Robert Mackwood at Word Vancouver: A literary agent’s take on publishing today

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Today I was at a Word Vancouver talk by Robert Mackwood: A Literary Agent’s Take on Publishing Today, presented by the Canadian Authors Association. Robert Mackwood is the director and principal agent at Seventh Avenue Literary Agency. He works with non-fiction books.

Literary agents in Canada

There are only about twenty agents in Canada: five in Vancouver, one in Halifax, and the rest in Toronto. New York City probably has about 150.

Dealing with a literary agent

Robert gets about thirty to forty queries per week (about the same as ten years ago). He can see quite quickly whether he thinks the project is something he can sell. He charges 15%, and of course, only gets paid when he makes a deal. Most agents don’t have a lot of clients. He tries to keep his client list to under forty.

Write, don’t call.

What about the proposal? He didn’t get into too much detail about the format and nuts and bolts of the proposal. Just put together a short description of your project and yourself. Describe what you’ve done so far to promote your writing, and include the trail of yeses: writing contests, magazine articles, previous publications, and any other time someone said yes to your writing. What he doesn’t really like to hear: “I can finish the manuscript in three weeks.” “We’re going to make so much money on this!” “Oprah’s going to love this!” and, worst of all, “I’ve decided I’d like to be a writer!”

Should you self-publish?

Deciding on the best publishing route is too big a topic to go into here, but here are a few points:

Advantages to self-publishing	Advantages of conventional publishing
You keep all the profits	No up-front expenditures
You have total control	The publisher does the marketing
It’s fast	You get the credibility of the publisher’s brand
	You benefit from the publisher’s professional expertise

If you self-publish, you have to be the publisher. Don’t rush, and make sure you get a good editor, designer, and printer. Robert estimated that you’ll have to spend at least a couple of thousand dollars to make a book that you’ll be proud of.

An important point is that a self-published book that gets decent sales and some good reviews may be picked up and re-published by a conventional publisher.

When to hyphenate

Hyphenation is one of the trickier aspects of writing and editing. As with other language choices, feelings can run high, and unusual hyphenation can stop a reader cold (“Violetpurple”? “violetpurple”? Would it have killed him to use a hyphen?^*).

Here are some guidelines you can use to make quick, reasonable decisions about hyphenation.

1. When the term appears in the dictionary, use the form in the dictionary.
2. Use the guidelines in the style manual for the project. Generally, I use The Chicago Manual of Style, which has a detailed table of hyphenation guidelines available online.
3. If there’s no guidance from the dictionary or style manual, apply general guidelines to make a choice and enter it in the project style sheet so it gets applied consistently. The most basic rules of thumb are as follows:
   • Compound modifiers before a noun are usually hyphenated (“full-length section”) before but not after the noun (“the section is full length”).
   • Adverbs ending in -ly usually don’t need a hyphen (“a smartly dressed person”) because there’s no ambiguity.

Looking at the resources in steps 1 and 2 first helps you conform with generally accepted practices, which usually helps make the text as easy to understand and “unsurprising” to the reader as possible.

When you’re making decisions about hyphenation, try to avoid getting bogged down on the “logic” or “rightness” of one choice over another. Let your goal be to avoid ambiguity and avoid distracting your reader with unusual formations.

^*In the case of literary fiction written by experts, of course, just about anything goes. There’s really nothing wrong with “violetpurple”; it’s not ambiguous or unclear. I find it surprising and therefore distracting, but I expect that this author considered it the most straightforward way of writing what he meant, and that’s fair enough.

Change to GST for BC freelancers

Photo by Jorbasa. Some rights reserved.

On April 1, 2013, BC went from HST back to GST. How does this affect freelance editors?

Freelance editors: Here’s what you need to know

Do I need to register for a PST number?

No. There’s no need to apply for a PST registration number because professional services other than legal services are exempt from PST.

What tax do I charge?

From April 1, 2013, editors charge GST only. Use your existing GST/HST number.

Place of supply

The place of supply rules stay the same as before: an editor who lives in BC charges a client the HST or GST rate of the province where the client is located (see the rules about place of supply). So I charge BC clients 5% GST, but when I work for a client in Ontario, I charge 13% HST. As before, when I work for a client outside the country, I charge no tax at all.

GST/HST rates by province (information taken from CRA)

This is how much GST/HST you charge a client in this province.

Province	Before April 1, 2013	After April 1, 2013
Alberta (GST)	5%	5%
British Columbia	12% (HST)	5% (GST)
Manitoba (GST)	5%	5%
New Brunswick (HST)	13%	13%
Newfoundland and Labrador (HST)	13%	13%
Northwest Territories (GST)	5%	5%
Nova Scotia (HST)	15%	15%
Nunavut (GST)	5%	5%
Ontario (HST)	13%	13%
Prince Edward Island	5% (GST)	14% (HST)
Saskatchewan (GST)	5%	5%
Yukon (GST)	5%	5%

Quick method remittance rate

If you use the quick method of GST/HST accounting (this is probably the right method for editors to use, unless they subcontract out a lot of work), your remittance rate is now 3.6% for BC clients. This is the remittance rate for a service provider based in a non-participating province (which BC is now) to a client in a non-participating province. (A “participating” province has HST; a “non-participating” province has GST.) Your remittance rates for income earned from clients in other provinces stays the same (except PEI, which instituted HST this April 1). Don’t forget that this new 3.6% remittance rate for BC clients only applies to your income from April 1 onward.

Quick method remittance rates for work done in BC (information taken from CRA)

This is how much GST/HST an editor in BC remits.

Client is in this province	Rate before April 1, 2013	Rate after April 1, 2013
BC (participation changed)	8.2% (part.)	3.6% (non-part.)
Ontario (participating)	9%	10.5%
Quebec (non-participating)	2.1%	3.6%
Nova Scotia (participating)	10.6%	12%
Prince Edward Island (participation changed)	2.1% (non-part.)	11.3% (part.)
Other participating province	9%	10.5%
Other non-participating province	2.1%	3.6%

Sources for my information

Changes to the Harmonized Sales Tax
BC Government: PST exemptions (see the sidebar “Non-Taxable Sales & Services”)
CRA: List of GST/HST rates by province
CRA: Place of supply rules for services

As always, this is backed up by a few calls to the CRA help line.

Other tax information

See also:

• Income tax for Canadian freelancers: Allowable deductions for freelancers and small business owners
• Income tax for Canadian freelancers: T2125 Declaration of business or professional activities

Janet Mackenzie on running a freelance editing business

The Editor’s Companion, by Janet Mackenzie, has a great chapter on starting a freelance editing business. In eighteen pages, she deals with all the major points:

• Qualities that make a good freelancer
• Running your office and being productive: time management, dealing with clients, stress, professional development, choosing projects
• Business considerations: what a business plan can do for you, insurance, bookkeeping
• Contracts: what needs to go into a contract, and a nice half-page sample contract

What to charge

To calculate how much you need to charge to earn your target income, start with a list of business expenses, the biggest of which is your own labour. As part of the cost of labour, consider the time you will spend on administration, project management, and the cost of employment. Employment costs are vacation, sick time, and pension plan. The author suggests that the “loaded” salary that includes these expenses is 17 to 25 percent more than a person’s base salary. (When you take into account the cost of maintaining a work space, I’ve seen estimates of 40 percent or more as the markup that a contractor needs to charge above an equivalent in-house rate.)

Hourly rate

Mackenzie suggests that an editor who is competent according to the Australian Standards for Editing Practice is worth at least AUD 50 per hour (about CAN 53; this book was written in 2004). She suggests giving a price by the job rather than by the hour, and feels it’s quite appropriate not to reveal your target hourly rate to the client (“If he presses you, say primly that your accountant has advised you not to reveal it”). She mentions in passing that hourly rates are not a good predictor of project cost because working speed varies quite a lot.

Work flow

Mackenzie suggests a three-column table—see below—to track your schedule of projects to come, in progress, and due. I think I’m going to give this format a try. I’ve been marking dates to receive and send projects on Google Calendar, but I find that the display gets too cluttered when I try to show which projects are in progress.

Date May	Due in	Working on	Due out
1	Joe Bloggs copy edit, first round
2	Flash Magazine, July issue, editorial	Bloggs copy edit
3		Bloggs copy edit, Flash editorial	Flash editorial
4		Bloggs copy edit

Because many projects are delayed or sometimes cancelled altogether, Mackenzie recommends overbooking slightly. “Bite off a little more than you can chew, and occasionally chew like hell.”

Reviewed from a library copy of the book.

The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells by Ben Bova

Craftsmanship can be taught, and it is the one area where new writers consistently fall short. In most cases it is simple lack of craftsmanship that prevents a writer from leaving the slushpile. Like a carpenter who has never learned to drive nails straight, writers who have not learned craftsmanship will get nothing but pain for their efforts. That is why I have written this book: to help new writers learn a few things about the craftsmanship that goes into successful stories.

Not only does Ben Bova have a long list of book credits to his name, he was the editor of Analog and Omni, and he used to read all the manuscript submissions. The whole slush pile. As he says above, most of those manuscripts failed, not because of deficient ideas or bad artistly, but through faults in their basic mechanics.

The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells is a short, to-the-point book that lays out the basics of crafting a good science fiction story. After a short introduction, the book has four sections: character, background, conflict, and plot. Each section has a chapter on theory, a full short story, and a chapter on practical considerations, with reference to the sample story. A final section discusses special considerations for novels.

Is research the key to good science fiction?

The book has some good points about research. How can you write what you know when you’re writing speculative fiction? Research. You find an astronaut and get them to coauthor the book. You move to New Mexico for a while. You spend serious time at the library. Bova suggests you keep a book of notes on plot, character sketches, background and setting, and everything else you have to keep straight.

That’s so much work on research alone, but maybe that’s what it takes. Dune is a great book because Frank Herbert built a detailed background of ecology,* politics, economics, and religion for his story. But books with poorly thought-out backgrounds are flat and uninteresting; their stories don’t ring true. Maybe, to make something great, you have to take the approach of doing as much work as possible.

* Although Dune is perhaps not the best example of good speculative science. For starters, it’s hard to think of a plausible way for sandworms to travel through sand.

Update: See also Christina Vasilevski’s review.

Reviewed from a library copy of the book.