Tag Archives: writing

Would you want this agent?

Posted on by

Found this tonight via Booksquare: The New York Observer‘s got a feature by Sheelah Kolhatkar about literary agent William Clegg who, in 2005, “suddenly stopped coming in to his office or returning phone calls.”

Here’s how Kolhatkar describes Clegg:

[His] reputation in publishing circles is as an attentive agent who garners significant (sometimes inflated) advances for his authors, but who was perhaps less focused on the nuts and bolts of his writers’ careers. (“Sometimes they were better-known for the advances they got than for their sales,”  joked one editor.) One of Mr. Clegg’s former authors described him as good at “holding your hand, calling you and telling you you’re fabulous and that no one’s more talented than you … he was almost like a personal manager. He was a cheerleader. I think that’s what a lot of people miss.”

He is described as a charmer who could be very aggressive in business dealings and who was, at one time, a fixture on the social circuit, known for hosting parties at the apartment he lived in on lower Fifth Avenue.

Okay, so imagine this. You have an agent. He’s brilliant. He tells you you’re fabulous. He’s gotten you an advance that would make other writers in your genre roll over & wet themselves.

You’re an active client, so maybe he’s got your latest book out with publishers, or maybe you have a contract that’s being negotiated.

And suddenly, with no warning, your agent just vanishes.

Would you want this type of agent?

If he reappeared months later and called you, would you go back to him?

:-)

Editors’ noses knowses

Posted on by

POD-DY Mouth sponsored a contest this week: she posted excerpts from 24 novels. Some were from commercially published books; some were from POD books.

The object of the contest was to figure out which was which.

I tried it and got half of them right. Nobody scored more than 80 percent.

But here’s what’s most telling, from her post-contest post:

The statistics are interesting, though–far more on point that I would’ve imagined. Here are the average scores broken down by group:

Average Score, Editors: 63% (19 exams)
Average Score, Agents: 60% (26 exams)
Average Score, Authors: 53% (72 exams)
Average Score, Other: 46% (550 exams +/-)

So it turns out editors and agents have a keener eye than I’d guessed. I suppose it makes sense that unpublished works go from author to agent to editor. Looks like we’re not turning the publishing industry on its ear anytime soon.

Yeah. And if you want someone’s advice on whether your WIP is publishable, you’re better off trusting an agent’s rejection letter than a lay person’s high praise.

But we already knew that, didn’t we ;-)

(Btw, POD-DY Mouth doesn’t support permalinks, so if you’ve come across this post after 7/28/06, you’ll need to scroll down to the entry from the 27th to find the post from which I’ve quoted.)

It’s all in the margins

Posted on by

For unpubbed writers, it sometimes seems that the “standards” held by agents and publishers are, at best, too stringent; at worst harsh, opaque, even perverse or malicious.

I don’t subscribe to that view. I think the actions of both agents and publishers are completely understandable when you consider the margins in the print publishing business. According to this New York Times article, for instance,

Publishers generally receive a wholesale price for new books that is about half of the retail cover price, or $13 for a hardcover book with a $26 jacket price. Thirty percent of the publisher’s share, or 15 percent of the cover price, goes to the author as royalties, and another 40 percent of the publisher’s take goes for the production, distribution, marketing and publicity costs of the book.

That leaves about $3 to $4 a book for the publisher, before accounting for the cost of corporate overhead or the books that will be returned — on which the publisher earns nothing.

For paperbacks, authors generally earn only 7.5 percent of the cover price as a royalty. But the lower price also means publishers earn far less, about $1 to $2 a book, before returns.

If you look at these numbers, it’s obvious that publishers can’t make too many bad acquisitions or they’d be bankrupt in a matter of months, if not weeks. Large publishers, in particular, can’t survive if they acquire books that only sell a few hundred copies. They need books that appeal to a wide audience, generate buzz, and inspire word-of-mouth.

It’s not their job to do me, the novelist wanna be, favors. I need to write a book that will meet their criteria. If I want them to publish it.

Beginning a new book

Posted on by

It’s the balm, they say, that soothes the query-monitoring itch.

I’m excited about it–the new book–but it’s scary too, vertigo-like to start to peer into the widening crack that’s now opened into yet another world and realize I have no choice, if I’m going to capture it for the telling, but to squeeze through the opening, close my eyes, and let go . . .

When writers are in the driver’s seat

Posted on by

Jessica Faust at BookEnds has a post up on her blog that discusses an important turning point in a writer’s search for an agent. When you receive an offer for representation, she writes, you are suddenly in the driver’s seat:

This is your opportunity to contact all the agents reviewing your work, and, if more than one offers, interviewing them to find the one agent you feel is best for you and your work. The one who shares your vision and enthusiasm and the one that you feel you can work the best with.

Do click through and read the whole post. Jessica relays a story of an author who didn’t do this–and quite probably wrecked her chances to sell her book as a result.

The “rebellious major”

Posted on by

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton, “the pseudonym of an associate professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college,” writes about why students choose to major in English.

English is, among my undergraduates at least, one of the last refuges of the classical notion of a liberal-arts education.

I ended up a Comparative Literature major because I recognized, however dimly, that academia would let me postpone a bit longer the pressures of real adulthood–it would let me savor, for a few years at least, the freedom to do nothing but think, and read books, and write . . .

E-queries and a prediction (you read it here first!!!!)

Posted on by

Of the 20-odd agents I’ve queried so far for my current novel, I’ve done only one by mail.

All the rest have been email queries.

I have to believe I’m not the only writer who’s inclined to favor e-querying. It’s cheaper and less trouble than printing and packaging a snail mail query. And you also get answers faster. Granted, most of them will be “no thanks” kind of answers but even they feel good in a weird kind of way. At least you have evidence that things are moving.

But here’s the thing. Many agents — many very good agents — still prefer traditional paper queries.

So I hereby predict that writers who take the time to craft and mail traditional queries will, at some point, have a slight advantage in the agent-hunting game. Because at some point the majority of the great unpubbed will be dashing off e-queries. Which means anyone willing to put in a bit of extra effort and expense will be rewarded with a slightly less-crowded playing field.

I predict you’ll soon be reading writer-advice articles that recommend you seek agents who only accept snail mail queries as a way of boosting your agent-hunting odds.

You read it here, first.

:-)

More agent interest

Posted on by

I’ve queried 21 agents so far for my latest completed novel, “When Libby Met the Fairies and Her Whole Life Went Fey.”

I mentioned previously that I got a request for a partial. Now I’ve also had a request for a full.

My query has now gone through one major and one minor revision. The major revision came after I queried Kristin Nelson and she noted that although the title sounded light, the query came across as dark. It was a spot-on critique, so I rewrote the query to bring its tone more in line with the tone of the book.

Now, this week, Anne Hawkins is the guest on Dorothy Thompson’s Yahoo forum, TWLAuthorTalks. I wasn’t going to query her/her agency — their list is so literary — but in her introduction she said she looks for fiction that’s on the border between literary and commercial.

Hmmmmmm.

I can’t presume that I’m able to hit that spot, but I will say it’s my ideal, as a writer. A book that’s plotted to keep things moving but doesn’t shy away from a pretty turn of phrase once in awhile . . . after all, that’s what literature once was.

In any case, the last rev I did to my query, I added in a couple of sentences about the — I wouldn’t say darker, but maybe “more human” elements of the plot — human in the sense that all of our lives are leavened, to some degree, by fear of aging and death, by the scars of betrayals we’ve either committed and betrayals we’ve suffered, by the disappointments of realizing our best-laid plans were actually elaborate illusions — my book doesn’t wallow in those themes but they are there.

Yet there’s also a romance . . . and little folk.

So you see, I need my query to show both. It’s not easy . . .

My title may not be quite right, for that matter. It may be skewed too much toward “lite & frothy.”

Lots of nuances to juggle, to pull this stuff off . . .

In praise of literary agents

Posted on by

No, I’m not writing this post on the off-hand chance that one of the agents I query will happen to find my blog. Although I don’t mind any agent knowing how grateful I am for what they do for writers.

This is a true valentine.

I started composing these thoughts a couple of weeks ago as I reflected on all the squirrely faux pas (I am so tempted to edit that to faux pases — better yet, faux pawses — squirrely faux pawses, get it???) that I’ve committed since completing my first novel some years ago (genre romance, MS hidden away now for all time).

Some of the “shoulda known better” things I’ve done:

* Submitted work that wasn’t, ahem, “polished.”
* Subset of above — submitted work from the wrong file. So the agent got the version that wasn’t polished. Sob.
* Sent sample pages from the middle of my book, instead of the beginning.
* Queried for a WIP — when I have zippo fiction publishing credentials.
* Assumed a request for a full was automatically a request for exclusivity.

Yup, pretty clueless.

And how have agents responded?

With grace and kindness and tact.

And that’s not all. More than just overlooking my newbie foolishness, agents have given me feedback that’s been immeasurably valuable to me as a writer. Their comments have helped me with everything from voice to plotting.

So, if I ever do get published, it will be thanks, in part, to the encouragement and advice I’ve gotten from agents — and keep in mind, these are people who will never make a dime off my writing (although I sure hope some agent will, one of these days).

It’s easy to grouse about the publishing industry, about the difficulty of navigating the querying process — about how formal or bloodless or even curt agents’ rejections can seem, sometimes.

But the fact is, agents want us writers to do well. And most of the time, that’s what shows through — in my experience, anyway.

(Somewhat related — Maureen McGowan blogs here about misconceptions of a newbie novelist, via Diana Peterfreund.

When characters meet “The End”

Posted on by

Here’s a piece by Charles McGrath in the NewYork Times about authors who have killed off their most famous characters. I won’t list them since it’s a bigger treat to read the piece ;-)

For a hook, he reports that J.K. Rowling has hinted Harry Potter may be headed for an untimely demise . . . well, untimely in the eyes of readers, because think about it, when you become engrossed in a book you step into a fictional time, and that fictional time swells into its own infinite bubble with no relation whatsoever to the relentless line we normally walk — so from our perspective, it’s always too soon for a Harry Potter to go, isn’t it . . .