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Of Gatekeepers and Paraliterates

Of Gatekeepers and Paraliterates

I started thinking about it last year after the Mount Hermon conference, but now my concern is bigger than ever. What are unpublished writers to do? There’s always self publishing and the Internet, but if you aim for a traditional royalty publisher, the slush pile is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

The way the market is today, you need to enter through a gatekeeper—an agent or an editor. You either have to have an agent already or go to a writing conference to present your book idea to an editor or agent. The door is no longer open in most publishing houses for unsolicited manuscripts. And even solicited manuscripts can sit for months in the massive piles most editors have to deal with. So what happens to those writers who are limited by financial, health, or other types of problems and can’t attend a conference?

There seems to be the same need developing for an intermediary between unpublished writers and agents and editors as has occurred in the legal and medical fields—professionals who can help unpublished writers take the long-term view and cover everything from editing and rewriting to writing targeted proposals and eking out appropriate agents. Paralegals and paramedics arose out of similar types of need.

"Paraliterates?" So what should we call them in the writing world? Paraliterates?!

As a former paralegal, I’m not sure I want that title, but that’s the role I find myself called into more and more since I became involved helping Austin Boyd rewrite his manuscript, develop his proposal, and break into the market a few years ago. And Austin was a shoo-in, a humble hardworking student, eager to learn and a natural marketer with a terrific timely story and powerful credentials. He just never gave up. (Be sure to pick up The Evidence when you get a chance.)

But what about the rest of us? Have we spent years creating our “missile” but given little thought to how and where to aim it? Are all the elements there for it to fly? Or will it crash and burn on its first flight? Forty rejections later will we discover those missing pieces? Or will we fall along the way, as many do?

Do we know how to take the long-term view with our writing? I didn’t. And like myself, most writers I’ve encountered seem to wake up slowly and painfully to The Publishing Facts of Life:

The Publishing Facts of Life

(1) The story is wayyy too long. (First manuscripts I see are sometimes 140,000 words and up, whereas the average novel is generally 80,000–100,000 words.) Our first novel went over that amount. (No, I’m not going to admit the total page number!), so, voila! It made a good series. Fortunately it divided naturally in half. But many don’t.

(2) The market isn’t interested in your kind of story. Autobiographies are hard to sell, for instance. But turning one into a novel may work.

(3) You forgot to research the market in advance, and there are already three hundred books on your topic. How is yours unique? Why do they need 301?

(4) Or you need to be an established expert to get any interest for your book.

I’m sure you have your own items to add to the list. The issue burning in my heart now, that seems to increase with each writers’ conference, is: When there are so few gatekeepers, who will help those unpublished Christian writers whom God is calling? Les Stobbe seems to be the only agent out there who specializes in first-time authors—bless his soul. But we need dozens, if not hundreds!

posted by Linda Nathan @ 5:34 PM 2 comments