"Tell your people what you are about to see." That's the heart Tony D'Souza's novel, Whiteman, a journey deep into a troubled African country. But it's also the heart of anybody's story, that primal desire to show somebody what happened to you.
Today D'Souza concludes a set of five essays about writing for my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Jason Boog:
You've published stories and essays all over the place in magazines, from the New Yorker to Salon.com. How did you build these relationships with editors? Do you have any advice for fledgling writers looking to pitch magazines with short fiction or essay work?
Tony D'Souza:
In the past year, I’ve published fiction and essays in The New Yorker, Playboy, Salon, Esquire, Tin House, World View, on Amazon, and lots of other places. Between ’99 and when I sold Whiteman in December ’04,
I published about 15 stories and as many poems in journals like The Black Warrior Review, The Literary Review, Nimrod, Iron Horse, Stand, etc. How does a young writer make the leap from the college journals to the glossies?
As a beginning writer, I kept my stories in the mail. Every one of my stories I sent to The New Yorker, every one was turned down. Four months after getting an agent, I’d sold my first story to the New Yorker, and now I’ve been in it twice in the past year.
We all know how hard it is to get in the literary journals, let alone the glossies. But I suggest that younger writers focus on getting to know the lit journals and building a track record of publication before trying the glossies.
Without an agent, glossy publication is very hard. What’s even harder is getting a good agent. A track record in the journals will make an agent more eager to read your submission. That said, keep your focus on your work, great work will be discovered. The agents are looking for it.
Let’s say you do get a foot in the door and have work coming out in the glossies. Who knows how long any of us will be on this side of the line, you know, but as long as we are, we must respect ourselves and believe in ourselves that we belong here just as much as the Oates and Updikes, whether it turns out to be true or not.
So I wasn’t shy about going to New York and inviting the different editors out for drinks. In this way, I met the editors at the New Yorker, Playboy, Salon, Outside, and Norton. Writing is a business, art is a business.
It’s not Nicholas Sparks, Dan Brown business I’m talking here because that’s not art. I’m talking the great writers, the great editors. For all the rhetoric of the Beats, Kerouac didn’t give his On The Road money back. And nobody called Gatsby a ‘sell-out’ book because it sold out. These editors are people, rather nice people, and things go better when you take time to build relationships. So social skills help. But nothing will help if the writing isn’t good.
Editors are skittish about meeting authors. Sooner or later editors have bad experiences with authors blaming them for the poor reception of their books, or with some belligerent/bitter/angry authors they’ve rejected, or even worse, harassing phone calls and threatening e-mails, so it should be no surprise that editors and publishers, and agents, too, are the wariest kids on the block.
They are like celebrities among the masses: Can they really make true friends here? Can they really trust anybody? Because the fact is, we do want something from them. We want them to publish us.
If you do get to have a drink with one of these editors, you’ll find first and foremost that they love books. That they care about the art. That they have to deal with the realities of the marketplace, and that their jobs are as tenuous and hard to come by for them as publishing in their magazines is for us. So we’re all in the same boat.
If you make friends with these folks, remember that rejection is always a possibility. Don’t hold it against them. Go back to your garret and try to do it better. Of course their taste is sometimes wrong and we must curse them from time to time under our breath. But these are people who are worth working hard to work with.
As far as pitches, cold calls, etc. go, follow the rules in Writers' Market. Don’t get fancy. Any deviation from standard procedure at this point marks you as an amateur and an easy rejection. I get a lot of calls from exuberant writers who have this great idea for a novel and can they please talk to my agent.
Have they finished the book yet? I ask. The answer is always ‘No’. I don’t get that.
» Tony D'Souza Explains How To Publicize Your Book from ThePublishingSpot
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