Responding to a question about covers selling (or not selling) books, I suggested that it's not as simple as most new authors think--get a great cover and it will help your sales.

One thing I notice is that cover impact varies from one genre to another. Horror is the most spectacularly unique: if you see a book with foil embossing, peekaboo diecuts, paper shaping, it's almost invariably horror.

On the other hand, romance covers tend to be totally generic. They are saying, essentially... this is a romance and you can see how steamy and/or reserved it is right here.

Science fiction is known for covers so generic that they often have nothing whatsoever to do with the book. This gets whined about in SF writers groups all the time, "I wrote this heavy DNA/psych story and it came out with a starship braving wheeling galaxies on the cover".
The "pitch" there is essentially, "Hey,gotcher SF here."

Westerns. same thing. Two guys galloping along shooting at each other of an Indian on horseback... guess what's inside.

You see books with just a single item pitching the reader. A swastika, for instance. Or hammer and sickle. (Both of them cover elements that mean I will immediately reject the book based on that one square inch of cover alone, by the way)

There was a time when naked chick + gun = "Hey Bond fans!"

Literary books are known for the non-descript blah cover. (I mean what are you going to do, photograph intense, wringing depictions of obscure emotions?) You see the stock vauge photograph, the color arrangment with no artwork, etc. They should just stamp "If you listen to NPR, check this out" on them all.

One thing I'm saying here--becuse these publishers aren't all that stupid--is that the cover doesn't have to be beautiful to work, it doesn't have to be a picture that equals a thousand-word book report. It's a signal to the reader that may not have anything to do with the specific content, like a red lightbulb meaning there's a whorehouse here, or "emporium" or "shoppe" suggesting classier merchandise than "store" or "mall". Like most pitches, it works best on people who know what they are looking for and only need to be signalled that this is it.

Other cover tropes: The writer has a Hispanic name. If Chicano, the book will feature pictures of border images, if Latin American, the cover will be earthy, magical realism/naif paintings featuring flowers, animals and dark-skinned women.

Chicklit: jazzy colors and Jetsons design with squiggly/sassy magazine depictions of chicks, cartoony typefaces.

Vietnam: picture of a some old, gray dude on the back.

FINDING AN AGENT

You cringe every time you see some newbie bop onto a forum and say, "I'm thinking of becoming a writer. Where can I find a cheap agent who handles gonzo confessions and flash fiction?"
And maybe refrain from telling them they could have used google quicker than typing into the forum.

But agent search is a legitimate question and like many such things it's not secret or esoteric, but takes a bit of work to scour around and find good resources. So once again I do all the work around here while you chill in your BarfaLounger eating cheetos and joysticking.

One thing. These aren't exactly fragile resources but every nitwit that clogs them up with frivolous queries is just strengthening the industry barricades that make it harder for everybody to land on a desk. Before you approach agents have a solid query letter and a handle on the etiquette for submitting it. Have something ready to show and a 50 page sample (adaptable to what they ask for on their website) with no formatting so you can paste it into your email. Please?


COMMON SENSE, LOW TECH

This is the easiest, most "duh" way to search for agents. But it also can be the most effective. Find out who represents the writers whose work is most like yours or appeals to your target audience. This also allows your query to say,
--I am approaching you for representation of my new novel, "The Man Who Killed Agents Who Rejected Him", because of your association with Charles Manson, whose work appeals to my target audience.
Instead of
--I found your name on some database recommended in some knucklehead's blog.

Search google intelligently to try to find the agent who represented the book or author. Also, cruise those books in the bookstore or library. Often writers, especially in their first book, will have dedications to their wonderful agents in front or back of the book.


AGENT DATA BASES (Click red titles for links)

AGENT QUERY
This is my favorite, and it's a beautiful searchable site with a very comprehensive coverage of agents. States what their memberships and status is. Mostly full, solid profiles on the agents and agencies. Search by category of book and keyword.


PUBLISHERS MARKETPLACE
This sort of "slices the agent pool different". And is thus an excellent adjunct to Agent Query.


WRITERS NET
This database is HUGE. Which is part of the problem: it's so vast it dredges dregs and you have to sort it out. But it's got a LOT of names in it.


AAR
The Association of Authors' Representatives is as official as it sounds. Not all agents (including some very good ones) are members, but it should be in your top 3 sites to search and is a good checkup to see if people are really members. Anybody who claims to be but isn't should get your quick dismissal.


CHILDREN'S BOOKS
A specialized list for kids' books.

There are many such special lists. Google is ever a friend to those of narrow interests.


WRITERS FREE REFERENCE
This guy is a resource/gadfly/crackup/godsend/nuisance of the first water. It's a howl to read his approach to the agent market, but there's a lot of good info here. Call it "Gonzo dBasing".


CHECK THEM OUT (Fer Crissakes)

It's just astounding how many forum questions run like, "Has anybody heard of WritersLitAgency? I signed a life contract with them in blood but now they're demanding money and my children and I'm wondering if...."
CHECK THEM OUT--on forums BEFORE THE FACT and on these sites.

ABSOLUTE WRITE
Has a whole thread on agents to beware that is often more up to date than the classic checkup sites, has more in-depth reporting form the inflicted. Sign up for the newsletter and get a free list of agents.


EDITORS AND PREDITORS
This is the "most referred" to watchdog site, and it's very cool. But also very incomplete and they have to walk a pretty tight rope. Click on "Warnings".



SFWA's WRITER BEWARE
These guys don't dance. You have to know that in contemporary litigation-happy America anything they say had better be bulletproof or they'll have platoons of winged monkeys with briefcases all over them like a cheap suit. So you can take this stuff to the bank. Unfortunately that also makes it impossible to cover every sleazebag in the sewer. But check here first. The last "Did I screw up?" newbie post I saw was asking about an agency that's on their TOP TWENTY THUMBS DOWN list.


GET IT TOGETHER FIRST

This is beyond the scope of this post, but DO check yourself BEFORE you wreck yourself. Many of the sites above, and the agency sites (which are more important to you, needless to say) have guidelines for querying them.

QUERY TRACKER
Consider this.


A POSITIVE ROLE MODEL
This little guide to writing agent queries has been praised by many from both sides of the fence.

Writing is the art form without technique. There are almost no little tips and secrets. But there are a couple and I'm going to give you one, for free. Just cause I'm a hell of a guy.

Consider the concept of Narrative Voice. You don't hear this mentioned much along with all the claptrap in "How To Write Gooder" classes and books, but it's vital. And unlike so much of that stuff--oriented to critics, teachers and smartasses and of no use to somebody actually trying to get something written: it's useful! Once you identify the distinctive narrative voice of a piece, it practically writes itself. Without it, you can spend years screwing around uselessly.
So what is it? Jack Cady, a sort of outlaw college writing prof I first heard it from, said. "It's like there are lots of singers singing the same song and each version is different. But the song has it's own voice, something that is the same in all versions."
That is a little mystical for me. But this isn't: the first time I ever spoke to Ken Kesey he told me that he was getting nowhere writing Cuckoo's Nest until suddenly the minor but pivotal character of The Chief leaped in and made himself felt. That unique, mute narrative became the fulcrum for unleashing the story.
The narrative voice is the way the story wants to tell itself. It's the "voice" you are hearing as you read it. It includes, but is not limited to, POV, first or third person, past or other tense, style, sentence structure, all that good stuff. None of which are worth worrying about one-on-one: they fall into place once the voice is identified. It could be some sarcastic onlooker, the child nobody pays attention to and speaking in a child's way, it could be cold and clinical depiction, it could be a breezy recollection later in a character's life. But once you have it, you're on your way. This happens kind of automatically when things work. But, unlike so much writerly advice, it can be of use to a writer when things aren’t working.

So, Mr. Genius, you're saying. How do I identify this voice. Sorry, you can't: you're screwed.

Just kidding. But yeah, that's the trick. Part of it is just knowing what you are doing while you are spinning your wheels. You aren't coming unglued, you aren't up against something you can handle, you aren't unable to apply the proper technical terms: you are just going through what a writer goes through to get his story to sing. That can be comforting in itself.

So, how to go about that? One way is to get away from the beginning and just start writing down scenes as they occur to you. The scene is probably "talking to you" in something close to the voice you need.

Run through your notes and look for scenes that pop out at you, write them. Write other ones, not worrying so much about whether they are in the same voice. You should feel yourself closing in on it.

Give a shot at writing the ending. It always helps when you are confident you know where things are going and sometimes the last scenes, by their final nature, include clues as to the mood and personality of the story.

Write some chunks of dialog. This is different, characters have their own voices, nothing to do with the narration voice of the story. But maybe it turns out one of the characters IS the narrator? Or several of them are? Or that the momentum from the speeches carry you into paragraphs that you recognize as the way you should be writing it.

The narrative voice is not just important at the writing stage. It's as important to a story as characters and plot. Is Holden Caulfield a great character? Please. Does Catcher have a great plot? Get real. What people like about it is the narrative voice of Holden. (I think it sucks, personally)

There are books where that is pretty much the main thing going on. Often when the voice is humorous. A powerful narrative voice can move from crushing pathos to chuckles easily, just like a good singer can bring you from laughs to tears in the single song.

Think of a hard-boiled detective story, like you're going to write one for a contest. We all know what you are thinking, "I looked up from the cockroaches trying to steal my empty Scotch bottles for the deposit and there she was, total ruination with more curves than I had brakes." This is almost a distinctive voice of an entire genre, in the way that blues has a different attitude from pop or reggae or whatever. BB King and UB40 and Sting do the exact same song... and it's a different song. And people buy blues and hard-boiled stories just for the way they are told. Part of it is almost indistinguisable from attitude. You can tell the same scene with a cynical attitude, a detached attitude, a breathless attitude. When you do an impression of John Wayne or Jay Leno what are you imitating? See what I mean? Bobby Darin modeled himself on Sinatra in many ways, same songs, same clothes, same voice (a better voice, in fact) but he didn't have the attitude and personae that Sinatra did.
AND, not all tough gangland films, for instance, have the same voice. Even with the same subject matter. Look at Goodfellahs, Godfather, Sopranos, Miller's Crossing. and you see some very different voices dealing with the same milieu and even audience.
And attitude is also independent of voice: take a look at The Matrix. Here’s a film that works a young, hip, jacked-in audience but is told in this stodgy old voice.

A crash course in voice would be Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man, by Joyce. Here we see the voice growing, maturing, changing from a child’s wide-eyed viewpoint to that of an adult as the narrator ages. Yet… isn’t the narrative voice conserved?

You can get a taste of what I mean by trying to write a story from the point of view of a different character. Gardner’s novel Grendel is a good example of that...you can actually see the thing as a different book! But I'm not just talking about POV. A film with a very strong, unique voice is "Fight Club". What if the author had been trying to write it from a third person omnicient? And Tyler would tell it very different from any of the other characters?

I’m known to be anti-jargon in writing. And I continue to maintain that there is no reason for writers to use or think in terms like “three act” or “protagonist” or “limited third person”. You’re telling a story, not reviewing it. But Narrative voice is different. It’s a phrase that hips you to something very real, very basic, and tells you something that can help save you time and at least direct your search towards the heart of your endeavor.

This POV obsession has flared out of control lately. I hadn't actually heard the term "POV violation" (Which I interpret as a disguised way of saying "slap some sense into me") until lately, but there it is.

I've responded to forum knuckleheads who get off that whole idea that POV is, 1)Something to be rationed out sparingly and 2)even really worth a writer THINKING about any more than a sprinter thinks about his shoelaces, with paragraphs showing completely natural shifts in viewpoint even within a single sentence.
(They always yelp about the paragraph sucking and being confusing)

But "head-hopping" is just so du jour.

It's crazy and lame, but understanding the why of it can be really helpful to young writers. MOST of the crap you hear on the internet about writing is absolutely worthless. Most of what you read in "how to write gooder" books is also. And definitely seminars.

Here's what happens, at two different levels.

Writers are, for some weird reason, a high target demographic for scamsters, some of them even well-meaning. We are INUNDATED by ways to spend money to get better at what is basically a pretty simplistic art with almost no real technique involved. Ninety percent of the "help" being offered for sale is by people who have never sold anything in their lives except "how to write and sell" books. Writing/marketing advice is the standby first pubication of the truly bogus.

So, since writing just, sorry to say, doesn't have the sort of technical requirement of, say, ballet or photography or playing the saxophone or hitting baseballs for power and placement, they have to come up with things to fill up their books.

So they cook up all this CRAP. Screenwriting is the worst, poetry the loopiest (duh) but you just hear all this complete cowflop.

Adverbs are bad. Headhopping is bad. Flashbacks are a sign of a weak mind. Voice overs are a sign of laziness and probably syphilitic communism. Yada, yada.

Add to this the whole schmear of editors and critics and the way THEY talk about writing (which is TOTALLY USELESS TO THE CREATIVE TALENT--you DON'T need to even be aware of the word "protagonist" to write, just to jabber about it) and you have a blather of solemn, heartfelt, brass underlined twaddle that is pretty much unique in the world of the arts. Okay, maybe acting (another area in which there is very little actual technique to balance talent) is worse for sheer lameness. Maybe.

Then there's the second level--people passing these little cowpies of wisdom on to others. Either in other books that are just like the ones they're knocked off from, or The Internet Forums.

People want to seem cool, expert, knowledgeable. It's natural. I'm a bit of a know it all showoff myself, believe it or not. So they grab these little nuggets, put their own shade of lipstick on them, and pass them on as if they'd baked them themselves after nine months of gestation in the oven.

And defend all this second-hand pablum RABIDLY. They have never sold anything, they don't work in the business, but they go ballistic if you challenge the idea that adverbs are some dangerous thing to be avoided.

(Think about that: telling writers that certain words are no good, like telling painters to avoid certain hues or musicians that there are bad notes. But they DO IT)

If challenged, there is a pattern you see unfolding. Somebody says don't use adverbs (or multiPOV or flashback or gumdrops or whatever) and get some hipster agreement.

Somebody says some degree of "That's nuts." Maybe even, "So tell me how you'd rewrite this sentence without adverbs" (And what is really screamingly hilarious/pathetic is when they DO the rewrites)

Then somebody says, "You need to know the rules before you can break them" and everybody thinks THAT is very wise and cool. So the question has been begged and whatever stupid fad is being discussed is now being called a "rule". Like, you know, the RULE against using adverbs or flashbacks or more than one POV in a (sentence, paragraph, "section", page, novel, lifetime, whatever)

The argument quickly becomes, well, sure you can use them sparingly, but should be careful.

The obvious question ("Why?") sometimes gets asked and the answer is always some variation of "well so many use them badly that they'be started to become bad by association so watch out or the readers will shred your MS or script, and probably also your feet and firstborn child"

Challenge to that usually devolves into "Well I went to Clarion... (know an editor, got a really glowing rejection from an ezine, was in creative writing classes in Community College for six years, etc) and you go right ahead if you want to be a total failure and loser and writhe in limbo."

In other words, there are tools in a writer's work box that should not be used because they have been used badly. And, of course, have a cute buzzword against them.

DON'T let people hem you in. DON'T take seriously the advice of whatever anonymous nobodies who have a good rap on the internet. DON'T take seriously the hooie of people trying to flog books to you.

A writer uses whatever is at hand and maybe invents a few more things that aren't around.

Critics and hucksters and teachers and losers tell you there are places not to go.