K. Marvin Bruce

The search for an agent is entering its fourth month and I often wonder just what classics we’d have to live without if Herman Melville or Charlotte Bronte had received email after email saying “it just doesn’t have that ‘have to have’ feeling.”   We’d be literary beggars. The true irony of this is I know people who work in the publishing industry.   They say that someone with my background should be a no-brainer for an agent.   When I was a young man a friend accused me of writing too much like Melville.   “Nobody writes like that anymore,” he said.   His father-in-law was a writer. Melville was friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne.   Their works are endlessly remade in a more modern idiom.   Electrum may look like gold, but it’s not the same.   Why not search for the real thing? People learn how to do things from watching the masters.   While it may have been the glib Doc Savage and Dark Shadows pulps that led me to reading, I soon...

I have another blog.   That one, under my real name, has fewer readers than this one.   Unlike the piece you’re reading at the moment, this is an occasional note.  I post on the other blog daily.   Interestingly I’ve had publishing professionals tell me that’s what they like to see.  Funny. Perhaps it doesn’t seem like much, but coming up with discrete, intelligent (I hope!) things to say every day, for over a decade, should demonstrate willingness to work hard.   When I started the other blog I had lots of followers.   Now I have few. I know, I know!   If I were in your place I’d be saying, “Maybe your writing sucks.”   Maybe it does.   Maybe it doesn’t.   The point is without someone willing to help we all spin in obscurity. Someone I know online recently published a book on a topic in which I also publish.   He has tons of followers.   I don’t.   He also has a university post and thus an institut...

I take courage from those websites that tell you how many times an author was rejected.   You know the ones.   Those written by naively optimistic sorts who say “your future is out there (just not with me).”   Still, I like them. The other day I counted.   My Medusa novel has received 57 rejections so far.   I believe in it, however.   I have been told by people that don’t even like me that I write well.   That should count for something, right?   And there’s that thing I can’t possibly tell agents: The book was under contract before.   See, you can’t admit such things.   You can’t say “The editor who accepted it responded ‘Loved it!’” and “they broke the contract when that editor left.”   I know that somewhere out there lives a publishing professional who got what I am trying to do with this story. Meanwhile, I continue to read.   I read a book recently that was really poor.   I mean, at times I had ...

The search for an agent continues.   As a working writer, my time is often limited to weekends.   Jobs, as many of you surely know, expand to fill the time between Sunday evening and Saturday morning.   They’re showing no signs of slowing down. I was excited that I had an entire weekend with no plans.   I was going to spend it redoubling my agent search, and writing up yet more stories.   I’d run into an agent’s page that actually asked for other finished works, published or not.   I would’ve thought all agents would be interested in how prolific prospective clients might be. Then I woke up sick on Sunday morning.   I don’t get sick often, and this wasn’t head cold sick.   It was a profound dizziness and nausea that happens to me from time to time.   The only thing you can do is hold your head still and try not to move your eyes.   Not very conducive to looking for agents. Of course this had to happen on what was on...

I’ve been spending a lot of time on literary agents’ pages.   One thing has become clear to me: to find an agent you’d better not have a regular job.   Well, unless that job is prominent, of course.   Professors, politicians, sports stars, actors—they can find agents with ease.   The rest of us, not so much. As I’m sitting here soaking in the proletariat pool, I’m contemplating looking for an agent for a story collection.   One of the things I noticed when doing all my agent hunting was that a few of them handle story collections.   Some writers made livings on stories: Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and H. P. Lovecraft come to mind. I’ve started reading collections of short stories again.   I really like the way a novel sucks you in and keeps you engaged for hours.   Our fractured lifestyles, however, often mean a collection of stories will get you through a compartmentalized day. As a writer I have written four no...

Blogger isn’t my native environment.   I can’t afford two WordPress sites, though.   Living a dual life doesn’t equate to having dual bank accounts, I’m afraid. I neglect this blog because I write non-fiction and conduct business as a normal human being with a normal name.   My normal job doesn’t allow for fiction publication, besides, I don’t want them to know what goes on inside my head. Trying to get the old Blogger site up to code has been a challenge, though.   Months ago I added other pages (see above) and wondered why nobody else could see them.   Turns out you have to have a kind of course in Blogger-ese to figure out how.   I think it worked. Why the additional pages?   Well, I’ve been querying agents again.   This is a great exercise for those of us who like to bang our heads into walls.   To get an agent you need to have a following.   To get a following you need to have an agent.   It’s a circle of ...

Just yesterday I found out another academic colleague is a wannabe novelist.   Unaware that I had written six novels and more short stories than I can count (I don’t have that many fingers), she asked me if I knew anything about getting an agent.   My response: I know a lot about NOT getting an agent. You see, a friend of mine knows an agent.   He introduced us via email.   The agent kindly agreed to consider my Medusa novel, even though two weeks later he forgot who I was.   At least he read it.   No other agent has.   Didn’t sway him, though. I spend some time on Medium.com .   They have some great stuff about writing.   They won’t care to read much of your stuff unless you’ve had more success than I have, but then, I’ve got a nine-to-five and I take my writing way too seriously. Hearing from my professorial colleague got me excited about my fiction again.   Problem is I’ve got a non-fiction tome under contr...

So I finally got an agent to talk to me.   That doesn’t mean he’ll represent me, but he knows, at least a little of, who I am.   This didn’t come about through a web search and cold call.   He agreed to talk to me because we have a mutual friend. This friend I have never met.   He contacted me after reading a blog post.   We subsequently talked by phone.   He emails me often.   He’s a real booster.   Turns out he’s a writer too.   Those of us who write need one another. My friend doesn’t know my pseudonym.   In fact, most friends to whom I’ve revealed it have forgotten.   They grow weary of waiting until I break through.   Until they can say “I knew him when.”   Of what does breaking through consist? Twenty of my short stories have been published.   My fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Write Well Award (Silver Pen Writers Association), and the Best of the Web Award. ...

My, is this thing ever dusty!   The problem with dual identities is that they’re, well, dual.   The working writer has to make a living.   Making a living interferes with being a writer. It’s no secret that I write under a pseudonym.   In certain professions writing is discouraged.   The only way I can get away with writing the fiction I do is by saying “It’s not me!”   I know I’m in good company here.   The average person can’t identify Samuel Clemens. No, I don’t mind the nom de guerre per se, but I resent a work life that doesn’t value the writer.   It’s not just editors, either.   There was a guy in my company who wasn’t an editor.   He quit to become a writer and the general attitude to his leaving was a smirk. Yes, it’s difficult to make a living as a writer.   Unless you get an agent you won’t make much in royalties.   You can’t quit your day job.   And aside from the many hours sapped from yo...

If I was a parent I’d be accused of neglect.   I have to say 2017 was the least published year of recent memory.   Not that I’ve been neglecting my fiction, but I had a non-fiction book accepted and I work full-time and commute to that job—you get the picture. I’ve also had a personal epiphany.   If you can write, you should get paid for it.   I know a publicist (not my own; I don’t have one) and she says she won’t let her authors even write an op-ed if they don’t get paid.   I guess I’d never get published then. My Medusa novel had a flicker of hope for a few moments.   A publisher actually wrote back asking for the rest of the manuscript.   That’s never happened before.   Then the editor disappeared.   Even called me by the wrong pseudonym.   I’ve gotta wonder about that because the second half of the novel’s even better than the first. While looking for an agent for my non-fiction (couldn’t find one of those either) I cam...

Ten percent, in the context of the Bible, is a tithe.  The old laws say that you owe God ten percent of your income.  Some religious people today still pay it. I was reading an article recently that featured another ten percent.  This applied to writers.  Although an unscientific survey—including information from Duotrope—this article suggested the acceptance rate of fiction writers is ten percent. That means, and I’m no math guy, that a piece has to be submitted an average of ten times before it is accepted somewhere.  This helps explain, but not assuage, my lack of success when it comes to getting published.  It’s normal. This has been on my mind lately since  Interview with the Gorgon  is getting more than ripe.  I stopped trying to find publishers some five years ago when it was under contract with Vagabondage Press.  They took a long time killing it—with no kill fee—leaving me in ...

I spent the last weekend on the quest.  If you’re a struggling writer, you know the quest I mean: the quest for publication. There are lots of websites to help, but there are even more writers than websites, and getting your voice heard is a matter of trash talk.  Can your work make money?  It doesn’t matter if it’s good (I know, because I read books!), it’s a matter of can it make money. It used to be independent publishers, fondly called “indies” in the trade, would consider non-agented books.  Have you trawled the listing lately?  Indie after indie, overrun with submissions, now only accept agent queries. So I ate up a weekend looking for agents again.  Problem is, how do you pitch a book that’s not meant to rake in the millions?  Mine is a fun novel, a provocative read.  It will make people laugh, and it will make people think.  It won’t make them open their bank account to bleed into the publisher’s bucket. Agents, of co...

Having gone back to my Medusa novel for the umpteenth time, I find myself still proud of it.  Every great once in a while, a writer produces something that s/he knows is very good, and worthy of publication.  Of course, the publishers hold all of the cards. I went back to the drawing board to look for publishers who will consider literary humor.  It’s not a large coterie, but, at the same time, there is an embarrassment of riches.  Lots of publishers claim to be interested in humor.  Look at their offerings, however, and a different story emerges. People like to laugh.  I read humorous novels frequently.  Finding a publisher, however, may require an agent.  Agents are more standoffish than publishers are.  Most won’t even acknowledge a query.  Their websites are outdated, and they have no interest in an author without name recognition. A disturbing number of independent publishers, I see, now only accept agented submissions....

Just how many literary agents are there?  I wonder if I’ve run through the entire list yet.  Just before the holidays, when I had a rare few free moments, I started sending out queries.  I use agentquery.com .  As Preditors & Editors shows, there are plenty of people out there ready to take you for every word you’ve got. In this day of webocentrism, you’d think agents, of all people, would keep up-to-date.  Agents, however, are literally spoiled for choice.  Most of them don’t need new clients since so many people are trying to break into writing that they can pick only what they find titillating.  Like deciding at a glance that you’d never go out with this person.  Never mind what might be inside. So I found five agencies, all listed as open to new queries and saying, “Yes, I’d like to see your work!”  Out the emails went.  The first email received an autoreply stating my query was being automatically deleted since the agen...

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had unsolicited advice from a couple of sources suggesting that my writing expectations are off.  Aim low, they advise, and even then don’t expect much.  That I already understand.  It’s the next bit of advice that gets to me: Don’t write what you want to write.  Write what sells.   One way they suggest doing this is to become a ghost writer.  People who have the profile to sell books but who can’t write often want someone with talent to tell their story and give them the credit.  It is accepted wisdom that this is a standard way to break into writing. I don’t doubt that they’re right.  Nobody’s heard of K. Marvin Bruce—he’s never been a major athlete, political figure, or entertainer.  Why should they care what he has to say?  (Never mind the creative part, or even the fact that he’s a nice guy.)  Someone with billions of dollars we care about.  We want their story. I’m frien...

it, and part of me feels utterly like an ass.  Like a poser.  A wannabe.  Only professionals have agents, right? I’ve been writing since I was a tween.  Living in a small town with parents who’d never gone to college, and a mother who never finished high school, I had no idea how to get published.  I discovered that by editing my high school paper I could publish my own stories, but that felt like cheating. In my days of formal schooling, publication became purely academic.  Serious scholars published serious papers.  I tried to have some of my poetry published in my college literary magazine, but the editors said it was too depressing. Although I’ve been writing fiction since the 1970’s, I didn’t start trying to publish it until 2009.  I was scared and unsure of myself.  My first publication won a small prize, and a subsequent story won a more competitive recognition.  Those who publish books, however, were less kind. I...

Both in my position as erstwhile professor and in my true vocation as a writer, I have come to realize that understanding the publishing world is essential to becoming a published writer.  Those of us write because we “can do no other,” but if we want to be read we have to play the game. There are hundreds of publishers out there.  The internet has led to a proliferation of presses, mostly small and of limited distribution.  They can easily get your book on Amazon, but with millions of books already there, getting it noticed is difficult. Once upon a time there were a couple dozen major publishers.  They have been bought out by one another until now there are only the “Big Five,” until recently the “Big Six”: Random House (which recently acquired Penguin, one of the six), Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon and Schuster.  You cannot get published by any of the big five without an agent. Smaller, independent publishing houses (Indies) will ...

Psychologists, I’ve read, have come to doubt Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s fives stages of death and dying.  Writers, it seems to me, know quite a bit about these topics, and they hold true to my experience.  I may not be typical in having so little time to write, but I do emote. So the latest literary agent has turned down my once accepted, and multiply-rejected Boeotian Rhapsody for publication.  I can’t believe it (stage one) at first.  The agent’s description seemed to match my genre so well.  Sometimes just opening email is a shock. Why is this so damned hard?  A number—very small, admittedly, but a number nevertheless—of short fiction publishers like my work.  They don’t publish books, of course.  Still, why can’t anybody give me a chance?  I guess I’m at stage two. I consider writing back to the agent.  Maybe making my case.  This, however, is the kiss of death in publishing.  Agents like quick, clean, and no com...

Writing a whole novel is difficult.  I've finished five and am nearly done with six.  Seven is almost half-way there. A friend who is a successful writer says, "Write 100,000 words, and throw them away.  Then you're a writer." Personally, I passed that benchmark long ago, maybe even before the invention of computers to mock me with the fact.  But you kind of get used to being out of sight. Consider the invisible man. In the nineteenth century, it seems, publishers were starved for material.  They would publish anything relatively good, just by dint of it being finished.  Today publishers are obese and lazy.  Prone to overlook really excellent writing, because it doesn't bring in enough free lunches. Writing novels, in my experience, means spending hundreds and hundreds of hours going over and re-going over story lines for inconsistency, begging muses to sleep with you, and awaking even more frustrated than you fell asleep. Those who belitt...