It is in this lovely vein that I then must work at promoting it. I have to tell other people why they must read it. An admission, because I am feeling honest. I’ve been working on promotional stuff for Proof by Seduction in which I tell you how much I love and adore my book. But it’s all a pack of lies. I don’t love my book.

Some people say they love their books as if they were babies. Maybe there’s some truth to that, because there’s a moment in every infant’s life when it has just wet its diaper for the fourth time in thirty minutes, not that it matters, because somehow it wormed out of the diaper, which it left in a wet mass on top of the stairs. It’s crying at the top of its lungs. And despite what appears to be a general tendency towards immobility, the baby has still managed to climb out of its crib, open three intervening doors, and is now splashing in the antifreeze out in the garage. Also–dear God, what is that thing in its mouth? You have to be kidding me. It’s not a–oh. Yes. Yes, it is.

Mothers, you know what I am talking about. (I do not have children yet, but I have a dog, which is almost the same thing, and this story also perfectly describes my younger brother at one year old.) This is the moment when every mother, whether she admits it or not, wants to shriek, “Please! Anybody! TAKE THIS CHILD, I will give you twenty dollars! No, thirty!”

This is what I think about when other people say that their books are their “babies.” I hate my books with an undying passion, even if part of me feels some kind of grudging kinship and responsibility. If anyone asks me in public, of course, my books are all little angels and I adore every fat little dimple on their collective chins. But in private, my books are that baby, covered in antifreeze, oddly diaper-less, leaving a trail of terrifying baby-slime in their wake.

So. Ahem. Who wants to buy a copy of Proof by Seduction?

*cringe* please don’t hate me!

I don’t think we answered that question at the panel.  I’m not even sure we could answer it; as Tessa points out, the panel was essentially about “How to be an Anomaly” and face it, if there were a six-step process, you wouldn’t be an anomaly.  As always, luck and timing play huge parts.  There are people out there who I think should be getting six figure deals (if they aren’t already).  Those may come in time to those authors, or they may never get a six figure deal.  Heck, their career could be ruined by a bad cover on their next book.  Luck.  Timing.  These things play a huge role.  But all the luck and all the timing in the world won’t help you, if you don’t have two other things.  They’re necessary, but not sufficient.

Are you ready?

1. Have a damn good agent. No, really. You’re looking for someone who is the complete package–someone who not only is savvy about editors, but who knows how to sell and who to sell to. You’re also looking for someone who is good at shepherding authors through publication, who will make sure the author is on target for promoting herself, and will make sure that the publishing house knows about the author’s efforts, who will stand up against bad covers or talk the author down off her ledge if the cover isn’t bad–and in fact will sell a ton of books. A good agent makes the publishing process easier for everyone–author and publisher alike. Who wouldn’t want to work with her?

Do not ever sign with an agent you are not excited about, who you don’t think is going to aggressively champion you and your career, on the theory that at least it will get you past the unagented barrier.  If your book is good enough to sell, it’s good enough to get an agent who will do you right.

2. Act like you’re going to get a six-figure deal, even if you don’t think there is any way in hell you can. I wasn’t sure my book would sell. In fact, I basically thought it was unmarketable until I talked to my agent. But in the beginning of 2008, I made a resolution–one of those resolutions you are told never to make, because you have no control over the outcome.  I resolved I was going to sell my book at auction. It was a completely brazen, foolhardy thing to set my sights on, especially since I couldn’t final in half the contests I entered, let alone get an editor to request the manuscript.

I ignored all that boring reality stuff and acted like this was the kind of book I could sell at auction, if I just worked at it enough.  When I didn’t think my sex scenes were working, I picked up an author who wrote damned good sex scenes (that would be Elizabeth Hoyt) and I read hers over and over, with multi-colored highlighter in hand. I deconstructed them until I figured out what worked for me from her scenes.

The whole time I was writing, part of me was screaming, “Just go to sleep! What does it matter if you don’t get this black moment right? Nobody’s going to even get past the first chapter when they find the heroine is a con artist.”

If you find, as you write, that you tell yourself, “It doesn’t matter if I don’t get this right,” you’re selling yourself short.

Huh. Turns out I don’t have two necessary conditions.  I just have one: You can’t sell yourself big if you’re too busy selling yourself short.

Those two words–used twice, I think, in the novella–gave me a lot of grief.  My thinking went like this.

1. As many of you know, British people today do not wish each other a “merry” Christmas.  They say, “happy Christmas” instead.  You see this formulation in a thousand different Christmas novellas.  It’s always “happy Christmas” instead of “merry Christmas.”  One of those across-the-pond things.  So everyone is doing it.
2. But it’s wrong.  You see, back in 1822, British people actually wished each other a “merry Christmas,” too.  It’s just that during the latter part of Victoria’s reign, people associated “merriness” with “drunkenness” and so the staid society decided to make it clear that they wanted your Christmas to be filled with happiness, not hangovers.   Thus, the transition to a “merry” Christmas instead.  That’s why, if you read Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, you’ll see all the characters wishing each other merry Christmases–not happy ones.
3. Brit-picking is thus in substantial tension with historical accuracy.  Which one wins out?

I decided to go for historical accuracy.  But I did so, knowing I would probably get more mails saying, “Hey, British people don’t say ‘merry Christmas’!” then I would get mails saying, “Actually, in 1822 British people didn’t use ‘happy Christmas’!”

But the whole thing made me question: Is the reason I strive for historical accuracy as an author just so I can avoid criticism?  Do I do it because it’s the right thing to do?  Or do I do it because my goal is to transport the reader to another time as best I can, and inaccuracies jar the reader back into the present?

When I picked myself up from the ground, guffawing, I decided I would give her what she asked for.  Here you are.  PROOF BY SEDUCTION: from shuffling Austrolopithecus to modern upright man!

When I post an excerpt of PROOF on my website I will probably put this there as well.  Enjoy!

I’m at the frightening place in my manuscript where I have a good smattering of scenes written, but no more than a few thousand contiguous words…. anywhere.  My manuscript is like a pile of confetti, with random pieces from beginning, middle, and end all piled together.  I jump ahead to scenes I know are coming, rather than beat my head against scenes I’m not sure about, and then jump back to fill in blanks.  That means that there’s some point–erm, that would be now–when I don’t really have a work in progress so much as a series of disconnected flashes, punctuated mostly by question marks.

Filling in those question marks is actually the most fun.  For instance, last week I figured out how the hero is going to solve a problem that crops up near the end of the book.  I wrote that scene, and realized that in order for the solution to be effective, the hero was going to have to rely on the availability of, some item.  Let us call it Dingbat A.  Now, you never want to have your hero reach into his bag of tools at the crucial moment and say, “Aha!  Dingbat A!”  Not unless you want your readers to complain that Dingbat A comes out of nowhere and is a complete deus ex machina.  You cannot do this unless you are writing episodes of Inspector Gadget.  So that means that I had to have a scene earlier on where Dingbat A is introduced.

Of course, you also never want to have an earlier scene where you say, “Oh, Dingbat A.  How I love thee.  I foresee that you might be useful, in the event I am set upon by ravening were-hedgehogs.” Because then your reader will get to the were hedgehogs and say, “Oh, for crying out loud, just use Dingbat A already.”  Ideally, you want to introduce your reader to the solution to Big Problem sideways–that is, you want to make Dingbat A present, or even better, problematic, rather than showing it as a potential solution.  (A side benefit:  This makes your characters appear smarter than they are.  Nobody needs to know you thought of the solution first and then figured out how to hide it in plain sight.)

I realize that all this sounds horribly circuitous.  Welcome to writing a book with Courtney.

In any event, I had this great idea for a scene that introduced Dingbat A.  It was sexy.  It wasn’t about Dingbat A, although you can see Dingbat A in use–and that’s always a good thing, because that means it’s a scene that’s a nice piece of misdirection.  Plus, it was funny, which is always a bonus.  It made me realize why I write my books out of order.  Because, you see, the scene starts at the point when my hero and heroine have Colonel Draven tied up on the floor and covered with petticoats.

You probably don’t think there’s anything odd about that (or at least anything odder than what I have said so far) and I suppose there isn’t.  But what I really really want to know is–Who is Colonel Draven?  How have they tied him up?  And why the hell are they covering him with petticoats?

Thus arises the minutiae of plot.

But what if you can’t do that?  I mean, what if you try to write a query letter–and by “try” I do not mean “give up after the space of an afternoon”–I mean, try and try and try to write a query letter over the space of months, and still don’t get anything that you love?  Some people say that this is a sign your manuscript has fundamental flaws in plot, or that you are a bad writer.  But since this happened to me, I’m going to tell you that it’s possible you are just a bad querier.  Being a bad querier doesn’t make you a bad writer; it just makes you a bad querier.  Think of it like this–you can be bad at flirting, but still be really, really good in bed.

So what do you do if you are bad at flirting–uh, I mean, querying?  Obviously, my path to publication is not one everyone can follow, but it was hardly the only path to publication.  And, knowing that I was not particularly good at querying, I did not hang all my hopes on the slim possibility that I would win Sherry’s query critique, and the even slimmer possibility that she would read my pages as a result, followed by the completely anorexic possibility that she would like what she read.  I had a lot of irons in the fire.  Here’s some of the things I considered.

Ways to Skip Querying

If you can’t query, it makes sense to try to find ways to get your material in front of an agent through some other means.  Here are some that I tried.

• Networking. If you know someone who likes your writing, who has an agent, ask them to recommend you.  I didn’t ask Sherry to recommend me to Kristin–she offered–but I did ask a few other people, who said yes.
• Networking (part II). I volunteered to do things, like give a workshop at the Beaumonde’s annual conference.  One of the multi-published, award-winning authors who attended my workshop ran into me a few days later and said she’d enjoyed my workshop so much that she’d mentioned me to her agent, who wanted to see more.  Someone else (who had also judged me in a contest) later told me she’d mentioned me to her editor, and her editor had asked to see my manuscript.  At the time, I had an agent and we were already on submission (with offers on the table), but I really appreciated both those efforts–and you can be sure I would have followed up on them.  If you are bad at querying, it helps to put yourself out there.  It may never pay any dividends–in fact, when I volunteered to do the workshop, I never imagined there would be dividends; I just thought I’d done a lot of useful research that might help other historical romance writers–but if nobody knows who you are, nobody can help you out.  And believe it or not, a lot of published authors–including multi-published, award-winning authors–really do want to help out younger writers.
• Conferences. I went to Chicago North’s Spring Fling Conference, where I pitched to two agents (one of whom was Kristin) and one editor.  All three requested materials.  Of course, this depends on your having a good pitch, but believe it or not, I found it much easier to pitch in person than on paper.  I think it’s because expectations for in-person pitches are lower, and since I’ve spent time as a lawyer, I probably have more experience handling my speaking-out-loud anxiety.  Also, most agents are too nice to say “no” in person.  Take advantage of that.
• Contests. I specifically entered contests that had agents listed as the final judge.  To be honest, I am surprised that more people do not do this.  Editor judges are well and good, but I wanted to get an agent first.  So I targeted contests with agent judges.  Of course, my manuscript that ended up getting published fared exceptionally unevenly in contests, and so I never finaled in any of those contests–but don’t think I didn’t try it!
• Critiques. At the point when I signed with Kristin, I had not yet bid on agent/editor critiques, but these are offered every so often from various auctions.  I got a lot of mileage out of Anna Campbell’s critique from Brenda Novak’s auction, and at the point when I signed with Kristin, I had already scoped out the agents on the list there.  Let’s be frank–this option is very, very expensive, and I hadn’t decided if I was going to do it.  But you do get your pages in front of the agent in question.  It’s useful.  But the price is so high that unless you really don’t mind donating that money to charity, it makes much, much more sense to attend a conference where your agent-of-choice will be, in order to pitch to her (and others as well).

Ways to Make Agents Request From a Query (despite not nailing the pitch paragraph)

Of course, you’ll notice that all of the items on the list above have a serious cost–money or time or connections, none of which are infinite.  So I also focused on ways to make an agent request my manuscript from a query, even if I never managed to nail that pitch paragraph.

• Contests, again. In my case, since there are a lot of RWA chapter contests, and it’s never clear to an agent or editor how competitive the individual chapter contests are, I thought it was important to have something Big in the bio paragraph.  For romance writers, there is one main Big contest:  The Golden Heart.  I read everything I could in preparation for the Golden Heart.  I stalked the Wet Noodle Posse‘s blog in November, when they talked about what to do.  I polished and polished my synopsis and pages for both my eligible manuscripts.  There are no guarantees, of course, and I was lucky that one of my two manuscripts finaled.  But it wasn’t just luck.  I had done enough research that I knew I should end on as strong a hook as possible, that I needed to have my best, cleanest pages there, and that the synopsis was far more important than I had originally thought.  I hoped that if I could say “I am a Golden Heart finalist,” that the agent reading the pages would give me bonus query points that would make up for a subpar pitch paragraph.
• Homework. I had a list of agents.  I did a scary amount of research on the agents on my list.  I don’t just mean looking up who their clients were.  I mean, googling them for any and all interviews about what they were looking for; reading numerous client books, to see if my voice/style seemed like something they would be interested in.  For every agent on my list, I had several bullet points, so that when I actually sent the query, it would start with something like this (but obviously targeted for the agent):  “Dear Agent Y, You’ve said before that you are looking for strong, smart heroines in historical fiction.  If your client X is any indication, you do a great job finding them.  I hope you’ll be interested in reading more about Jenny Keeble, an independent, intelligent woman who has made the best of a bad lot in Victorian Britain. . . .”

  To give you an idea, by the time I pitched Kristin, I had not read Ally Carter’s “Cheating at Solitaire” (I couldn’t find it), Becky Motew’s “Coupon Girl” (ditto), Cheryl Sawyer’s first two books (ditto), and Jenny O’Connell’s nonfiction.  Everything else that she’d sold, that had been released?  I’d read it.  And Kristin wasn’t the only one whose client list I went through so voraciously.  I love reading, and I figured that the more I liked someone’s client list, the more likely it was that they’d like me.  There was not an agent in my top ten list where I hadn’t read books by at least three clients, if not more.  (Besides, I really do love reading, and an agent’s list is like a list of recommendations.)  I wanted to be able to truthfully and clearly convey that I thought I was a good fit for her list.  So I did my homework.  I did a lot of homework.

• Voodoo. I have to admit, I had a very firm idea in my mind who I wanted to represent me.  I was also terrified of jinxing it, and so I didn’t tell anyone what my list was.  Seriously.  My critique partners asked me when we were in Vegas, and I think I gave them some really vague ridiculous answer that wasn’t even true.  Was it because I didn’t trust them?  No.  It was because I didn’t want the universe to overhear and decide to taunt me Odysseus-style.  I was sure that it would, given half a chance.

  I am not normally a superstitious person.  In fact, I probably lean toward hyper-rational.  But occasionally (and I blame you for this, Mom) I indulge in ridiculously superstitious impulses.  This was one of them.

• The bio paragraph. I’ve done a few things that are different and interesting, perhaps even among writers.  I wanted to make sure my bio paragraph captured that without going over the line into boring the agent with credentials.  That being said, given a choice between saying “I am a personal assistant,” and saying, “I am Oprah Winfrey’s personal assistant,” you always want to say the latter.  (But given a choice between saying “I am a personal assistant,” and “I am Joe Blow Off The Street’s personal assistant,” you are just a personal assistant.)

So there you have it.  If you’re bad at querying and you didn’t win a critique from Sherry Thomas, you still have a lot of options.  Don’t let a little thing like being bad at querying stop you from getting your manuscript read.

Oh, and one final thing?  If you are bad at querying, you’ll probably get fewer requests for pages.  That means that every request you get must count.  Seriously count.  And that means, especially if you are bad at querying, your pages have to be damned, damned good in bed.

PROOF BY SEDUCTION will not be my publishing debut.

There.  I’ve said it.

HQN has asked me to participate in a Christmas-themed anthology for 2009, and so my offical debut will be a novella that I am writing for that collection.  The other novellas will be from Mary Balogh and Nicola Cornick (they are, I think, previously published novellas for the other two authors–when I have more details, I’ll let you know.)  It should be released in October of 2009.

As for my little novella….  well, if you want to find out more details, you’ll just have to come back and see what you get, right?

To me, what Kay proposes sounds like something between heaven and magic.  Right now, my organization is to stack things up in a five-foot pile on my desk, and hope that if the cat knocks the pile over, it gets restacked before the dog chews up anything important.  I desperately needed this.  She’s convinced me to go digital in 2009 and buy a receipt scanner.

If you’re interested, check out her awesome posts here, and here.