Book Review: Agents Editors and You

This should be a quick review. As part of my New Year's Resolution I am reading books on the writing craft. Agents, Editors and You, The Insiders Guide to Getting Your Book Published was not quite as informative as most other books on publishing, but did keep my interest if only for those one or two new nuggets of information, and the constantly switching voice.

The book is a compilation of articles compiled by the Writer's Market into a book. Every single one of the chapters had been previously published in magazines. So like a vacuum cleaner bag, this book just brought all the debris together into one place. All told I didn't learn too much I didn't know, except in one area. Editing.

This book went into detail about the number of people who get to read, comment and edit a manuscript prior to publication. I'm no longer curious as to why it takes close to two years to get a book published. Agents, Editors and You certainly laid it out for the reader about the number of times an editor is going to look over and suggest changes. It also provided feedback on how to deal with different types of editors.

Another interesting aspect of the book was that it broke up the articles into non-fiction and fiction publishing, and further broke down those categories by genre. This meant that I had a couple of good articles that pertained to writing mysteries.

All in all though, waste of my time. I think I need to amend my resolution to state that I must read craft books that are timely if they discuss publishing. This book was written in 2002 and brought up e-reading in a completely different vein, as if it might die out and just blow away. But, as a primer for traditional publishing, it gave me one or two interesting answers, but for the most part just reinforced what I already knew and suspected. I would have been better off with either of the two other craft books on my list, Stephen King's On Writing, or Guerrilla Marketing for the Writer.

The best part about this book was that it was written in such a way that I could tear through it and get to the next book on my list, a novel suggested by an old friend Wheeler. His recommendation came from "the ghan" and he said this guy "had it right." Looking forward to it is an understatement.