Interview with Robyn Schneider

Interview by Amy Brozio-Andrews

With Correspondences with YA Fiction Agents, nineteen-year-old novelist Robyn Schneider shares the full text of her e-queries to agents paired with their replies, from 2002 until she secured representation from Susan Schulman in 2004.

Her YA novel, Better than Yesterday, was recently sold to Delacorte. She's co-curator of the Barbès Reading Series in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and currently attends Barnard College. Robyn also does manuscript consulting, blogs at robbiewriter.livejournal.com, and is a reader for a New York literary agency.
  

Please tell us a little about yourself and your work.

I'm an underage novelist living in New York City.  I attend Barnard College, which is the all-women's division of Columbia University. I've been published in the Orange County Register's Irvine World News, Better Non Sequitur, the Princeton Review, and a couple of others.

Do you think there are any special advantages or challenges that come with being a younger author?

I think that people think there are advantages, but there really aren't so many. So many people assume that young authors only get deals because they have family connections, or because they're young, and not because they're actually good.  It's impossible for some to fathom that a lot of us actually go out and send query letters for a few years before anything happens.

Also, I'm in school. Today, I had a two-hour break between my classes. My agent needed a write up on my novel for foreign markets.  I had a paper due later in the day that I hadn't started.  I did the write up. So it's tough balancing school, which isn't 9 to 5, with writing.

Have your professors and classmates been supportive?

It's a difficult issue to bring up. When would I drop "I have a book deal" into a conversation? Especially since my school has an ultra-competitive writing program that I'm trying to get into for my junior year. I've never asked for an extension on a paper because of writing. I get everything done somehow.

Okay, advantages of being a young writer: Mostly marketing. Teen magazines will profile a cute young writer. But why would they profile a 56-year-old bald guy?  They'd just recommend his book.

Do you think a YA novel written by a young adult has more validity than one written by an adult? Do you think readers notice? Do you think it makes a difference to them?

It depends on the subgenre. A YA fantasy or historical fiction could be written by anyone.  But a contemporary YA written by a young adult? I'm not sure. I think it depends how long someone has been writing. A 23-year-old's fourth YA book should ring more authentic than a 60-year-old's first. And I think readers only notice young authors because it's a selling point. Having a young author is a publishing house's way of saying, "You can do this, too."

Before Harry Potter, no one was reading. That book series got huge when I was in middle school, just the right age. So my generation has always been just a little bit interested in reading. But to show them that they can not only read but write is huge.

I'm always so excited when a new young person sells a debut novel.

Do you get the opportunity to meet many other young authors? How about networking with other writers? I know you're really busy; do you do any online writing groups? Is that something you'd recommend to other aspiring writers?

I network a lot. Most of my friends who are writers have LiveJournals. Plus, I co-curate the Barbès Reading Series, so a lot of awesome writers e-mail me to do the series. I don't do any online writing groups.

Barbès has run a reading series for a couple of years. Actually, my friend and fellow young writer Ned Vizzini hosted last year. I attended a couple of times and really liked it, so a friend and I took over this year. We've made some changes.  We have the event on a different night, plus we pass out free homemade cookies. I'm trying to put together a young writers night in January. It's going to be fantastic.

On your website, you mention doing speaking engagements. What sort of events do you do? How do you get the word out about your availability and expertise?

I was the keynote speaker at the California Writers Club last month. And I'm hopefully on a panel at the Great Writers at Barnard writers' conference, although I haven't heard about that for a while, so I hope I haven't been cut. [ed. note: Robyn Schneider is scheduled to be part of a panel discussion at this event on November 6, 2005. Here's the link for more information: http://www.barnard.edu/writers/schedule.html]

Ideally, I'd like to do a speaking tour of colleges, but that's for later.  My book isn't coming out for a while. 

Do most of your speaking engagements go through your agent, or do you make those arrangements directly?

I make most of the arrangements myself. Usually it's a friend asking me if I can come talk to a group he or she belongs to. Although Susan (Schulman), my agent, did tell me about the Barnard event.  But I went to talk to the woman in charge of it myself.  Still, I don't even know if I'm even part of it.  I should e-mail that woman.  After I write the essay I put off writing this afternoon.

I'm in love with book readings, and I usually wander around New York looking for them.  Some speaking engagements come from introducing myself to the people in charge after the event. This one woman e-mailed me and asked how she could get in touch with my publicist.  I was all, publicist?  Don't have one.  Although I assume Random House will assign me one to do with my book.

It's cool that she thought you had a publicist!

Yeah, I was flattered. It was as though she thought I was important enough to hire someone to book my appearances.

Do you have any words of wisdom for younger writers looking to make an excellent, professional impression on agents, publishers, and especially other writers?

So many young people get frustrated by negative responses from agents and claim that they're being rejected because they're a teenager. But what about Christopher Paolini, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, Marty Beckerman, and Nick McDonell?  They weren't rejected because they were teens. My advice is to learn how to write an amazing query letter. Just because you can write a book doesn't mean you can write a query. I have a lot of advice up on my website, Correspondences with YA Fiction Agents. Just Google the phrase and you'll get a whole bunch of stuff.

What made you decide to post a record of your correspondence with agents? Have you received any feedback in regards to that decision? If so, has it been positive, negative, or mixed?

I decided to post the correspondences on the Internet because it hadn't been done. Gerard Jones runs a great site, Everyone Who's Anyone, but that deals with adult trade. And YA is such a hot market now. So I spent my first Halloween night in college in the 24-hour computer lab, coding HTML for the site. I've gotten a ton of feedback because of it. A lot positive, but some negative.

Some people think that the information is "personal," but you know what? They read it anyway, and I bet they enjoyed it and learned something. My agent endorses the site.

And it's awesome.  I get these e-mails from people telling me that they had been querying for months and never had a positive response, but then they visited my website, rewrote their query letter, and had a response for a partial the very next day.

Plus, once I was in a Barnes & Noble in New Jersey, and a friend said my name, and a man turned around and introduced himself. He was the agent Barry Goldblatt, and he'd heard of my correspondences website.

I wonder what they think is personal? I mean, it's not like you're telling everyone your deepest, darkest secrets...

There's a website where people post their rejection letters, so it's not like THAT was so personal. And Susan is such a wonderful agent.  The website sings her praises. She tells me that she gets a ton of query letters mentioning the site.

I think people are just shocked that no one had thought to do it before, and that it took an 18-year-old kid to think, hey, why don't I share my story to help everyone else?

Is most of your mail from readers in their late teens and early 20s? Is it mostly from readers or writers?

Most of my mail is from readers who are older, believe it or not. Thirties or forties.  Mothers of teenagers, sometimes. But there is a lot of mail from teens and people in their twenties, too, because everyone wants to write YA.

Why do you say that?

YA is hot right now. A lot of the big publishers (so I've heard) have their YA imprint lists filled through 2007, even. So many chick lit writers have gone down in age and are writing chick lit YA. Plus Harry Potter has finally crossed over and been named YA, and Eldest just came out.

I accepted the offer on Better than Yesterday in March 2005. The book is slotted for 2007. I know of at least one author who just sold a YA that isn't going to be released until 2008. I guess all I can do is hope that my release date is pushed up.  I mean, what's the fun of celebrating the launch if I'm not going to get carded (I'll be 21 in Spring '07)?

On your website, you wrote that, "It's very important to me that I worked hard and earned everything without knowing someone in the industry or getting a break because I was a kid." When and how did you reveal your age to your publisher? What sort of reaction did you get?   

It is very important to me. There have been rivalries between teen writers in the past about that sort of thing. About kids with connections getting everything so easy. And I never wanted to be one of them. I mean, I go to a great university, and grew up in Orange County, CA.  Plus I'm obsessed with designer shoes.  The last thing I need is my uncle publishing my novel.

I think what happened with Random House is that they were never sure exactly how old I was. This is what I've heard from an editor there, at least. My agent sent them a headshot of me along with the manuscript. And they kept asking, "How old is she?" but Susan wouldn't tell.

Is sending a headshot with a manuscript common practice?

Not really. I had a headshot lying around, though, so it was kind of like, why not? It couldn't hurt. And besides, I think it was a good tease. I don't know.  It just seemed like a fun idea.  A headshot rather than a birth date.  Actually, I sent a picture of myself to Susan before she signed me, come to think of it.

I got an e-mail from her agency after they requested the full manuscript, and they wanted to know more about me and my plans for my next books, so I told them and sent a picture.

Who are (were) your influences? And would you agree with the opinion of some that teenage authors' work can be imitative?

My biggest influence is probably myself. I know that sounds SO self-centered, but let me explain. I've written about a half-dozen novels so far, and only one of them was good enough to land an agent and get me a book deal with Random House. So having the knowledge of what I did wrong, and how my earlier plots and characters didn't work out for me stored inside my head is invaluable.  It makes me really stop and think before I start writing something.

But I'd say my traditional influences are George Orwell (particularly his non-fiction), J.D. Salinger (particularly his short fiction), Sylvia Plath, Meg Cabot, Caren Lissner (for writing literary chick lit, which I ran with and turned into what I like to call "chickliterary"), Faulkner, Kafka, and J.K. Rowling.

And about young authors being "imitative": I think every author is imitative to some degree. Art is imitative of art as well as nature. However, I think that older teen writers are often nearly impossible to distinguish from twentysomething or thirtysomething writers.  Bound for Harvard, Yale or Columbia, these older teens' books display all the poise and sophistication of four years of A+ high school English papers and a year or two of Ivy League lectures and term papers.

Furthermore, books are obviously not published unedited, so that older helping hand is present in EVERY novel, not just those written by younger authors.  Tom Clancy is edited just like J.K. Rowling just like any seventeen-year-old.

I know there are a few people out there who were published at 13 or whatever, but just one or two. Most "teen" authors are in college by the time they're published.

Amy Brozio-Andrews is a freelance writer and book reviewer. She brings more than five years' experience as a readers' advisory librarian to her work, which is regularly published by Library Journal, The Imperfect Parent, and Absolute Write. Her reviews have also been published by The Absinthe Literary Review, ForeWord Magazine, January Magazine, and Melt Magazine. Amy is also the managing editor and an international markets columnist for Absolute Write. Visit her online at http://www.amyba.com.

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