Is Ordering the Opposite of Selling?

A DVD catalogue showed up in the mail a couple of days ago, and since we try to make sure we have all the best Agatha Christies (on tape or, nowadays, on disc) my spouse and I perused it eagerly. Turns out we have the A.C.s we want to have (except the latest David Suchet Poirot, but it's on order elsewhere), so of course we scanned the rest of the catalog because who knows? Maybe our selection criterion has been a bit narrow.

Well, yes, there are a good many interesting titles available. Many we think we might like, priced well beyond what we would pay for anything we might only watch once, and many taken from TV series we never heard of, priced at what would be bargain rates—if we had a reason to suppose we wanted them at all.

Does this raise the question of judging various things by the price? You bet it does.

Back when the McAllister duo had no publisher at all (and no agent either—still the case) and were wondering whether we could get anybody to look at our work, the answer was that no, we couldn't. Any agent or editor would have to pay a price, in order to decide whether she or he was interested. Namely, he or she would have to look at a portion of the work. But for writers he/she had never heard of, that price was too high. It was the same problem my wife and I had when we wondered whether to order any of those DVDs. Fairly analogous. Simply to find out whether we are interested requires an investment, small, yes, but real.

Actually, for our work, a couple of agents "sort of" bit, but not really: they were people interested in acquiring a significant fee (carefully not called a "reading fee") or else a series of smaller fees in return for their doing something they were unwilling to say much about except for the part about fees and how hard it was for them to earn them.
If you write and are not well known, you are sure to have had the same experience. Yes, I have heard of a few people, probably fictional, who merely sent a nice query letter (or sometimes a great many of them) and were soon asked to send a sample and (wowee!) hit the immediate jackpot. As I mentioned, such people are probably fictional. Editors and agents want to have already heard of writers whose queries show up in their mailboxes, and my wife and I want to have already heard of the performances whose DVDs we were being asked to decide among.

Okay, it's a universal phenomenon. Here's a slightly parallel situation. I'm to have "a drink a day," because (for me—this is by no means a prescription for you) one or two per day lowers the level of so-called "bad cholesterol." Wine seems to be the best alternative, but at the store the variety of available brands is so enormous that I have no guidance. Or rather, very little guidance. I can follow the principle "high price denotes quality," which I already know has serious problems despite being valid in moderation, or I can go by whether I've heard of that brand before. Fortunately, the medicinal aspect comes into play here, and I can settle for whatever quality I happen to get; when I make a bad selection, I just drink it and try to grin. One glass per day isn't too difficult to force down.

Editors and agents have the same problem, both at the wine store and at the mailbox. Except they (especially the editors and the publishers) are responsible to a bunch of howling stockholders, and I face only an occasional mild spousal comment. (She can't drink alcoholic stuff: serious conflicts with her medication. She is free to comment, however.)

Well, your writing may in some sense be medicinal, but what are you to do about those guys and gals who need to read it in order for you go get published? I've already answered that in previous The Hell You Says, but here it is again: someplace, somehow, you have an edge. Either somebody has seen your writing and knows it's nearly as great as you hope it is, or one of your cousins who doesn't hate you knows somebody who publishes books, or the editor of your old, high school yearbook now edits an online magazine, or your contributions to the local newspapers' readers' letters page have attracted the attention of some literate person in the community or you have some other edge. Or maybe you're a celebrity? Shucks, even just having money in the family can be an edge. Find your edge, and use it.
Now, which DVDs—if any—shall we buy? Shall we pay high prices for items we sort of know about? Shall we ave money by giving some of the unknowns a chance? It ain't medicine, so we don't want to just hold our noses and swallow. Unfortunately, the people who sent us the catalogue didn't fashion their blurbs after query letters, which might tell us something useful about their product. We have to already know. Result? We may or may not buy at all.
Too bad they hadn't time to write the equivalent of a query letter for the DVDs not of "celebrity status." Your submissions, however, even using your edge, need some sort of query, and I wish you luck! If I had any advice to give on that one, it wouldn't have taken us so long to get into print.