Chapter One

Art, in general, is a confusing and over-used term.

After all, what is art?

We can all agree that Michelangelo’s works are art, but does merely holding a paintbrush in your hand make you an artist?

Does learning to play the intro riff to Stairway to Heaven make you a musician?

Does playing “second bunny” in your kindergarten play make you an actor?

Heady stuff.

In the art of writing, one torturous hurdle separates “recognized success” from the sublime world of anonymous scribbling. That hurdle is getting published.

The process by which one goes from “writer” to “published author” is the least understood of all artistic endeavors.

It’s much easier to understand the process of going from “musician” to “recording artist,” because if you’re a good musician, and you get yourself some gigs, and the crowds increase in size, and people talk about you, and girls you don’t know are suddenly sleeping with you, there’s at least a chance that a music label will wander into a show to consider your potential.

Musicians are also fortunate because, in order to enjoy the fun of being a “musician,” they never actually need to make the transition from “musician” to “recording artist,” They can simply stand on a street corner, play some tunes, and people walking by will listen.

Credit for this goes to the Doppler Effect.

Same for an actor. You can spend a couple hours at Happy Hour, then bellow Hamlet’s monologue on a street corner until the cops come; all the world’s your stage, no?

A writer, however, lives in a different world.

A writer seeking to become a published author is an “imagination egotist” that sits alone at a computer, pecking out the details of some sort of story he hopes others will pay to read.

The investment takes hundreds, even thousands, of hours. When he’s done, well, what now?

Let me tell you, Amigo, there are few things uglier than a big, thick, unpublished manuscript. Why? The time investment.

Let’s consider a musician saddled with this same multi-hour-investment reality:

Guitarist: Hey, Mom! I’ve been practicing for the past 8 months. Want to hear my stuff?

Mom: Sure, Hon-

Guitarist: Okay, but there’s one small caveat.

Mom: What’s that?

Guitarist: I’m coming over every night for two weeks, and each night I’ll play for three hours, but you can’t comment until I’ve completed the entire set.

Mom: Son… that would be great. But I’ve got to go to the doctor.

Guitarist: What Doctor?

Mom: Kevorkian.

Or how about a painter caught in the writer’s world:

Painter: Hey, Mike! My old college roomie! Sup’?

Mike: I’m good-- what’s up, Dude?

Painter: Man, I’m having my first art showing! You in?

Mike: Cool! Where’s it gonna be?

Painter: At your house. I’m going to come by every night for two weeks, and each night you’ll sit in silence while I spend three hours discussing the paintings: The technique, the inspiration, how they make me feel, how they should make you feel, you know—the usual.

Mike: Dude, I wish I could, but I’ve got committed to attending a multi-level marketing meeting—they’re selling time shares, and I just can’t stand the idea of missing it.

No matter how you slice it, the journey to become a published author is a long, strange, demeaning hike.

If you tell someone you’ve spent the past two years writing a manuscript, it’s amazing how often you’ll hear a reply along the lines of, “Really? I’ve got a great idea for a book myself, if I could just find time to write it.”

If you say to the same person that you’ve spent the past two years perfecting Handel’s Messiah, the odds are extremely low that they will respond, “You know, I’ve been meaning to perfect Beethoven’s Sixth myself, but I haven’t been able to find the time.”

No, they will likely look impressed and ask, “Will you play it for me?”

So what is a writer to do?

There is only one answer: Get published. And how hard can that be, right?

Good question.

How Hard It Can Be

For every writer seeking publication, there is one single icon that emerges as the symbol of the quest.

Unlike the Holy Grail, this particular symbol is easy to find, and unlike Ahab’s great white whale, there’s no peril in attaining it. In fact, it’s available right down the road at your neighborhood Post Office.

This hallowed jewel is none other than the self-addressed, stamped envelope.

The self-addressed, stamped envelope is such a unique and ubiquitous part of the journey to publication that it has morphed into an acronym amongst those in the biz, and is called simply a SASE.

One need only purchase a “How to Get Published” book to connect immediately to the power of the SASE, as every literary agent who agrees to be interviewed lists the SASE as the single most important element within a submission package.

“I wonder why?” I remember thinking during my perusal of my three get-published books. “Maybe it’s so they can quickly and easily send me my advance.”

No, no… that’s not quite it. Literary agents are not seeking a more efficient way to begin their personal and professional relationship with you. The truth is a bit more nuanced.

You see, SASE doesn’t stand for Self-Addressed, Stamped Envelope. It actually stands for “Sorry, Ass-monkey. Send Elsewhere.”

Yes, I’m afraid it’s true.

Due to the sheer volume of rejection letters that literary agents send out every day, you (the submitter) must pay your own dream-crushing freight.

By way of an analogy, imagine a loan shark calling to say he’ll be by next Tuesday to kick your ass, but he needs an advance to pay for the dry-cleaning of his soon-to-be-bloody suit. For a struggling writer, that’s what the SASE comes to feel like.

Inside these SASE’s, rejection letters come in many forms.

Or, in my experience, many, many forms.

The nicer ones-- which feel like, oh, just a Ninja throwing star to the Adam’s Apple-- come on the agent’s official letterhead, and use phrases like “we are unable to give your work the attention it so richly deserves.”

The not-so-nice rejections, well, they sting a little more. Imagine submitting your great American novel to a literary agent, and three months later you receive one-third of a sheet of paper, hand-cut and crooked, a copy of a copy of a copy, that starts off, “Due to the volume of queries we receive….”

For an unpublished writer, that’s a baseball-cleats vasectomy, without a bag of frozen peas for the post-op.

Why must this be? Why must the literary agents be so cruel?

Think about it: They have the worst job on the planet.

Imagine, if you will, committing several hours a day to reading some stranger’s poorly written, disjointed, mind-numbing fiction.

Then let’s season that salad with a few volumes of bad poetry. Add the occasional biography of someone’s grandpa, who fought in WWII and went on to become philosopher-janitor.

Finally, let’s top it all with the rough-note ramblings of every single yo-yo this poor literary agent has ever met, no matter how briefly.

People, this isn’t a job-- it’s Hell, in a Word document.

Here’s the painful, statistical truth: As writers, you and I suck.

Except no one ever tells us we suck.

If you write a romance novel about Renaissance England and show it to your husband, what do you think he’s going to say? That it’s boring? This man wants to have sex with you at some point in the next decade.

How about the man who writes the crime-fiction novel about the perfect heist? Do you think wifey-poo is really going to tell him the truth? With that new ottoman hanging in the balance? Not a chance.

So, the literary agents get to tell us we suck.

And this is where the disconnect occurs. None of us want those statistics to include our writing.

Every other writer might suck, but you don’t, right?

You can describe a “heaving breast” like no one before or since.

Or your bad guys aren’t just bad, they are symbolic icons of the good-and-evil duality of man the likes of which hasn’t been encountered since Moby Dick.

And if the damn literary agent would just stick with the manuscript through the first hundred and seventy pages and allow the story to build, they’d see that you are quite possibly the next James Joyce.

News flash. Here is how much money the agent who discovers the next James Joyce will make: Zero.

Here is how much the agent who convinces Oprah to put her name on a cookbook that she’s never even laid eyes on: One gazillion dollars.

You see, for a literary agent to make money, they have to sell the book to a publishing house. The publishing house must then in turn print and sell thousands of those books to readers.

Now, which do you think will sell more copies: The cookbook with Oprah’s photo on it, where she swears she stays thin with no effort? Or your “important” novel that explores the relationship between conjoined twins, and cuts deep down into the issues of self, selfishness, and selflessness?

Hint: Are there more people looking for a no-effort solution for thinness? Or conjoined twins, seeking someone to understand them?

If you’re still confused, ask yourself this question: If Americans won’t even commit two hours to an “important” movie, what leads you to believe your “important” four hundred page book will fare any better?

Strike One

My first manuscript entailed the trials of turning thirty. Part-truth and part-fiction, it was a humorous memoir of myself and two friends traveling through Europe, struggling with the concept of reaching the big three-zero, and having to become real, no-kidding-around, adults. (At the time, thirty seemed old).

At the end of this exhaustive typing exercise I gave it to a couple dozen friends and family, and got solid reviews, with broad consensus that it was, at the very least, laugh-out-loud funny.

In my opinion, this manuscript defied the statistical suckage, and thus deserved publication.

Next stop, my acquisition of several How to Get Published books.

As mentioned earlier, this is where the SASE came to light, but that was only the beginning. There is a very specific style for kissing a potential agent’s ass, and straying from the formula will doom you faster than signing a three-movie deal and discovering a taste for Bolivian marching powder in the same weekend.

A shortened version of the formula reads as:

Dear (Agent’s Name),

With great self-loathing and humility, I beseech thee taketh a look at my musings. Yea, though my scribblings are not worthy for your eyes to behold, I feel it my bounden duty to present it to you. It is unlike any work ever produced, because ___________.

With Great Thanksgiving and Humble Obedience,

(Your Name).

The blank is where you describe how your book is unique and destined to sell more copies than, say, the cookbook Oprah agreed to smile for.

Perhaps you wrote it without using verbs.

Or maybe you shattered the current record for heaving-breasts per page.

Maybe you drew Vonnegut-style cartoons of Mohammad, and are ready to go into bestseller exile.

Whatever the angle, it better be good. In my case, the angle was a right-of-passage book that wasn’t all angst-filled and boo-hoo-hoo. I thought it filled a pretty interesting, under-served niche. In a non-sucky way.

Only a worm hole in the space-time continuum could account for how quickly the SASE rejections began crowding into my mailbox—in fact, one was waiting for me when I got back from dropping off the initial mailing at the post office. And they kept coming. I didn’t keep exact count, but I’m fairly confident three rejections materialized for every query letter sent out.

The How-to-Get-Published books were once again scrutinized, and their advice was clear: Don’t give up! Press on! You don’t suck, even if you suck!

So I pressed the quest. Then, after playing SASE boomerang for months, it occurred to me that the United States Postal Service may be behind the writing and publishing of these How-to-Get-Published books.

What could be an easier way to margin their profits?

My local postman spies a letter to a literary agency and sets it aside. One day later he opens it, stuffs the SASE with a rejection note, and drops it by my house. Two stamps are purchased, but the letter never leaves the neighborhood.

Genius! Evil, but genius!

My wife listened to my theory as it spewed forth in angry detail. After a while she worked the words “trial separation” into the conversation, and the conversation faded towards something like painting the crown molding or getting the dog fixed.

But still, I wonder.

My next move involved playing a few of my aces in the hole. Through family connections, some people in the publishing biz kinda-sorta knew my name, so it was time to call in some favors.

Even if these folks couldn’t actually pull the trigger on a book deal, they could assuage my ego by telling me what a not-sucky writer I am, and perhaps kick it upstairs to the decision makers who could at least consider it.

Their responses ripped into me like John McCain at a pancake buffet.

One said, “You need to be more deliberate,” as if my chosen style of writing was… an accident?

Another said, “You need to practice writing more,” unaware that my professional job (for 10 years) was as an advertising writer—and that I’d won a couple dozen awards for the craft I now needed to practice.

The third opinion was that the book was too “stereotypical Southern male,” and thus “wouldn’t sell well.”

Apparently, us Southern Boys is just a bunch of toe-pickin’ mule humpers, and our kind don’t buy nothing that’s got’s to do with fancy book learnin’.

A great deal of thought went into my re-writing the book from another point of view-- perhaps an atypical, New England lesbian-- but the idea fizzled when the term “heaving breasts” surfaced three times in the first chapter.

From there, I returned to my stack of get-published books, which assured me in no uncertain terms, “Perhaps the topic you chose sucks, and maybe the way you arranged the words sucked, but there’s no way you suck. Consider purchasing our companion book, How to Write Better So You Can Become a Writer.”

The concept struck me as a bit like selling a book to biology majors entitled How to Be Smarter So You Can Get Into Med School. I subsequently moved the ownership of these books between cerebral categories-- from “good value” to “suspect.”

Having already spent our family emergency-fund on SASEs, a brilliant idea rose like a Tomahawk missile to my brain: To hell with the old book-- just invest a few hundred hours writing a book on another topic!

The get-published books said that if your book is good enough, it’s impossible for it to not get published. My thinking here belays my affliction with the writer’s disease, because if I really felt my literary mission involved exploring the angst of turning thirty, then that idea would remain front and center until achieving perfection, right?

Nah.

The point was publication, and if that meant writing a new book, then a new freakin’ book was comin’ up!

Strike Two

Okay, the space between this paragraph and the one above represents the two years lost to writing my next book.

A humorous history of the United States, it uncovered lessons we should’ve learned, but failed to. No less than a dozen people told me it was the funniest thing they’d ever read. That’s a good thing, no?

That space up above represents the several months lost to playing SASE boomerang with this second manuscript. The need for more up-to-date versions of the get-published books began to haunt me… and then it happened: A real, live, fast-talking, New York literary agent called.

Agent: Did you write this?

Me: Uh, yeah?

Agent: This is the funniest stuff I’ve read in two years, and I’m gonna sell it, so don’t lie to me. Is this your stuff?

Me: Yes.

Agent: Okay. Send me the rest.

This wasn’t the appropriate conversation.

Doesn’t discovery lead to … compliments?

I mean, what if I was fragile? A sensitive artist, one mood-swing away from a Drano martini? Or a quirky, reclusive, alcoholic genius who might burn my manuscript rather than submit to such a blasé reaction.

The issue demanded pressing:

Me: So you really liked the book?

Agent: It’s not a book. It’s a manuscript. You’re not gonna be one of those whiney, needy types, are you?

Me: Nah, that ain’t me. I dig your style, Dude.

Agent: Terrific. Why aren’t you on the way to the post office?

So, step one was officially complete. The impossible morphed into the possible. A literary agent now represented me on the mean streets of the Big Apple-- a player in the game! And he loved my stuff! New York address, big name clients… I was on my way to the top!

Why they call it the “submission” process…

After an infinite amount of time passed, my agent called:

Agent: Alright, ya’ big sissy, we’re going to start submitting your manuscript. And they don’t call it the submission process for nothing. I hope you got thick skin, because these people will say what they think.

Me: If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to be rejected.

Agent: Funny. All I’m saying is you don’t have dick until you have a deal. And right now, you ain’t got dick.

Me: Does that mean I shouldn’t have leased the Porsche?

The next eight months rolled out as the slowest, most agonizing months of my life. My agent sent the manuscript out to one publishing company at a time, along with a cover letter endorsement in which he stated “Maybe I’m weird, but this is the funniest stuff I’ve read in years.”
And one by one, the rejections made their way back.

Ever sensitive to my feelings, my agent faxed them to me at work without a word, and my secretary delivered them to me.

A rejection, I could handle… but the wording in some of the letters was too much to take. In fact, most of them agreed with my agent, and stated, “I’ve got to agree. This is some of the funniest stuff I’ve read in a very long time.”

Yes! Yes! Go on!

“Unfortunately, this genre isn’t selling very well these days, so we’re going to have to pass.”

Wait! Wait! You’re doing it wrong! You say “It sucks,” and then you pass.

You don’t say “It’s good,” then pass.

You’re MegaWorld Books! Whatever you say sells is what sells! If there’s a problem with a genre, you make the market! I mean, Al Franken is getting published! If he’s getting shelf space, how can you turn down a book you think is actually good?

Are you there, God? It’s me, Prioleau.

And then, the call came.

Agent: Well, Pray, we gave it our best shot. No takers.

Me: But, but, but, but-

Agent: Win some, lose some. Hey, I thought your manuscript was good.

Me: But, but, but, but, but-

Agent: We had a few laughs, though, huh? Good times.

Me: But, but, but, but-

Agent: Listen, send me something I can sell, okay?

Me: But, but, but, but-

Agent: Don’t be a stranger.

Aaaaaand, click. Dial tone. Insert sound of crickets.