Rejected Much?

The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile by Noah Lukeman. Reviewed by N. Vivian 09/22/08

Received, read, and finished the book within a day. It is excellent; not only is it helpful and informative, I even found it mildly entertaining. It's divided into 19 chapters, and each chapter focuses on problems that catch an agent's or an editor's eye and cause them to toss the manuscript, generally before having read much more than the first five pages. The chapters are arranged in order of likelihood of getting your manuscript rejected, and so, it starts off with very concrete ideas and rules, and as each chapter goes on, the ideas and advice get more theoretical. Chapter One is about presentation; granted, the kind of paper your manuscript on has no bearing on the quality of the work itself, but a lot of editors won't look at it anyway. As Lukeman says, editors (and their overworked assistants) have to plow through thousands of manuscripts, and are just looking for reasons to toss yours out of the window. Refusing to comply with industry standards is a quick and easy way for them to justify it. Also in the first chapter, he mentions the idea of researching the agents and editors you're sending your manuscript to, and sending it only to people who work with titles like yours--sure, you might lose out because the editor just picked up a book similar to yours, but sending a horror manuscript to a horror editor still gives you a higher chance getting accepted than sending a horror novel to a romance editor. Chapter 2 is about the abuse of adjectives and adverbs, 3 about the way your manuscript 'sounds', and on and on until Chapter 19, which discusses progression and pace. If your book hasn't been rejected by any of the reasons outlined in the first 18 chapters, then you're probably golden.

Lukeman gives examples about all the issues he discusses, so you can see exactly what is wrong with the problem under discussion, though he doesn't go very deep into fixing those issues (especially as he gets more metaphysical). Sure, Chapter 1 explains exactly what your margins should be (an easy fix), but it's much harder to give specific advice on appropriate story hooks (Chapter 14) or subtlety (Chapter 15). Still, he points out the problems, making them easy to spot in your manuscript, and he admits up front in his book that this is a "Don't Do" rather than a "How To" book. If you can see that you have a specific problem, you can go out an buy a ton of books related to that issue. He does give exercises to do at the end of each chapter, most of which involve sitting down with your manuscript and going over it with a fine tooth comb. I've tried a few with my Nanowrimo project, and they did seem to help.

In all, a good book. It won't tell you how to write your novel, or give you the magic best-seller formula, or even be able to fix a manuscript that's just hopeless, but it does give you a lot of tools to make it better. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to get published. I found it so helpful, I went out and bought another one of his "how to get published" books.

5 stars

In books I trust,
Nu