Interview with Agent Kristin Nelson, part I

By Pamela

When I started writing fiction years ago—even before I began networking with other writers—I turned to the Internet as my first resource—for how to write compelling characters, how to create conflict, and ultimately, how to secure an agent. One of the agent’s blogs I faithfully read was Kristin Nelson’s Pub Rants, and later I queried her with my first project. She turned me down (and she should have—I had a lot to learn yet!) but she remains a favorite agent of mine for her commitment to telling it like it is and educating writers about the industry. So, imagine how delighted I was when she said, YES! when I asked her to participate here on our blog.

Here's more information about Kristin:

Kristin Nelson, Nelson Literary Agency, LLC

Being an avid reader practically since birth, Kristin is equally happy reading a Pulitzer prize-winning literary novel for her book club or a sexy romance novel. She established Nelson Literary Agency, LLC in 2002 after the literary agent she was working for expressed dismay that Kristin wanted to represent—gasp!—genre fiction as well as literary novels. Forming NLA was absolutely the right thing to do. She currently specializes in representing commercial fiction (mainstream, women’s fiction, romance, science fiction, fantasy, young adult and middle grade) and literary fiction with a commercial bent. In general, she does not handle nonfiction projects with the exception of an occasional memoir. Clients include bestselling authors Jamie Ford, Ally Carter, Gail Carriger, Simone Elkeles, Courtney Milan, and RITA-award winners Sherry Thomas and Linnea Sinclair. When she is not busy selling books, Kristin loves playing Ultimate Frisbee (where she tends to be the oldest person on the team) and taking hikes with her husband and their dog Chutney. Member: AAR, RWA, SFWA, SCBWI. Please visit her website www.nelsonagency.com before submitting and also check out Kristin’s popular blog http://pubrants.blogspot.com.

Pamela
You’ve been blogging for over five years. How do your posts differ now from those earliest ones?

Kristin
Initially I spent a lot of time blogging about beginning writers’ mistakes—and still do occasionally if I find a topic that’s helpful for my audience—but today I tend to write from an agent’s viewpoint about how writers can protect themselves and what some of the changes in the industry are. Because, regardless of the changes in the digital publishing industry, mechanics of writing and beginning writers’ mistakes haven’t changed much in the past five years and those were covered in earlier entries.

Pamela
Publishing is all about relationships. How much do your relationships with editors and publishers play into your deciding to take on a project? Have you passed on a submission that sounded like an amazing story for which you just couldn’t think of a publisher/editor? 

Kristin
I’ve definitely looked at sample pages or a full manuscript where I don’t have a really good vision of how I could talk about it. But I know I’m going to take on an author when I can’t put down the book and can immediately think of ten editors who would love to see it and I start formalizing in my head how I’m going to talk about the novel. When I’ve read things that were good that really didn’t speak to me and I didn’t have that clear vision in my head, ultimately I passed on it. A lot of those never got representation. Some have gone on to be agented but not sold. And then quite a few have gone on to be agented and sold. And some for really good money. But if I didn’t have the vision for the book, then I was not the right person for it. I know writers hate to hear that, but because they feel like, ‘Oh, if it’s good writing and the person’s telling a good story, wouldn’t you take it on?’ But no, not necessarily.

Pamela
So, no agent-remorse when something you passed on went on to do really well, if you knew in your heart it wasn’t what you wanted to represent?

 

Kristin
I’ve only been remorseful about one project, and while reading it, I kept going back and forth and back and forth. At the time I was thinking, ‘This is kind of like a knock-off of Twilight.’ And what I should have been thinking was, ‘Oh, this is kind of like Twilight.’ The writing and the concept were really good but I decided if I was going back and forth, I should pass. Two weeks later, I was still thinking about the book and I got back in touch with that author but she had already signed with someone else. And then I knew that was going to be the one that I was going to be remorseful about. But all the others that I’ve passed on, that have gone on to sell and do well, I still review them to see if there are a lot of revisions since I’ve seen them, and I still don’t get the feeling that they were for me. Not every book in the world is going to appeal to every reader in the world. There are a lot of people who don’t like JK Rowling and I can’t imagine it, but there are.

Pamela
Several of your recent blog posts focused on query letters and writers missing the mark as to piquing your interest. Do you feel the biggest problem is good writers who over-think the query or writers who submit work that’s not yet ready?

Kristin
To me, those are two very separate things. Because there are some writers who nail the query letter and then you look at the sample pages and you realize it’s just not ready for an agent to see. They’ve just not mastered their craft—at least in the draft that I’m seeing. Not to say they won’t ever master the craft. If someone hasn’t written a good query letter, we’re just passing on it regardless of how good the pages might end up being because we’re not even getting to the stage that we’re looking at the pages.

Of about the 36,000 queries we got last year, probably more than 50 percent were so poorly written that they were rejected within seconds, so you’re not really competing with them. If you’ve learned how to write a good query, then you’re competing with the group of writers who may or may not pique our interest.

Pamela
I watched a video on your blog that was recorded at a conference you attended. And of all the research I’ve done online about how to write a query letter—that video of you and what you advised: to reread your first 30 pages and find the inciting event and let that form the cornerstone of your query, became a light bulb moment for me. It’s really the best piece of advice I’d seen. 

Kristin
I don’t disagree. And when I teach that workshop, it’s amazing how hard it is to get some people to think about what their inciting incident is—usually it’s because their inciting incident isn’t happening within the first 30 pages. It ends up being on page 100 and right there you know your manuscript’s in trouble. You have a pacing issue.

Pamela
A couple of us at What Women Write are Backspace members. For writers who are not familiar with Backspace, how would you sell them on the benefits of belonging to the group? Are there other online support systems you think are worth the investment of time and money?

Kristin
I know of three: Writers.net, Backspace and Absolute Write’s watercooler. My question to writers would be: Why aren’t you involved in one of these groups? All have wonderful, professional writers who dispense advice and offer feedback and generally make themselves available. Holy cow! Why wouldn’t you want to be a part of that? For example, on Backspace agents will often chat on the forum boards. Where else can you get that one-on-one opportunity in a virtual situation where people will address questions? Some of the most amazing posts on the forum are by experienced authors who say: These were my mistakes.

I’ll never forget on Backspace when a very popular NYT’s bestselling thriller author talked about how she got into a world of trouble for not paying her taxes on time. Ever since then, I always have a conversation with my authors who have large advances on the importance of keeping up with their taxes. How smart that she was willing to say, ‘Hey, this was a big mistake that I made.’

Pamela
We’ve followed Jamie Ford’s publishing journey—saw him speak in Dallas, featured him on the blog and will eagerly hear him again as he returns this fall for Richardson Reads One Book’s event. He stated that his query included having a portion of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet place in a short story contest. How important are pre-pubbed credits such as contests when it comes to getting your attention in a query? 

Kristin
It absolutely never hurts to have prepublication credentials, especially if you’re writing literary fiction and are in the good literary magazines. That’s going to carry a lot of weight—just like graduating from Iowa’s MFA workshop carries a lot of weight. But it’s not the end-all, be-all. I’ve definitely signed authors who didn’t have anything. Nada! And I took them on. As long as the manuscript is wonderful and strong enough, that’s most important. Having non-fiction credits, even if you’re shopping a novel, doesn’t hurt because it communicates a level of professionalism and shows you know how to meet a deadline. In the end, non-fiction pub credits won’t play a factor in promoting fiction unless you’re an NPR correspondent or if you have a pretty high level of media exposure as someone like David Sedaris.

Come back tomorrow for part two of Kristin's interview where she discusses contract negotiations and what she's currently looking for in submissions. 

Clutter

By Susan
 
It takes all kinds, I know, when it comes to decorating. I have friends who ooze style: deep, luscious fabrics and layers of pillows, intricate and intimate arrangements of family photos and mementos, and heavily carved furniture weighted in history. I also have friends who are minimalists: retro thrift store chic, clean lines, echos and open spaces. Whiteness and air rest in their freedom, pleased with the sparseness of it all, and each item shines as a focal point in it's own simplistic beauty.

And then I have my house: my 'temporary house' we purchased almost ten years ago. We are still here and it is full of the messy-ness and busy-ness of our life. I realize, of course, as I write this that my temporary house has become my permanent home.

Like the ship of Theseus, we replaced every working part of this vessel, from the plumbing to the hulking units that keep us cool. We ripped out carpet and replaced it with hardwood. We gutted the kitchen and tiled until we developed carpal tunnel syndrome. We have roofed. I have painted. He has cursed, and I have prayed (and vice-versa.) I have yanked off baseboards and nail-gunned bright new two-point-five-inch replacements. In all my renewal and renovating, I have yet to find a style that I can name. I am not lush, yet I am not Spartan. But my house is full of myself. It's everywhere I look. 

As I write this post, I turn to my right and snap a photo with my iPhone: it is a simple chair I purchased at Target. Yet the blanket is one I carried home from Mexico in 1995 from my honeymoon. I snagged the leather ottoman in Ghana. The beads dangling from the lamp's light switch are Greek, carried back from the island of Santorini. The books? My Bible and a book of poetry by Mary Oliver.

I turn to my left. A tired tumbler of iced tea, my printed manuscript, reading glasses. Stacks of books about Kentucky, and bourbon, and the contemplative life of Thomas Merton. One candid photo of me from 2006. Little pieces of self. A new red shade adorns a marble lamp base that is over one hundred and twenty years old (I could tell you many stories about the things this lamp has seen.) More me. I can't escape it.

I think about my friends and your homes. Are you filled with the same wonder at the imprint you are making on your surroundings? Does the book purchased in Hemingway's house in Key West rest on your shelf, full of its self-importance because you bought it and brought it home? What about that shell you pulled from the deep white sand of a North Carolina beach, is it blessed by being in your house? Are you?

Now. Look at your manuscript. Are you able to clear out the clutter and have a yard sale? Or are you holding on to each word, and each scene, because they mean something to you? Look at it again, lest you become a hoarder. There are things that tell the story, and then there are just things. Determine what is the story. Cut what is not.

I'm in full-on edit mode right now with my completed manuscript, and I'm also hosting a yard sale Friday and Saturday to purge my temporary house of temporary things, leaving only what will last. It's as though they are the same exercise with different muscles. I am purging my house of the excess, and I am purging my manuscript of the extraneous bulk. We are thinning down. We are getting cleaner, and stronger, and better.

What is the mark you are leaving with your manuscript? Is it full of the extra details of your mental clutter, or can you slash it-- making it the best possible work it can be? Do you write the way you decorate? Are you frilly and detailed and rich? Or do you keep your words simple and clean? Or worst of all, are you a hoarder?

Or, are you like me: Lots of reds and blacks and browns, with pebbles and shells?
Here is one thing true: your writing, like your home, carries your DNA. Your heart. Yet you must learn to separate what is holding you back from what will propel you forward. My cluttered house? I'm ready to purge. My cluttered manuscript? Let's bring on the knife.

Ideas

by Elizabeth

People often ask me where I get my ideas. I really don’t know “where” or “how”—I guess they just come. Most of them get discarded. I used to feel like they were magic or special somehow, but once I got over that, once I realized that my brain is wired for them—I let that go. Which was liberating (ha ha, get it? Let it go? Liberated? Yeah, never mind).

Every now and then I’ll get motivated to start a new notebook labeled “Ideas” (to replace the one I started six months or three years earlier, and lost, I mean misplaced). I’ll jot stuff down, maybe even tape a newspaper article to a page if I’m really motivated and can find tape. When I stumble across these old notebooks, I generally do remember the story ideas from the notes. Sometimes not, though. What the heck did the cryptic words “owl/cherry pie/sisters/the last one ever” possibly mean? That one is lost to the ages. Bummer, that. Surely it would have been a bestseller had I only been able to stretch eight words to eighty thousand.

And sometimes the ideas are rooted in pop culture; good ideas maybe, but perhaps more fan fiction than a fresh idea. I’d love to see a movie called “The Dinner Club,” an update of my generation’s touchstone flick. There’s not an actor from the movie who couldn't use the work, really, so why haven’t they done this yet? I have no Hollywood connections, so I wouldn’t know, and it’s entirely likely multiple scripts have floated around Tinsel-land for years. And maybe rejected when "Before Sunset,” the same concept based on the Ethan Hawke original, failed to bring in zillions. Then again, Ethan Hawke was never any competition for the raw adolescent surge of that kiss Judd Nelson planted on Molly Ringwald.

Speaking of fantastic teenage kisses and the ideas they engender, was there ever anything sexier than Eric Stoltz clutching Mary Stuart Masterson’s hips as he gently touched his lips to hers in "Some Kind of Wonderful"? There’s an idea for a remake for you: "Some Kind of Ho-Hum." Maybe the characters meet again, now in their forties, and their lives are not as magical as seventeen-year-olds are certain they will become. Or maybe they just can’t recognize the magic, and seeing Watts brings back the artist in the architect for Keith, or something. Or something.

But this isn’t about movies from the eighties, much as I could go on all day about John Hughes and John Cusack. This is about ideas, where they come from, and which get chosen.

And the real answer is, I’m not sure. Pop culture, sure, a definite springboard. History, both in the traditional sense and the very personal. (Or both.) Observation (also known as snooping and eavesdropping.) Simple musing, looking at a person I know or a person I don’t, and imagining their life when they leave my presence.

Here’s the thing: the ideas, wherever they come from, always come. I guess I had always assumed, if I’d thought about it, which I never really did, that everyone thought that way. That everyone had these ideas constantly flitting through their brains, stories churned and discarded like so much buttermilk. (And there’s a story right there, from history: six high school girls at a tacky breakfast diner, and one orders buttermilk and peppers it. What sixteen year old orders buttermilk? And off we go…)

I wonder if other writers have ideas nibbling at them all the time the same way. Some writers have huge ideas, giant ideas; is there room for the little ones with those monsters taking up so much space? I have had so many tiny ones, and some pretty big ones (that I have not yet found the, yup, let’s call it courage, to undertake), and I don’t understand any more than the people who ask about it where they come from or how it works. But I do think I have come to realize that this is not normal, or at least not the norm.

The ideas, they come. And maybe more than anything else, other than the proof on the page, the actual words written down, I think the stream of ideas is what makes me a writer. I just can’t help it.

What's in a pen name?

By Pamela

Writer Henrik Ibsen--would a
pen name have helped?

Authors choose pen names for a plethora of reasons and I thought it might be fun to talk about what’s behind that pseudonym in the bookshop window.

Famous pen names include: Eric Arthur Blair/George Orwell; Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum/Ayn Rand; Samuel Langhorne Clemens/Mark Twain; William Sydney Porter/O. Henry; and Mary Westmacott/Agatha Christie.

In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King tells of inventing his alter ego Richard Bachman while listening to Bachman Turner Overdrive on the turntable. At the time, King claimed, if an author produced more than one book a year, they were turning them out too quickly. Writing as Bachman allowed King to publish at twice the accepted rate. King kept his identity as Bachman secret for years before an eager bookseller figured it out. In typical King fashion, he faked Bachman’s death in 1985.

Why use a pen name?

Authors site various reasons for penning books with a name other than their own. Some like the anonymity that using a pseudonym provides. With 24-hour Internet access to celebs and stars, authors may wish to keep themselves and their families from eager fans or critics. Others who have a famous last name and would like for their work to be judged autonomously might adopt a pen name—as in Stephen King’s son Joe Hillstrom King aka Joe Hill.  

Writers might use one name to write a particular genre; a second name for a different genre. When a fan finds a particular author’s works appealing, chances are he or she will gobble up the author’s backlist, looking for more of the same. If an author writes romance or women’s fiction in one name (Nora Roberts), she might write a detective series in another (J.D. Robb). You might want readers to enjoy all your titles, but they may only like one side of your writing life. 

Joanne Rowling decided young boys would be more likely to read books about a wizard from someone named J.K. rather than Joanne. Young children are drawn to an author who is himself a character—such as Dr. Seuss over Theodor Geisel or Lemony Snicket over Daniel Handler. 

And would you rather ask advice from Esther Pauline Friedman or Ann Landers? 

Authors who collaborate on projects would either have to flip a coin to determine whose name to use, combine their two names or come up with an original third. (Joan and I pondered this when we co-wrote a manuscript and tossed around names such as Mora Hamm.) The Warriors fantasy novel series is credited to Erin Hunter, but is actually written by Kate Cary, Cherith Baldry and Victoria Holmes. 

Others contribute to an established series and only get mentioned on the title page and not the cover, in a sense adopting as a pseudonym the name of the original author. For example, my daughter and I read The Thoroughbred series together each night, one originally penned by Joanna Campbell and then written by Karen Bentley, Allison Estes, et al. 

Writers have also been known to create a pen name when reinventing themselves and their careers. I’ve met one author who admitted to having mediocre sales in her earlier titles, and then finally hitting her stride in a different genre and resubmitting to publishers with a different name so her previous sales didn’t color their opinion of her new work. It happens. And as writers, perhaps we’re fortunate to have a certain anonymity that allows us to reinvent ourselves. 

In the manuscript Joan and I wrote, our character contemplated a pen name, and her boyfriend suggested using the trick that porn stars are rumored to do: combine the name of your first dog with the street name you grew up on. (Would it work for you?)

If you could choose a pen name, would you? And what might it be?

Glimpsing Ghosts

By Kim

In April of 2009 my beloved aunt Siegie lost her life to cancer. While going through her things, Siegie’s son Chris came upon a box of home movies. Most were filmed in the early 60’s and featured my father and aunts as teenagers and young adults. Chris had watched them several times as a kid. One box appeared different, however, and the only hint as to its origin was the name printed on the outside.

Stephen Jones.

Stephen and Sigrid (Ahrens) Jones

Stephen is a character in my novel, The Oak Lovers. He was a photographer for the Toronto Star back in the 1920s and 30s and husband to my great-aunt, Sigrid Ahrens. Why we had it and not Sigrid and Stephen’s descendants remains a mystery.

Chris decided to hire someone to transfer all the videos to DVD and brought along the mystery box. It was good he hadn’t investigated the contents himself, because the roll of nitrate film inside was highly combustible.

The man doing the conversion called Chris later that day and said the video was very old, professionally done, and it featured a wedding, honeymoon, and young children. The wedding part struck me at once. It would be Sigrid’s 1929 wedding, of course, and her parents, Carl and Madonna Ahrens, are the protagonists of my novel. Surely the film would show the parents of the bride! While I wouldn’t be able to hear them (no sound) I would at least be able to see them move and smile – ghosts would come alive, briefly at least.

In the end, I was disappointed to learn that the parents of the bride were not filmed at the wedding. Carl is, in fact, not in the video at all, but Madonna makes several short appearances. The footage is still incredible because it offers moving glimpses of candid scenes from the past. Stephen and Sigrid strolling the streets of Quebec City (streets I walked myself half a century later as a teenager). A father roughhousing with his children. Doting grandparents. The clothes are different, but the people aren’t that different from today.

I am sharing the video here. It’s eleven minutes long, but quite fascinating. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, but wish to see Madonna (a main character in The Oak Lovers) here are the spots to skip to.

1:37 – Madonna and her daughter buying fruit.
1:43 – train station, Madonna and Sigrid walk by. Madonna is the short one.
7:05 – Madonna holding baby Ingrid’s hand as she tries to walk.
9:45 – Madonna holding baby Stephanie.

Enjoy! I would love to hear your thoughts!

One Day prize pack winner!

Katie Saba is our winner for the One Day prize pack! Congrats, Katie! (Check your Facebook mail so we can send your goodies!)

Thank you all for reading What Women Write and sharing your favorite summer reads. Hope you'll stop back by often, and if you get a chance this weekend, check out the movie ONE DAY, which starts Friday (August 19)!

(And ... if you want to, check out my new movie review site at what women watch, where I posted a first review today--for One Day, of course!)

Validation

By Pamela

An email showed up in my inbox today, inviting me to enter the first 2000 words of a manuscript in a contest. Get exposure for your novel--even if it's not yet finished! it promised. I don't even have to finish it? And someone will read it and possibly pass it along to an agent? Well, how tempting is that?

I actually spent about fifteen minutes reviewing the logistics of entering and then had a little talk with myself. I'd already submitted the first 15 pages of my WIP to a contest, mostly wanting feedback about the start of the story. I didn't place in that one but felt the feedback was certainly worth the price of entry.

But since then, I've done little work on it. Blame it on the job, kids home for the summer, sick dog--you name it; I had reasons for not writing.

And today's avoidance took on another name. Validation. I needed it, as I'm pretty sure we all do. But my Fearless Five had already told me the story had legs, that my writing has merit and they eagerly await more pages.

So the validation has been given, by five women I trust with my whole heart. What more do I need?

The courage to finish it. A deadline I can stick with. Motivation to complete it. Determination to write the best damn story I'm capable of.

Validation. I don't need it as much as I think I do.