Oh yes, I read other stuff too

 I've written a bit about my summer (2025) reading list and why my reading doesn't provide comps for agent queries. Yesterday I got caught having to admit I was reading something more in line with current popular tastes.

I was sending a query to an agent who, I'll admit, seemed like a pretty hopeless choice for what I'm trying to sell but after a while, after you've sent out dozens of queries, you sense you're beginning to run out of possibilities -- so you grasp at straws.

The agent I was querying used Query Manager for submissions and I had all my materials ready to pop into the appropriate boxes -- bio, word count, genre, query letter, pages -- but then, this particular agent had added to the Query Manager form, a question of her own: "What book are you reading?"

It wasn't "what books have you read lately?" or "what books are your favorites?" or "what books do you want to read?" but "what book are you reading?" Of course I was reading a book but not one I would have liked to get caught reading. I was reading The Perfect Marriage, by Jeneva Rose and I had a history with this book.

A year or two ago I had set out to get a taste of what was currently popular in fiction. I was browsing through the fiction section of our local Barnes & Noble. The staff had tagged certain books which they had particularly enjoyed. I bought two of them. At home I found both unreadable.

I set them both aside and turned to some other books which I had wanted to read. I didn't quite forget them and I did think that "someday" (like Justin Bieber's perfume) I might get around to them, but I was in no rush. Then, as we were making plans to go to Canada, my wife spotted my copy of The Perfect Marriage and told me her book club had chosen it for their next book. I offered it to her and it came along with us. I still hadn't read it. My wife however dug into it.

Then she began to urge me to read it. If I wanted to be a "contemporary writer" (which I didn't!) I had to read this book. I continued to resist, plowing through the titles I had picked up at Frenchys. But she persisted and, without giving anyway anything, finally got me to promise to read it. Finally I did and, I'll admit, once I got into it -- it did take a while -- I wanted to keep reading ... until I had finished it.

So this was the book I had to name when, in that query, I was asked, "what book are you reading?" It wasn't a title anything close to what the agent was looking for. It was probably as far out of her specified preferences as it was out of mine. But, like it or not, I had to tell the truth regardless of how embarrassing it was.

But the real truth is that books fascinate me and teach me and add something to my vision of the world I live in, even books I never expected to be caught reading.

Factory fiction

When a publisher discovers they've got a hot title, they want more of the same. When their competitors discover that they have a hot title, they want similar titles. What you might have thought of as a creative art becomes a creation factory, a fiction factory.

You've got to remember that publishing is a business, a tough business, so the publishers are looking for opportunities to make money. Yes, the top publishers will, occasionally, put out a book that has intrinsic value, something special. But these few books aren't expected to make much money. They might even lose money. But they give the publisher prestige and prestige attracts books that will make money.

As a writer there are plentiful opportunities to get your work published if you can master the requirements -- the template -- of the fiction factory. If you can do it and do it well, your career can thrive and, if your career thrives, you can dare to write an occasional piece outside the fiction factory template and your publisher will humor you by publishing it.

If you want to be a writer you have to think a bit of what kind of writer you want to be. It's always going to be hard work -- your hard work -- but how you approach the industry will, to a large extent, determine your economic success.

Literature trends like real estate

Yesterday I was looking over an email I got from a real estate broker. I'm on his mailing list and, about every week or so, get a missive suggesting what our house would sell for in the current market and reporting sales and offerings in the neighborhood. He also includes a graph showing his suggested price for our house along a progression of dates. The numbers rise, fall, and rise again. Tomorrow? Who knows.

Now all this while, while our house had been rising and falling in value according to this agent, I've been hard at work peddling stories I've written -- novels -- with, thus far, no success. The rejection emails from agents generally say something like "it's not right for my list."

Thanks to Albert "Ricky" Stever, I'm encouraged by the realization that markets aren't fixed; they aren't set forever. Themes agents and publishers are looking for today won't be the same in a future tomorrow. So what I'm writing now might have to wait for a culture shift in readers' interest until they align with what I write and what I want to write.

But I can wait. That's not an option open to every writer. You have to live; you have to somehow make money. (I'd like some too!) But, from watching that real estate curve, the changing numbers, I'm confident that what I write will, at some point, align with what readers are looking for, publishers who want to give it to them, and agents who serve as the go-betweens.

 

Another gem from Frenchys

 Last Sunday after church my wife suggested we go to the farmers market in Shelburne. I wasn't sure there was a farmers market on Sunday afternoon but a check online confirmed that indeed there was, so we went.

After picking up some blueberries, carrots, and beets, we walked back to the Bean Dock for lunch, for me a scallop and bacon wrap. Then, rather than having our usual ice cream desert, we headed for the Shelburne Frenchys.

I was looking for a couple of long sleeve shirts and I found two which I liked. Then I came across a cotton sweater which caught my eye and I added that to my "shopping cart." This, I was thinking, was enough. I hadn't seen a book bin and assumed that there wasn't one. In the past the book bin at the Shelburne Frenchys had always been in the front of the store.

Heading for the restroom -- the "washroom" as they called it, I spotted two things that were different this year. The door to the washroom was unlocked, you didn't have to ask the cashier for the key suspended from a stick too big to put in your pocket, and, in the back of the store near the washroom, was a book bin. Of course I stopped to look.

It being a bit past mid-summer, the bin was nearly empty but, sorting through it, I found two books I decided to buy. One was Tom Clancy's "The Hunt For Red October." The other was a slightly battered but probably unread book by someone with a really weird name. The back cover reported some prize nominations for the author so I thought it could be interesting. I left Frenchys that day with my two shirts, one cotton sweater, two books, and my wife.

I had picked the Clancy book with the idea that breezing through it could give me some relief from the intensity of the books I had just finished. Unfortunately, when I started in on it, I found that the type, in this small, thick, paperback edition was a struggle for my eyes. I turned to the other book by the writer with the weird name.

At first I thought "Yaa Gyasi" was on of those made up names that creative people adopt to conceal their real backgrounds -- like "Elizabeth Arden" who started out in life as Florence Nightingale Graham. But, it turned out, Yaa Gyasi was real, and her writing inspired. "Transcendent Kingdom" was the book I had acquired. Thank you, Frenchys. The book is a gem.

Gyasi's writing is so good it humbled me. Could I ever write as well? But it also was a challenge, to do better with my next project, to work harder, to try to live up to a standard I'd discovered at Frenchys.

It's an amazing world out there.

Three reasons why I can't produce comps for literary agents

I've been busy trying to connect with a literary agent who can market a story I've written -- a novel. The often asked information I'm supposed to supply in my query is "titles of books similar to yours" -- the "comps."

I'm stumped for three reasons. Maybe you understand.

(1) Money

Reading costs nothing but acquiring current literature is expensive. Libraries can help but, underfunded and sometimes trimmed by local censorship, they don't fully solve the problem. Ultimately to get your hands on a trove of current books to sort through to find the matches, you have to spend money. Paperbacks start at about $20. If the book you want isn't in paperback yet, then it's $36.95 and up. And you'll need at least a dozen. That will set you back around $360. I'm not exactly a starving writer but $360 would be a big hit on my budget ... too big.

(2) Time

There are only so many hours in the day. Duh! I spend some of them reading; some of them writing. My reading is not from the (unknown) books that might be good comps for me. My reading is eclectic: books I hear about from some article I've just read, books listed in the back of other books I've just read, and books that I pick up by chance in a book bin. I'm currently backlogged by about eight tittles and my wife keeps making more suggestions from books she owns and has read. These titles are unlikely to provide me with comps.

(3) Theme

When I'm looking for a book to read I'm looking for something special, something that stimulates my own creative juices. I'm not looking for a book that is "like" something I'm writing or want to write. The books I'm picking to read are not comps.

So I strike out on comps.

Hey, literary agent! Are you looking for a knockoff or something original?

 Years ago at Canyon House, a long forgotten marketing company, Norman had a sharp eye for products we could knock off, products that were already proven winners. Knockoffs were low risk and they made money, not as much as the originals, but enough to keep things profitable.

Marketing a new and truly original product is risky. Most don't make it. They're dropped before too much money is lost. The big money goes to push the winners. When you just go for knockoffs you eliminate losses from those hopeless products that would never make it. Because your product is a knockoff of a product that's already proven to be winner, you can be relatively certain the it too will make money.

Marketing knockoffs is boring.

In submitting queries to literary agents (I'm still looking!) a common request is to name "comparable books." I laughed when one agent's wish list mentioned that he/she/they/them wanted submissions that "defied categorizations altogether" -- and then asked for comparable titles.

It's understandable. There are hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of agents out there trying to make a living, and it isn't easy for them. Wouldn't it be easier for an agent to make a deal with a publisher by offering a book that is "like" a current best seller? Norman wouldn't hesitate.

So "original" is going to be harder to sell; riskier. "Original" is not for every agent out there. It takes someone special.

Original stories do get published. Out there among the agenting universe there are players who do recognize these special books and champion them and bring them to the market.

But it's risky.

How I selected my summer reading this year

My wife carefully curates her summer reading before we head for Canada and our house on Nova Scotia's South Shore. My summer reading is selected using a different method, one that is risky but, some summers, immensely rewarding. It goes like this:

From Walden, New York, we drive to Bangor, Maine. Then, from Bangor, we drive to St. John, New Brunswick, where we get the ferry across the Bay of Fundy to Digby, Nova Scotia. From the ferry terminal at Digby it's about a three hour drive to our house and you might think that, after so many hours on the road, we'd head right for it, right from the ferry terminal. But actually we make a stop in Digby before heading for the house. We stop at Frenchys. It's a must.

My wife goes through the ladies clothes for her summer wardrobe. I've mostly gotten my fill of clothes from Frenchys but I'm eager to see what books they might have.

This year (2025) when I first looked into the book bin I was disappointed. It was almost empty. There was probably a reason for this. Usually we make it to Canada at the end of June, in time for the local Canada Day celebrations. This year we had some delays and didn't arrive until the last week of July. Others had grabbed up all the good books and this book bin is only stocked at the beginning of the summer.

But I did want some summer reading so I picked seven books out of the bin, all authors and titles unfamiliar to me. I had low expectations for my selections.

That changed when I started reading.

My first book was Berji Kristen: Tales from The Garbage Hills, by Latife Tekin, translated from the original Turkish by Ruth Christie and Saliha Paker. It's about low -- very low -- income people whose community -- their houses -- are all built on a garbage dump and, for those who work for wages, their workplaces -- the factories they work in -- aren't far from the garbage dump. Their environment is full of toxic waste -- chemicals from these local factories which infuse the air these people breath and the water they drink, the effects of which is just taken for granted. They have no options.

Tekin's tale is low key. No preaching; no shouting. She just lays it out for you and how you look at it is up to you.

With the Garbage Hills behind me, I picked up The Watsons Go To Birmingham -- 1963, by Christopher Paul Curtis. My wife noticed the Newberry Honor award on the cover and told me I probably wouldn't want to read a kid's book, but I thought I'd give it a try. I devoured it. Aside from the interest in the book, I was fascinated by the author's story of how the book got published and launched his literary career at a time when he was no longer a youngster.

It's a beautiful tale of a beautiful family and, through this book, I learned about the "conk" -- a hairstyle not favored by Mr. and Mrs. Watson (their oldest son gets one and, as a result, has his head shaved by his father!) but you may have seen prominent musicians who adapted this somewhat risky hair straightening style -- Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and others.

Then, from Mr. Curtis's tale, I learned that in 1963 a car could be fitted with a record player -- not an 8-track, not a tape player or CD player, but a real record player -- in the case of the Watsons, one that played 45s. (This so amazed me that I had to look it up on Wikipedia for verification!)

As the Watsons travel south from Flint, Michigan (where the author lived and grew up) to Birmingham, Alabama, we learn how America can be both beautiful and terrifying.

So the first two books were hits. Then I plunged into Wild Thorns by Sahar Khalifeh, translated from Arabic by Trevor LeGrassick and Elizabeth Fernea. Originally published in 1976, the story is timely -- a tale of Palestinians in the West Bank and their interactions with Israel.

When I finish reading this book I still have four more to go -- all seven for just twenty seven dollars (Canadian). Even if the next four are bombs, hey, I've gotten my money's worth. More than my money's worth.

So this is how I pick my summer reading. Unplanned. Uncertain. But often the overlooked books in Frenchys book bin turn out to be gems that widen my horizons and expose me to worlds I would never otherwise have lived. These are books I would never have discovered in my local book store or by following a reviewer's "Ten 'must reads' for Summer 2025." Now back to the books.