Category Archives: Finding literary agents for writers

How to find a literary agent

August 1, 2013 · 11:13 am

The Next Thing I Learned

They don’t promote your book.

Nowadays, that seems like the kind of thing I should have known. With as much information as is available online, I assume everyone now knows that publishers no longer do any serious promotion unless you’re a celebrity. But I was truly naive.

Of course, they hadn’t paid me very much and didn’t have much to try to recover. In fact, they sold my book to their affiliate in England and made back the advance instantly. Moral: make them give you a couple of million in advance money, and then they’ll worry about getting it back.

They asked me for lists of famous people I knew who would read my book and write blurbs for it. I gave them lists of famous people, but I didn’t know any of them. They did send the book out for review. The reviews were extremely strong. They got it into some libraries. But that was the extent of it on their end. Maybe there were efforts I never heard about or saw.

I contacted local bookstores and got the book on the shelf in a couple of them. But I learned about bookstores. Your book–my book–wasn’t going to appear in Barnes & Noble or Borders or any of the bookstores then extant unless it had $$$$ behind it in advertising. Since it was a hardback (and they never sold the paperback), it didn’t appear on any drugstore shelves. I was advised to make the rounds of all the bookstores and find out who the book reps were and make friends with them and sell them on my book, so they would push it to the independent bookstores.

This is all so far away from the kind of person I was (still am) comfortable being that my efforts in this direction fell way short of a lick, let alone a promise. Self-promotion has never been easy for me. It’s why I can’t really pitch well. Besides, I was still working, making about 8K a year (a sum not as bad then as it would be now), and the idea of driving all over the country glad-handing book reps felt like something that wouldn’t happen unless I had a personality transplant. My agents and my editor both said, “Let go of it. Get on with the next book.” (I think today that translates into “Less tweeting, more writing.”)

At a few conferences I’ve been to, when the resident agents learn that you’ve been previously published, they ask for sales figures on your books. The idea seems to be that if you weren’t writing bestsellers then, you never will. KOTR sold, as best I can tell, about 20,000 copies. Not sure if this includes the later Bantam paperback. I have begun to think that I am almost better off not to tell some of these people that I ever was published. Let them think they’ve “discovered” me.

That is if I truly want to work with someone like that.

I have slowly come to believe that the ongoing changes in publishing are for the better. At least now you go in knowing that if anybody’s going to market, it will be you. I have read mixed reports and have mixed feelings about the various gung-ho marketing schemes people recommend, so I don’t know which will work for me. At least I also know now that I will not be getting the 2 million in advance and so that worry is off my mind. What a relief.

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Filed under Finding literary agents for writers, Myths and Truths for writers, Writers' conferences

Tagged as agents, creative writng, Editors, getting published, Marketing books, publishing, readers, writers' conferences, writing, writing novels

December 2, 2012 · 7:14 pm

Quick point

J and L made so little money off me that I am truly glad they even took the time to do what they did. They made 15%. I assure you they did not retire on that. I owe them much. I just wish I had called on them more and perhaps more insistently. I think I could have learned a great deal that I did not. I think they could have saved me some heartache if I had just asked.

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Filed under Finding literary agents for writers, Learning to write, looking for literary editors and publishers

Tagged as agents, getting published, learning to write, publishing, readers, writing, writing novels

November 4, 2012 · 10:44 am

Brave souls

So J and L had a 700-page manuscript to deal with.

Admittedly their investment was small–from the writer’s point of view, anyway. They had to pay whatever it cost them (before email and Facebook) to get it to publishers. They had to “talk it up” at lunches in New York, but I assume that my book was one of many they pitched. I guess they spent some time on the phone, but not, I also assume, long distance. They had to read it, of course, in order to decide they wanted to invest even this much. So these were their losses if the book did not sell.

Mine? I didn’t figure those. As far as I was concerned, I was going to write it anyway, whether it ever sold or not. I suppose I should have calculated opportunity costs. Could I have become a millionaire if I had invested all those hours in learning to beat the stock market or in becoming much sooner what I eventually became, a university professor? (Of course I would have been a biologist if I had planned better, not a writing teacher. Moms, don’t let your babies teach writing. . . .) But all I wanted to do was ride horses and write. Two guaranteed ways not to make money. But I have never regretted writing that book. Or riding horses. But that’s another story.

J and L said, we don’t like to edit. We don’t want to impose our views on what the editor will want, when you get one. At the time, that seemed smart. For that book, it probably was. But later, I wished I could have relied on them more as strong, knowledgeable readers. I have come to see readers willing to plow through and respond to drafts as essential to any writer’s attempts to find a market. Now I am hungry for the simplest chance to talk to someone about my work.

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Filed under Finding literary agents for writers, looking for literary editors and publishers

Tagged as agents, getting published, publishing, readers, writing, writing novels

October 17, 2012 · 8:25 pm

Being Trolled

Why agents go to conferences is not a mystery. They think, perhaps with good reason, they’re going to discover the next John Grisham, a prolific but hitherto undiscovered writer who has struck a vein without noticing that what is flowing out is lifeblood. I wonder, if one could ever know, what the stats are. How many eventual bestselling authors are discovered at conferences versus those who are “discovered” through steadfast efforts at publication in small magazines or through driven submissions to slush piles? No one seems to calculate such odds.

I do think that one stands a better chance of being “discovered” by new, hungry agents who hope to find and promote the next John Grisham than by those who already have quasi-John-Grishams in their “stables” (sorry to offend any agents happening by with my barnyard metaphor). That is what happened to me. J and L had both been editors at major publishing houses. They had decided their future lay in agenting rather than editing, and from the little I really know of what editors even at major houses get paid and what they go through, I suspect they were right. So they came to the conference I had recently begun attending, and there they “discovered” me and my seven-hundred-page manuscript.

L told me later, “When I saw you, I thought, ‘This girl has something to do with horses.'” I do not reveal this as a very good strategem to getting published: looking like you have something to do with horses. Or maybe it is. I have lost the ability to tell what might be the deciding factor. Oddly, I remember the dress I was wearing. It was powder blue and flowing, a bit longer than the dresses and “hot pants” I wore a decade earlier when I was writing the novel. I was a blonde then. I looked like I had something to do with horses. This sold. They asked me to send them the ms.

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Filed under Finding literary agents for writers, Writers' conferences

Tagged as agents, getting published, publishing, writers' conferences, writing, writing novels

October 10, 2012 · 8:36 pm

I conference

A lot of the chronology has blurred. This was all so long ago that “far, far away” refers to next door in comparison.

But.

I did undergraduate work at a Florida university. Because all I wanted to do in life at that point was ride horses, I didn’t finish: stopped 31 hours short of an English degree. But I had contacts there, whom I bugged with my deathless prose. The first professor I asked to read my opus was gentle and generous but not much help. I don’t recall what he said about my book. I do recall he had kept a test of mine on the metaphysical poets. “You’re the girl who writes really, really small.” (I may be allowed to brag that he’d kept the test because my answers were really, really good, not because he liked small handwriting. I have always been a good taker of every kind of test.)

I knew of, but had not taken courses from, a genial older professor who ran a yearly writers’ conference. I begged him to read one of my best chapters. He told me, “If the rest of it is as exciting as this, I don’t see why you can’t get published.”

Of course, the whole point is you can’t tell whether it’s all that exciting. Only readers can tell you that.

Anyway, it must have been that very spring I went to his conference. It was one of those that early on saw the benefit to inviting actual agents and actual editors to come and troll for new authors.

I have these things to say about my eligibility for getting trolled for: I was young. I was pretty. I had what might be called a “fresh innocence.” I smelled like the outdoors. I had a complete manuscript about the Kentucky Derby. I was trollable.

I was trolled.