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"It’s a little like saying ‘George Clooney, my boyfriend,’
and meaning it," says Stacy Sims on the acceptance of her first novel, Swimming
Naked. "Amazing, but surreal."
In October of 2001, Sims submitted a cover letter, two sample chapters, a
synopsis and an endorsement to six different agents. Mid-December, Deborah
Schneider at Schneider and Gelfman asked to see the entire manuscript. January
third, Schneider called, agreeing to represent the Sims’ work. On the
twenty-third of the same month, Sims’ novel went to auction, garnering a book
deal with Viking by the close of the day.
This is unbelievably fast. This is surreal, a fairytale, amazing. This… this is
like ‘George Clooney, my boyfriend.’
Auctioning a first novel, even from a writer who has never published any
fiction at all, is not unheard of, though certainly not the norm. And such
auctions, when they do occur, very rarely don’t work. Numbers sometimes become
prohibitively high for a publisher, but usually an author walks away with a
hefty advance and good word of mouth.
In other words, every first novelist’s "well-I-can-dream,-can’t –I?" wish.
Let’s backtrack a bit: where did Sims meet Clooney? Er—
Though she’d dabbled in creative writing, Sims had never published any fiction
before. Nonfiction, sure; two articles in Northern Ohio Life, a few pieces in
her college newspaper, but no fiction.
"I always imagined myself to be a writer, but in the same way for ten years I
imagined myself to be someone who worked out and I didn’t do anything at all,"
Sims admits. Now a certified Pilates instructor with her own recently opened
studio, she’s brought reality up to speed.
She was told that "‘Writers write,’ and I was pretty sure that didn’t mean me."
When she finally did sit down to write in earnest, Sims brought an image with
her. "A friend of mine told me about when she was little, going on vacation
with her mother to the beach, how her mother wore this black bathing suit and
these dark sunglasses and smoked a cigarette—there was this moment of
recognition.
There was someone different inside your mother than who you’ve come to know as
your mother."
When she’d finished writing, it felt like she had a scene, one which set up
that moment of recognition between a young girl and her mother. The young girl
would develop into the protagonist of Swimming Naked, Lucy Greene, and the
subsequent pages of the manuscript chronicled Lucy Greene’s relationship with
her mother over the years. "Within fairly short order, I understood what I
wanted to happen in terms of the structure of the novel—going back and forth
between past and present, point of view and interweaving… I’m lucky I didn’t
sit down one day, hands poised to write ‘my novel,’" she says, intoning the
last words with a wry twist. "That would have been a lot of pressure. It just
evolved into a bit more."
She confesses that for the first three months she worked on it, she couldn’t
bring herself to admit to writing a novel. But after six months of squeezing
time in for writing, mostly on weekends and days off, she decided to commit to
it. Sims left her position at a design firm to finish the manuscript. She took
on a few freelance writing and marketing jobs and began to teach Pilates, since
she could no longer afford lessons and teacher certification meant free
instruction. "I loved the combination," Sims says. "Writing in the morning and
then getting out of my head to teach somebody to do something with their body.
It’s something that still is meaningful to me, rather than trying to get
excited about marketing something."
Throughout the writing of Swimming Naked, Sims kept it loose. "I didn’t set
rigid rules for myself. It works for some people, to write every day from this
time to this time… I really just gave myself freedom for thought; writing and
thinking are sort of the same thing. By the time I get to the typ—uh, the word
processor, it’s just getting it out; I just gave myself the freedom to do it
when it felt like the right time to do it."
She describes this method as intuitive and adds, "I never sat down without
something to say."
Once she’d committed to it, she wrote for several hours three or four days a
week until her first draft of 317 pages felt like something worth showing to
readers. Sims selected her initial audience carefully. One friend, a woodcut
artist, read a great deal of fiction and could tell her when "Something didn’t
ring true." Another reader was a local poet and filmmaker and another, Susan
Andrews Grace, was a Canadian poet and creative writing teacher who Sims
corresponded with but hadn’t met. "I knew enough to know it was well-written,"
Sims says slowly, "so it was a tricky thing to figure out what I was asking
them to do. I wasn’t looking for a line edit, I was looking for an overall
response." Her readers came through their advice, certainly, but even more so
in the validation and encouragement they gave Sims.
Opening up to friends and family came next. Though the reactions varied in
focus, they didn’t in intensity. "There were very different and very personal
responses to the characters—‘I was so mad when she did this’ and ‘I couldn’t
believe when this happened,’ which I thought was a good sign." Sims couldn’t
address everyone’s reactions without watering down the book, so she focused on
a few criticisms and clarified a character or smoothed a rough patch of
dialogue. "The only thing I majorly revised was the first chapter," she says.
"It was plain old too long. I was saying the same thing about the characters
over and over again. That got edited substantially before I sent it out."
She adds, "I still believe it could be a tighter manuscript, but I felt it was
ready to get into the hands of an editor—one person to work with."
Submission: "Baffling, baffling process."
Sims had researched manuscript format early on, because that was something she
didn’t want to tangle with twice, but as for agents… "I sort of assumed that I
would figure those steps at the time, I figured I was clever enough to handle
it, but when I finished writing, which was the most important part, I didn’t
see anything that dealt with this stage."
She did read somewhere that writers get agent recommendations from other
writers so Sims, being resourceful, approached other writers. She rolls her
eyes as she admits, "And they wouldn’t tell me their agents."
Using phrases like ‘smoke and mirrors’ and ‘baffling, baffling process’ and
‘impenetrable,’ Sims describes researching the world of agents. Eventually,
Sims targeted six likely candidates, four from the Internet, one suggested by a
friend in New York and the last, who ultimately asked to see the manuscript,
was a former classmate of another friend.
"It was so weird not to be able to call and ask someone how this works. I tried
to be as respectful as I could, using what I learned about the industry from
various guides. Even sending two chapters, I said, ‘If I broke some huge rule,
I’ve done it for a reason," she says. "Mainly because the narrator in the book
alternates between being a grown woman and being a child so I wanted them to
get a sense of her at both ages."
Despite her efforts and careful considerations, she received her share of
rejections. "Three, literally not even and eight and a half by eleven sheet of
paper. It was like half a piece of paper, Xeroxed." She did receive a really
nice letter from one agent, who had obviously paid attention to the package of
material Sims had submitted, but it was a polite ‘No, thank you,’ nonetheless.
Then, in mid-December, Deborah Schneider of Schneider Gelfman called asking to
see the rest of the manuscript. It would probably take Schneider two or three
months to get back in touch, she said, so Sims settled in to wait.
"In my mind, she was going to be my inside track to ‘Great letter, sucky
chapters’ or ‘It’s fine, I’m not interested. Send it to these 8,000 people,’ so
I was delighted when she ended up wanting to represent me. I didn’t want to
send out sixty packages in the beginning, but I would have."
On January 3rd, only a few weeks after shipping off the entire manuscript of
Swimming Naked, Schneider called and accepted Sims as a new client. And she’d
be taking the book to auction.
With the auction scheduled for January 24th, Sims had just enough time to worry
a lot. "I was trying so hard to not freak out but I was freaking out just a
little, and then I read the manuscript again." The butterflies calmed as Sims
reread what she’d written. "It gave me comfort. This is what this is about and
I’m really happy with it." She distracted herself with some freelance work and
waited for the auction to take place.
When the round of phone calls finally stopped, Swimming Naked was sold to
Viking, to be edited by Molly Stern and appearing in May 2003.
Keeping in touch with New York
Sims wanted to meet everyone I involved, so after the deal was closed, she flew
to New York. "These people would be really important to my life," Sims
explains. "We went to lunch and talked a little about the book but mostly we
talked about other stuff. Deborah was so competent, so good at what she does… I
felt like I was in good hands."
Then she went to the Viking offices to meet her editor. "Molly’s great, she’s
just really enthusiastic."
The entire situation, however, was a little overwhelming. "It’s not as though I
didn’t understand what was happening, but walking into Viking and seeing all
the tiles in the bookcases and the titles in her office, that was a pretty big
deal because I wasn’t being sent down the hall to work with some other
division."
The meeting between the two women lasted about an hour, covering mostly
generalities for the most part, but Sims had accomplished what she’s set out to
do. "They have very, very busy lives and in the publishing cycle, my book was
far out for them. I think it was just a good idea for them to see me and know
who I am. This way, if I feel like something needs attention, hopefully I won’t
register as that pesky, annoying writer from Cincinnati."
Sims left New York with the idea of having two distinct jobs to do, "One as
author and one as writer. There will be times when I’m called on to do the job
of the author, which is the book tour, the interviews, the business side of it…
I’m fairly interested in that, it’ll be a fun time and I’m confident enough to
take part in that activity. It’s almost like, if I do a good job as the author
two percent of the time, it’ll allow me to live the other ninety-eight percent
of the time as a writer, which looks a whole lot like the life I led before I
became the ‘author,’" she says, smiling. "Which is, I get up, I make my own
toast, I have my coffee—you know, it sort of separates this all out."
Foreign Rights, Film Rights
Her current situation satisfies her; with Swimming Naked in a good home with a
nurturing editor and all those negotiable rights carefully sheparded by her
agent, Sims has reason to be assured. "I’m somewhat curious about what’s going
to happen and how," she says of the rights she retained. "But it has really no
bearing on my day to day life. We don’t really talk about what’s going to
happen, if it happens then we have something to talk about."
Recently for example, Sims received a preemptive offer from Holland for foreign
rights. The advance would be in euros. "I don’t even know what that is!" she
laughs. She’s confident that her agent will explain what the offer means and
whether or not she can use those euros to buy a new computer printer.
Sims won’t need to ask Schneider why her book found such a quick market with
the Dutch, though. "My friend told me that family dysfunction is huge in
Holland."
In addition to foreign rights, it’s likely someone will approach Sims
concerning film rights; Swimming Naked is a strongly visual book—relying in
part on a snapshot motif—so an extension to film feels like a natural next
step. And then there are all those other rights…
Sims isn’t focused on those now. "My head is really more in my second novel,"
she admits. "I have those glasses on now, I look at the world with this other
character’s lenses, not with Lucy’s so much. But when it’s time to go back and
revisit, I’ll be really happy."
An Agent’s Take: Deborah Schneider
What attracted you to Stacy's ms? Was it professional, or
maybe unusual in some way?
From the opening pages, I was taken in by her characters, her mastery and her
confidence as a writer. This was no typical first novel; it was convincing,
moving, compelling and the work of a mature writer. I usually know within the
first few pages if a novel is working, and whether it's something I want to
represent.
Less than two months after sending you her manuscript, she had a book deal with
Viking. That was fast...
It was fast. It is far more common for a first work of literary or serious
fiction to take some time to find the right home. Publishers are looking for
books with obvious marketing hooks, name brands and bestseller potential. It is
harder to market beautiful writing on its own merit, especially if the story
isn't big, sensational, or "high concept." In Stacy's case, her novel had both
beautiful writing and a great story.
Why did Swimming Naked go to auction? That's incredibly unusual for a debut
novel, right?
As I said above, Swimming Naked had everything going for it. Publishers are
hungry for good material and I thought this novel had potential. Additionally,
an auction stirs the adrenaline a bit: it causes more excitement, good word of
mouth, makes the book more of an event.
How did you arrange the auction? Were publishers selected based on certain
criteria? How many publishers were involved in the bidding?
Every publishing house has a host of editors, all with different tastes,
sensibilities and fields of expertise. I chose editors from fifteen different
imprints whom I considered ideal for this kind of literary/commercial fiction
and would know how to publish it well. Five publishers called to say they loved
the book; by auction day, two were bidding.
How are auctions done? By phone, e-mail?
By phone, in rounds. The agent determines the terms and rules of the auction
and invites bids. In this case, I was offering the US and Canadian publication
rights only (all foreign and ancillary rights reserved to the author). Then
each editor takes turns topping the previous bid until one of them can or will
not bid anymore.
Now that the book is sold, how involved are you with the publication process?
The publisher is the final arbiter of all decisions about the book's
publication, but I consult with the editor on each step of the process, from
jacket design, cover copy and quotes, to marketing and promotional plans.
Additionally, the sale to a U.S. publisher is only the first of what can be
many: to UK and foreign publishers for translation, to the movies, to
magazines, to audio publishers. As well, I oversee all royalty payments, from
all sources. An agent is involved for the life of the book.
Copyright 2002 Writer's Digest Books. Reprinted with permission
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