agents

When Zero Is Greater Than One

September 24, 2018 By Susan Spann 5 Comments

During the early days—correction, decade—of my writing career, before I had either an agent or a publishing deal, I often felt a kind of desperation. When would it finally be my turn? When would I see my work in print?

Would my day ever come?

I wrote, I researched agents and publishers, I pitched and queried, and—like everyone—I received rejections. Rejections upon rejections, until I almost dreaded opening my email for fear of finding another missive that began, “Although I enjoyed your work, I’m afraid I just didn’t love it quite enough to take a chance in this difficult market . . .”

At times I felt tempted to stop researching “fits” and simply adopt a shotgun approach in the hopes of finding any agent or publisher willing to take a chance on my stories.

Fortunately, twenty years of experience as a publishing lawyer stayed my hand. Because, despite the temptation, I knew that having no agent and no publishing deal is better than having a deal I would later regret.

The same is true for you.

Before signing a contract with an agent or publishing house, you must take off the emotional artist hat and evaluate the offer with a non-emotional, business manager’s eye. Consider every aspect of the deal. Does it make business sense? Does it fit your plans and desires for your overall career? For where you are now, and where you hope to go?

Beyond that, take the time to consider these important factors: [Read more…]

When Publishing People Can’t Write

April 21, 2017 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

Query Their Skill Sets

It’s something of a “quiet provocation” I bring to you today—a point that lies deep within the industry: A lot of professional publishing people couldn’t write their way through a two-sentence blurb if their P&Ls depended on it.

Don’t worry, no names will appear here, I’m on a bloodless warpath.

But I was struck recently when a literary agent of considerable visibility in the industry contributed a blog post on query letter writing. Not that the world needs another word said, spoken, or thought about query writing, of course. Can’t we gather all the books, posts, and articles written on the tired, tortured, tedious topic of query letters and just yell, “Read Number 4,622!” when someone asks us for something special?

For our purposes here, never mind that the thing was about queries.

The problem is that the article was woefully badly written. Any agent worth her web site would have rejected the article along with the day’s query letters.

Subjects didn’t agree with verbs. And some of the verbs didn’t agree with life as we know it.
The entire article lived in Preposition Purgatory. (Your plane really does not “arrive into” London Heathrow.)
Human beings were reduced to inanimate objects. (We all know self-described writers that don’t know the word who, don’t we?)
Wooden? Stilted? Victorian? I’m still searching for an adequate term to describe the creaking formality with which this thing was written. This is a great sign of amateurism, by the way, as I’m sure you know. Good writers are able to communicate in a conversational English that gets out of its own way. This piece was in everyone’s way, a refrigerator fallen from the truck of author instruction.

And remember that in many cases—maybe most cases—a literary agent is an author’s first editor. Some agents do deep developmental work on manuscripts. More do multiple copy-edit jobs on their clients’ texts.

As a journalist covering publishing, I probably see examples of bad writing from industry people more frequently than most do. Maybe I approach a publisher with a series of questions for an article or I ask an agent to give me a few paragraphs of descriptive commentary about a special book that he or she is keen to promote at a trade show. What comes back frequently needs a lot of work.

So there’s my provocation for you today.

If you go to a doctor, you assume that he or she knows the difference between ibuprofen and penicillin. So why, when you turn to a publishing professional, should that person not know the difference in its and it’s?

[Read more…]

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What I’ve Learned in the Last 4 years as an Agent

November 6, 2015 By Guest

Today’s guest is Katie Shea Boutillier who has been a literary agent with the Donald Maass Literary Agency since 2011. She is the Rights Director handling the agency’s translation and audio rights, and selected film/TV and electronic rights. In addition, Katie focuses on her own client list of smart contemporary women’s fiction/book club; edgy/dark realistic YA; commercial-scale literary fiction; and celebrity memoir. She looks for projects with the perfect balance of plot and emotion. Katie loves novels that seek big truths, touch on important social issues, and explore unique family dynamics and unlikely friendships. She is a cum laude graduate of Marist College.

Connect with Katie on Twitter.

What I’ve Learned in the Last 4 years as an Agent

Last week marked my 4-year-anniversary with the Donald Maass Literary Agency . . . and a lot has happened. First, I’ve become the agency’s Rights Director, closing over 70 deals to-date. I’ve hit two agent milestones: held my first book auction and closed my first six-figure deal. While all along, I’ve become a wife and a mom.

With each passing year there have been beautiful moments, hardships, celebrations, and frustrations. Being an agent is challenging. I think we can all agree. We are advocates. We are set out to show the industry what we believe will work in today’s competitive market. We want others to hop on board with us, put a price tag on it, and give the author a chance to gain an audience. And it’s not easy. Our industry is constantly changing. But that’s no excuse. We must catch the wave of change and continue to ride. We must learn how to maneuver challenges. Learn what works and what doesn’t. Because at the end of the day, this is a business. And in every business, success is achievable. Focus on your strengths and defeat your weaknesses. Continue to be inspired.

The material I send out to editors must speak for itself. I must push my clients to the furthest limit when it comes to editorial. The stronger the material, the larger the advance. The bigger the buzz. The more copies sold. The more chance of longevity in a publishing career. The concept must attract a major audience, and it must feel different. [Read more…]

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False Summits–and How to Get to the Top Anyway

May 20, 2015 By Guest

Today’s guest is Harry Bingham, the (British) author of the Fiona Griffiths crime series, which has been critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. He also runs a couple of outfits, The Writers’ Workshop & Agent Hunter, that offer a variety of help and advice to new writers. Harry lives in Oxfordshire, England. He’s married and he and his wife are, this summer, expecting their second set of twins. They’re not terrified at all.

I’ve had over a dozen books published by some of the world’s biggest publishers. Some of those experiences have been wonderful, while others have been . . . not so great. I want to help other writers have the best possible experience of publication.

Connect with Harry on his blog and on Twitter.

False Summits–and How to Get to the Top Anyway

If you’ve ever hiked any distance in the mountains, you’ll know how elusive that final summit can feel. The loom of the mountain always shields your view, so your near horizon is filled with a crest which, as you approach, melts away into a new horizon, a new crest, another draining slog upwards. Never mind the actual ascent: that succession of false summits is wearying in itself. An inducement to despair.

If you know anything of what I’m talking about, you’ll also have a good sense of the life of an author. You want to write a novel? OK. That’s a tough gig, but you do what you have to do. You write away until you have a hundred thousand words of half-decent prose. Only then – whoops! – another summit looms. Gotta edit and correct and rewrite, till that half-decent prose becomes almost flawless.

[pullquote]Forewarned is forearmed. It’s important to realise that your job isn’t only about writing, and your job doesn’t finish once you get that book deal.[/pullquote]

And then you have to get a literary agent. And then you have to get a publisher. And perhaps, just possibly, you win an advance large enough to mean you don’t also have to haul garbage, or wait tables, or (horrors!) do anything else which is, like, an actual job.

And that has to be it, right? Manuscript, check. Agent, check. Advance, check. Plus, in this fantasy of ours, a big publisher ready to blast you into the stratosphere. No more false summits, surely. This is, this has to be, the very top.

Grumbles in Paradise

Well, yes. In theory. Only it’s no secret that my own experiences with publishers have been somewhat mixed, and you don’t have to hang around with authors for long to realise that plenty of them feel likewise. Indeed, when Jane Friedman and I surveyed more than 800 authors to find out what they thought of the firms that published them, we got a true measure of what authors actually think. [Read more…]

Are You Publishable or Not? Reading the Tea Leaves.

March 18, 2014 By Dave King

Flickr Creative Commons: stillthedudeabides

Writing never feels more lonely than after you’ve sent your manuscript out to every agent and publisher you can think of and gotten nowhere. Of course, you can always take comfort in the long list of massively successful books that were initially rejected by nearly everyone who saw them. But for every brilliant book that gets rejected out of blindness or stupidity, there are thousands that get rejected because they’re just not very good. How can you tell which camp you fall into?

The quality of your rejections are a good sign. Granted, form rejections don’t tell you much, but if all of your rejections are form letters, it’s probably time to either start a major rewrite or put this manuscript in a drawer and start the next one. (If your manuscript is getting repeatedly turned down on the query alone, you might want to take a second look at your query letter.) If you’re getting glowing rejections (“I love the book, but it’s not right for our list.”) then you’re probably doing something right and should keep sending the manuscript out — though you might want to refine your agent search to make it more likely it will hit the right desk. And it’s still a good sign even if you’re getting, “I love the book, but . . . “ If a publishing professional has taken time to give you free advice, then your manuscript is probably worth the effort.

You don’t have to rush to take the advice. Individual taste matters a lot in publishing, so don’t rip into your manuscript unless most of your feedback starts to agree. If three different professionals tell you your main character is off-putting, that’s the time to consider if you’d like to hang out with this person.

Independent readers may give you a fair assessment of your manuscript, though the quality of that assessment depends on the expertise of your reader. For ego support, there’s always your family and friends. Fellow writers in mutual critique groups offer a bit more know-how, since they’ve at least gone through the same struggles as you. But writers often help you by telling you how to write more like them, which isn’t much help to you. Realistically, the best way to get a detailed, expert assessment of your manuscript is to pay for it – to hire an independent editor. I know that, when I’m reading a client’s manuscript, I can’t cover more than 40 or 50 pages an hour, and it takes me at least three hours to write up an assessment. So if your manuscript is 300 pages long, you’re talking about an investment of ten or more hours’ work. If you hire an editor who’s thorough, expect to pay accordingly.

Be careful, though. There are plenty of scammers out there happy to give you the praise we all long for just to pry some money out of you. So be leery of praise from people with a vested interest — agents who ask a modest up-front investment to represent you, e-presses that will publish your book for a reasonable design and marketing fee, or small presses that promise to publish your book if you’re willing to have some editing done. Any one of these might steer you to you an in-house editorial “service” or a less than qualified editor who pays kickbacks.

Some years ago, two of my clients who’d had work done by one of these editorial mills were kind enough to send me copies of the critiques they’d gotten. When I compared the two, it was obvious the reports were at least half boilerplate – you could see where the blanks had been left for someone who had skimmed the manuscript to plug in a few individual details. Essentially, every manuscript got the same advice. It was the kind of “editing” that could have been done by a relatively bright high school freshman, and the authors were charged premium rates with the promise of publication dangled in front of them.

Then there’s Quoth the Cabbage. [Read more…]