We’ve talked about this some as it happened in comments, but this first post from Claire Holworth from earlier in the week tells a few more details. And some fantastic comments following about agents in this blog from Ted Mooney.
And remember, folks, this was a top, really top agent. Not a slush reader by any means. This is the problem with no regulation and letting someone else touch your money before you do.
There are NO rules anywhere in publishing that your check must be sent to your agent first.
Read Claire’s article here. (Go NOW before you read any more or none of the rest of this will make sense.)
Ted Mooney gave permission to respost a comment he made about the situation on a couple groups. It follows and is some great information about going alone with your books and his opinion on it.
Reposted with Author’s permission from LinkedIn/Books and Writers Group:
Ted Mooney • For my almost entirely negative experience regarding my sole literary agent, see Claire Howarth’s recent article in “The Daily Beast,” to be found here. I have been representing my most recent novel, “The Same River Twice” (Knopf 2010), entirely myself, with Gary Fisketjon as my editor, and not only have I had a much easier time seeing that things get done, but I also now know more about how Knopf works than almost anybody who actually is employed there, as the various departments do not communicate well with each other (true at any large publisher). As fewer and fewer agents are interested in anything but money, they make fewer and fewer of the phone calls necessary to be sure, for example, that the foreign rights are sold to the right houses, and so on. If you can possibly do without an agent (I simply got sick of the agents I was considering to replace my old one and submitted my MS to Gary myself), I would advised you to go solo. Only those writers just starting out and those who make millions every time they publish really need an agent, I’m coming to think. But I reserve the right to change my mind. Read Clare’s article, in any case; it’s almost unbelievable. In fact, though, she had to tone it *down* after consultation with legal counsel on both sides. It was all *much* worse.
Here’s Ted Mooney’s reply when asked for permission to repost to writer’s groups:
Post with my blessings. Claire’s article elicited responses from as far away as India and brought still more information on the HW affair to light. The one thing I forgot to include in my earlier posting is that if you represent yourself you will end up doing a good deal more work than you would if you had an agent. That’s because agent these days rarely follow up on “small” things once the initial (big money) sale is completed. Of course there are always magnificent exceptions–agents who work tirelessly and out of belief in your work and in literature in general–but, tellingly, they rarely take on new clients because they are actually busy doing all the work involved in bringing a book into the world. More and more agents these days come out of a business administration background rather than a literary one and deploy their energies wherever they determine the most money can be made for the agency. Of course a lot of writers like to have agents because the agent will provide (often false) comfort in stressful situations, leaving the writer unaware that the phone calls that might have solved whatever problem is causing the stress were never made because they were deemed by the agent to be insufficiently remunerative. That’s why so many agents have too many clients; they want to have only the big payoff moments while avoiding the scut work. If you represent yourself, you will see how much of this scut work there is, and you will do it. Why? Because in the end no one cares as much about what happens to your book as you do. Period.
Fascinating read, Dean. Thanks for posting that. Do you mind if I spread the link to this post far and wide? More writers need to at least add this to their storehouse of knowledge.
I’m not in charge of this one, it’s getting reposted to a bunch of writer web sites with permission from Mooney. It’s come across three of mine in the last few hours actually. So feel free.
A number of Mooney’s comments resonate strongly with me, such as his experience that too many agents don’t exert themselves beyond collecting their commission on the advance, and also his experience that, without an agent, it’s actuall easier to get things done, in terms of business and the publishing process, to follow through, to know what’s going on in the publishing house, etc. It has long been my experience, too, that, far from facilitating the publishing process or enhancing communication with the publisher, agents tend to be so reluctant to do anything other than cash the advance check, so uninterested in what’s actually happening in the publishing process, so keen not to rock the boat at a publisher, etc. that, in fact, most of them make the publishing process murkier, more vague, and LESS communicative, rather than enhancing it.
My own consistent experience is that problems are much more likely to get addressed and questions answered when I’m the one in charge of dealing with the publisher, rather than the agent being the conduit. And yet the whole protocol tends to be that an agented author is supposed to go THROUGH the agent to communicate with the publisher. To such an extent that–get this!–in most agent-author-editor relationships, after the editor reads the delivered MS, who does he call first? NOT the author. The agent. The author–the person who actually spend months or a year or more WRITING the book… is SECOND on the list, AFTER the agent, of whom the editor calls after reading the book. (Which was PARTICULARLY ridiculous every single time this happened to me, since none of my agents ever READ any of my work, and were therefore hearing an editor’s reaction to a book they were totally unfamiliar with.)
See? I got STARTED agai.
Anyhow, good to see Ted Mooney talking about this! So good to see yet another going public with this minority view. Here’s hoping the notion that you don’t have to have an agent, and that NOT having one works better for a percentage of writers, ceases to be treated as the crackpot view of a few fools on the lunatic fringe (albeit heavily contracted and making a full-time living at this, even in this tight market) and become accepted as another viable business model for managing a writing career.
I’d already heard about that, but thanks for posting Ted Mooney’s comments. I hadn’t seen them yet.
Best quote from the whole thing reflects perfectly what you (and Laura and several others) have been saying all along: “Because in the end no one cares as much about what happens to your book as you do. Period.”
For me that sums it all up. Even the best super-duper agent who does actually do everything right, they still have other clients to think of.
I think the last sentence said it all.
Saw this on linkedin, when he first posted it. It was a shock at first to see the issue had climbed so far into the business.
I am so glad I found this site before I wasted my time trying to get an agent. I’m going to post my first novel to Kindle in the next couple of days; instead of rewriting it to death, I’m onto the next book. I will continue to work directly with publishers, something I never considered a year ago.
Dean and Laura – thank you so much!
You have saved me countless hours of fruitless work.
Kat, good luck on the book sales, and guess what, writing the next book will be the best thing you can do to help your writing. Moving forward and writing new material is the best practice and the only way to keep learning. Congrats.
thanks for providing this kind of info. Dean.
The cracks in the agent-to-editor model just keep getting wider. I have a hunch that as more water flows over the spillway, more and more writers at all levels are going to start coming out with the dirt — in public — about their bad agent experiences.
Which will not, of course, deter anyone stuck on the Agent Myth from proselytizing heavily for what they see as The One True Way — and decrying all claims or criticisms to the contrary.
I’ve all but stopped trying to publicly champion writer-to-editor flow, at least on the few writers forums I frequent. I’ve been labeled all kinds of stupid things — openly and in confidence — for daring to suggest that the agent-to-editor model is a) not working the way it’s advertized and b) not iron-clad necessary in the 21st century.
The Agent Myth is going to die a hard death, and take a lot of people and their careers with it. And the bizarre part about it is that scads of writers will continue to praise and defend the “ship” even as it sinks beneath the waves.
Brad, the more I learn and the more I try to share what I learn, in an effort to inform others just as Dean and Laura and Kris have informed us, the more I encounter stiff resistance. It’s almost not worth the effort. Effort I should probably just be spending writing my next book or short story, really.
Jim, totally agree with you. I point people to Dean’s site–since he has a hundred novels behind him–and then drop the subject. Well, ok, sometimes I *repeatedly* point them here, but . . . *shrug* Oh, well!
I sure appreciate people pointing out these chapters, but caution, folks, as some of you have learned. The myths are frighteningly powerful and important to many new writers. Sadly the myths will kill the careers of most of these writers quickly. But they will hold onto them all the way down and wonder why it never worked for them, and there’s not a darned thing any friend can do I’m afraid. Watched it and fought that battle with friends for decades. You just can’t change someone who does not want to be changed.
So thanks, but caution. Let me take the heat. The Dean Wesley Smith name can handle it, since I’ve sat in all three major chairs in this business and been around more than two decades doing this full time and have almost a hundred novels under my belt.
Brad said: “The Agent Myth is going to die a hard death.”
I’ve seen proof of this in several writer discussion lists. The more stories of bad agents out there, the more tenacious people seem to want to hold on to this myth and if the myth is challenged, some writers get really defensive and angry. I think it really does boil down to wanting someone to take care of them. A lot of people seem to believe this will give them freedom to just write when I think it creates shackles because you’re listening to someone else tell you what to write and rewrite.
I would rather write what I want to write and figure out how to sell it. Everyone’s career is different and what works for one won’t necessarily work for someone else but we can all learn from each other and share ideas. I’d rather make my own mistakes and be learning than be ignorant of my business and rely on an agent. If that agent turned out to be a bad one, I’d have double the work to do, not only to learn my business but to also overcome my own expectations of how it was supposed to go.
It really is all about being responsible.
Right square on the money there, Rebecca. Thanks!
What I’d like to know, as a newbie writer, is how much influence I’m going to have with an editor–how I’m supposed to know (or figure out) “what goes on in the publishing house” and how to be a part of it. I’d love to learn this, since I’ve come to the uncomfortable conclusion that you’re just as likely to get hosed by an editor who is making poor decisions as you are by an agent coming between you and the publishing process. If your editor is hell-bent on disaster, is there anything you can do about it? Can you call marketing and say, “Look, you’re about to publish 200,000 copies of a first novel by a complete unknown. What are you doing for promotion beyond my web site? What can we do to support sales, besides me going on Facebook?”
If I can’t count on agent doing this on my behalf, how do *I* do it?
Laura said, “without an agent, it’s actually easier to get things done, in terms of business and the publishing process, to follow through, to know what’s going on in the publishing house, etc.”
Easier if you know HOW. So how do you find that out?
I admit that I have so little clout at this point in my career, I can’t imagine doing any worse than an agent when it comes to knowing what’s happening with my book once it’s been sold. How do you learn what you need to know about the production process and how to interface with it? Once you’ve sold to a publisher, for instance, is it best to go to NY and meet with your book’s team? Or is that a no-no?
I know you can fire an agent. I suppose you can fire an editor, too. But at what cost? I’ve learned the hard way that getting published is easy–but getting published WELL is the hard part. I’d like to know what, if anything, I can do to boost my chances for the latter. You guys seem to know. Beyond selling my own foreign rights, what else can you influence along the production process?
First off, Ginny, what happened to you is a wild exception. And about 99% of the time when it has happened, it has worked. You were the exception on that, I’m afraid. You got a good thing happen to you and it turned sour.
But to answer your question, can you help the process by having the agent out of the way? Yes, and you don’t have to know that much. Just ask logical questions, offer to help where possible, and learn. Can you go to New York and meet everyone. Sure, they would love to see you. Could you have stopped what happened with your wonderful first book? Nope.
Here’s the problem with the situation you describe. You have an editor who is excited about the prospects of a good book selling well. THAT’S WHAT WE ALL WANT. You have a publisher behind the editor with the same level of excitement, and a sales force with the same level of excitement. THAT’S ALL FANTASTIC!! There would be no reason to try to SLOW down this excitement. In fact, you want to ride with it and enjoy it because it doesn’t happen at huge numbers very often.
Does it always work? No, as you discovered. (And with me saying that about four of the writers who have attended workshops here who now have huge first deal sales are going “It DOESN’T?”) Does the author pay the price? Yes. It is a sad truth in publishing that nothing is for sure, and publishers make mistakes with print runs that hurt authors and there is not one darned thing you can do about it.
But any book going out at those numbers will have good sales underneath the poor percentage. Yours did, Ginny, I know. You had an agent who got in the way at that point, as we’ve talked. Ginny has an agent horror story that makes many Laura and I have shared seem pale. If you had been dealing directly with your editor and other publishers with those sales numbers, you would have had a second book in a heart beat. Agent problem is what caused your following problems, which leads me to your next question:
“How do you do it?” “How do you find out how to help in New York?”
One detail at a time, one book at a time, one visit to New York at a time. One workshop with long time pros and editors at a time. That’s the answer.
Can you fire an editor? No. Especially not for being excited and loving your book and thinking it will sell well. But you can move on and write the next book.
Everything, folks, everything Laura and I have been saying in all these comments has one underlying theme. WRITE THE NEXT BOOK AND JUST KEEP GOING. Laura and I and others have relayed some ugly truths about what can happen, mostly with agents and now a few exceptions with editors. Long term writers just suck it up and write and sell in some fashion the next book. We are writers.
Ginny, my advice to you is simply use your real number sales as part of your promotion for selling your next book to a new house. Say something like…”my first novel sold 80,000 or 50,000 or what ever copies and here’s my next book.” In this tight world, editors will jump and be excited to have someone with your record and sales numbers. Now it’s up to you to get the agent and the memory of the first shot out of your mind and go forward.
Everyone, welcome to the real world of publishing when even good stuff can turn sour at times. Even having editors and sales forces excited can sometimes hurt an author. It happens, not often, but it happens.
So what is the lesson Ginny has opened the door to here? Writing is all that matters. Write the next book and release it into the great wilds of publishing and then turn your focus back to writing the next book and the next. If you start looking at every book as an event, you are doomed. Just enjoy the writing, have fun, everyone. Crap will happen. Just think business when dealing outside of the writing and some of the crap won’t happen, but some will, for the oddest reasons. Like your editor got pregnant or went back to law school or got fired or believed in your book too much and pushed it too hard. Crap happens, write the next book.
And if you are new to these chapters, go back and read my chapter on “Book as Event” to help you with this thinking.
Ginny, thanks for the comments. Your situation is really interesting in that the editor did everything right, but screwed up at the same time. More than likely it wasn’t the editor, but the sales force and publisher that figured wrong numbers. And the cover didn’t help. It cost you a lot of heart ache and your stupid agent made it worse. But you don’t want to think about stopping excitement for your fantastic writing. You want to hope it happens again, and this time with you in control and helping. Now, back to work. (grin)
What Dean said.
(I think that’s the third time today I’ve written that sentence. (g))
You learn as you go along. And the SINGLE MOST COMMON AND MOST SERIOUS MISTAKE that writers make, the one truly CAREER KILLING MISTAKE is… not writing the next book, and the next book, and the next one after that.
I’ve lost half a dozen publishers during the course of my career–by “lost,” I mean they either dumped me, or they folded while I was under contract there (or folded the branch that was publishing me). The reason I still have a career is that I keep writing and submitting, writing and submitting, writing and submitting.
Sure, there are OTHER reasons I still have a career, and a pretty decent one these days… but they ALL roll out of THAT reason. THAT reason is the one non-negotiable factor in my having a longterm writing career (or, indeed, a writing career AT ALL–but ESPECIALLY a longterm one). Write the next book, and the next book, and the one after that, and keep submitting and submitting them until you’ve exhausted all markets for them, then watch the market and send them back out AGAIN when editors are replaced, new markets emerge, or the market in general goes through (yet another) sea change.
As to how do you learn everything you need to know? You learn by doing (MOSTLY by doing), and you also learn via the self-education we just talked about in one of these recent post-discussions here.
After all, -I- don’t know everything I need to know; I’m still learning. I still ask my editor questions almost every time we talk. I also regularly ask questions of other people at the publishing house. I regularly read industry news and info, I regularly read articles about the industry, I monitor and read books about the industry, and I ask other pros their experience and advice.
What Laura said. And I also am still learning all the time, and hungry for the knowledge.
And to be honest, I’ve learned a ton from every mistake I made. I don’t mind failure or mistakes. I HATE making the same mistake twice.
Keep writing, keep learning, keep sending stuff out. Only way to do this business for any length of time. Great post, Laura. Thanks!
Yep, learning from MISTAKES is a huge educational tool! (wg)
How do I know to send an editor a deal memo after we’ve talked but before the first draft of the contract is presented to my lawyer.
Because one time when I did NOT do that, it turned out to be a MISTAKE. The editor and I disagreed about a key point that had been discussed. No ill intention on either side, just a misunderstanding. But we only discovered this weeks into contract negotiation between my lawyer and the publisher’s legal dept, by which time that misunderstanding was a pretty serious one. Whereas, had I written a deal memo to the editor right after getting off the phone the first day we had a deal, we’d have discovered the misunderstanding then and there, and cleared it up then and there.
So now I know to always write a deal memo right after getting off the phone, reviewing the things we’ve verbally agreed on.
Or, in small stuff. I recently contacted the production manger at my publisher to ask if I’m still supposed to use “straight quotes” rather than “smart quotes” in my MSs. For reasons too convoluated to bother relating here, I’ve always written in “smart quotes” and (ibid) I wondered if I was supposed to change that. I’m not. (Which is good, since I am a creature of habit.) But it’s an example of how minute my questions can be. And I ask questions all the time. ALL the time!
“And the bizarre part about it is that scads of writers will continue to praise and defend the “ship” even as it sinks beneath the waves.”
This statement reminded me of a movie quote.
“This ship can’t sink!”
– J. Bruce Ismay, TITANIC
And of course there was the response from the shipbuilder, Thomas Andrews, delivered brilliantly by Victor Garber:
“She’s built of Iron, Mr. Ismay. I assure you, she can. And she will.”
I’m not in agreement that the agent business will sink entirely, because that’s not how things work. Enough authors will keep it floating, and it will change just enough to keep sailing, albeit slowly.
Wow. That’s quite an extended metaphor. Sorry about all that.
I hear you, Dean, I do. What’s missing for me is where my agent should have stepped in and didn’t, what she could have done if she *had* stepped in and what her limits would have been. That’s the kind of thing I need to know to learn from this. If I’m going to do her job, I need to know where she got in the way–by doing too much or not doing enough–so I don’t make that mistake again. At this point, even after that experience, I am still fairly clueless as to what I could have done to prevent it–and I certainly don’t want to go there again!
Hmmm. I don’t suppose you and Kris would consider doing a workshop on what goes on in a publishing house and where, how and what an author can influence or impact what happens there. You would be uniquely qualified, on many levels…
Almost done with the sequel, btw, and partway done with the third book in the series. Thanks for reminding me to keep my nose to the grindstone!
Ginny, again, nothing really went wrong with your book except what you and the agent did after the sales figures came in. Up until that point, you had a dream going on, a first book hitting big. Nothing at all wrong with that and nothing you would ever want to stop.
Where your agent failed and failed completely is not realizing that the huge numbers your book sold, even though not up to what was expected by the editor, were still HUGE numbers. And she had a lick of brain, and hadn’t been near death, she would have jumped and run with that number and got you a great deal with a new publisher that your old publisher would have gotten into the fight for.
Again, nothing in the publishing house went wrong at all with your books. Books often have higher expectations than the final numbers, but everyone in publishing (except your agent it seems) knows this and sure use those numbers.
What you should have done is PUSH a follow up using those numbers and the moment your agent got cold feet, fired the idiot. Your sales numbers were to die for. Your mistake, a natural mistake for all of us who bought into the myths early, was to listen and believe the agent. The editor of course would have cold feet, but with those proven numbers, a hundred other editors would have been chomping at the bit.
So trying to figure out what went wrong inside the publishing house is where your focus is just flat wrong. NOTHING WENT WRONG. Your book got a wonderful push and sold great numbers. What went wrong was you and your employee in the follow up. Sorry to be so blunt, but when you have success and call it failure, it ain’t the publisher’s fault. Sure, they pushed TOO HARD on your book. About 99 of 100 authors reading this would only dream of that happening to them. The problem is your employee and the ultimate fact that you didn’t fire the person and use those fantastic sales numbers to get a second book and continue to build.
You asked, I be blunt. (grin)
Some of the best advice ever given anywhere, and applicable to a huge number of situations, including pubishing situations, is in THE HITCH HIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY. Namely:
Don’t panic.
Sounds like your agent panicked, Ginny. Which is not what a writer wants in a business advisor. (Much like “colorful risk-taker” is not what one wants in a tax accountant.)
The very best way to learn from this mistake: Write the next book and start trying to sell it; and the next; and the next. Figuring out what to do differently will occur most fruitfully in a different publishing process. Learning is very good; and learning by DOING is the best way of all to learn.
Very often, figuring out what TO do is a question of not repeating anything that already has failed to work well. It’s also a question of realizing that (as has been said before here), whatever you do to solve a problem, it’s not actually going to lead to an editor coming to your home with a gun to kill you. So why NOT try something you want to try in order to solve a problem?
Unable to get any straight answers from an editor once, I actually went into the publisher’s production department (during a trip to New York) and sat down with the production manager for over an hour to sort it out.
Who DOES that? Well, I did it. And–wait for it!–no one shot me.
I probably wasn’t particularly WELCOME in the production department… but I cared about solving the problem much more than I cared about how much they wanted me there or liked me.
Obvously, “physically go to the production department and don’t leave until the problem is solved” isn’t in any guidebook to the profession, nor is it advice you’re ever likely to hear at the bar. But when nothing else was working, that looked to me like another possible way to try solving the problem, and so I tried it. (And, in retrospect, I don’t know how else the problem WOULD have gotten solved, frankly. It was a VERY bizarre situation.)
We learn by doing–and by avoiding the stuff that didn’t work last time. (Such as your agent panicking. Lesson: Panic doesn’t work; don’t let anyone involved in your business do it again.)
Laura
Oh, and what I learned TO do, from that incident? Whenever possible (it isn’t always; but it often has) develop a direct relationship with someone in production.