We’re talking this month about the mechanics of the publishing industry: understanding author bios, understanding freelance independent editors, understanding agents.
So today let’s talk about understanding writer credentials.
There’s something very important that you should know.
Dashiell Hammett wasn’t the world’s greatest writer. He wasn’t even the world’s greatest self-marketer. But he had something essential to success as an author:
credentials.
Hammett had been a professional private eye for the San Francisco Pinkerton Agency for years when he began writing his ground-breaking, gritty, realistic PI mysteries set in—you guessed it—San Francisco.
The British author Ivy Compton-Burnett was one of the eldest of an enormous mixed family full of malice and intrigue. Her twin youngest sisters committed double-suicide in their locked bedroom on Christmas Day, while the rest of the family was sitting down to dinner, and are now suspected of having been lovers.
Compton-Burnett was once told by an incredulous interviewer that real families don’t act the way they do in her fiction: secretive, back-stabbing, prone to multiple marriages and bare-faced lies and theft and suicide and even murder by neglect.
“Oh, but they do,” she said.
Stephen King uses a medical expert.
So what does all of this tell us?
Successful authors have great credentials.
If at all possible, you should have professional experience in the subject matter of your fiction. Failing that, you must become a professional researcher and find an expert who does. Interview. Study. Read the books, watch the documentaries, analyze the reference material.
When an agent reads an author bio that says, “I don’t have any experience in this field, but I can picture it,” I’m afraid that’s a donation to the circular file right there. However, when they read one that says, “I’m a retiring homicide detective with the Chicago PD,” for a mystery about an unsolved series of murders in Chicago’s notorious Englewood neighborhood or, “I’ve been the head of ER at the Las Vegas Valley Hospital for eight years,” for a novel about a recovering gambler turned doctor who gets embroiled in a local casino scam that implicates the head of a fictional Las Vegas ER or, “I spent two years interviewing young streetwalkers in the red-light districts of San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and LA,” for a white slavery horror novel set in the underworld of West Coast prostitution. . .then that agent’s going to sit up and take notice.
Even Compton-Burnett—who wrote literary novels entirely based on inner-familial warfare—could have said, “After sixty years as the matriarchal eldest sister of a mixed Victorian family of twelve, four of whom died young and all of whom bear intense hostility toward each other, I have accumulated a certain knowledge of human nature within the confines of the traditional Victorian family milieu.”
Of course, the quality of her writing helped.
If you’ve been on this planet long enough to learn how to write business letters to total strangers (queries), then you’ve been here long enough to accumulate complex, persuasive, and utterly intriguing data on human existence.
So do yourself a favor.
Use it.