An Aussie client's New Weird book gets a second life; lots of books I've recently hated; and Seriously, The Very Last Guide To Writing A Query Letter You'll Ever Need, SERIOUSLY.
Plus: As always, interesting and funny questions I'm answering for English as a Second Language students over at Reddit
Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on June 30, 2022, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.
David Lynch and a big scary box, just two of the elements of Dave Neuman’s Kaleidoscopic Shades
The Curious Second Life of "Kaleidoscopic Shades"
So I heard recently from a writer I worked with last year named David A. Neuman. A while back, he published a sorta...New Weird, I guess? (we'll get to that) novel called Kaleidoscopic Shades—Within Black Eternity, but unfortunately not much happened with it; some publicity was sent out, no one really bit, there was not much media interest, and it just never ended up selling many copies nor getting much notice over at Goodreads. But recently things had started turning, and it was great to hear the details about it from him recently while I was checking in on the status of his second novel, which he's in the process of writing.
First, he was finally able to get the book into the hands of the right reviewers, who could appreciate its extra-long length, its experimental nature, and its flip-flopping back and forth between many different genres; and that got him eventually on the highly popular podcast The Constant Reader—The Canon of Stephen King, because like the Netflix hit Stranger Things, one of the genres of Neuman's is also King pastiche, but in his case only if you mix it equally with the darkly surreal vision of David Lynch, then throw in a fair amount of the Hellraiser movies for good measure. He was telling me that he was then supplementing this with some Amazon Ads, one of the only places where he was actually spending money, and also paying for sponsored tweet campaigns.
The results? Well, it's reached #137 on the bestseller list for time travel novels amongst the entire country of Australia at Amazon, so that's impressive! It's also getting notice from some bigger organizations like Reedsy, and all of this has finally started bringing in the large amount of Goodreads reviews that he'd been hoping for all this time. This shows us the same thing that we saw with another one of my clients a few months ago, Jacob Moon and his race-aware horror/crime novel Dead Reckoning; that a combination of a lot of free labor ("sweat equity") combined with a little bit of very smart spending can often get you big results, but that you actually need both those parts added together, in that you can never do just free labor and still get the big oomph in audience size and national exposure that a $2,000 campaign at Amazon or Goodreads or Audible will boost you to. And of course simply spending money while otherwise phoning it in will never get you a big success either, not ever, let Bloomberg's Presidential campaign always be a humbling reminder of that, Amen.
By the way, this is one of the few times I get to actually publicly mention a book I’ve worked on through the publishing services company Gatekeeper Press. I’ve been working with this company steadily for the last two and a half years, and I can strongly recommend them for self-publishers who may not want to go to all the trouble of finding and booking the five to six freelancers they need to take their book from a Word document to a finished paperback in their hands. They can instead go to Gatekeeper, pay a retail fee for it all (i.e. a little more expensive than hiring each of us on our own), and get their own dedicated project manager who keeps all these crazy amounts of wheels in motion and organized together.
I love working for them—everyone over there is great, and they’ve really gone out of their way a lot of times over there to help me out, a standup company with a standup staff who give everyone what they deserve for the (admittedly) high fee you’re paying there, for the luxury of having someone else bring all the pieces together for you. The only thing is, I have a confidentiality clause with them, so unfortunately I’m not allowed to mention most of the 30 or so books every year I edit for them, just the authors who go out of their way to voluntarily give me permission to do so. Neuman was one of those people—and Rob Price, CEO of Gatekeeper, nicely gave me permission to mention this project publicly too—so this is a nice case where two clients come together with me for a total that’s greater than the sum of the parts. I recommend them for anyone who’s looking for a package service; you can start the process by clicking this link.
So what's next for Neuman? Well, he's just about to do a book giveaway promotion through the service Crave Books; and then of course at some point a little later he and I will get to work on editing the new book, of which he's told me a bit so far and it sounds great as always. Meanwhile, though, don't forget the current book, which readers around the world can buy at Amazon, currently $14.99 for Americans for the paperback or a tantalizing three bucks for the Kindle version. Have some news like this about your own book to share? Drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com; I'd love to share it in the next issue!
Finally, The Only Guide You'll Ever Need Again To Writing Query Letters, I Swear
It might not be the number-one question I get from authors I work with and just talk with out in the world, but certainly in the top three is, "How do I write the perfect query letter?" And that right there gets to the heart of the problem, which is that so many writers treat this subject like it's some sort of obscure form of magic from Dungeons & Dragons, full of arcane rules you'll never understand but that you must somehow memorize and then perfectly execute. Instead, you should think of query letters and their relationship to editors and agents in much more realistic terms, which will then let you have a much more common-sense understanding of how to write a great one; namely, you should think of yourself at one of your streaming or subscription services, like Netflix or Kindle Unlimited or Audible, and trying to decide how out of tens of thousands (sometimes millions) of options, you're going to decide which one to take on next.
Probably you start by picking some category you like, correct? A comedy, science-fiction, romance; picking any of these eliminates a whole bunch of other ones at once, which is great because you were never going to watch a Western or gory horror film anyway, no matter what. So it is many times with agents and editors, so you should let them know upfront what category yours is in, exactly like how you have the choice at your streaming services to start your look with a trip to the search bar:
To whom it may concern,
My name is Samuel Clemens, and I'm writing to seek representation for my Young Adult novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Now, these agents and editors are business people, and so they want to know most of the facts about the project upfront, much like how at your services you see a title's audience score, its running length or page count, etc. In particular you'll want to mention whether the manuscript is fully complete at the moment, in that there's a tradition among some literary genres (particularly journalism and travel writing) not to actually write the book unless the author gets some advance money and a guarantee of publication, so editors and agents like to know if yours is indeed ready to read this moment.
Already complete, it clocks in at 70,570 words, a genteel coming-of-age comedy based heavily but not completely on my own childhood in pre-Civil War small-town Missouri.
There—that's essentially all the top-of-the-scroll page information at a streaming service; so if your editor or agent is still there, it means they've now eliminated...what, 90 percent of the other queries? That means it's finally time—and not a moment before—to finally go into the sorta fun part of actually describing your book, because both they and you know that you're within this nice niche now of a small amount of choices where you'll probably like a lot of them, so it's finally worth your time to start sitting there and reading the detailed descriptions to see why this particular one is worth your while.
Set in the 1840s, I paint a picture here of a rural, American pastoral past that never was, which of course is what so many people right now in our shocked post-Civil War 1870s want. Tom's rambunctious, often dangerous childhood has one foot planted (against his will) in the rapid civilizing of what was before the West and now is suddenly the Midwest, while his other shoeless foot is ankle-deep in the mud of the frontier and all the weird, dangerous, mystical things that happen in the wilds at night. Told as a series of vignettes, perfect for splitting up and publishing at magazines beforehand for publicity, I stitch together a perfectly magical, magically perfect look at a quiet, peaceful, often very funny yet equally dark time of a barely tamed American West, before our recent War Between The States forever changed the now "Midwest's" nature.
Finally, if you've made it this far at Netflix or Audible or Kindle Unlmited, isn't it always nice to hear at this point if anyone involved ever won any awards, or did something else really big of note like that to be worth noticing? I'm talking, like Oscar nomination, not "won second at their college's senior thesis show" or “was editor of their undergraduate lit journal.” It’s especially great if you can show you have a paying audience behind you already:
It might interest you to know, by the way, that under the pen-name "Mark Twain," I'm actually quite a popular newspaper columnist on the New American West Coast, myself based in San Francisco. I have a large audience spread among a syndicate of 52 papers nationwide that carry my work, and I tour relentlessly.
Finally, remind them about the finished manuscript, and that you'd like them to read it:
To whom it may concern,
My name is Samuel Clemens, and I'm writing to seek representation for my Young Adult novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Already complete, it clocks in at 70,570 words, a genteel comedy based heavily but not completely on my own childhood in pre-Civil War small-town Missouri.
Set in the 1840s, I paint a picture here of a rural, American pastoral past that never was, which of course is what so many people right now in our shocked post-Civil War 1870s want. Tom's rambunctious, often dangerous childhood has one foot planted (against his will) in the rapid civilizing of what was the West and now is suddenly the Midwest, while his other shoeless foot is ankle-deep in the mud of the frontier and all the weird, dangerous, mystical things that happen in the wilds at night. Told as a series of vignettes, perfect for splitting up into promotional printing at magazines beforehand, I stitch together a perfectly magical, magically perfect look at a quiet, peaceful, often very funny yet equally dark time of a barely tamed American West, before our recent War Between The States forever changed the now "Midwest's" nature.
It might interest you to know, by the way, that under the pen-name "Mark Twain," I'm actually quite a popular newspaper columnist on the New American West Coast, myself based in San Francisco. I have a large audience spread among a syndicate of 52 papers that carry my work nationwide, and I tour relentlessly.
I can send along the finished manuscript anytime you might be interested, so please let me know. Thanks for your time.
Regards,
Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
That's it! Far less than one page, with a logical reason for every bit of information there's there, and most importantly, a logical reason for every bit of information not there. You don't need anything else than this at all, because frankly an agent or editor is never going to read any more than this either (take it from me, I ran a small press for a decade and received 500 queries every single year; I became an expert at throwing these away at the speed of lightning the moment I saw even one thing I didn't like). If you always think about what you'd like to see at a listing at Netflix or elsewhere, you'll always write a great query, and that will legitimately get your chances of getting read go quite high.
Of course, you can always self-publish too. But that's the subject of another lengthy newsletter!
This Week’s Links: I HATED IT! Edition
Wow, so many reads completed since my last newsletter! Such reading! So hate!
I finally finished my entire completist run of Isaac Asimov's 15-book "Future History" series (encompassing the former standalone trilogies "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation"), with 1986's Foundation and Earth! I HATED IT!
I read Ottessa Moshfegh's 2015 debut, Eileen! I HATED IT!
I read Manual Puig's Postmodernist classic Kiss Of The Spiderwoman! I...DIDN'T LIKE IT QUITE AS MUCH AS THE MOVIE!
Oh, but then it gets better...
I read Ottessa Moshfegh's much better 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation! I LOVED IT!
I read the original 1951 Foundation! I LOVED IT!
And I read Sloane Crosley's latest, the hilarious and bitter contemporary relationship comedy Cult Classic! MAN OH MAN, DID I LOVE IT!
And of course, who can forget the English as a Second Language students at Reddit I give free advice to, and answer esoteric questions about culture for? Here's some of the more interesting questions they've been asking lately:
What's the word for someone who's quick-witted and eloquent, but also cruel and acrid?
What do you call someone who exchanges sex for favors but not directly for money?
How do you refer to the musicians on stage with a famous solo singer when they're performing live?
And What's Going On With You?
Got some news to share about your own book? Drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com and let me know. I love sharing news about recent triumphs among this ad-hoc community that's starting to form around my freelancing shingle I hang out there in the literary wilderness; we can all use as much shared good news as we can get, I think. Don't forget as well that if you ever want to talk about booking me for freelance work, that's the simple and direct way to do it too; no online contact page, no HTML form, just drop me a line at the above address and we can start talking about scope, terms, and if we're ready to sign a contract and pick a deadline, or you can just shoot me some vague ideas and learn where you might want to go next with them. I take 25 percent off the total bill for anyone who's subscribed to this newsletter when they book the job—any job, any time—so don't forget to mention it if you write. I look forward to talking with you all again in another few weeks!
