Episode 19: Chuck Sambuchino, Freelance Editor and Publishing Expert
Insights from industry veteran Chuck Sambuchino on how to become a well-informed writer, build a platform, and get published.
Want even more Good Story Company content? Become a member! Get access to tips, workshops, handouts, resources and videos for writers of all levels—all for less than your Netflix subscription.
Transcript of Podcast episoDe 19: Interview with Chuck Sambuchino, Freelance Editor and Publishing Expert
Mary: Hello, this is Mary Kole and "The Good Story Podcast," helping writers craft a good story. With me, you will hear from thought leaders related to writing, and sometimes not, about topics important to writers of all categories and ability levels. Here is to telling a good story.
Hello, thank you for joining us for "The Good Story Podcast." I am your host, Mary Kole, and today with me I have Chuck Sambuchino, friend of the podcast, friend to writers everywhere. Chuck, why don't you introduce yourself and all the many things you do for writers?
Chuck: Hi, Mary, thanks for having me on "The Good Story Podcast." Okay, to introduce myself, I've been helping writers get published for almost 20 years now. I worked for "Writer's Digest" for about 10 or 12 years and did a lot with them. I was an editor on the magazine for a while, edited the "Guide to Literary Agents" for a long time, the "Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market" book for a long time, helped with online education, which means if you ever signed up for a webinar or a tutorial or, you know, a boot camp, I probably was the one facilitating that, handle social media and did a lot for them, help plan their writer's conferences.
And, in 2017, you know, right at the beginning, I went out on my own. So for the past about 4, 4.5 years, I've been doing the exact same thing, which is helping writers get published, but now I do it on my own. So I'm a freelance editor. Now, I critique other people's books and I run a business called Writing Day Workshops, which primarily does writer's conferences. We used to be, kind of, the big name in planning regional writer's conferences to areas that didn't have a lot of regional writer's conferences such as, like, Indianapolis. or Nashville, or Seattle, or Detroit, or Austin, Texas, or Denver, or anywhere like that. Now, as of Spring 2021, our events are all online and then we'll continue to be online until the pandemic becomes a safer place where we can get faculty and attendees back together. But our hope is to do well online and in-person events in the future. And that's it.
I live in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm a dad. I am a dog owner. I'm looking at my lazy dog right now. He's doing nothing. He's completely worthless but I love him to death. And I don't know. I work and I play with my daughter and that's about it.
Mary: All right. Well, thank you for that, and I would like to actually talk to you today about all of the things that you do and all of the experience that you bring to writers. So your work with "Writer's Digest" and the blog and the "Guide to Literary Agents," you have spotlighted me there, thank you, but a lot of agents... So, you have, sort of, communicated... And now, with your workshops, you have, you know, a Rolodex full of agents, full of publishing house editors. So, you really see it from the, sort of, like, a 30,000-foot overview of the entire industry. So what would you say... If I was a writer hoping to get an agent, what would you say are some dos and don'ts from your interactions and your inside view with these people who are the gatekeepers?
Chuck: All right, so if you were an aspiring writer, when you're talking about some dos and don'ts of getting an agent, I would say there's a bunch of things here, so I don't know how much you want me to talk. But, okay, I would say a do would be to educate yourself because, for example, if you're wondering about what are agent pet peeves or what are things you should write in your query letter or you shouldn't, what's overused, what's a good tactic, a lot of that stuff is online. If you spend time online and you're reading agent blogs, you're reading editor blogs, author blogs, or looking through social media, you're becoming an informed member of the community, you're reading educational materials, you're going to learn a lot of this stuff.
But at the same time, one thing I should mention, and this is always, kind of, caveat to when I'm talking to people about education is don't believe everything you hear because there's just some... out there that are saying some stuff that are just incorrect. And whether that's, you know, a purposeful lie but oftentimes just a mistake, that that can be very frustrating to hear, "Well, I saw on such and such blog that you need to do this," and it's like, "No, that's incorrect." I've been to many writer's conferences and I've heard a lot of people in the writing community, not a lot, but a few people in the writing community say things that were blatantly incorrect and I had no idea that they were hearing it.
So the way that you get around this, because I just said, "Educate yourself but don't believe what you hear," you're saying, "Well, what do I do?" The answer is...
Mary: At least you know you're making contradictory statements.
Chuck: It's just like getting your news from the media I mean, my best advice is to get your information from a variety of sources. Don't just follow one author's blog, or one self-publishing blog, or one agent blog, and think like you're getting the absolute gospel. If you're getting your information from a variety of sources, then most of it will line up. And when it doesn't line up, for example, if someone says, "Oh, I'm writing a memoir of my teen years. I'm writing a YA non-fiction memoir. Do I write a book proposal or do I write the manuscript?" If on one place, you find one answer, another place, you find another answer. So if you get your information from a variety of sources, you're going to see sometimes they don't line up, the answers, and then at that point, you can do more research and you could find out what the answer is. And oftentimes the answer is it's in the middle. It's neither A nor B. It's both. So I'd say educating yourself because, if you do that, you're going to find out a lot of dos and don'ts.
I would say another do would be to take any opportunity you can to get your work in front of agents. I mean, think about 25 years ago, if you wanted to get a literary agent, the only thing maybe you could do was you would send an actual printed letter into an office in New York and you'd say, "Hi, would you like to consider my manuscript?" and maybe either print the manuscript, too, or maybe either print the first 30 pages, and you include a self-addressed stamped envelope. And that was basically your only option.
But now what can you do? Well, first of all, agents are so much easier to contact because they want to be contacted online. Sometimes that is via email. Lots of times now, it's about through an online submission form. They will say, "Go to the submission form," where you literary fill in the blanks like, "What genre is it? What is your name? What is your email? What is the title? What is the word count? Paste your query letter here. Limit, you know, 1,000 characters," or whatever it is. They make it very easy with that sort of thing.
So what we're talking about, we're talking about educating yourself. We're talking about using... I guess this point is using opportunities. Now, you've got the ease of submitting stuff online. But also, when I was working at "Writer's Digest," we used to run all kinds of classes and contests. Classess cost money. You know, coming to a webinar or a boot camp and then "Writer's Digest" isn't the only one doing it. I suggest looking around. There's probably better options out there like online classes that are being taught by agents where a component of the class is getting your work in front of the agent like they'll do a critique. That's always worthwhile because, number one, you're getting your work critiqued by someone who knows what they're doing, and second of all, if an agent comes by your work through the class or through whatever they're teaching, they're going to request more work if you write something really well.
Every time I was running webinars or boot camps, the agent judges, about 50% of the time, I would say they sign somebody. They find the diamond in the rough, the 1 out of the 50 people who signed up. They were like, "Wow, this person can really write." That happened. So it really does happen. And when I was running contests through my blog, my guide to literary agents blog, they were free. But, again, they were judged by an agent with a critique component. So you would see agents signing writers through it.
Use any opportunity that you have to get your work in front of agents. And where that comes in with me is writer's conferences. If you're tired of submitting these cold queries online which you call the slush pile or cold submission, go to writer's conferences. Go to one online where you can meet an agent one on one face to face. Do agents sign writers that they meet at writer's conferences? The answer is absolutely.
My favorite paying webpage that I've created, out of all the many, many, many webpages I've ever created for all the writer's conferences I've had is the success stories page because it's got now I think about 80 and counting success stories of people who have attended a writer's conference I planned that have signed with an agent. And there's countless others that have probably signed with agents, too, but they just didn't tell us. We can't track these people down one by one, but sometimes they come back to us and they tell us.
And another thing that you could do is utilize Twitter. If you're not on Twitter, it's probably because you're just confused. You don't understand how it works and how to use it and it seems overwhelming. The first thing You need to realize about Twitter, what I always will tell everyone, is that Twitter fundamentally is a media source, which means it's just taking the information that's being shared on Twitter and you don't have to say anything back to it much like receiving a newspaper in the morning. You receive a newspaper in the morning. Does the newspaper ask you to talk back to it? No, it doesn't. You consume the information, that's all you do. Twitter's the same way. You build your newspaper online full of publishing and writing and reading news.
Mary: And that's where a lot of media people hang out. I mean, Twitter has sort of become the place where media journalists, publishing people, that really is the source over, say, Instagram, over, say, Facebook, right?
Chuck: Yeah, and you bringing up a good point, which is there's this Mindy Kaling, the Canadian writer and actress, she wrote a book called “Is Everybody Hanging Out Without Me?” which is what we all wonder, right? And if I try to explain it to people is that everybody is hanging out on Twitter. It's a party there, it's an informational party, and you have an invite if you want to go. So you'll need to go. And on Twitter, there are pitch parties where you have the opportunity to pitch agents actually through Twitter. That's the only time you have to engage with agents online and actually type something and you talk if you don't want to do it. But there's so many opportunities now, I mean, through writer's conferences, and online writer's conferences, and pitch parties, and online submissions, and classes, and contests, whether they are paid or free for you to get your work in front of agents. That's another do. Okay, so I could keep going but let's move on.
Mary: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, my friend. I'm going to ask another question so you can take a breath, sip of water. So, I'm a writer. I have a manuscript. So this is going to end up being a two-part question but we'll get to the second part later. I'm a writer. I have a manuscript. It's not ready. It's not entirely ready yet. So, I see a lot of writers in my editorial practice who like the relative safety of the writing/revising thing. This is before you get out there, before you put yourself out there, before things get "real," right? And they tend to hold off on submission until they're truly ready but then, you know, what is ready? And then there are people who leap out and they say, you know, "I just typed 'the end' on my NaNoWriMo manuscript, and I'm ready to submit December 1st," right, which I would see a huge spike in submissions the day after NaNoWriMo, which is the other end of the spectrum which is, "Okay, maybe you're not entirely ready to submit." You just don't know it.
I'm genuinely curious to hear your answer. When it comes to some of these opportunities, which are encouraging writers to avail themselves up like getting in front of an agent, doing Pitch Slam or #PitMad or whatever on Twitter, when should you start actively doing this in the overall scope of your writing? Is it when you've revised the thing a thousand times and you are beyond ready and you should probably be pushed out of the nest, or is it when you're still writing? And, you know, if you get a request at that point, that might put you in a little bit of a tough spot because you may not be ready to submit right away. But basically is it better to put yourself out there before you're "ready," whatever that might be, or do you really think writers should get that experience just later in their process?
Chuck: Okay, that was like an 18-part question, but I think I followed it. I will do my best to answer all 14 questions. Okay, so my favorite of the questions, it was this one is that, should writers use pitch opportunities even if they know that they're not ready? And the easiest way to assess, if you're not ready, is the darn book just isn't done, okay? Start with that. Like, it's not done. [inaudible 00:13:30] through it or you just finished it but you know it needs revision. So you know the book's not done. Should you use pitching opportunities? And the short answer is, special opportunities? Yes, because the offer to submit from the agent does not expire.
So if it is today, it is a day in April 2021 that we are recording this, if there is an upcoming writer's conference in your area... Like, maybe you live in Jacksonville, Florida. There's one coming up with literary agents in your area in May, and you think, "Well, I'm not going to be ready. My manuscript is not going to be ready by May. Should I attend the conference? Should I pitch that agent now?" or, you know, "Also, should I use the Twitter conferences happening next week and pitch the agent," the answer I believe is yes because that agent offered to submit the work.
Whether you get it through Twitter or you get it in person, these special opportunities does not expire. So if it takes you one month, three months, six months to get your work battle-tested and ready to submit to the agents, you can still submit and you just spin the time in saying like, "Listen, hi, we met at the Jacksonville writer's conference back in May 2021. I'm sorry it's taken me four months to get this manuscript to you, but I wanted to get it as perfect and polished as it could be before I submitted it to you."
So if you're ever submitting a great deal later than agent request, you use the time in a way to say like, "I battle-tested this for you to get it ready," which is true. The manuscript wasn't ready and you wanted to make sure that it was ready. So that's my favorite question. But you don't want to just simply be querying agents and getting out there before your manuscript is as perfect as you can make it. But if there are special opportunities that will pass you, I recommend you do it because once again, when the agent says, "I like it. Send me the first 30 pages," or, "I like it. Send me the full book," that offer to submit does not expire. It's not like, in two weeks, they say, "Well, I don't want to hear from you, Mary." That's it. That's my question.
The other thing you brought up is, when is a manuscript truly ready?
Mary: That was part two of the question. So it was actually a two-part question even though there was a lot of blah, blah, blah. That's kind of my style.
Chuck: Well, what I would say with ready is you want to get your work to a point where it lacks any major problems. Now, if you're wondering, like, what is a major problem? It's kind of a common-sense answer. It's that, okay, your book is too long or it's too short. The main character isn't likable. There's tense issues. There's point of view issues. There's too much telling and not enough showing. A big common problem is that the book starts slow. The beginning isn't interesting, and the pressure is really on the beginning of a book to be amazing. These are common examples of big problems in the manuscript.
When you're looking at your own work as well as when other people critique your work, people are always going to have small ideas on what to fix down to a sentence and word-level. They might even have medium ideas on what to fix. But what you're trying to eliminate is those big problems. So if you edit and revise your own work to the point where you can't do anything more with it, and you feel like, "I've hit a wall. I've done as much as I can with this. I need outside, independent, objective, critical feedback," to get that, you either go to a freelance editor and pay them or you go to your peers, your writing group, and so forth like that, you get feedback on your work. Whether you pay the freelance editor or just your friends, you're looking for people who are smart, critical, and honest. And when you work back from these smart, critical, honest people, you want them to have a response that's along the lines of, "Well, I have some thoughts but overall I thought it was very good and I don't have any major problems with the work."
So in real life, what happens is you pass it to somebody, they get back to you a month later. They say, "Okay, I think it was good, Chuck, but it's got problems X, Y, and Z." So you try to adjust them as best you can. You give it to somebody else, somebody else smart, critical, honest. They come back and they say, "Chuck, it's really good but it's got problems X and Z." So you're like, "Okay, I believe I've eliminated Y." And you keep doing that with these smart, critical, honest people until they come back with an answer that is something along the lines of, "I have some thoughts, I've got some notes, but overall I didn't find anything majorly wrong with the work." That's what you want.
And what's interesting is in 2016... I've been saying that line for, like, 10 years. In 2016...
Mary: I feel so special.
Chuck: I haven't really told anybody this if you want to feel special. In 2016, a literary agent came to me, not Mary Kole. But a literary agent came to me and she said, "I wrote a young adult novel, and I can't give it to my writers to help me critique it because what if it stinks?" And she was a successful agent who was selling mostly YA and was selling, you know, probably at least a book a month. And she said, "Will you help me?" and I said, "Sure." And so I critiqued the work, and after reading it, I thought... You know, I sat down with her because we met in the writer's conference and her leg was literally shaking under the table just like a writer would be if they met with someone. It was adorable she was very nervous and her hands were shaking and she tried to, like, eat her salad. And I said, "I've got some thoughts here and there's definitely ways to improve this, but I didn't find anything majorly wrong with it. Overall, I thought it was good." And a month later, she got a top-notch other agent to represent her.
So it's real-life proof that the system and belief works. When you get someone who's smart, critical, and honest telling you that line, you know you're in a good place to submit to agents to give it the best chance possible. And the agents might all say no. It's just a question if anybody falls in love with it, but your job isn't to guarantee yourself success. Your job is to give yourself the best chance possible.
Mary: I like that. I mean, we can't guarantee it. As much as we want to, as much as we go through the process, we can't guarantee what happens once we get out there. What I really like about your approach is, you know, you've given writers a pretty clear benchmark for what to aim for with their writers...I'm sorry, with their other eyes, their readers, whether they're paid agents and, yoohoo, you have two people sitting here who would love to work with you or with their critique group.
Now, a lot of what I hear from writers is, where do I find a good critique group? And it can really be a tough process of trial and error. It's almost like dating. Now that your workshops have, sort of, migrated online? Maybe you could have said, "Oh, when you do an in-person workshop, maybe you meet somebody at the happy hour or whatever in your area," but now that we're, sort of, still in the pandemic, I hate to say it, where would I find other like-minded writers, do you think, if I'm a writer looking to even get into having a critique group, having some beta readers?
Chuck: That's a good question. When people were coming to the writer's conferences I planned, we were encouraging them to schmooze and mingle with each other, but that sounds good written in an email. But then when you get there and you're surrounded by strangers, it's very weird to just—this is pre-pandemic—approach someone at close range and be like, "Hey, my name's Chuck. I like 'Star Wars.' You know, do you want to be my friend?"
So people weren't doing this and they were complaining that there wasn't a happy hour. We wanted to avoid happy hours for a variety of reasons. So we're like, "Okay, that's not going to work." So what we encouraged people to do was we said, "Listen, if you are looking for the right writing peers and critique people, here's what I offer you to do. Here's a hashtag on Twitter." It's another reason to be on Twitter. A hashtag is basically just almost like a connective thing that brings people together.
Mary: Like a keyword.
Chuck: Yeah, it's a keyword. If everyone wants to talk about something like a presidential debate and they want to talk about it in a big forum with each other, this is a way to do it. So we said we're going to create this, like, online forum where anybody who attends, say, the Minnesota Writing Workshop can meet in this little room and they could say where they live like, "I live in Edina, Minnesota," or, "I live in Bloomington," or, "I came down from Duluth," or, "I'm actually from Northern Iowa," something like that. And what happens is the people who are really interested in meeting other writers were able to go into this online room and just say, "This is where I live. Does anybody live by me?" And this is pre-pandemic. That said, like, that's how we were working it. But the first thought that came to mind, the number one thing people can take home is meetup.com. It is not a dating website.
Mary: It's not, yeah.
Chuck: meetup.com is a website for people to start groups of any kind that are not, like, romantic or sexual. So you want to start an archery club, you go to meetup.com. You want to start a writing club, a reading club, you want to start an atheist club, you would like to start a business entrepreneur club, an investing club, a walking club, meetup.com does that. You sign up for a free account, and you say, "I'd like to search for a keyword," which is always writing or writers, "within 50 miles of your zip code."
And here, in Cincinnati, where I live, it would turn up, you know, four to seven different writing groups, some of which are quite sizable where you've got 30, 50 people showing up to these meetings. Again, this is pre-pandemic. But things are going to come back, meetup.com is the ultimate place for any kind of group and it's the number one place you can find writers. That and a simple Google search. Like, if you live in Fort Worth, Texas, search Fort Worth writers and scan the first 30 results that come up in Google. You're going to find Fort Worth writing groups. That combined with Meetup will definitely give you all the opportunities you need. And at that point, going back to a different point Mary made, it's on you to just have the courage to show up to show up.
Mary: Yeah, I actually haven't heard Meetup recommended. I think it's a really good, sort of, local alternative to... You know, there are a lot of Facebook groups out there, a lot of writing forums, but I do think that there's something to be said about local writers that you connect with. You know, we used to meet in coffee shops before this whole thing. I agree with Chuck. It'll come back.
Okay, one thing I wanted to circle back to speaking of information that may or may not be correct, are you finding that agents have sort of lifted their conference-specific deadlines to submit? That's one thing that you said that I've seen handled differently sometimes. When I used to speak on The Conference Circuit, editors and publishers specifically, agents would sometimes say, you know, you have... This mostly applies to publishing editors who open a submission window for, say, three months to attendees of the Rutgers SCBWI Conference or whatever. Sorry, the New Jersey SCBWI. And then that window closes. Is that something that you're seeing not as much anymore now that things have gone all virtual?
Chuck: That is a fantastic question. I appreciate you bringing that up. So what Mary Kole is saying is that I'm on here and I'm saying, if you meet an agent at a writer's conference in-person or online, or you pitched them through Twitter, and they request your work, there is no deadline of when to submit. So you could submit 2 weeks later or 6 months later or even 9, 10 months later, I suppose, if you want. The longer you go, the more... You could be forgotten and she's saying, "Well, I haven't heard this." Editors especially have limited windows. And my answer is, in my line of work, my job is to bring writers together with agents most of the time. Very rarely at the writer's conferences do we have editors because most editors, especially adult fiction editors, don't want to come to the conferences. They want agented submissions. They don't want to talk...
Mary: That's true.
Chuck: You know, we'd get some Saint Martin's people and we'd get other publishing houses and stuff like Skyhorse. We do get these great editors every once in a while, but the editors would make up at the most 5% of our agent/editor faculty. Even probably closer to, like, 2%. Now, most editors don't deal directly with unpublished writers. The small exception is in the kidlet community, which is what we're talking about today.
And so, yes, if you are pitching an editor who is a kidlet editor, who is close to submissions, then opens up, they should be forthright about what their open window is. And then, yes, you've got to hit that open window. But if they don't mention an open window at all, then the presumption is there is no timeframe. There is no hard deadline. And once again, that's only for editors which is not really a lot of what you're going to be pitching. That is a minority. In the kidlet community, I mean, maybe that is, what, like a quarter of the time at the absolute most. Most people are still pitching agents. So Mary Kole brings up an interesting point here. Yeah.
Mary: Thank you for always using my full name. So one thing that I really do want to echo home for people is this idea of for agents and maybe sometimes publishing house editors but sometimes they do have a more specific window in which to submit. So if you are not 100% ready and Chuck has done a great job of defining what 100% ready might mean, even though I would argue that nobody is ever 100% sure if they're 100% ready, if you are not entirely ready yet and you do pitch, you do take advantage of a special opportunity, as Chuck said, I think he did a great job of breaking that down, too, and you do get a request, one of the things that I see a lot of writers doing that is maybe unnecessary is rushing to fulfill that request.
Definitely, you want to put your best foot forward, and some of the criteria that Chuck defined for us is a really nice way of thinking of what that even looks like. You know, a manuscript with no major issues, one that is sort of hitting all of your intended points and reading well with your beta readers or a freelance editor. A lot of writers rush that if they feel time pressure from a request, and I hope this at least in some small way put some of that anxiety to bed for you guys because I would rather see you submit your strongest foot forward rather than, "Oh, my gosh, I have five minutes to act. I have to strike while the iron is hot here." Chuck is saying, you know, if it takes you six months to really button it up, you still have that warm lead now and I think it's better to just make sure that you're showing your best self, your best manuscript to that person. So I think that's really reassuring because that's one of the questions I get a lot, which is somebody fills out my contact form and they're like, "I need this edit yesterday because I just got a request, and I need to hit it now, now, now." Not necessarily the case.
Chuck: Well, I mean, the writer who writes that to you, their gut instinct on getting stuff done quickly is not wrong per se because, if I'm an agent, and I hear a really good pitch on Saturday, and it's in my mind for a limited amount of time, so the author is saying, "I want to get my work into this agent while I'm still on their mind," and that's absolutely true. So, like, the thinking behind this is completely rational, it's absolutely true, but here's the thing which you have to remember. It's not something people want to think about because it's depressing. It's this. If you submit any work to an agent that is anything less than excellent, it's going to get rejected. So the whole thinking of, "I need to get this in now," it's like, "You can get this in yesterday, or this morning, or tomorrow, or a week from now, but if it's less than excellent, it doesn't matter how you submit, or what you submit, or when you submit, it's going to be rejected." And the only time you ever want to submit on a rush and submit work before you feel like it's excellent is, and what Mary said, you have a very limited window with an editor and they have defined it, which again is a serious minority here. But if that happens and you have to turn it in by Tuesday or else they literally won't accept it, then turn it in because you know what? If you submit it and it's not excellent and they end up rejecting you and not responding to you, then guess what happens. Nothing which is exactly what you had coming in. You had nothing going into it, and they just rejected you and you lost nothing. So if you want to submit your work to the people who are going to close their little windows, go forth because the worst thing that can happen is nothing in your life changes. But besides that is be patient. That's all.
Mary: I think that's a really good point. So to distill so far, if you have an opportunity and it's sort of a special opportunity whether a Twitter pitch contest is coming up, a conference is coming up, Chuck is coming to your area in 2022 when things are opening back up, you know, take advantage of that and then put your best foot forward. Maybe wait a little bit. If you have a hyperspecific special opportunity to submit, I would probably take it even if you don't feel 100% ready because you could learn something or you could hear silence and then you're no better worse off than you were before as Chuck is saying.
A lot of writers are expressing concern and disappointment with the fact that, you know, agents are so busy. They don't write back. You don't hear back. You check in. You don't hear back. It's just sort of like a wall. Do you have any insight into that and what it might mean? Because we used to say, Chuck... And I think you and I have been teaching writing for long enough where we're kind of on the same team here. We used to say, you know, "Go on a submission round. Get your feedback. See what they say back to you and, sort of, use that to inform your revision or what you do next with the project," and now people just aren't even hearing back. So how do writers get any information about their submission?
Chuck: You mean from the agents or editors that they're submitting to?
Mary: Yeah.
Chuck: You can't. The way that you get information back on your manuscript as to why it's failing, number one—this is the hardest thing you can do—is develop a core group of writing peers that are smart, critical, and honest, finding other writers for a little writing group, whether it's online or in-person. That's not difficult. But finding people who are truly smart, critical, honest, that's very, very difficult. And if you can find those people, if they're worth their weight in gold, you should buy them gifts and hang on to them with white knuckles. That's the best thing that you can do. They say, if you don't have that, then you end up coming to someone like Mary or me who's a paid freelance editor who can give you worthwhile very helpful feedback. The downside to us is that we cost money. And the third thing that you can do is you can pay money to an agent who is doing some kind of critique thing through a class. And maybe they'll critique their first five pages or your query letter.
So, yes, you have to get feedback on what's failing by either paying money or developing smart, critical, honest friends. There's no easy way to do it. And then, yes, the one thing that I've been... A lot of times when writers will complain about something, about the submission process, a lot of it I think is, kind of, like... It can be sometimes a little whiny or can be a little bit sour grapes, but the one thing that writers consistently get frustrated with, where I really feel for them, is the lack of response because most... the majority of the agents nowadays have approached this by saying, "If I am not interested in your submission, then I will just not respond to you." And at least they're forthright in telling you this. So kudos to them for that but it's just so frustrating to have to keep an Excel spreadsheet and say, "Okay, I submitted to Chuck Sambuchino on January 1st and he said 90 days. If he didn't hear from me in 90 days, consider that a no. And now it's April 1st, you have to mark it red or mark it dead or whatever." There's no response that says, "Hey, this wasn't for me." And, yes, it's almost never. Maybe 1 in 500 where you will get a rejection that says, "Chuck, I'm going to say no to this project and let me break down to you why." You will never see that. Agents do not have the time. If they have the time to do this, they wouldn't be doing their job and they wouldn't even exist. So there's definitely a fair rationale as to why they don't do it but it is frustrating and I'm glad you brought that up.
Mary: Yeah. I mean, I remember... So 2009, 2010, I was agenting and tried my best. This is why I do editorial work now because really giving feedback to writers directly, my favorite part of the whole endeavor, but I remember trying to offer a little something, a little bit of feedback, whatever, in my declines and my passes. And then I remember, like, two years later, editing my autoresponse, sort of, my canned response, every time somebody would send me a query, this was done via email. This was before those forms that Chuck described became par for the course. And my autoresponse, I remember getting into my Gmail, and editing it, and saying, "You know, due to the overwhelming nature of submissions, I no longer have time to respond to every inquiry." And I remember that sort of breaking point in my agenting when it became no longer feasible because I now had a client list and, like Chuck said, I wouldn't be doing my job, which is actually serving the clients I do have by spending even that little bit, that couple of minutes to everyone that wrote in with a query. And that's one of my big regrets about the industry and where it's moved even since then where writers really don't get any feedback on their submissions. So they have no way of knowing what was the reason for the decline.
Chuck: Exactly. Yeah. But there are answers. There's just no easy answer. It either involves a lot of work or paying somebody, but they do exist. So at least there are [inaudible 00:35:55].
Mary: Oh, there are no easy answers. Ugh, yeah, I mean, that's why I wanted to have you on because you have a very realistic perspective with your trafficking with these agents. And writers do need to hear it sometimes that, yes, it does suck that people aren't following up with you when you submit. It's such an emotional thing to go out on submission, but the reality is there are answers. They're just pretty hard to get, and you have to do the work.
But unless we bum everybody out today, what are other proactive, pardon me, things that writers can do? So we talked about finding a critique group, taking advantage of submission opportunities, making sure that the work is as strong as we can get it via repeated feedback from... What is it you keep saying? Honest, critical...
Chuck: And smart.
Mary: And smart, yes. From honest, critical, and smart people whether you pay them or you cultivate them with gifts and coffee cards, what else can writers do? What else is in my control as a writer?
Chuck: Well, okay, off the top of my head, something we haven't talked about is read a lot. You know, Stephen King says, if you want to write really well, you need to read a lot. So read more. And reading is great because ideally, it's an enjoyable experience. You're also educating yourself in the process, and you're also supporting the publishing industry. So reading is a win on every level. Another thing you can do is don't focus just on one project. I always tell people if you're writing one memoir, or one picture book, or one novel, or one screenplay, you are setting yourself up for disappointment because a lot of those first books don't sell because they're just not good. The writer is just not ready. It takes them two books or three books to develop a voice in the sense of storytelling, and the three-act structure, and craft, and so forth, and character development. And then it kind of clicks and everything comes together on Book 2 or 4 or whatever it is, and that's the book that gets them the agent and the book deal. So write your next project.
Something else you can do is that, when you have downtime from writing, when you just don't want to write, you can work on anything that involves making friends and building your platform. That means on social media, Twitter, Facebook, creating a blog, writing a guest... When you're saying, "Oh, I don't want to create a blog," okay, then write some guest posts. Get followers any way you can—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. Whatever your social media channels are, get followers who are connected with you permanently, so when your book comes out two days from now or three years from now, whether it is self-published or traditionally published, you have links to people, connections to people so that you can sell the book. So [inaudible 00:38:52] on your platform the ability to sell the next project read.
And the last one I'd mention is just time management. Understand time management because the number one... Like Mary Kole was saying, the number one thing that really stands in front of a writer with a completed novel and getting an agent is impatience. She's totally right. It's the number one thing. People just get impatient. They get so sick of working on something, they just want to send it out but the book is not quite there. And remember when an agent reviews your work, an agent goes by this mantra, which is a maybe is a no. So if an agent looks at your work and they think, "I don't know, maybe," it's like the maybe will make them pause for an hour or even three days, but in the end, they will always say no.
Mary: Oh, I have to chime in with something I haven't shared, and I'm so sorry to overtalk you. But it was those maybes that would kill me when I was agenting, and I would let them just sit there in my like... I actually had a "maybe" folder in my email, and I would drag things in there and then think about them, and think about them, and agonize, and they almost always ended up nos eventually because it was just, like, whatever... They usually had some kind of fatal flaw that would take a lot of editorial massaging, and an agent has to think, you know, "Is this a pet project that I'm in love with and I want to put a lot of sweat equity into it or is it something I can go and sell?" And I think with the proliferation of agents, that's one complaint I've heard from agents is that there's so many of them. So the competition factor is very fierce for agents. They all pounce on the projects that are ready, and then the fixer-uppers kind of tend to languish. I mean, it's a commission-based sales job, right, at the end of the day, so they have to keep an eye on what they can sell. And so those almost theres just don't often cross the finish line. I think you're completely right.
Chuck: So the maybe is a no. It's almost, in a weird way, reassuring to hear that every once in a while you'd say yes to a maybe but even you, who are probably kinder than most, said no to most maybes. Wrapping this final thing that you were asking about, like, what can we do to be proactive? I say time management. I think the number one reason why people just don't succeed is the lack of time management. I mean, I myself woke up this morning, took my daughter to school, and then ate breakfast and watched YouTube videos for an hour. Who do I have to blame that I wasn't productive for an hour? [crosstalk 00:41:32.361]. And people do this. I mean, BuzzFeed, YouTube, whatever the heck, sports highlights, whatever it is, they'll waste the time.
I'll test people. I'll be talking to a writer and be like, "Hey, man, did you finish that novel?" and they're like, "I just can't find the time." I'll wait about 7 to 10 minutes just long enough so I know that they've forgotten they said that to me and I'd be like, "What are you binging right now, bro?" and they'd be like, "Oh, man, just binging 'Breaking Bad.' " And I won't say anything, but at that point, I will cease to have any pity for them at all because I'll know that time exists. They're just not using it correctly.
Like, that's the number one thing that's going to stand in your way. It's just time management. If you were putting as much time as you can into your project, into writing your platform, being proactive, and all the things that we're touching on today, like, you are giving yourself an amazing chance at success. Not guaranteed but an amazing chance at success, but most people never get there due to their... They're either bogged down by these little pursuits or decompressing or watching videos or... We're in the golden age of television, so there's so many shows.
And the last thing that you can do to be proactive to wrap up this thread is you can always be on the lookout for markets even when you're writing your work and you're not ready to submit. You might not be ready to submit for a whole year. If you see an agent online that pops up, who's experienced or new, if there's a contest, if there's an editor, if there's this or that, or a class, write that stuff down in some kind of database. Gather your markets now so that when your work is finally ready two days or a year from now, you know where to submit it, "Here are the editors I want to submit to. Here are the beta readers, the peers I want to be friends with. Here are the agents who just started agenting in the past two years who are actively building their client list who also represent young adult contemporary, which is exactly what I'm writing." Build that up as you go along so you don't have to go into pure research mode when your work is done. Be adding to that right now.
So that's what you can do. You can read a lot, write a lot, work on your platform, work on your next project, manage your time better, and be gathering markets now.
Mary: That last tip I love so much because I have not actually heard somebody express that before where it's like you've got to keep an eye on the market, right? We tell everyone, "Keep an eye on the market." But this practical thing of, you know, taking little clips here and there, because you did edit the "Children's Writer's & Illustrator's Market" which is about the size of a phone book for those of you who know what one of those is. And it details all of the places where you can submit your work from magazines to publishing houses that take unsolicited submissions to agents and all this stuff.
And so your career has been based on, you know, finding new markets for writers and helping writers find markets. And so I think that's really, really advice of like, "Oh, hey, you know, I'm not quite ready yet but I just saw a manuscript wishlist which is not only a website but a Twitter hashtag that you could follow. I just saw somebody that sounds really interesting. They're an agent. They're on the up and up. They're building their client list. I would love to keep an eye on this person's career and maybe connect with them on something."
And just if you do that every once in a while and you just keep this little notebook of all your clips that you're saving, or a spreadsheet, or however you like to work, that takes a lot of the anxiety out of, "Oh, no, I've finished my project. Now I have to do all the research that I could have been doing incrementally." So I love that.
Chuck: And if you're educating yourself, if you're looking online at a blog, or a website, a podcast, a YouTube video, Twitter, Facebook, anything in the publishing industry, you are going to find this information and you're even going to find stuff like... Well, let me give you a piece of advice on what no one ever says about writing their synopsis. Well, you might think I'm not ready to write my synopsis, just copy and paste the hyperlink into your master file under the synopsis tab. So that when you're ready, when your work is done, you have articles on revision, articles on Twitter, articles on synopses. You have a list of new literary agents. You have a list of experienced literary agents to submit to with their websites or their submission pages and everything...not everything but you have a massive foundation waiting for you with information and markets when you are ready.
And it's nice because it's a nice break when you're just writing fiction every day and you're revising. And sometimes they can give you a headache or, you know, your eyes can get tired. It's a way to further your goal without writing fiction because, if you're writing fiction, I say, when you sit down at the computer, your first and primary goal should always be to write fiction and make it better. That should always be your primary goal. But if you want to contribute to your career on those days where you just can't write fiction, there are things you could do and that's what Mary and I are talking about.
Mary: I love that a lot. And so I wanted to interrupt quickly and give a plug for something that my team at Good Story Company is developing which is called Pubdeets. It's a newsletter, and website, and, you know, all those social media presence of... We go through publishing news that is relevant to writers. And every day we distill it down to, kind of, your three bullet points for the day that you need to know. So it's launching this week actually. I would love a follow for you to subscribe to our newsletter because that time management piece that Chuck was talking about, you could get lost in a Twitter rabbit hole for about three hours and get nothing else done. And we're hoping to sort of synopsize the days publishing news that's relevant to writers to, sort of, give you no excuse on the time management front. So you can sort of get your news and get on with your writing or your research. So, you know, time out, sidebar, just a quick plug.
One of the things I really want to nail you down to, Chuck, though, and my interviews do tend to get more difficult as time goes on, so I think this will be sort of the AP level question. So everybody says build your platform. Dun, dun, dun. Get some followers. You said that just now. Just get some followers. And one of the biggest things that writers come to me and they say, you know, "I've heard I need to build my platform. As a fiction writer, I have no idea what to do." You know, if you're a non-fiction writer, then your platform is a little bit more self-explanatory. You have a medical slant to your writing. And so you blog about medical issues, right? Done. Fine. For a fiction writer, it's much less straightforward. And so build your platform, get some followers. Writers all know that they need to do this, but the how escapes a lot of people. So do you have any thoughts there on this very pressing issue?
Chuck: Am I getting this right? You're not asking how to build a platform. You're asking what does a fiction writer actually talk about when they get online. Is that what you're asking?
Mary: Yes, sir.
Chuck: Okay, that's the harder question.
Mary: Yes, sir.
Chuck: That's all right. I can answer that. The answer is when a fiction writer... And Mary's right. For example, you know, my specialty is getting published. So when I do a podcast and talk about getting published, when I get interviewed, same thing. Blog, Twitter, Facebook, talking in person in Timbuktu, I'm always talking about getting published. So my platform is getting published. But if you're writing a young adult book, a middle-grade book, picture books, what do you talk about? And you have three options, but you want to develop a brand online talking about something. You've got to decide kind of what you want to talk about. The way that you figure that out is there's three jumping-off points.
The first is the loose connection niche which is where you connect what you're talking about online, what you want to be known for, something that has to do with your book. For example, if you were writing a book where the main character snaps after being bullied in high school, maybe your blog focuses on helping parents in the real world to deal with bullying, sharing bullying experiences that are going on all over the country, and blow by blow how are they dealing with it. How can you address the administration of schools? How can you talk to teachers? Should you switch schools? So you're providing real, advanced, educational, helpful, valuable information online that deals with bullying, and the connection is your novels deal with bullying. And so people are going to come to your website for the quality content and you have, like, a permanent sidebar on your website that says, "By the way, I write these novels that feature, you know, characters overcoming bullying. Check them out here." They click on the sidebar. Then they get the by pages with the little blurbs and pitches and the big pictures and you want to buy it on Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, or IndieBound, stuff like that.
So they come to you for the content and you have a connection that leads them right to something else. Like, if you're selling picture books, who's going to buy the picture books? New parents, right? So online you need to be talking about, like, calming kids with colic or how to deal with an infant or, you know, like ways for new mommas to avoid the baby blues and get out of the house. You need to be known for that thing. Like, if I was writing books where people overcame bullying in high school, I would want to be known as an authority on bullying. I would go take some type of a class or certification so that I have a good bio, and I have something there, and I share articles and interviews with professionals all over the world as to how they did that. And I would be known as that guy who helped parents overcome bullying. And when those parents came to me, they would see the books and they would think, "Well, I need to buy that book for my child. It would be an inspirational read for them." So that's the first thing. You connect what you're talking about all the time online to what you are writing.
Now, that's the best thing to do, but if you can't do that and you said, "Listen, Chuck, I'm writing different novels every time. There's no interconnected theme. There's nothing I can latch onto and build a presence online," then you...
Mary: Yes.
Chuck: ...[crosstalk 00:51:40.334] altogether different niche. And it's where you become an authority or presence online on x, on some subject that has nothing to do with your books. And the first thing you need to ask yourself is, "What can I talk about for five years straight and never get bored?" That's it. What can I talk about for five years straight? It might be red wine. It might be, you know, what shows you need to binge-watch now. It could be...
Mary: Pickleball?
Chuck: It could be pickleball. Absolutely.
Mary: I happen to know that Chuck is a pickleball aficionado.
Chuck: So it could be American history. It could be seafood. It doesn't matter. I mean, up in Minnesota where Mary lives, it could be ice fishing. It could be hockey. You got to pick a subject where you could talk for five years and never get bored. And that is what you become an authority on. And remember the thinner, the better. Don't become an authority on food. Somebody already did that. Don't even become an authority on seafood. Somebody already did that. Become an authority on oysters. Something specific as you can be, and you are the person to go to on oysters, or mountain biking, or dating, or chocolate chip cookies. It doesn't matter.
And you say, "Well, Chuck, if I became an expert on mountain biking, I'd like that but what the hell does that have to do with me writing young adult fantasy novels?" The answer is it doesn't. It doesn't now and it never will. Your goal is to build the largest audience and following and followers possible. And in that mass glut of people that you're going to be talking about the fact that you're an author, some of those people are going to buy your book because they like young adult fantasy but a lot of those people are just going to buy your book because they like you. A lot of people will buy your book because they want to read it, but a lot of people just buy books because they like the person.
A real-life example of this altogether different approach is me. It was 2010 and my first book was coming out, my first real humor book, successful book, it was called "How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack." And I actually sit down, have a conversation with myself in the mirror and say, "How am I going to develop a whole new platform because I've been building my writing and publishing platform for three years? How am I going to develop a whole new platform on social media based on this humorous idea of garden gnome attacks?" And at the end of talking to myself, we decided that we're not going to do that. We are not going to develop any new platforms on garden gnome attacks.
Our goal, it was just to build the biggest platform possible which had to do with writing and publishing, which has nothing to do with humor books about garden gnomes. But the overwhelming number of people I was able to draw in as followers, as [inaudible 00:54:25] subscribers, as blog readers, and Twitter followers and so on, mentioning my book when it was organic and helpful, a lot of people bought those books because they wanted to read it or they had a neighborhood with garden gnomes. And a lot of those people just want the book because they liked me. So if you have a big enough audience, you could be writing a book about anything. It could be Western. It could be a young adult memoir. It could be a picture book about STEM and STEAM stuff. People are going to buy that book because of the overwhelming number of people that you are touching in your life. And so there's that.
And the third approach, which you could do, this is kind of a last resort is you could talk about writing. Talk about writing and publishing in the publishing arena. And I get that it's an easy trap to fall into. The problem is most people don't make their blogs and social media that talked about kidlet, and writing, and reading. They don't make them interesting enough to set themselves apart from the hundreds of thousands of other people trying to do the exact same thing. So if you want to take this approach where you want to talk about my submissions and kidlet and writing and conferences and queries and synopses, anything that has to do with writing and publishing, the key thing is making it extremely different and extremely valuable. Don't write something like, "Oh, I just wrote my third query draft today and it's so frustrating, so I want to write an article about how much querying is a pain in the ass." We've seen that before. Instead, go out and find something difficult like find me three kidlet agents who actively seek short story collections for kids. I'm not even sure three agents exist that do that. So if you can find...
Mary: I was going to say, if you find them, let me know because I would be curious.
Chuck: That's the whole point is... I just took on an intern, and I'll show you this example in the adult world. I just took on an intern and she writes short stories. And so I said, "You know what you should do? Find three agents who represent adult short story collections, get them to go on the record, and ask them hard questions like, 'Does there need to be a theme? Will these actually sell? Do people need to write a novel first before they saw these?' " And she did. She wrote the article for me. Her name is Lindsey Catanzaro, Rhode Island, this great intern. And she wrote that article that's on my blog on chucksambuchino.com/blog, and it's good because it's just something that nobody talked about. Nobody gets these short story collection agents to sit down.
So I'm saying take that piece of example and piece of advice with you if you want to create a blog that's based on writing, publishing, submissions, reading is you've got to be [inaudible 00:57:03] and really unique and difficult to acquire content if you want to cause any kind of stir and attract the attention of someone like me who is a prospective follower because if you're providing good information, I'm going to follow you. And then I'm going to be endeared to you. And when your book comes out in two days or two years, all kids that are buying it, because number one, I might want to read the book and, number two, I've just become endeared to you and I want to support you in any way. I'm going to buy your book. I'm going to put it in my bookshelf and never read it." So one of those could happen.
Mary: Well, I think providing value because it's like, "Well, my experience querying," da, da, da, it doesn't really track. It's more just you venting into the void. But if you're able to bring valuable content to other writers who are going to be early supporters of any writer, usually it's our critique group. It's our online Facebook group that we have connected with in our writing journey. Those usually are our number one supporters, and our first supporters, initial supporters. But if you can bring value to the equation, I think that is 100% the way to go.
This has been incredibly helpful, and you've answered some really tough questions with actionable advice. A couple other things I've been kind of bummers but I really appreciate the realistic approach, too, just because we would be doing a disservice to you if we sat down and said like, "Oh, it's all going to be fine. You're going to get detailed rejection letters from everyone with actionable advice," and blah, blah, blah, it is important to sort of know the realities of the market. But I think there's a lot of actionable advice here, a lot of hope to persevere, and I have to say you've been a fantastic guest.
Chuck: Thanks. Look, if anyone is ever interested in learning more about me as a freelance editor, just Google my name, which you'll probably find on the name of this podcast. And my name is just Chuck Sambuchino. Come to my website. And it's like, hey, my email's there, contact information there. I edit query synopses manuscripts, and my writer's conferences that I've planned, which is either online or in-person and dozens of cities across the U.S., that organization name, if you want to write it down, is Writing Day Workshops. Google that. The website comes up with a schedule and contact information, and that's it. So I'm happy to talk to anybody who wants to talk to me, but besides that, Mary, you're always doing great work, and thanks for having me on the podcast.
Mary: Of course and here's to a good story.
Thank you so much for listening. This has been "The Good Story Podcast" with your host Mary Kole. I want to give a huge shoutout to everyone at the Good Story Company. You can find us online at goodstorycompany.com. The team is Amy Holland, Amy Wilson, Jenna Van Rooy, Kate Elsinger, Kathy Martinolich, Kristen Overman, Michal Leah, Rhiannon Richardson, and Steve Reiss. Also a shout out to our Patreon supporters. And to everyone listening out there, here's to a good story.
Ready to take your writing to the next level? Get even more of the Good Story Company resources you love, plus videos, workshops, handouts, and content you can’t get anywhere else. This post contains affiliate links.
