Old publicity photos and RWA Idol

Do you think publishers are the ones who decide to keep the decades out-of-date photos for authors? Or do the authors in their seventies choose to keep the glam shot from their forties on their books, etc.? Is it all just part of The Business?

With that pressing question out of the way, onto the infamous RWA Idol session.

Last year I was not at National, but heard about the inaugural session where anonymously-submitted first pages of manuscripts were submitted to a panel of editors/agents to give their truthful reactions as the pages were being read. This sounded really useful to me, but I was surprised by the amount of people afterwards who said the panelists were too mean. I thought this reaction came from that cadre of people who never want truthful feedback on their work.

I was wrong.

But more about that later.

The RWA Idol immediately followed the JAK/SEP talk which was dang convenient since I was already in the room with a good seat for snapping pics. I was really looking forward to seeing Irene Goodman in person because I'd read good stuff about her from some of her clients like Debbie Macomber and Linda Lael Miller.

They started the session by having everyone come up and put their submissions on a table in front. I think this year was different from last year in that the submissions were two pages, not one, but I might be misremembering last year's guidelines.



On the panel were Lucia Macro, an editor from Avon.


And Irene Goodman, founding agent of the Irene Goodman Agency.


And Miriam Kriss, also with the Irene Goodman Agency who appears in the middle in the next photo.

They then asked for a volunteer reader, and they picked a teacher. She is on the left in the photo below.



They announced that, in the tradition of tv show American Idol, Lucia would be Paula, Miriam would be Randy, and Irene would be Simon.

As an aside here, twice in two days I have noticed that people are happy to play someone of another gender, but if they are of another skin color, this requires special commentary. This happened at the Shakespeare Tavern the other night too. Three white guys happily played all the roles, male and female, but then when they got to Othello, there was a whole separate bit about how they couldn't do Othello because they were "crackers." Then they launched into a rap version of Othello. Here too, Irene accepted the Simon role without comment, but Miriam made a special comment about her playing Randy perhaps being "less appropriate." OK, enough of my boring sociological asides.

We were off to the races.



The reader read the first page, and Miriam was the first to halt it. The conversation was a father to a son, with the father lamenting his son's unwed state. Everyone on the panel felt that the marriage mart conversations were pretty rote, so not the best choice to open a book.

Lucia also commented that she doesn't like her hero to have parents.

Meaning, he should be in control, independent, have the title, have the money, have the power. Not spending his time being nagged by his parents.

Irene did a lovely English accent as part of her Simon imitation.

Next up I think was a sitting and thinking scene with the heroine on the couch with a "tatty afghan" watching tv. The writing was quite good in places, but heroine was very passive, and the scene had no hook, so it was stopped.

Meanwhile the reader, understandably nervous, kept reading faster and faster. This had the unintentional effect of adding great drama to the next reading which was about a woman climbing out the window on her wedding day (I think it was hers, I couldn't always catch the words being read) with a small child. The reader raced through the two pages in a breathless stream of words, and this ended up getting a nod from the panel, with Miriam saying the author could send her a partial.

The reader (sorry I don't know her name) was asked to slow down, and this seemed to make her stumble over more words. I think RWA really should provide a reader like NJ does for their conference. The woman reading was totally brave to do the reading, but she just wasn't able to do the readings justice, and it made the pages more painful to listen to.

One of the next submissions was a scene where a man sees his blind date has brought a child. I thought this was a lovely beginning, all filled with confusion, frustration and an unexpected twist, but it was stopped by Lucia, I think, who said "Kids are not sexy." She and Miriam made a few comments about how the scene had no sexual tension, in fact, no tension at all. Irene said the scene was too sad.

After that, the comments got harsher, and I felt that the panel was playing to the audience, going for laughs.

Which is fine, but this is where my own mistaken expectations came into play. I don't watch American Idol, but when I thought about it later, I realized that that show probably also features a lot of mockery or mean comments because even I know about Simon, Randy, and Paula, and their respective styles.

But I was really uncomfortable sitting in the room while an editor and two agents made fun of people's writing -- people who were sitting right there in the room albeit anonymously -- and everyone laughed. It felt too ugly, so I left in the first half hour.

Here are some other tidbits I jotted down though before I went that might be useful to those of you thinking to submit to Avon or the Irene Goodman Agency.

• Miriam doesn't want any submissions where the heroine hits her head on a rock and wakes up in the Middle Ages.
• Miriam uses a typewritten envelope as an indicator of a potential client's sanity. "Think about it, people. Somewhere out there is a person who, if they have to make one change to the manuscript, they have to retype the whole thing! They're crazy!"
• Lucia and Miriam think politicans/politics are very unsexy.
• Miriam stopped one story when the description included a hungover man with a "throbbing brain" because it was a short step to "throbbing manhood."
• Lucia and Miriam both had enough of the infamous opening scene where someone is debating whether they should go through with their marriage, and the corollaries of finding out the intended groom is gay or having an affair with her best friend.
• After I left, they apparently said they were looking for books that people in Walmart would like. In other words, with a very very broad appeal.

So RWA Idol was not for me, but there were tons of people there, so it obviously works for a lot of others. I think it helps to enjoy sarcastic humor, which I don't, and often don't even get.

I really value unvarnished, truthful feedback (heck, I'm a Cherry -- it's required). I like to hear when a certain scenario is cliche, or a certain paranormal backstory has been done to death, but I like it done with an air of professional-to-professional.

But, before I end the post, I have to note that Lucia, like Jayne, also rocked the Snazzy and Comfortable Footwear category.