How to Get Rejected:
1. Name your fictional city “Vamperia.”
2. End your title with “…of Destiny/Fate.”
3. “I’d like you to read my 400,000 word novel…”
4. “Here are the first three chapters, each of which is 80 pages long…”
5. Assert that there are NO young adult books with strong female leads, and yours will be the first.
6. Describe your thriller’s token female sidekick/love interest as “smarty and feisty BUT attractive.”
I have read that story. Many, many times. I think I WROTE that story, too, once upon a time.
When I was submitting this last book around, I ran across the guidelines for one literary agent who rather plaintively beseeched people not to send their manuscripts on scented paper. They also specified that they did not consider books about cats, or angels. No indication of whether cats and angels together, or cats which ARE angels, would have been acceptable.
Via metaquotes, from which all awesome comes.
A.
The last comment on that post, by a literary agent for an off-Broadway theater who has to read scripts for a playwriting contest every year, nearly sent me into hysterics. From notes written about one of said scripts: “Parts of this read like Isak Dinesen had used Barbara Cartland to ghostwrite Out Of Africa.”
I spent my first two years of graduate school helping my dad look for Barbara Cartland books once a month for my grandmother to read. The titles alone were almost enough to put me off reading entirely. The scariest part of all that? We had to start keeping a list of those we’d gotten her already because she could tell she’d read it already *after the first page*. At age 90. And Cartland wrote something like 600 books! My grandmother was like a romance novel savant.
oh, they aren’t too bad, and good ole barbara had herself buried in cardboard.
i think i read a couple of hers eons ago.
ok, they weren’t artful.
That’s why the LOLCat bible is self-published.
Of course, there are entire press houses devoted to cats. None of them are as talented as my cats, …
I couldn’t have said it better, 789.
Scented paper? My manuscripts smell of blood, sweat, cheap coffee, and Pall Mall’s. And aren’t half as good as that sounds.
Moving slightly off-topic with the word “Vamperia” as the impetus, bloggerGinmar once described a rating system she had for movies that depended on how many zombies, vampires and, most importantly, werewolves the movie featured. I don’t have the link to the particular post, and searching for “werewolves” on her sightisn’t particularly helpful in turning up that particular post. But I thought it a wonderful rating system and recommend it to all.