still going strong. I'm sure there's people who are sick of it, but I wouldn't reject a good query because of a trend being overdone. A good book is a good book. What we do know is that publishers are still buying paranormal YA and adult, which is what we really care about, because it's the job of an agent to sell a book to a publisher. It's the job of a good agent to know which editors are particularly interested and/or don't have too many vampire/zombie books on their list already to justify another buy and then to get cozy with those editors. But that's on our end; your job is to write a great book.

I was at an AAR meeting last week to discuss the convention at Frankfurt, which for financial reasons a lot of people who normally attend didn't attend this year. In discussing what people were buying, two things were agreed upon as being hot:
- paranormal romance
- Scandinavian literature

I don't know the reason for the second one.

Google Books Ducks Copyright Law, Sort of

I thought this was an interesting article. It reminds me of a case I once heard about from a copyright lawyer:

A publishing company decided to republish a book that was on their backlist. The original contract of course stipulated that the author had to be paid royalties, something they hadn't had to worry about for some time because the book wasn't in print. Most contracts say that if the book goes out of print for a certain amount of time (usually 5-10 years), the rights revert entirely to the author and the author can republish the book with a new company if he/she chooses to, or can negotiate a new contract with the old company if it wants to keep the rights to the book. In this case I don't remember if the publishing company still had partial rights or not; the point was they wanted to publish the book and they had to alert the author.

The problem was they couldn't find him.

The author had vanished without a trace, leaving no living relatives in charge of an estate that would manage the book rights. Living relatives can only get book rights if the will stipulates it; in this case the author had no will and couldn't even be proven to be dead. The publishing company hired the contract lawyer, who went to the judge with all of the documentation. The judge ruled that they had to do a certain amount of regular attempts to find the author - hiring private investigators, posting in newspapers, etc - and if nothing came up, they could republish the book without the author's permission. If, however, the author then reappeared or the author was proven dead and a will surfaced granting rights to living relatives, the publisher would then have to pay back-royalties to the author/author's estate.

I thought this was a very interesting case. A week after I heard him speak, I got my first offer from a publisher. It's been a few years now and I have two books published and a couple in the can. On the way home from shul on Yom Kippur my family happened to walk home with our lawyer/accountant, and I mentioned to him that I should write a will soon because I now have a literary estate that will last for 70 years after my death. It might be a minuscule or nonexistent estate, but it will be there. In fact it will probably be longer than 70 years, as they keep extending that number whenever Mickey Mouse is about to go into public domain, and books I publish in the future may fall into a later time-period extension.

I'm actually against the extension of copyright laws to the point that it has now reached for the written word. Works in the public domain are more published and better-read as a result, and if an estate is large then children are likely to squabble over it, sometimes preventing a book from being republished long enough for it to disappear entirely. Do my potential, currently non-existent heirs need to benefit that badly? If I were to live another forty years, which is extremely possible, my current books won't go into public domain until 2119. Does that sound ridiculous to anyone else?

A rare reason to make a call

Dear Rejecter,
I moved this past summer. Before I moved overseas, I sent a query to an agency that doesn't have a website or e-mail address. My relatives in the US informed me that the said agency replied asking for a full. I sent the full from my current country of residence in September. (The letter for the full came in July). My question is, should I call the agency to know the status of my manuscript? I know this is a no-no, but I did not send the package as certified because it was going to a PO Box, and for the past month, many letters have gone missing in the post offices around here.

I really want to make sure that they received the manuscript since they are the only agency to ask for a full. Thank you in advance.

The agency has no email whatsover? Check that it's a legitimate agency at Preditors and Editors, do a web search again for the email, and if you find nothing, I think you're justified in making a call. On the phone, be brief. Just ask them if they received it and if they have an email address, not whether they've read it or not (they probably haven't).

Non-Platform Fiction

I'm a completely non angsty person, so feel free to punch as hard as you want on this one.

I know that most non-fiction depends on a great platform; either you are famous already or you are writing about something insanely compelling(you accidentally spent a magical summer with chairman mao.). With that said, and while I acknowledge that this is a completely logical and fair way to do business, is there any space for someone with an interesting non-fiction concept, written with humor and wit?

I'm talking about something without historic signifigance or tear-jerking poignancy, but still a concept which an average person might find interesting and amusing. I'm purposely leaving out my concept for two reasons: you don't want to waste your time reading it, and I want more of a general industry answer than a specific acceptance or rejection of my ideas.

David Sedaris makes a pretty good living talking about wacky neighbors and childhood memories, which would make a terrible platform if you pitched it like that, but he's actually really funny and, I think, deserving of his bestseller status. At least for When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

In short: My answer is yes.

I Should Finally Say Something on E-Books

Since I got a Sony e-Reader for my birthday, my parents have been utterly dedicated to cutting out clippings from newspapers about e-books and either mailing them to me or leaving them on my desk when I come home for some family event. When I came home last night I was met with about 7 clippings, and there was a front page article in today's New York Times that was already highlighted for me before I came down for breakfast. They all pretty much say the same thing, which is that e-books are new and awesome and libraries are using them to reach digital readers and Sony and Amazon are lowering their prices to battle for the market in e-readers (finally). A lot of the articles have noted that people can't get library books or Google books on the Kindle, which is exclusive to Amazon and the reason I got a Sony. Very few articles have much to say about the publishing industry other than this must be good somehow, because all things internet are good until they're bad and destroy industries (music and, slowly but surely, movies).

I would have reported on my e-Reader early but honestly, I don't use it that much. I own a lot of books. Way too many books. I have too much to read in book format at the moment, and I haven't been on any vacations where carrying 503 books around in one slender case in my backpack would have been helpful. That's how many books I have on my e-Reader, by the way - 503. How much did I pay for them? $0. I read a lot of public domain books - classics, translations of classics where the translation is in public domain, and non-fiction books that were written earlier than 1932. Google Books could literally provide me with millions of these if I could afford that many memory cards. Oh, and that's just if I stay legal, and don't take advantage of the fact that people have been massively digitizing their private collections (mostly sci-fi) for years and posting them as torrents. So far I've had no reason not to stay legal, but to be honest, sooner or later some book is going to come along and it's going to be overly expensive and a used copy isn't going to be available, the library copies are not going to be available, and because I hate the author or something I'm going to download it to read it.

There are some kinks to the e-Reader. The version I have seems to drain its battery if you don't use it for awhile, so when you turn it on after a couple weeks it barely has enough life left start up. Sony's having some software problems with the book version of iTunes, and the books won't sync properly to my computer and I have a lot of doubles on my memory card. Books scanned by Google instead of being designed for the reader can be hard to read, as in the text will be small and up in the corner of the screen if it's a .pdf or if it's an .epub, not all of the text will translate. The software that translates it will pick up some old fonts as different letters and some dirt on the ancient pages of a library book as marks so the text you're reading is only 95% there and your mind has to make some jumps. And frankly, I'm not as impressed with the e-Ink technology as I first was. It looks a lot like text, but the screen is still glass/plastic and therefore there's a glare from bright lights or sunlight. It's obviously not a book. Still, 503 free books on a single device? I'm going for it.

This device will not destroy publishing, but it will reshape the industry as we know it.

The biggest issue I see here is the market for classics. Publishers make huge amounts of money on public domain books, and once the e-Reader becomes advanced enough to feel more like a book (like they finally decide to put in a second G-ddamn screen so you can open it like a book) and becomes cheap enough, the market for classics and other public domain works will fall out. Not entirely, but it will take a large hit. Some imprints dedicated to these books will fold. Also once publishers digitize more of their own books, more will be leaked (I've never heard of drm technology stopping anyone) and you'll be able to download thousands of current books with torrents or whatever the next generation of downloading software is. Current publishing (new books) will take a hit. Textbook publishers, who have been screwing over students for years by publishing a new edition of everything every year to make sure nobody just hands over their old copy to a new student, will insist that schools only have licensed copies of their e-versions, and charge a lot for the licenses. Like, thousands of dollars, like Adobe does for photoshop. After many years of enjoying the program, I actually went to buy photoshop in gratitude, only to discover it was a thousand dollars. How the hell was I supposed to buy that? How was anyone who does photoshopping for fun?

In the end, the book market will survive because its essential medium is not something that cannot be digitized, unlike music, tv, and movies. It's paper. In your hand. But man, will it take a hit. And from the looks of all of these articles, nobody's ready for it.

(PS I'm out a lot this weekend so on top of Shabbos, most comments won't be approved until Sunday because I won't be around to approve them. But by all means, leave them for approval)