Jan 31 2010
Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Agents Can Help with Careers
Kris and I in workshop after workshop, in conference after conference, give the same advice over and over. WRITE WHAT YOU ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT, THEN TRY TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SELL IT.
The myth: Agents can give good career advice to writers.
This chapter on agents to me is the most important of all the agent chapters. Agents thinking they can give career advice to writers is so wrong in so many ways, it’s going to hard to figure out where to start first. And it disgusts me in so many ways, I’m going to have a certain level of problem keeping balanced on this. Fair warning. I think this myth is flat dangerous to any artist working.
So let me start first with the “art” aspects of writing and work to the business.
ART vs AGENT CAREER PLANNING MYTH
Every long-term writer I know does their best with every project. We all put our hearts and souls into every story, into every novel, into every project. There are no exceptions. Sometimes we hit, sometimes we miss, sometimes we love what we wrote and can’t sell it, sometimes we love what we wrote, critics hate it. Sometimes we hate what we wrote, critics love it.
But, without fail, we always do our best at the time we were writing the project. That’s Given #1.
Given #2 is that every writer should write what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, or what they love. From the passion comes true art. (I have started two comic book stores and own over 100,000 comic books. When I got to write X-Men and Spider-Man, I was writing what I loved deeply and felt frightened and challenged to even have the chance.)
Given #3. No writer ever should think for one moment about a project selling either before or during the writing phase. Ever. You try writing to market, to fad, to trend, and you might as well find another job.
So, putting all three together, you come up with a very clear statement that I repeat over and over and over.
Write what you love, what you are passionate about, (or as King says, what scares you), then figure out how to sell it when you finish.
Let me repeat: SELL IT WHEN YOU FINISH!!!
So along comes the agent myth about helping a writer plan a career.
Now understand, I have said over and over and over again that I have no problem with a writer hiring an agent. But for heaven’s sake, do it with solid business practice in mind and a clear head. Clear out the myths. You might just very well end up with a an agent you can work with for a very long time.
So back to this myth about agents. Writer believes that some agent can help them plan their career and what to write next. They take advice blindly from an agent who doesn’t really know them or their work or what they love and hate, some agent who they have not even bothered to check out (see previous chapters and comments), a stranger who is more concerned with their own business than what is best for an artist.
Here is the problem. Some young writer gets excited, does all the work, learns the craft, and writes a book he is passionate about. And then starts following the myths.
Myth: Rewriting is good, so agent tells young writer how to “fix” the book, so young writer dumbs his passion in his work down to what some stranger (agent) thinks might sell. (Yes, rewriting is career advice because the agent always says something along the lines of “I think this will sell better if you do this and this.”)
Myth: Agent takes the book out to a bunch of editor friends and actually gets a small advance. Author is happy about the sale and ignores the fact that it’s not his book much anymore. It sold, that’s all that is important. Any thought of art is long gone at this point. His name is on the cover and he has made it. That’s where all the thinking is for the writer.
Myth: Agent now thinks they know what the young author needs to do, so tells them what to write next. Young writer hates it, thinks he has already written that book the first time, doesn’t want to write the same thing again, but does as agent says. Doesn’t like the final product because it has no passion, agent doesn’t like it, and off into rewrite myth they go.
What I have seen hundreds of times is that young writers stop their careers right there. Second book was no fun, third book was pure torture, why bother, sales were not that good anyway, and writer stops writing. I would to.
This myth kills artists.
This myth combined with all the aspects of the other agent and sales myths, force young artist after young artist to compromise, think about selling before they write a word, move away from passion into safe sales, and thus into losing the very reason and passion the writer was writing in the first place. And when you lose the reason to write, the love of writing, the passion to write, you soon just stop writing.
It takes a very, very powerful self-belief to stand up to these myths and just write what you want, at the speed you want, and mail to who you want after you are finished. Yet to be a true artist, a true long-term professional writer, you have to learn to stand up for your writing and your art.
Is all this easy to learn? No. Darned hard, actually.
But to be a true artist, write what you want. Never write to market.
PERSONAL BELIEFS vs AGENT CAREER PLANNING MYTH
Now, this is a fun area because when you look at it, this myth becomes just flat silly on the surface.
You live in Outback small town. You were raised by some combination of humans, have friends that makes up some combination of humans, believe in some combination of religious beliefs, have some combination of writing talents, and have a very certain combination of fears, passions, and likes and dislikes.
In other words, you are an individual, a one-of-a-kind writer. That’s what makes your voice unique and your writing different from everyone else.
The agent is also a unique person, with certain likes and dislikes and beliefs in what sells and what doesn’t and who will buy what and why and how every writer should follow the recent trend and have a vampire do something on page three.
So you, young writer, believe in this myth of career planning, trust some stranger to tell you what to write. The stranger has a different upbringing, a different set of values, and no idea at all who you really are as a person. They don’t know your voice or what makes you unique. In fact, to them, you need to be more like everyone else.
Yet you let the stranger tell you what to write. And then you wonder why you are not passionate about your writing anymore. Duh.
From the fact that each of us is different, each of us is unique, it should become clear that no writer should ever listen to anyone else, family, spouse, kids, workshop, or agent to tell them what to write next.
Just write your own book. That way lies success. Anything else is just a disaster or failure waiting to happen.
BUSINESS vs AGENT CAREER PLANNING MYTH
Agents flat don’t know a writer’s business. That is a truth. Some may think they do, but they don’t understand writer cash flow, don’t understand how writers make money, let alone how much time and effort it takes us to produce a product. They don’t know and shouldn’t be expected to know. (If you think all your writing money comes through your agent, wow do you have a lot to learn about the business of being a writer.)
But to an agent only concerned with their own business (which writers do not understand either), they want to sell books. And if there is a current trend, agents want their clients to write into that current trend, even though a trend is usually two years old by the time an agent catches a whiff of it.
I had an agent call me four years after the vampire craze started and ask if I had a vampire novel. Wow, that was a human ahead of the curve. Not. Another agent called me after the Titanic movie became a hit and said, “Didn’t you publish a book about the Titanic once?” I said I had a novel that partially set on the Titanic, but that was it, and it didn’t fit. Agent didn’t believe me and wanted to see it, so I sent it and then agent wrote me a snippy note asking why I thought that book would ever fit being reprinted. I just laughed and said nothing.
So, because the agent thinks it would be good business for you to sell another book just like your last one, or worse yet, just like the one they just sold for another client, they tell you to write that. And if that one sells, they tell you write it again. And again. And again, until finally it doesn’t sell anymore and they drop you.
Now understand, I am not talking about series characters, or writers who love to write just mysteries or just science fiction. Back to the top. Write what you love first and foremost, then worry about how to sell it. If you love mysteries, write them. If you love science fiction, write that. If you have a series character you love to spend time with, keep writing books with that character.
But if the only reason you are writing the next mystery is because your agent wanted you to write it when your passion has moved to romantic suspense, then you are in trouble.
To an agent’s business, it makes great sense to tell writers to write the same book over and over again.
To a writer’s business, it makes no sense to write anything they are not passionate about. To do anything else dooms the business.
Speed Advice from all three perspectives: Art, Personal, and Business.
Well, every agent I know will utter the phrase: “Slow down and take your time and do your best work.”
That is career advice shows ZERO understanding of how writing is done from the creative side of the brain, how each writer writes at their own natural speed, how slowing down and writing from a critical perspective usually creates complete crap. The statement shows no understanding at all of how art is created by great writers.
And, of course, it shows no understanding at all of you as a person. Or even your writing methods. You are unique and maybe the best advice to you would be speeding up, or cutting down on rewriting, or doing some rewriting. The agent doesn’t know. They just spout a myth at you like it’s good career advice, even though every writer is completely different.
To an agent’s business model of only needing one or so books a year from an author, it makes complete sense to say such stupidity.
But to a writer’s business model, where more product means more money, more chance of hitting it big, more chance of creating art, unnaturally slowing down is just stupid business advice.
Some projects write fast, some write slow, some art has been created quickly, some art took longer. Study the history of writers and how long it actually took artists in the past to write something to completely understand this.
But the key is, you are unique, write at your own speed what you want to write.
PUTTING A BOOK AWAY CAREER ADVICE.
This is yet again the stupidest career advice ever given to a writer. Some agent will say, “Why don’t you put that book away and work on the next one.”
My response is “While I’m working on the next one, why don’t you quit looking for excuses to not work and mail the book to five more editors.”
But, of course, you would never say that because they would mail it dead, meaning they would kill it in their cover letters to editors just to prove themselves right. But what you do is fire them, take the book back and mail it yourself while you work on the next book. Duh.
Never let anyone tell you to shelve a book for any reason. ANY REASON. And reasons agents give that seem logical to young professionals are things like:
—”Your career isn’t ready for this book.” Huh?
—”This book clearly isn’t strong enough for you to break in with.” Says who?
—”We got five rejections and it’s not working. Write the next book and we’ll see what we can do.” Lazy SOB.
Let me say this again. NEVER let anyone tell you to NOT market a book. Not your spouse, not your workshop, and certainly not some stranger who has a business card that says agent on it. Put your work in front of people who can buy it and keep it there. That’s good business. Nothing short of that is.
Again, back to a point I have made over and over in the other agent chapters in this book. Agents are not trained in any fashion. They have no schooling for agents, no organization that polices them. They have not gone to any publishing business school. They have nothing but a business card and an opinion.
So it’s bad enough that we writers trust them with our money, with picking editors to mail something to, with trying to get our books into Hollywood or overseas.
But it gets worse when we let an agent step into our writing offices in any fashion and give career advice. They are not writers, so they wouldn’t know good career advice it it hit them. They are not interested in writer’s careers, only their own anyway. So any advice would just be focused on what was best for them, not for you.
And they don’t know you as a person.
In summary:
—Write what you love, what you are passionate about, what scares you, what you want.
—Never, ever write to market. Just go into your writing space or office and be an artist.
—Then, when the project is finished, worry about how to sell it.
—Never, ever let anyone tell you what to write. It will kill your writing and your career faster than anything ever will.
Trust your own skills, your own voice, keep learning, and enjoy the writing.
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Copyright 2010 Dean Wesley Smith
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This is part of my inventory in my bakery now. (Confused on that, read the last Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing post about making money with writing.) I’m giving you this small slice as a sample. I’m giving you a taste, but not selling any of the pie. If you feel this helped you in any way, toss a tip into the tip jar on the way out of the Magic Bakery. If you can’t afford to donate, please feel free to pass this article along to others who might get some help from it. Every week or so I will be adding a new chapter on the myths and sacred cows of publishing. Stay tuned. Upcoming are chapters on bestsellers, research, rejections, and so much more. This business has a lot of myths. An entire book full.
Thanks, Dean
Yup.
I once showed my (then) agent the first couple of chapters of a new project. Agent said: That doesn’t grab me. Why don’t you write something like The Golden Compass?
A while later I had finished the project and sent it to the agent. Agent said: I told you not to write that.
That agent soon became an ex-agent.
Hi Dean,
Not quite to the place in my writing career where all these posts about agents are of immediate importance (though I am bookmarking them fur future reference), but this piece of advice really hits home:
“No writer ever should think for one moment about a project selling either before or during the writing phase. Ever. You try writing to market, to fad, to trend, and you might as well find another job.”
It’s a big, big problem I have. Just recently I was working on a short story, and as I neared 7,500 words, I thought, “Once I cross this point it’s going to be harder to sell.” Don’t know why I thought that, just did. Luckily, I’ve been following your blog for a while, so I knew that was the WRONG way of looking at things.
Thanks for these wonderful posts! They’ve been a tremendous help.
In this post you admonish us to “Never write to market.”
Yet the description of the Denise Little Short Story Workshop, which you co-teach, includes this: “You will be required to send a story in written to order[.]”
Is your advice to short story writers different than your advice to novelists–as this seems to indicate–and, if so, why?
Michael,
Yup, and the first assignment is to write a science fiction story set on the edge of the galaxy. Fun, actually. But Denise Little is a workshop for professional writers and that makes a huge difference.
There are times when a professional writer must write to an assignment. Or at least some of us. Steve King has. Lawrence Block and Joyce Carol Oates have. For a professional writer, it’s a way of stretching and having some fun. One of the keys to writing to an assignment is to write your own story inside the assignment. Those are the ones that work. But unless you know how to write your own stuff, you’ll never be able to put your own voice and story inside a general area.
I have turned down many an anthology assignment because when offered, I looked at the idea, at the type of story I would need to write and it just wasn’t my type of story. I only accept assignments that fit me as a writer and that would be fun for me to write.
So, in other words, I write to assignment only when I want to, not when someone tells me to. And especially when some agent tells me to. I listen a lot more to editors than agents, and that’s the truth.
Some of the professional writers at Denise Little workshop will discover they can’t write to every assignment, which is a good thing to understand about your own writing, others the assignment will hit square in their own writing area. Denise Little is a class, a teaching place, and that’s the place to try writing to assignment. Not because your agent has an editor friend who likes vampires in church conspiracy stories.
Michael – I’m not presuming to speak for Dean here, but in my understanding and experience, writing to market and writing to order are different things.
With the former, you might see a lot of, say, werewolf stories being published and think that that’s what you should write. But all those stories were written months (or more) ago and editors are now looking for something different. Writing to what you perceive the market to be means you’re chasing tail lights.
Writing to order is when you get an invite from an anthology editor: “I’m putting together a book on werewolves in space. Do you have something?” The correct answer is “yes”, and then you get writing.
Alastair, right on the money.
Michael, one more point about your question. When an editor asks, all bets are off. Decide if it is something you want to write and can write and if it fits for you. But keep the passion in the decision.
For example, when Kris and I were first invited to write a Star Trek book, I almost fainted. Not kidding. I was a high school student in Boise, Idaho, going home on Friday nights to watch Star Trek instead of doing other things. (You know, the days before vcr and dvd). So when an invite came to me from an editor to write Trek, I was so passionate about doing it, I was scared almost to death. Thankfully, Kris was on that first book with me and got me through the excitement. The day I was sitting in New Mexico next to a Bantam editor and she turned to me and asked if I liked the Men in Black movie, I had a hard time not bouncing right off the chair like a little kid. When you get an assignment from an editor to write something you love, you are lucky as a writer, and I have been fantastically lucky.
As Alastair said, writing to assignment given by an editor is one decision every professional writer makes. Writing an assignment in a class in another. Writing because an agent says, “I might be able to sell a vampire novel.” is something to avoid at all costs.
Great question. Guess I should have covered that in the chapter. More than likely will in the final book form. Thanks.
Dean, you posted your answer to Michael while I was writing mine. Not that there’s much I’d disagree with.
Where I’d differ relates to our experience level differences. You can turn down anthology invites. You know what you’re likely to be better at and what you don’t like to write, and you have enough of a track record that editors will respect that.
I just had my first anthology invite (vs open submission). The subject wasn’t a sub-genre I’d written in and my gut reaction was to say “no”. That was fear of the unknown speaking, not experience, and I knew it. I also suspected that if I said “no” this time, I might not get another invite.
I ran an idea past the editor, he liked it, and liked the story. Still awaiting final decision depending on the right mix for the book. Worst case he says “no” and I’ll send it elsewhere. Meanwhile I’ve expanded my comfort zone.
Heck, my first sale was “write to order” for an anthology, although that was open submission rather than invite.
But for the most part I write what I want — and I have enough of a contrarian streak to sometimes write opposite to market.
Once again I’m left stunned after reading a new Sacred Cows post. I really can’t describe the profound effect these posts have had on me since I discovered them in December. I started to want to call it an awakening, but it’s really a RE-awakening. I don’t have a great deal of experience in the field — certainly not on the novel-length side, but everything you talk about is true. The horror-stories you tell and the things you explain to guard against when talking to agents — these are all things I’ve seen friends deal with (and traps I fear some have fallen into). One thing I would have never expected when I attended Clarion eleven years ago, is that here today I’d know so many writers of promise who have quit the business. I’m stunned that people would work so hard to break in, sell a few stories, write at least one novel, and gradually start to feel beaten down, disillusioned, and bitter. Feeling and talking like angry jaded hacks before they really even had a career to speak of. Every myth you’ve mentioned that certain agents believe and like to foist on clients (or blog readers) is something I’ve actually heard friends say agents have told them, or that I have read written on agent blogs, or in their how-to books. (In the forward of one such book I just happened to glance through this weekend, the agent actually complains about clients who ask him why he doesn’t send their book to a particular publisher, Viking for instance! Can you imagine? A mere writer asking an agent to send his work out — scandalous!) It’s frankly scary how dead on the money the se posts are with the actual myths as they are currently propagated on an unsuspecting generation of new writers hungry for career advice for any agent or other non-writer willing to dispense it.
WRITE WHAT YOU ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT, THEN TRY TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SELL IT.
That’s how I started. I think that’s how most writers start out. In my case the myths didn’t send me on a path of trying to work to pleas some agent. Instead they just depressed me, left me trunking novel manuscripts while I wait for the day I’m capable of writing a “breakout” (breakout of what, I wonder? I’m not even in!), and a semi-annual horrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when I thought about doing the required agent search. The solution was always there, right in front of me. Just like shorts, so with novels too: “Write what I’m passionate about, then try to figure out how to sell it.” That’s all I ever wanted to do in the first place. Today, coincidentally, or not, I wrote the final 1600 hundred words of a long suspense novel, AND the first 2000 words of my next novel, a contemporary fantasy. That one is a novel I never had any inclining of until a couple months ago. The words are just flowing.
Dean, thanks for giving me that back.
Alastair,
The invites are both fun and frightening at the same time, that I agree with. And even writing to a certain universe or an invite anthology, I stand by what I said. “Write what you want to write.” So when looking at an invite, all of us need to decide “Do I want to write this?” and of course, “If I say no, will I be invited back?” Those are decisions in writing what you want to write FOR AN EDITOR.
Again, can’t begin to stress the difference. Writing for an editor, or rewriting for an editor which even Heinlein’s Rules say is fine, is completely different that writing for an agent who has no credentials, doesn’t know your writing, and will give up after five submissions.
So agreeing with you completely, Alastair. Thanks for the comments.
Wow, Michael, you are more than welcome. And thanks! For the wonderful comments.
I wish most of these comments weren’t coming from my own experience, but alas, they are. I am writing more words now than I ever have at any time in my career and enjoying the process more. Why now? Because just lately I finally got rid of a few of these myths myself. And interestingly enough, the more I study and work to explain these agent myths, the more I feel free as well.
So thank you. Keep writing and any questions come up, just ask. You know me, I’ll be blunt.
Cheers
Dean
Dean and Alastair,
Thanks for your comments. Your experiences seem consistent with mine and, yes, Dean, I think a post clarifying the difference between “writing to market” and “writing to assignment” or “writing to order” could be enlightening.
You might also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of “writing to order.”
“”I once showed my (then) agent the first couple of chapters of a new project. Agent said: That doesn’t grab me. Why don’t you write something like The Golden Compass?”"
Pati, I snarfed my morning coffee when I read this, since it’s such a familiar experience. On one occasion, I sent my then-agent a career-oriented letter talking about what I wanted to do with my two current projects and pitching a new one that I was passionate about. The response I got was that “instead of all these little books, can’t you write something like THE THIRTEENTH TALE?” [which novel was then the hot new trendy flavor-of-the-week on the NYT list]
First of all, I was both puzzled by and objected to any of the work in question being described as “little books.” Mostly, though, I was appalled at getting the pitch that most agents publicly say they never make… but which, in my own experience and observation, a large percentage of them inevitably seem to wind up making: “Can’t you write a book just like [insert name of current hot title or current hot author here]?”
And, as always seems to wind up being the case in my own personal experience with agents, the suggestion was clearly made by someone completely unfamiliar with my work, since I happened to have read THIRTEENTH TALE (well, about 1/4 of it) 2 weeks earlier, and anyone -remotely- familiar with my work would realize that I and that novel’s author have completely different and dissimilar strengths (and interests) as writers, for goodness sake. But I was once again dealing with an agent who (even after the agent had assured me this would NOT happen) didn’t know my work and therefore was ill-equipped even to represent it… never mind to GIVE ME ADVICE about writing. (I left the agency within the week. This wasn’t the only reason, it was just the final straw–the one that made me say: “Good God, man! What am I DOING here? “)
And that sort of thing has happened, oh, any number of times, with agents I’ve worked with -and- with agents whom I’ve queried. One agent whom I queried once, for example, was at least up front about this. He contacted me to say he was interested, but he didn’t want to see any of my published books, and he didn’t want to see my new proposal, which he said without even seeing it that he wouldn’t send out. Instead, he wanted me to write and send him four one-paragraph ideas with elements “x, y, and z” in them. He would pick which one he liked, tell me how to write it, and we’d go from there. This was a bigshot agent, head of a major agency, supposedly someone whom it would be quite a coup for me to get as an agent. I wrote back politely that this wouldn’t work, since I was interested in selling -my- proposal, but thanked him for his time in responding to my query.
There was another agent who spoke at a convention I was at a couple of years ago who openly said, over and over, throughout the course of her talk, that if vampires are hot, that’s what she tells her clients to write, and she expects them to listen; and if Regency historicals are hot, that’s what she tells her clients to write, and she expects them to listen. I thought the way she was talking ought to ensure that no one in that audience ever considered querying her (and based on the chatter afterward, that did indeed seem to be the case), but at least in that case the agent was being up front and public about this sort of behavior. Most of the time, you only find out an agent does this after you’re already a client and have sent the agent a proposal or a book to market.
OTOH, this is a complicated subject, rather than a simple one. One of my former agents, for example, is the only one of the four whom I don’t regret having hired, since this is the only one who ever gave me “value added.” It only happened once in our association, but it was a very important instance for me and gave a LOT of value added–enough to keep me at the agency for several years after I was -extremely- unhappy, since on that ONE occasion, I’d gotten a lot of value added. The agent looked at a couple of successive drafts of a synopsis of mine and made constructive suggestions that –without changing the story, theme, or characters in any way–made it a much more commercial project, as well as a much more complex and challenging one. This turned out to be very valuable advice, enhancing my craft, my career, and my income. I will never regret having hired that agent, despite a lot of problems, stress, and unhappiness that followed (as well as what eventually became a -very- acrimonious parting that causes me problems even now, years later), because that agent’s input on my work was so invaluable. However, that was ONE INSTANCE in about 15-16 years of working with four different agents (and getting advice from a number of others whom I queried), and I think the specifics of what happened are important to note: the agent’s suggestions on the project never involved changing theme, characters, tone, or story. Nor were the suggestions ever specific or intrusive. Rather, this was the one sole instance in my career where I was working on something which happened to be within the agent’s narrow area of expertise, a project really right for the agent’s buddies, and the agent had an excellent grasp of a couple of general principles about that market which I did not–not least of which because I did not, at that time, have the confidence that my skills were up to the challenge that the agent proposed I tackle.
So it always comes back to your own judgment. I’ve always treated “writing advice” from agents the way I treat editorial notes: Does it MAKE SENSE to me? When it does, I incorporate it; wne it doesn’t, I don’t. In the case of agents, on that occasion, it made a lot of sense to me. Otherwise, no agent has ever said ANYTHING to me about my writing that made any sense to me. But because I did have that one really valuable experience, I don’t have a blanket “rule” about this. I just think the writer really has to use her head, listen to her instincts, and decide what makes SENSE to her.
And, of course, as Dean notes, sometimes professional writers need to (or choose to) write to an assignment, and a BIG difference in that case is that we’re being offered MONEY to do it (whereas an agent offers only predictions or promises to write to -her- parameters).
I’ve written about 60 short stories, and all but -one- of those was on assignment. I’m a novelist, not a short fiction writer, so I’m really only interested in writing short fiction if I know up front that it’ll be paid for and published. Oterhwise, I’m just not passionate enough about short fiction to study the market and pursue publication for a short story. (The one time I did so, it took me 18 months to sell it, which was more effort than I wanted to go to a second time for short fiction. Oh, and guess who bought it? Dean! (g) He was acquiring-editor of fiction for a magazine called VB TECH back then. Apart from that, a couple of times I’ve written a story on assignment a couple of times for projects that fell through, and I eventually found markets for those stories, but I again found it a nuisance. So I’d rather just not even write a short story if there’s not already an offer on the table for it.) So I’ve written 98% of my short fiction on commission–someone invites me into an original anthology or asks me if I’ve got anything available for their reprint anthology.
And that means, I’m writing to assignment. I ENJOY this in short fiction. I almost always find it a fun and challenging writing exercise in which I get to practice and experiment with all sorts of things that I’ve never done (and probably never will do) in novels. I also find it worth doing from a practical perspective, since there’ve been a few years when my short fiction income wound up being 10%-15% of my income. I also find it refreshing creatively. Between books, it’s stimulating to tackle something off-the-wall that I’d normally never do. It’s sort of like a sorbet course between heavy dishes at a big meal.
But I’d NEVER write to assignment if there weren’t money-and-publication on the table, as part of the invitation. I do not write for open-submission anthologies. That’s a personal choice. If I’m going to risk NOT getting paid for my work (which is indeed a risk with an open-submission anthology, just as it’s a risk when submitting to the magazine market for short fiction), then I’m only going to write what I’m passionate about–a new novel proposal. Obviously, if I were passionate about short fiction, I’d feel different about that.
Meanwhile, since I am indeed passionate about writing novels… I’m not at all comfortable writing a novel to assignment. I’ve done one media tie-in novel, and while I was initially really intrigued by the challenge and the possibilities, I overall didn’t like doing writing a novel on assignment and wasn’t particularly good at it. But there are nonetheless two circumstances under which I’d certainly consider writing a novel on assignment again: (1) if it was a project that I felt passionate about, or (2) if I really needed the money. I do this as my full-time self-supporting living at all, and I have bills to pay.
“Every long-term writer I know does their best with every project. We all put our hearts and souls into every story, into every novel, into every project. There are no exceptions.”
To that end, I think my head will explode if I hear an agent on a convention panel, or in a speech, or in an interview or article or column give this sage advice EVEN ONE MORE TIME: “Write the best book you can.”
I was at a convention where, since I needed cash (I’m a writer–I ALWAYS need cash) I was trying to get people that EVERY SINGLE AGENT present would say that phrase AT LEAST ONCE during the program, and I was willing to best that some of them would say it AT LEAST three times in the space of a single given panel discussion. And NONE of my friends would take me up on this bet, because they’re all experienced pros who know that you can’t get through a conference without hearing agents spouting this phrase over and over, like some mystic mantra.
What? You mean my dedicated career plan to =churn out mediocre crap= is misguided? My expectation of rising to the top of one of the most competitive professions in our society by NOT trying my hardest needs adjustment? Gosh, next you’ll be telling me to run a spell-checker on my MS before I deliver it! Is there no end to your unreasonable demands?
The idea that we -aren’t- breaking our backs with every book could only be held by people who, yup, really don’t know anything about writing–or about writers.
And it’s a depressingly frequent even that, having written the best book you can, you send it to your agent and, in response, hear: “But can’t you write a book like [insert trendy flavor-of-the-week author name or book title here]?”
I have been writing the best book I possibly can ever since I started out in this biz. And I am SO SICK of hearing this feeble suggestion, every time agents open their mouths on panels or in interviews, suggesting that I’ve been fudging it.
By the way, this week’s Writing Excuses podcast (www.writingexcuses.com) with Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells and Howard Tayler explicitly addresses Dean’s posts on agents. Brandon and Dan both sold novels before getting an agent (Howard’s a successfully self-published cartoonist), then got agents to negotiate the contracts, foreign rights, etc. It sounds like both of them have had better luck with agents than Laura Resnick has.
FYI, Dean, you’re getting “hit” by Sanderson & Co. from their Writing Excuses web site.
http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/01/31/writing-excuses-4-4-agents-do-you-need-one/
=^)
As always, thanks again for the great writing and career advice. Like Michael I feel liberated about my writing and my pace has definately picked up in the last few months.
I have a question about writing trilogies. I’ve written the first book of a sci-fi trilogy and its currently making the rounds at publishers. I’m about 20k words into the second book and lately I’ve been wondering if I should even be writing this one.
I won’t be able to send this out when its completed. It’s tied to the first one. I have plenty of other ideas I’m passionate about, so I’ve been toying with the idea of putting it aside and starting a different project. That way I can get more Irons in the Fire.
Any advice?
Laura, and again I agree completely.
One panel at a writer’s conference (that I am no longer invited to), I was in the audience when an agent said that stupid phrase and I stuck my hand up and asked, “Are you saying that as writers we don’t write our best books all the time? Sort of insulting, don’t you think?”
Agent stammered for a moment as the audience laughed, then the moderator got the agent off the hook by changing the subject. I have decided that from now on out I won’t let that crap pass while I am in the room. Again, a reason the writer’s conferences don’t invite me back and neither Clarion would think of inviting me to teach. Blunt is just not what these folks can take. But I’m with you, I am SO SICK of agents spouting that stupid phrase.
Thanks for the great comments.
Thomas, well, there is business advice and there is writing advice. My advice, write what makes you happy and that you are passionate about at the moment. If you take a business decision into your writing office, it’s often wrong.
I know I used to have a lot of worries about “wasting the time and writing.” Took me a long time to understand that first off, no writing is ever wasted. Sometimes it is practice, sometimes it won’t sell for a while, but it is never wasted, especially early on. So stay with the passion and the decision will usually be the right one.
Brad, discussion is always a good thing. And since these posts are hitting right into writer insecurity and fears and desires to have someone take care of them, of course I’m going to be “hit” as you put it. But in my opinion, informed discussion is always great.
Spouting back myths as a form of discussion however, just makes me laugh.
As usual Dean, Laura and all contributing comments this is enlightening. I do need some clarification, though on something you said in this post: Write what you love, what you are passionate about, (or as King says, what scares you), then figure out how to sell it when you finish.
I am currently powering through my fifth book (about halfway through 60,000 words) and filled with excitement. I also put together a short four-page proposal and query package to send to editors. I do my proposals and queries on a different computer than the story work by the way. I actually keep them separate so that I don’t allow the market into my story computer.
Should I not be working on the proposal and query yet? I pretty much know by how the story is playing out where my market will be. Should I wait to send these until I have finished writing the ms?
Holy frak, I translate this as, “Why can’t you magically intuit what will be the next Big Wave in fiction, 24 months from now, so that I can get 15% of your huge contract(s) as a result, and all of it without my having to lift a finger!”
Wow, sounds awesome. We writers are so dimwitted. Clearly, it’s all crystal clear from the agents’ perspective. (rolls eyes)
“I was in the audience when an agent said that stupid phrase and I stuck my hand up and asked, “Are you saying that as writers we don’t write our best books all the time? Sort of insulting, don’t you think?””
You know what, Dean, that is a really good idea. I should start saying this, too, when I hear that rubbish. In fact, I think EVERYONE should start saying it EVERY time agents spout this line.
We ARE all writing the best books that we can. So if that’s the big gun in an agent’s public advice arsenal, maybe s/he should just stop speaking.
Brenda, totally up to you of course. I personally would just be cautious to not let the marketing creep into the writing too much.
But that said, I often (especially lately) send out books with just proposals and sample chapters to sell. (With over 90 published novels, it’s pretty clear I can finish a book.) I am excited about and would love to write them if an editor said, “Here’s offer, finish the book.” A couple weeks back I came up with a proposal and did some sample chapters and got done with the sample chapters and said, “Holy, crap, I want to write this book and write it now!” So I tossed out the proposal and will just write that book on spec because it hit a level of excitement for me that I don’t want marketing involved at all in the process.
So, in other words, know your own process. All of us are different. I like editors telling me what to write because, as Laura said, they pay money and I do this for a living.
But, warning on what Laura said and I did, folks. The myths are frighteningly strong and if you raise your hand and call their bluff or the stupid comments too often, you don’t get invited back.
Brenda,
I think there’s not “right” answer to your question.
On the one hand, response times are so slow that it’s quite understandable if you want to send out queries now, since there’s a fair chance you’ll have finished the book before hearing from anyone, but then hopefully not have too long a wait AFTER finishing it before you start getting responses to your query. Finishing it, and then sending out submissions and starting the wait of 8-10-14-18 months to get the first replies to your submissions can be deflating and frustrating.
OTOH, what if someone surprises you with a quick response, before you’re done? If they want to see it, will that freak you out and make you rush your process in order to get it to them promptly? Or if they don’t want to see it, will that depress you and make it difficult to finish the book?
Note: I’m not saying it’s a good idea OR a bad idea to send queries out before you’re done with the book. I’m saying that these are the things I’d think about when making that decision.
Thanks so much for your responses, Dean and Laura. By now I have gotten pretty used to firing material back out if I get a pass from somebody. And potential cash from an editor coming to me for something I’m already having a blast writing? Win win, sez I. The way I figure it, I have already spent far too long dithering around waiting with stars in my eyes for my former agent to market my work and then tell me after six tries the market had gone stale. Sheesh. He said write YA, that’s hot. I wrote a YA in under three months and fired it off to him. The ms sat on his desk for half a year! That was when I fired him.
What really burns me is a recent comment he made to me: “Why weren’t you writing what you’re writing now when I was repping you?” I think he meant it as a compliment but that isn’t how it came across to me.
Thomas,
That’s another question where there is no “right” answer.
One school of thought is that you should only write the first book of a trilogy on spec (i.e. without a contract), because if you write all THREE books and then don’t ever sell the first, you’ve automatically got two more completed MSs you can never sell. And there is certainly merit to that argument–especially if there are other books you’re interested in writing while waiting to see whether you can sell the first one.
OTOH, there are arguments in favor of writing the remaining two books on spec which are equally strong, IMO, or maybe stronger.
If you DO sell the first book, then you’ve already got your next two books written and ready to be included in the same contract, and you’ve set yourself up for an excellent release schedule. Having three books in a series or a trilogy already completed creates an opportunity for the publisher to establish a very strong initial release schedule–possibly even bringing all 3 books out in the same year. By having the books finished, you’re prepared for such an opportunity.
Also, some writers have found that a completed MS, even if it doesn’t sell when written, turns out to be a nest egg, something they can sell later on (possibly after revising/updating it). Just off the top of my head, I can think of at least half a dozen of my friends who’ve wound up selling older, completed MSs that they’d had lying around for a few years.
So, again, I wouldn’t say “write” or “don’t write” the other two books of the trilogy; there isn’t a “right” answer. I’d just say that the above issues are the things I’d think about when making that decision.
Lately I’ve come to the realization that it’s often better for me to say nothing, rather than what I’d like to say, in most situations.
Dean’s question is exactly the kind of thing I would ask in a similar situation. I’ve done things like that often, all the way back to middle school. People hate that. But that’s not my problem. What is my problem is politics, and I like to play them from time to time to avoid pissing people off too badly.
That said, if someone asked me, “Why can’t you write something like ‘Novel X’?” I’d probably respond, “I don’t know. Why can’t you negotiate a contract for me like Author Y’s agent did?”
They’d answer that it’s because I didn’t write Novel X. But of course, that’s not it. The real answer is because the world doesn’t work like that. Deals are made case by case and are dependent on several factors.
Just like writing. We write what we are passionate about; what wakes us up in the middle of the night; what drags us out of the shower, covered with soap and shampoo to quickly scribble on a scratch pad before we forget; what makes us laugh; what makes us cry; makes us think.
Asking me to write about vampires would be a stupid thing to do. I hate vampire stories, and I always have. So I’m hardly the correct person to ask to write one. That said, if an editor placed an order with me, I’m a businessman, and I could write a good story about one. But like Dean said, I’d have to twist it to my own passion, or it just wouldn’t work.
hi, Dean -
I’m with you on marketing my own work. Still have much to learn on doing that more efficiently, but no arguments with the concept. A big reason I’m coming to the Novel workshop in a few weeks is to learn more about targeting editors — i.e., what to look for when building that list of the top 10 or 20 names to send a project out to. Looking forward to it.
Have no issues at all with the idea that I’m much more invested in looking out for my own career than any agent will ever be. And “…get advice on being a writer *from* other writers, rather from a non-writer…” (which includes agents). Seem like a couple of great big “duhs” to me, and am surprised by the push-back these idea seems to be getting in other venues.
I read with great interest the discussion about agent vs. literary lawyer as options for negotiating the contract; the literary lawyer option making a great deal of sense to me. In either event, still have much to learn so that I understand as much as possible of what a contract is saying before I sign it.
And the idea of letting an agent tell me what to write? Sorry, unless they lead into the conversation with either a check or a contract, that one just isn’t going anywhere. In my primary career, I write what someone else hires me to write (not fiction, alas). For my fiction career, it’s my turn to make those choices.
(Somewhre in the back of my brain I keep seeing this largish sign that reads “You are responsible for your own career.” I think the image permanently imprinted itself on my retina…)
So to the next question: What comes next?
By which I mean, there is a whole bucket of “what (writers think) an agent (will/is supposed to) do for you after the contract is signed.”
Not only do I, as a writer in the beginning stages of my fiction career, not know much about this beyond what all the agent blogs tell us (eeep! wrong answer!); but if a writer decides to go into the publishing world unagented, what are we going to need to learn how to do for ourselves (besides writing and sending out our work)?
In some very real ways, I’m feeling about as qualified to represent myself as the slushreader agents you and Laura have so thoroughly pointed out who have (a) no training, (b) no particular connections, and (c) a poor grasp of the industry.
(Wow! I just realized that all I need is a set of business cards, and *I* could be an agent!!)
Would love to hear what you, Kris, and Laura (and any other commenters with the experience I lack) have to say.
LynW, good question there. And it has me thinking a great deal, actually.
The “great unknown” is flat scary for all of us, and of course, with selling and writing novels and starting a writing career, we think there is so much we don’t know, and there is. A great deal.
But the more I look at it, actually, the more I have come to realize that what most writers don’t know about the business is BEFORE the sale. And that has been, except for this last post, where my focus has been on these agent posts for the most part.
So let me go back a second and look at what a writing career is. Since I know you, I know for a fact you already have a writing career as a working nonfiction writer making a living. So you are going to have a pretty easy task in crossing over, since you know the basics.
Basics are: Handling cash flow, meaning keeping expenses under expected income. Any small business person does that.
Basics are: Taxes. For fiction writers early on, the biggest check they get every year is their tax refund because of the expenses they can declare if they are mailing. But after money starts flowing, career planning includes tax planning. When to become a corporation, what can you do to save yourself the most money, all legal.
Basics are: Setting up a work system and environment that allows production of product. (This is the one that kills many writers, actually, and you hear lots and lots of stories about these problems that often start with “Oh, you’re not working, can you help me with…”)
There are a list of basics like this after sales, some before, but to become a full-time career fiction writer, those kinds of basics need to be handled.
Notice, not a one of them involves an agent….
So what areas of career planning do involve an agent? None, actually.
Can an agent sometimes help you increase cash flow? Yes, sometimes.
—-If you push them and haven’t sold all rights or world rights, you can get your book, through your agent out to overseas markets, usually through agents in other countries. (Internet is making this possible and better for all of us to do on our own without the agent chain.)
—-Sometimes an agent can help get your book into Hollywood markets, but also that’s not really that important these days either. You can hire a Hollywood lawyer or agent just as simply as your agent can unless your agent is with one of the monster agencies like William Morris.
What else can they help you do to increase cash flow after a contract is done? Not much, actually.
So why do you and all writers I know (and I was no exception) feel like we need an agent to handle our career after a sale if they actually do nothing? (Hmmmm, this is sounding like another agent chapter. Sigh…) I think it comes down to we need security and have been lead to believe that if we have an agent, we have “security” in the business. And if we have an agent, they will tell us what to write (back to this main post) and who to talk to and all that. Of course, listening to them can just cause huge issues, but alas, we all want to listen to them.
So how really do you work a career as a fiction writer? Same as a nonfiction writer, actually, when it comes to the basics. First, you write and sell a project. Then you do what is needed in that project while you write and sell the next project. And then the next. And then the next.
New writers think the rejections stop (they don’t), everything you write will sell (it doesn’t), and you will never have to worry about money again (you have to) if you could just sell that first novel and get an agent, or worse, get an agent and then sell that first novel.
The hard truth is that professional writers are no different than beginning writers at our core. We may be better at the craft of story, but we still write and work towards sales, we try to write enough to keep the mortgage paid, we do the best damn work we can do every day on every project, and we never stop tying to make sales.
And those of us who have been around a long time at some point learned business and stopped listening to others around us and just listened to ourselves. So maybe the best advice that I can give about learning a career in fiction writing after a sale is just trust your own business experience and trust yourself.
I have an old edition of Richard Curtis’s “How To Be Your Own Literary Agent”. Some of the details are clearly out of date (and at the rate the business is changing lately that’s probably true of the 2003 edition too) but it is (it seems to me) a starting point for learning what things you’ll need to learn if you want to go that route. For that matter, under the heading of “you are responsible for your own career”, it’s worth learning even if you don’t intend to be your own agent. How else can you keep tabs on your employee?
Dean, any suggestions on resources that dive into more detail than you can with these great blog posts? (And boy, if that doesn’t sound like an opportunity for you to plug your workshops…
)
Dean, this was a great post. I’ve got plenty to learn about the business side of publishing, but this post is something I already know in my bones and I think you’ve done a great thing in reminding everyone of it.
This must be a huge “lesson” around trusting yourself for people who get most or all of their income from writing. For example, I’m independent and determined enough to write what I want to write, regardless of the market–but even if I never sold a book in my life, I’d just go back to the “day job,” so I can afford to write whatever I’m passionate about, whether it succeeds it fails. But that’s fairly easy.
For people who depend mainly or totally on their writing, then wow, this is big stuff. Because not only is it an issue of artistic integrity and passion, you’re also trusting yourself to know what will make you money over maybe an agent whose job is supposed to be knowing what will make you money–or you might starve. Then you have to decide whether to trust lil’ old you, or the guy or gal with “literary agent” after his or her name.
And sometimes, the agent is going to be right about these things. It’s not that anyone should ignore the input of a good agent. It’s the ones who tell you to write some kind of crap that you couldn’t care less about who need to be exorcised.
Thanks again for doing what you’re doing here. Frankly, in these posts you and Laura have shown more courage to speak your truth about the complex matter of agents than everyone else I’ve ever seen, combined. You’re doing a great service here because you’re telling your truth and encouraging others to think, so I hope the detractors aren’t getting you down.
Alastair, I’m still pretty convinced that being your own agent isn’t right for a large percentage of the writers out there.
I say that you don’t need an agent to sell your work, and Laura has pointed out clearly that you don’t need an agent to negotiate a contract, and you sure don’t need anyone on the planet helping you decide what to write. So it does seem that with all that, there doesn’t seem to be much reason for an agent. But actually there are.
Sometimes we just need someone to shout in our behalf, to fight for money in our behalf, to chase problems at a publisher in our behalf, and a bunch of other stuff.
Agent/writer relationship, for the most part, worked great for a lot of decades. It’s only in the last 15 years or so has the agent/writer working model become twisted and silly at times. What I have been saying over and over is that if you are going to hire an agent, hire them for the right reason, treat them like any trusted employee, but watch them, and understand their job.
Some of us work well without agents, some of us work fine with only using an agent for certain tasks, some of us need a good agent (not a slush reader) to help out.
So, with all that said, a good resource for helping out with details of how to do it all yourself, I’d read my wife’s Freelancer’s Guide from the beginning. In my opinion, she pretty much tells you what it takes to be a small business owner and do it yourself.
And actually, we don’t teach a workshop about how to not have an agent. We are doing a weekend workshop on agents, but that’s only to help writers learn how to use an agent correctly and how to find one and all that.
I know some people are saying that I am saying writers don’t need agents. Not saying that. I’m just saying that some don’t, that all of us are different, but if you are going to hire one, do it without myths. That make sense?
Thanks, Moses, for the great comments. It is very hard to trust yourself at times. Very hard, in fact sometimes almost impossible, depending, as you said, on the forces coming at you from the outside. I know at times for me, when I went too far off track, I tended to look for some other way to make a living and play to clear my head enough to get back on track. Thus I had a period where I played tournament poker and made enough to cover the downturn in the writing income and then there was my playing with starting a store, which lost money but still cleared my head of a wrong road I had taken with the writing.
We all go down wrong roads and make bad decisions that are head-shaking in hindsight. Part of the learning process I’m afraid.
The key is just pretend to not have any fear. We all make stuff up for a living, so we can pretend we aren’t afraid all the time. We are, cash flow is hell at times, just like any business or any family in these hard times. But as fiction writers, we have the ability to pretend we have no fear and trust our dreams and just keep writing and make mistakes and then pretend those mistakes didn’t matter much.
Well, that’s how I do it sometimes, anyway. The key is I have finally learned to just trust myself. Do I know if my stuff is any good? Oh, of course not. I am the worst judge of my own writing, but I just write it and mail it and let editors decide it it fits or is good enough. And that takes courage and a lot of pretending that I’m not afraid, just like every other writer on the planet.
And thus, that fear is where an agent can find a really nasty open door to all of us. We’re afraid what we might write won’t be right, won’t sell, won’t make the next house payment, and some agent just said, “I’m sure I can sell a book about a Christian Vampire who hides some really cool secret for two thousand years in a crypt under a modern high school.” So you think about the money and start trying to convince yourself you can write that book, even though you hate vampires and high schools. That’s where the problems really start and wrong roads are taken that many, many writers never recover from.
I wrote the novelization of the Madonna and Guy Richie movie Swept Away, the worst movie ever filmed, one that had no social redeeming value at all. It took me exactly eight of the worst days of my life, I got paid almost twenty grand to write it, and when I was done I knew I had gone far, far too far from my own writing. No amount of money was ever worth that. And the only way to get the real me back was to walk away from writing for a while, focus on my own work again, get the excitement back about my own writing. In other words, I needed some time to clear the bad taste out of my writing that project had left. I did.
But that took years and a bunch of writing and books to come back fully from that hole I had dug into my own brain. I’m back completely now, again trusting myself and my own judgment. But wow, it is amazing what money and freelancing can do to that judgment at times. None of us are immune. The key to helping yourself stay immune as much as possible is never, ever allow an agent to give that kind of advice to you. It’s hard enough when it comes from other sources.
But over a long career, you will fail. And that’s all right too. As long as you come back to your own writing.
Brenda wrote: “He said write YA, that’s hot. I wrote a YA in under three months and fired it off to him. The ms sat on his desk for half a year! That was when I fired him.
What really burns me is a recent comment he made to me: “Why weren’t you writing what you’re writing now when I was repping you?””
Brenda, boy, this all sounds so familiar.
“”That said, if someone asked me, “Why can’t you write something like ‘Novel X’?” I’d probably respond, “I don’t know. Why can’t you negotiate a contract for me like Author Y’s agent did?””"
I love it!
Lynw wrote: “(Wow! I just realized that all I need is a set of business cards, and *I* could be an agent!!) ”
Yup.
Back around the late 1980s, there was a writer whose -mother- set herself up as an agent, her qualifications being that her daughter was a writer and thought she was really smart.
And I’ve met two people, years later, who were “represented” for a while, early in their careers, by that “agent.” Their stories are, oh, exactly what you’d expect.
Dean wrote: “I’m still pretty convinced that being your own agent isn’t right for a large percentage of the writers out there. ”
I agree. For one thing, just the fact that so many writers WANT to work with an agent demonstrates that. Additionally, the fact that there’s a percentage of agent-author associations that even -I-, a harsh critic of that business model, would say have worked out very well for the writer ALSO demonstrates that.
And (as John Scalzi noted in a recent blog about writers and money management) a percentage of writers are flakes. (g) It’s not only that they’re insecure about handling their own business, it’s that their insecurity is well-merited in this area, i.e. they’re really pretty bad at handling their own business.
This brings to mind an incident early in my career. An editor of mine, who was otherwise always very proper and professional, stepped over the ethics line to talk to me about a writer who she knew was friends with me. The publisher wanted me to convince that writer to get an agent. Because the writer was SO bad at handling her own business, she was driving her own editor (who was not my editor) crazy, and causing a bunch of in-house problems. NOT by being difficult or temperamental, just by being THAT bad at managing her own business. This had become a big enough issue that it was being discussed at editorial meetings. They didn’t want to drop the author, but they couldn’t go on like this. (At which point someone said, “She’s a friend of Resnick, isn’t she? Let’s see if Laura can convince her to hire an agent.”)
Given the writer’s business conversations with me, I wasn’t really that surprised by this request. I had already imagined she must be causing tremendous problems in-house. So I agreed to do it, and the next time the writer called me in hysterics about yet another bizarre business misunderstanding with the publisher, I talked her into hiring an agent. She did, and things quickly quieted down then.
Lyn, RE “What next?”
Statistically (and I am not making this up), there are more people who [imagine that they] want to WRITE a book than there are people who READ books.
More to the point, on any given day of any given year in my adult lifetime, there are thousands more people trying to sell a book to any given US publisher than there are publishing slots in that entire publishing program.
I am approaching the 22nd anniversary of my first book sale (I was an embryo at the time), and have been doing this as my full-time self-supporting living pretty much ever since then. In almost every year of my career, the publishing industry has been in chaos, losing money, canceling contracts, shutting down programs, seeing distribution shrink, dropping writers, and entering its final death spiral.
Some writers I met when I started are still here. At least an equal amount disappeared. (According to a study done in the 1990s, the average novelist sells two books, then disappears forever from the biz.)
All of the above makes this one of the most highly competitive and unforgiving professions in our society. EVERYONE wants to do it, there’s only room for a few people to do it, and there’s any any room at all for -succeeding- at it.
What I have seen over and over is that the two key deciding factors in who keeps working and who doesn’t are NOT, as most aspiring writers believe, talent and luck. They are brains and perseverance. Making smart decisions and never giving up are the single most common qualities that separate longtime professional writers from people who (a) never break in, or (b) break in but then disappear.
I’m not inherently that smart, so I make sure I’m well-educated, which ups my chances of making smart decisions. I follow the business, I talk with other writers, I watch the market, I try to learn from what others say and do, from what others DON’T say and DON’T do, and from what I see. I particularly pay attention to the advice of people in the business who I think are making smart decisions–and I also analyze what’s happening with people (agents, writers, editors, publishers, etc.) who SAY they’re smart, but whose careers or business experiences don’t necessarily demonstrate that in reality. I read articles, blogs, and books about the business–including really tedious aspects of it. I was an ardent student of the publishing-contracts article that Ray Feist wrote years ago in the SFWA Bulletin, and that literary lawyer Bob Stein wrote a few years later in the ROMANCE WRITER’S REPORT. I read about copyright law for writers, about contract negotiations, about the current controversy over electronic royalty rates. I network with a lot of other writers, as well as with various editors whom I know. Although I don’t want to work with literary agents anymore, I certainly like to learn what I can from them, whether this means chatting at a party, reading a blog, reading a column or article, or attending a discussion panel.
Although this sounds incredibly exhausting and time-consuming, it’s not. I’ve been doing it for 22 years. I didn’t need to learn everything in YEAR ONE. I’ve been spacing out my self-education over 22 years of working in the industry, and I plan to continue spacing it out for at least another 30 years.
Because, in terms of “what next?”… it’s hard to predict what you’ll need to know. Lots of things happen in a career that the writer doesn’t expect, many of which probably couldn’t have been foreseen. (Ex. Your respected, high-profile literary agent is exposed as a drug addict and embezzler, and it turns out you’ve been expecting a check for $20,000 that has disappeared up his nose. This happened, in a notorious incident, to a number of friends of mine.) Or: Your publisher, in regrouping after a merger, cancells 100 book contracts–including yours. Or: You discover that AFTER reverting all rights to you for a book, the publisher THEN published an e-version of the book which has been selling ever since, unbeknowst to you (this just happened to me two weeks ago).
Years of self-education, networking, making contacts, and learning the business is what gets you through these things. And, alas, in my own experience, agents do NOT get a writer through these things (and they sometimes ARE these things).
And one good place to start or continue your self-education as a writer is my Writer’s Resource page:http://sff.net/people/laresnick/About%20Writing/Writers%20Resource.htm
If you want to increae your rate of learning, double your rate of failure.
— Thomas Edison
I cheer every time I get a rejection.
Okay, I guess I didn’t make myself quite clear. I have no intention of becoming my own agent, but I do think that learning at least a little about what it would take would let me better understand the job(s) I’d be hiring an agent to do.
I know how to paint a house, but I’d rather hire somebody else to do it. But because I know how, I can better judge the competence of whoever I might look at hiring.
So, not asking for advice on becoming my own agent, but on the kinds of things an agent should (or shouldn’t) do, what’s likely to be in a typical contract (and which of those a publisher is likely to give on and which not), and so on. Your posts are an excellent starting point. A quick scan of Amazon turns up several titles on being your own agent, how to negotiate a book contract, and so forth. Most of them at least seven years out of date. Just trying to get a feel if these are a reasonable starting point or worse than useless.
Think of it as asking about textbook recommendations for the necessary homework and due diligence before hiring an agent. (And of course, the Killing the Sacred Cows and Freelancer’s Guide are part of that — as are your business workshops.)
It’s the engineer in me. I want to know how everything works. I hate black boxes. I read medical books too, but wouldn’t perform my own surgery.
Alastair, sorry I took that backwards. Your point is right on the money, and I’m afraid I just don’t know any books on target that would help. But I think any book or article about hiring an employee would help a lot. And any general small business book and how to run a small business would help.
Someone, in some post somewhere, said I had an advantage because I went to three years of law school. I suppose, but I don’t think so. Where I got my advantage and clearer vision at these employee agents is by running small businesses. I started my own small business with a friend at 20 and learned a ton, mostly how not to do things. In Palm Springs, as a golf pro, I suddenly had to run a clothing and merchandise shop called a pro shop, where I bought and ordered my own stuff and helped the cash flow by teaching lessons and had to worry about stuff sitting for the off season and I had an employee, an assistant golf pro. Then when I went back to college I started a bookstore (that is still going) and designed, built, and ran an entertainment center. Then came Pulphouse, where I really learned larger and deeper lessons in business and employees. Not counting the comic store here or the comic store in college or a number of other businesses along the way.
All of that gave me a lot of experience on how to run the business of being a fiction writer. And it is a business. I know so many young writers just want someone else to take care of the business side (which is why these problems exist) but as a small business owner, no one but you can take care of the problems in your business. So the best learning I think can come from business books. And anything about employees you can find, how to hire, how to fire, and how to check them out. I play poker every week with a man who owns a business that does nothing but check out perspective employees for other businesses.
Maybe someone should start that business to check out agents for writers. Or better yet, writers get smart enough to do it before they hire an agent and say “Here’s all my money.”
—What I have seen over and over is that the two key deciding factors in who keeps working and who doesn’t are NOT, as most aspiring writers believe, talent and luck. They are brains and perseverance. Making smart decisions and never giving up are the single most common qualities that separate longtime professional writers from people who (a) never break in, or (b) break in but then disappear.—-
Laura, I can’t agree with that more. Spot on. And never giving up cancels a lot of not-smart decisions over time.
I also was a hard core fan of Ray’s articles, and spent the early ten years of my writing life exchanging contracts with a dozen other young pros (all are still around and hitting at full speed, which leads me to believe the contract exchange helped all of us a lot).
You said— “Years of self-education, networking, making contacts, and learning the business is what gets you through these things. And, alas, in my own experience, agents do NOT get a writer through these things (and they sometimes ARE these things).”
Exactly! And that’s the point of all these posts. Self education and learning business.
Thanks, Laura, for that post. Spot on.
By the way, on a few posts around the web, it has been said that I had bad experiences with agents. Laura sure did, my wife sure did, but I have never, ever had a bad experience with an agent.
All I am trying to do here is present another side, a logical side, business side of hiring an employee called an agent.
My own agent experience? I was with a young agent for ten minutes, then went with an agent who has been around as long as I have and we were together for 17 years until I started writing books she admitted she didn’t know anything about and had no desire to handle, so she suggested another agent for me for a book I had done, I talked with him and ended up in short order not liking his agency that much even though he was great, so I went with another long time friend who is a good agent and had a fine relationship with him for what we wanted to do together. All good with all of them. No problems.
So should I be telling everyone to go get an agent because I had a good track record? Of course not. Laura flat says that her experiences taught her to do it herself, but she flat says numbers of times that’s not going to be the right way for most writers.
These posts are for learning, folks. Kill the myths and open your eyes and decide which type of agent, which system works for you as a writer. Make the decision with good business in mind, not from some myth. That’s all we’re saying here.
The fact that I’m doing these posts from watching other writers and listening to a thousand horror stories over the years should scare you enough to think when hiring an agent. All my experiences were great with my agents.
But remember, I have sold and published well over ninety novels now and no agent sold a book for me. I sold them all. And I still had good agents who did good jobs for me.
Kill the myths, make decisions with your eyes open and from a business perspective.
I have an agent. I’ve been agented for about twenty years now. I have horror stories to compare with Laura’s and one that trumps her, since an agent embezzled from me.
Yet I still have an agent. Am I bad at business? Hell, no. I’m one of the best at business (see my freelancer’s guide: http://www.kristinekathrynrusch.com).
I have the agent for a variety of reasons, mostly for a second eye on contracts and to do the active work of negotiating for me.
But I’m willing to get rid of the agent in a heartbeat if the relationship no longer works. (This was a hard-learned lesson.)
However, I would hope that the agent would also get rid of me if the relationship no longer works. In other words, I would hope that the employee quits if things aren’t working out. Note I’m not saying stops working. I think lots of agents just stop working for their writer and that’s a passive/aggressive way of quitting. I want the upfront–I’m sorry, we no longer suit (which I have said to half a dozen employers back when I was an employee).
I’m happy with my current situation. Of course, I have finally found an agent who understands that this is my career, my business, and he does what he does to improve it. I also realize that I’m not his only client, and that I don’t make horrible demands on his time without reimbursement.
Since I have a 20+ year long career, there is no way that anyone other than me could do a better job with it. I have too many books and too many other projects for another person to keep in their head. For example, a French editor who underbid on my Retrieval Artist series and didn’t get it, asked to see Diving into the Wreck. Turns out he didn’t like Diving after he read it, but then volunteered that he’d read two other books of mine that he loved but are “too American” for the French market. So I pitched him (off the top of my head) similar books in a fantastic setting–books that have never seen print in France and were published a decade before I hired the current agent.
Could the current agent have done this? No. Could any agent, even one who’d been with me all those years? No. Could anyone besides me have done it? Maybe a hardcore fan of my work. Otherwise, no. When you have 50+ novels in many genres, you can’t even keep track all the time. Expecting someone else to is just unrealistic.
So many expectations of agents are unrealistic. And writers aren’t the only ones who have them. So when an agent offers me career advice, I laugh. When two agents who are not mine offer me career advice gratis, I listen. That means they see from a New York perspective something that’s going wrong and they (like a shark) want to jump in and help–as my agent.
I won’t hire them, but I”ll try to figure out what has gone wrong. And this too comes from hard-earned experience. I can’t tell you how many times several agents approached me about my career just before I realized that it was imploding. Again.
Do I think writers should have agents? Not all writers, no. Do I think agents serve a purpose? Yes, if the writer and the agent agree as to what that purpose is. Do I have an agent? Yep. Have I had bad agents? Oh, my god, yes. Have I had good ones? I’ve had ones I’m happy with. That doesn’t mean you’ll be happy with them.
Lots of good stuff here, folks. Figure out how it applies to you.
Kris
Kris wrote: “I think lots of agents just stop working for their writer and that’s a passive/aggressive way of quitting.”
I think this does indeed happen quite a lot. And it’s amazing how many agents, as she notes, do this RATHER THAN say to a writer, “It’s time for us to go our separate ways.” Even more amazing: I know of SO MANY occasions when the -writer- said this to the agent, and the agent protested and talked them into staying… but the agent didn’t get more interested or engaged after that conversation, so the writer eventually wound up leaving after another year or so, anyhow. TWO of my former agents protested and tried to talk me out of it when I said I was leaving; given how BAD things between us were when I decided to leave, I was flabbergasted by this–indeed, I was far too stunned and perplexed to be swayed (let alone flattered) on either occasion, precisely because of how irreparably dysfunctional our relationships were by the time I left.
Later on, an old pro explained it to me in a way that made some sense to me: Many agents think a big list of steadily-contracted professionals looks good, so they don’t like to see that list shrink at all–which is also why they’ll usually just stop paying attention to a client, rather than actually end the association.
Laura wrote:
” … I make sure I’m well-educated, which ups my chances of making smart decisions. I follow the business, I talk with other writers, I watch the market, I try to learn from what others say and do, from what others DON’T say and DON’T do, and from what I see. I particularly pay attention to the advice of people in the business who I think are making smart decisions–and I also analyze what’s happening with people (agents, writers, editors, publishers, etc.) who SAY they’re smart, but whose careers or business experiences don’t necessarily demonstrate that in reality. I read articles, blogs, and books about the business …”
Sounds almost exactly like the way I’ve approached the continuing education/professional development aspects of my non-fiction writing career — AND the way I’ve approached my initial education about the fiction writing business.
Learn as much as I can from those who have been there, who are doing it. Absorb others’ expertise and use it to supplement my own lack of experience, and point out potential benefits and pitfalls. Look at the various models and craft one that works for me and where *I* want to take my career. I’ve done that for twenty years on the non-fiction side; it’s easy enough to expand my independent studies to the fiction side. Excellent advice. Thanks.
In fact, the more I compare the two (non-fiction consulting work and professional fiction writing) the more I’m finding that they have much more in common on the business side than I at first thought — which pleases me to no end. Significant differences in the contracts, royalties, copyrights and all that (which I can learn), but the basic business principles are quite similar. That’s very good to know. Thanks.
Laura wrote: “(According to a study done in the 1990s, the average novelist sells two books, then disappears forever from the biz.)”
Without a link to the study to see what it actually says, this is the kind of information that needs to be taken with a big grain of salt.
Even if true on its face, how many of those novelists actually disappeared behind one or more pseudonyms? And how many are still writing, but not producing novels?
And, really, what is an “average” novelist?
Dean, Laura, Kris,
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and insight into the business! What I’ve learned here in all of the Sacred Cow posts (and in Kris’s Freelancer’s Guide) is absolutely invaluable.
At OWN, Dean had mentioned that the comments section here was like sitting around in a bar and listening to pros talk about real business. Damned straight. And I’m buying the next round!
Actually, Michael, the facts are that, and I was surprised when I read the study that novelists actually last two novels. My experience from watching that most don’t ever get the second novel done.
The novelists that make waves are those of us who get past this first very real barrier. I know you wouldn’t know this, but I was one of those. I sold my first novel in 1988, it came out in 1989, and that was it for me. My writing career died and I didn’t write. One novel and a bunch of short stories. I started over in 1993 and managed to keep it going from there, but my first start was standard. One or two novels and out.
Scary, huh? And you are fine with pen names, clearly, but most writers I know have an ego that won’t allow them to write under a name others don’t know about. So most never think of that option.
Kris and I will search for any link to that study that Laura mentions. It was an eye-opener at the time.
I read about the study in an article in 1995. I don’t remember the publication, but I remember the year because I remember the trip I was on where I had dinner with another writer and we discussed it–and that trip was in 1995.
“Average” is not the same as “median,” and our assumption, as we discussed it at dinner, was that for every writer like Nora Roberts (who had, at that point, published close to 100 books), or like friends of our who had published 30 books, or like us (I had published 12, my friend had probably published a bit more than that), or like NINC members (where we did a survey and found that members had published an average of 16 books each), etc., etc…. there were no doubt a LOT of writers out there, as Dean suggests, who probably disappeared after ONE book, rather than two.
Incidentally, it looks like Brandon, Howard, and Dan agree with you.
[Brandon] I think the thing to take away from this podcast is the idea that there are a lot of great benefits to agents. But at the same time, we should bring out the simple fact that no, you do not need one. They don’t match every person. A lot of new writers get it in their mind that, “Oh, I must have an agent before I can sell…”
[Howard] I think a safer take away is everybody doesn’t need an agent, but you, fair listener, might.
[Dan] Here’s a quick story from David Hartwell to finish this up, because I thought this was wonderful. We’re talking about first-time authors specifically. He said as a first-time author, really, 50 to 100% of what you’re selling to an editor is yourself rather than your book. An agent can’t sell that for you.
LOL, Patrick. Yes, I had read that as well. They are pretty sharp writers, making livings, and all three sold their first novels not that long ago without an agent. And all three did the smart thing and got help with the contract and negotiations after they got the offers.
Agents do not match everyone, but they match a lot of writers. Just know your reasons for hiring one, know what to expect from an agent and talk to them about that before hiring them, and then be the boss and communicate with your employee and keep an eye on your own business.
Oh, wait, that just sounds like good business, doesn’t it? (grin)
“Here’s a quick story from David Hartwell to finish this up, because I thought this was wonderful. We’re talking about first-time authors specifically. He said as a first-time author, really, 50 to 100% of what you’re selling to an editor is yourself rather than your book. An agent can’t sell that for you.”
That surprised me when I heard it. 50-100%? Aren’t editors looking at your manuscript more than your website, etc. if you’re a first time author? David Hartwell knows the reality from his perspective–obviously–but I still find this a bit shocking and hard to understand. How much can an editor learn about the author before publication, and if that’s such a great focus then why aren’t they asking for you to do more to prove how Cool you are rather than reading your manuscript to see if they think the book is good and marketable?
I thought this advice was one of the most interesting and somewhat puzzling things in their podcast.
(grin)
I’m not surprised they agree, except the way Brad referenced it, I expected to find them bashing, but heck they even mentioned Bad Agent Sydney!
Moses,
Yup, frighteningly enough, and this is rare for me to say, I agree with David on this one. So many authors come to editors through writer’s conferences where the editor has met them, or from reference from a friend, and often the editor will do research about you far before you get a call with an offer from them.
Think about it. They are going to bat with their careers for your book and will have to spend a lot of time working with you on the book. They first have to love your book and your work, but once that is past, they will do what they can to find out something about you before making the next move. Only logical and smart for the editors to do that. If they can’t find out anything about you, they will make sure that’s part of what they tell others around them in the house, and if they go to your web site and you’re a nut case, they kick the book back because life is too short. They often will contact some of their other writers in the same area to ask about a new writer. I can’t begin to tell you how many times this has happened to me and Kris, a lot since we teach workshops.
So the quality of the book and the story must come first, but in this business, there are many, many other factors. And editors smartly try to reduce those factors before an offer as much as they can.
Dean: Wow, I take that as incredibly good news then. I have another life where I’ve got 15,000 subscribers to my opt-in email newsletter, etc. etc.
However, this also means that I really need to get cranking on my writer website and blog. I’ve been putting that off.
It also makes me realize how important everything is that one puts on the internet, including comments on blogs.
Oh, have I forgotten to mention today how wonderful and smart I believe editors are. I find they are such tragically misunderstood human beings
Moses, viz that Hartwell quote, what an editor wants in a new writer is someone who can go the distance. Most new writers can’t/don’t. What an editor is always looking for are those few new writers who can and do.
This is because it’s extremely rare that a publisher can make money from a first novel. That’s not what’s profitable. If they want to publish you, it’s not because they’re excited about THIS book (though they may well love it), it’s because they’re excited about the longterm multi-book potential they see in the -author- via this book.
Publishers make their money when they’ve published a -bunch- of your novels; when you’ve built a loyal audience book after book, and word-of-mouth (which costs the publisher nothing, and which is still the single most effective form of advertising for books) is spreading from your readers to other readers, thus increasing your audience with each book; and when your backlist [previously published books] are still-in-print, after production and publishing expenses have finally been recouped, and selling to your new readers and still-growing audience–which money is almost all profit once production-and-publishing costs have been recouped. As your audience grows, your current and future books become (at least in theory) more profitable to publish because, as your print-run goes up, your per-unit production cost goes down, Thus, over time, all of your work becomes more profitable for them–the newer, more-profitable books, and the older books which are still selling now.
That’s what a publisher is hoping for every time it acquires a brand new writer. Someone who’s going to work out that way and become that profitable model-writer whom they all seek and want.
Most new writers don’t. Most new writers disappear after a book or two. Maybe they stop writing, or maybe they don’t write anything else the publisher likes enough to publisher, or maybe it took them 8 years to write the first publishable novel and will take them 6 years to write the next one. Maybe they wrote two publishable books, but then disintegrate under the pressure of the publisher’s scheduling demands and commercial editorial pressures. Maybe the editor who acquired them and loved their work leaves and the new editor won’t even return their calls (this happened to me shortly after I delivered my first book, and it took a LOT of effort and true grit for me to save my career after that and eventually sell a second book to that house). Naybe the publisher is over-extended and decides to drop 100 contracts, including that writer’s, and the writer never finds another one.
And so on and so forth.
While most real people (non-writers) regard selling ONE book as a big accomplishment, it’s just a drop in the bucket in the publishing world. A relationship in which the publisher acquires one or two books from a new writer and then no others happens all of the time, and it’s generally regarded as an abortive or failed publishing relationship in this industry, since it’s rarely profitable to acquire and publish a brand new writer. A -successful- relationship is one in which they publish a number of your books steadily; and that only works out a modest percentage of the time after a writer makes that first sale.
O/T question for Laura & Dean,
Do book publishers even care about sales of shorter work? Do sales of shorter work help at negotiation time? Or is someone who has never sold a novel before — but has sold short work — treated more or less the same as all the other unpublished novelists?
Brad,
Selling anything professionally puts you in a higher position with publishers. Nonfiction writers, short story writers, if the sales are at a professional level, they help a lot, mostly in getting your work read with a better attitude. (And trust me, editor attitude is everything.)
Does it change what Laura said about what a publisher wants in hoping to buy more than one book? Nope, they still want that, but they may look at a well-published short story writer or a well-published nonfiction writer as a writer who has a better chance of staying around long enough for them to make money. So in that aspect, having previous professional sales is also slightly positive.
Kris shocked a large room of people one day at a conference when she said…. If I had a brilliant story from a first author who I had never seen anything from, and a very good story from an author who had been around and trying hard to break in for a while, and I only had room for one story in the issue, I would by the very good author who had been sending me a lot of stories because I knew there was a better chance that author would send in another story.
As the publisher of a short fiction magazine, I wouldn’t care about buying new authors unless the editor thought they would continue to send in more stories and eventually they would work up to cover authors. To a publisher, first authors LOSE a ton of money. I have to pay the author, pay for the printing and space in the magazine, pay for the editor to deal with the author, and what do I get in return????? Nothing. Only the author’s mother is going to buy a copy because he is in there. I get ZERO positive side return on a new writer. My only hope is that they stay around long enough, as Laura said, to get fans, get following, so I can put them on the cover and have their story sell copies of the magazine.
Just business, folks, just business. As David Hartwell said, editors are more interested in buying writers than stories.
I have a 1958 issue of Galaxy magazine right here. Cover names are Frederik Pohl and Robert Sheckley. Yup, top names, and inside there’s another name that stuck around, Fritz Leiber. But anyone remember Paul Flehr or Finn O’Donnevan (pen name I bet), and L.J. Stecher, Jr.????
That’s normal folks.
Brad,
It’s always better to list a legitimate publishing credential than NOT to list one. A professional sale is a professional sale.
Previous sales don’t affect whether someone buys the book current in submission–that’s only affected by whether the editor loves this book and thinks it will be profitable for her publishing house.
Previous sales may or may not affect whether your work creeps higher in the slushpile. And, as it happens, that’s the case whether you’ve sold two short stories or thirty books. When I send out my work (whether I’m submitting a novel, a short story, an article, or a nonfiction book), some people see my credentials (which are not too shabby) and read my material very quickly; others shove it to the very bottom of the slushpile and may not get to it for a year.
But since previous sales -may- help you creep higher in the slushpile, and since previous sales are (if you’ve got any) your professional resume, they should certainly be part of your personal self-presentation.
Er, I meant:… part of your PROFESSIONAL self-presentation.
I’m a little distracted. Have just spent the past… GOOD GOD, MAN!– =SIX HOURS=…. setting up a computer.
Laura
I just sent a manuscript in late November to Pocket Books, and it came back within a week with a mail room bounce, meaning someone in the mail room over Thanksgiving was assigned to just clear stuff out and didn’t bother to read any cover letters or anything. This sort of thing happens, and it annoyed me until I glanced at my own cover letter. I had buried my credits in the letter. Dumb move, something I don’t normally do.
So I turned the thing back around to the same editor (who never saw it, of course, the first time) with the opening of my cover letter as follows. “I am the author of over ninety published novels, thirty of which have been with Pocket Books under varied names.”
Now, that won’t get a mail room bounce. The book might still get bounced if it’s not right, but it won’t get ignored and that’s all I can ask for. Credits do help, but a good presentation of your credits also makes a difference I have discovered.
Thanks, Laura and Dean! Great to know, going forward.
Thanks Laura and Dean. Now that quote makes perfect sense. I’m blown away by how much I’ve learned about the biz from you two.
The whole process seems analogous to playing poker. In the short run, you can lose with a good hand. So if you’re only playing a few hands, you’d better get lucky.
But if you’re a good player and you’re persistant, eventually it all works out for you in the end. So don’t get too excited about short term success or failure, because a new hand is coming around and you’d better be ready to play.
Another question along the lines that Brad has asked for Laura and Dean.
Should I let an editor know I write for a couple of successful tech websites that draw 20k+ readers a month? I write sci-fi, so in my mind, they coorelate, but I’m not sure what an editor thinks.
Thomas, of heavens YES. In this modern world, that’s called a “platform” and editors get real, real happy talking to their company sales force when they can put on the sales pitch sheet that you have a platform with that many readers. So heaven’s yes, put that in cover letters. It not only shows you write professionally, but have a large following. Cuts through a lot of the first novel resistance.
And your analogy about poker is right on the money. I used to get annoyed about bad beats, but now I just sort of chuckle and think to myself to the guy who did the bad beat “Hold onto those chips, I’ll have it back shortly.” Now I never let a bad beat or bad stretch of dead cards bother me. Just like in writing, it’s all part of the game. Spot on, Thomas.
I just wanted to say thanks again to Dean and Laura, and actually some of the commenters, like Thomas. You’ve answered a lot of questions for that I had in these comments, some I didn’t even realize I had!
Thomas’ question about trilogies related to a series of novels I’m working on right now. Not a trilogy but a series of standalones about the galaxy’s most famous thief. (For anyone who reads in the mystery genre, think Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder crossed with Lawrence Block’s Bernie the Burglar, then shoved out an airlock and you have my character, Jack Hudson). So thanks to Thomas for the question and Dean for the answer.
Also, in regards to books on publishing contracts, I found this site: bookcontracts.com. I haven’t bought the print book or the ebook so I don’t know if it’s any good. Well, let’s be honest, I could buy the book and still have no idea is it’s any good.
Which is why I’m asking Dean and/or Laura what they think from what they can tell.
Thanks to everyone. I’m learning a ton.
Steve
Hmmm, that one looks very interesting. I’ll get a copy and report back on it. With some of the blurbs and the author’s credits, sure sounds pretty good.
Cheers
Dean
I just stumbled across an interesting bit of advice written by Isaac Asimov in HOW TO ENJOY WRITING that sort of fits in with the discussion:
“My own system is to do everything myself. I have no assistants, no secretaries, no typists, no researchers, no agents, no business managers. My theory is that all such people waste your time. In the time it takes to explain what you want, to check what they do, to point out where they did it wrong–you can do at least three times as much by yourself.” — Isaac Asimov
I’ve some publishing credits — all non-fiction — from quite some time ago, but they’re not even remotely related to my interest in writing science fiction and fantasy. Some were articles published in a weekly magazine (which is still around), and some others were published online at a writer’s forum. I rather doubt that these could be included as part of my résumé in a cover letter to a fiction publisher, but I gather from all this that if I have professional short story credits then I should definitely include them in my cover letter.
I will say, though, that, based on what I’ve seen in the magazines that I read regularly, short story sales seem to be a good means not only for additional income, but also for promoting a recently published novel or an upcoming novel, thus adding to one’s potential audience.
L.M., Yup, I am slowly discovering that same thing myself over the last few years. Of course, early on, no beginning writer will understand that or the time it takes, as Laura and I have detailed out, to deal with agents and how much, if you let them, they can hurt you.
I’m agreeing with Hartwell and with Asimov. Anyone who knows me knows how really, really weird that is. But good advice is just flat good advice.
I don’t agree about not putting in your credits, G.D., I’d put them in until you can replace them with other credits more appropriate. Any show to an editor that you can write and have done something like articles in a weekly magazine is a good thing. Book still has to stand alone, but it clearly puts the editor in the right frame of mind to read something from a professional.
But I do agree that short stories can really, really help a writer. But don’t bother even trying if you don’t normally read short fiction and just love it.
That’s good to know! Thanks, Dean.
“”My theory is that all such people waste your time. In the time it takes to explain what you want, to check what they do, to point out where they did it wrong–you can do at least three times as much by yourself.” — Isaac Asimov”"
Good point. This is exactly why I stopped having a webmaster. His work, his temperament, and his prices were all fine, but updating the site was always such a time-consuming process, for exactly the reasons Asimov cites, that when I decided I wanted to build an all-new site and retire the old one, I also decided it would be more efficient to learn some web software and just do it myself. That was five years ago and I still find that just doing it myself suits me best. I use Dreamweaver, which was actually a nuisance to learn, but I think the preponderance of writers doing their own websites now with Wordpress (which I gather is a lot more user-friendly and something I should look into for my next overhaul) means that quite a few writers have decided that it’s less trouble just to do it themselves.
Anyhow, I find it really interesting that Asimov says he eschews agents in a piece entitled HOW TO ENJOY WRITING. That highlights something which has been true for me, which is that working with an agent always wound up significantly diminishing my enjoyment of writing. And, as already discussed, I also lost BOATLOADS of time and energy when working with agents, due to the stress and distraction they caused me.
In fact… in a perfect example of the TIME that such people cost me (as well as mental energy)… On one occasion, I found out that an editor of mine was leaving and I was being reassigned. This happens fairly often in publishing (and has happened a number of times to me), and you never know how it will go for the writer. (Once it went really well and led to many more books sales; once it meant I had to leave a house because my new editor went A YEAR without ever answering my emails or returning my calls; and so on.) I was philosophical about the news. I hadn’t heard great things about my new editor, but I also hadn’t had a great impression of the previous one. So I would wait and see how it went.
My agent, OTOH, freaked out. Both my agent and the agent’s assistant spent the morning on the phone telling me that my new editor was a nightmare to deal with and this would be a disaster for me. So that afternoon, the agent and I talked about whether to request ADDITIONAL reassignment–but I didn’t know anyone else at the house, and the agent didn’t like anyone at the house, do we just dithered. So then we talked AGAIN toward the end of the day; still MORE dithering.
I had by now spent a WHOLE DAY thinking and fretting about this… when, in fact, I’d pretty shrugged off the news, first thing that morning, with a “it happens” attitude. It was the -agent- who’d gotten me up in arms and wasting the whole day fretting about this. So now… as we’re talking, then agent asks to put me on hold for a moment to take another call. But instead of putting me on hold… the agent disconnects me. (Out of courtesy, I’ll assume it was an accident.) I wait by the phone a few minutes, assuming the agent will call be back. But no call comes. So I call the agent’s office; not there. So I call the agent’s cell; I get voice mail. So I email the agent.
Well, 5 o’clock comes and goes. And it’s Friday. So now I spend the ENTIRE WEEKEND fretting about this editorial problem–which -I- hadn’t considered a problem until the agent whipped me into a frenzy about it, had 3-4 phone conversatinos with me about it… then disconnected me and NEVER CALLED BACK. So, yep, I waste AN ENTIRE WEEKEND fretting about this.
I assume, of course, that the agent will phone me Monday morning, full of apologies and A Really Good Explanation for not phoning me back on Fri. After all, I have left an office-phone message, a cell phone message, AND an email.
But no call ever comes. EVER. No response to the email, no acknowledgement that I was simply left HANGING in the middle of an interrupted conversation, wholly generated by the agent and the agent’s assistant, along the lines of, “This is a disaster for you, Laura! A disas–oh, can I put you on hold?”
So finally, on Tues or Weds, -I- called and tried to re-open the discussion. The agent never acknowledged having hung up on me, never acknowledged ignoring my calls and messages… and now tried to backpedal and say that the reassignment to the new editor was no big deal and didn’t really matter, but if it wound up bothering me as much as I expected ( I? I??? =I= expected?), we could talk about it again then, but there probably wasn’t much we could do.
So by now, I’ve wasted 4-5 days fretting anxiously about something -I- had seen as a standard event, which the -agent- then freaked me out by (rather hysterically) defining as a huge problem, and then further freaked me out by leaving me hanging mid-sentence for days, and THEN capped off by pretending was all -my- idea and one that should be shoved aside. Which led to me losing several MORE days in the stress of bewildered frustration, feeling ill-used, and wondering if I should fire the agent. (I eventually did fire the agent, but it was later and for other reasons.)
Oh, and on ANOTHER occasion… an agent of mine called and placed before me the prospect of working with a (very, very, VERY) minor celebrity, more or less editing a novel she was working on. The agent thought this could be worth about $10,000 to me.
Well, of course, if a publisher asks you to do that, they put money =on the table=. And if a (very, very, VERY) minor celebrity came to -me- for editorial help, I’d name a fee and wouldn’t start work until the first payment had cleared my account. (Well, in those days, when I needed money so badly, I would have. These days, I wouldn’t touch a situation like that with a ten foot pole.
So I read the whole MS. And I write a constructive 2,000-word revision letter about the changes I recommend. And, as anyone who’s ever done something like this knows, reading a MS to evaluate it takes 2-3 times as long as just reading it, and writing a -constructive- revision letter takes about 10 times as long as just saying, “This is awful and needs a complete overhaul from page one.”
So by the time I talk to the MS’s author, I’ve spent DAYS on this… And although we have a fairly friendly talk (since I’m a polite Midwesterner and she’s a nice person), she disagrees with my assessment, think the MS just needs a little but of work. MOre to the point, she clearly states that my agent must have misunderstoof the sitution, she never had any intention of paying anyone to help her with it. (And since she’s being very pleasant and polite, and has taken my negative “it needs a lot of work” reaction to her MS in pretty good stride, she’s making a good impression on me… and I think she may well be telling the truth about the -agent- being the only one here who ever brought up money, and only with -me-, never with -her-.) She thanks me nicely for my time and hangs up.
Bewildered and wondering how I’m going to get paid for my time if -she- never intended to pay anyone, I call my agent. The agent simply shrugs it off as, “Oh, well, guess that won’t work out then.”
And I have now wasted 4 full days and a lot of work on NOTHING… after hearing the agent tell me I could probably make $10,000. I realized then how naive I had been to do -anything- without a contract and money ON THE TABLE– and I felt totally played by my agent, who’d dangled this distracting carrot in front of me… probably in hopes of getting a publishable novel from a minor celebrity who couldn’t write. No skin off the agent’s nose that it didn’t work out… but =I= lost four full days to that nonsense.
G. D. – what Dean said. My non-fiction publishing credits are over twenty years old (contributing editor at Byte magazine and a couple of freelance pieces for space magazines), so I know where you’re coming from. Putting those credits in your cover letter lets an editor know a few things up front beyond that you know how to write, namely that you know a bit about the business: deadlines, contracts, correcting proofs, etc. This suggests you will probably be easier to work with than J. Random Unknown.
That may not be much of an edge, but every little bit helps.
Here’s another example of an agent stealing TIME from a client. (And also causing a lot of stress.)
A friend of mine delivered a MS to her editor, and another copy of it to her agent (since, unlike my agents, her agent actually read her work). They both read it. The editor then leaves a message for the agent on a Friday afternoon, saying simply, “We need to talk.”
The agent FREAKS OUT. She interprets “we need to talk” as meaning the MS is a disaster. Although the agent had no problems with the MS when she read it, now -she- decides it’s a disaster. She contacts my friend and freaks HER out. They’ve only got THIS WEEKEND to save her career! They need to be able to tell the editor, when the agent talks to her on Monday, that they know what’s wrong with the book and the writer can fix it–indeed, has already STARTED fixing it. There is no reason for the editor to lose faith, cancel the contract, drop the writer, etc.!
So the agent dumps a boatload of notes on my friend Friday night, who–in a frazzled, anguished, bewildered state of mind–commences emergency revisions on Saturday morning, as per the agent’s notes. When Monday comes, the editor is in meetings all day, so the writer keeps revising while awaiting news…
When it finally comes, later in the week…. it turns out that the editor thinks the book is FINE and authorized the delivery-and-acceptance check for it. Her “we need to talk” message to the agent was a run-of-the-mill message meaning they needed to talk about scheduling, about the next contract for the writer, etc.
So the writer had by now spent DAYS in fear and anxiety–and, more to the point–DAYS needlessly rewriting-for-the-agent a book that the editor had ACCEPTED and thought was fine.
Obviously, -anyone- can waste a writer’s time (and energy). But since an agent =can’t even pay= the writer, it’s time that I tend to think of as PARTICULARLY wasted.
Folks, I hate to say this, but Laura’s stories about agents wasting your time for no money are accurate and not only have they happened to me (guess I do have some agent horror stories) but I can’t begin to tell you how many writer friends I have heard these stories from. I now NEVER write unless I have money up front or a contract signed.
And since I don’t have an agent in the middle of my career, I never spend one moment of time with those worries anymore. Now granted, I can make stuff up about business problems with the best of them, and often don’t need an agent to get me fretting about something. But that’s my doing, not something that comes in from the outside and hits me like agents can do to you.
I have a friend who is, for some reason, convinced that an agent is necessary, even though there is no contract yet on a possible new project. So hours and hours of time and conversation have been spent on agent this or agent that. And I have no idea how much time this friend has spent as well.
Sometimes this need for someone to validate us as writers is pathological and we turn to agents to do it, the worst thing we can do. Thus the reactions to these blog posts across the web and the push-back. I’m suggesting to writers that they act in a business fashion, with good business practice, to agents, and that causes writers no amount of problems because of this need to just be accepted.
Thanks, Laura, for the stories of time and how agents can waste writers time. Asimov was right.
Look at how much time I have spent on these posts about agents. (grin)
One of the frustrating things, of course, is that in all of the three incidents that I described above, there was at least one (perhaps several) sensible businesslike way to handle the situation… but the agents in question didn’t.
First Ex.: Say to the client, “I want to make sure your reassignment to this other editor goes smoothly, so I’ll put in a call to the editor next week to establish our constructive expectations and open a line of communication. And if you have any problems with the editor, let me know immediately. Or if there’s someone you’d rather work with, let me know.”
Second Ex.: Say to the client, “There’s a minor celebrity working on a novel, and she’ll need a ton of help for it to have any chance of being publishable. If I negotiate a contract and remuneration with her for you, would you be interested in doing that work?”
Third Ex.: Say NOTHING to the client AT ALL until you’ve had that talk with the editor and found out what’s what. Keep your unconfirmed fears to yourself, for goodness sake.
One of the oddities (it has always seemed to me) of the publishing industry is that writers are supposedly unbusinesslike flakes, and agents are supposedly rational professionals who are businesslike. My own experience is that the reality is very different from that particular myth, though. Some agents are indeed very professional and businesslike (and some writers are indeed flakes). But a substantial percentage of agents are actually very UNbusinesslike, and this is one of the great rarely-mentioned truths of the profession, both in my personal experience and in the anecdotes I’ve heard from dozens and dozens of writers over the years.
And Laura, what I find head-shaking is that we writers EXPECT them to be businesslike. That’s where the myth hits the hardest on this stuff. Agents, as I have said, have no training. Most graduated from an some college you would recognize the name with an English degree, worked for a few years, maybe as an editor, then switched to agenting. And with that background, we think they should understand small business, understand cash flow the the problems writers face, understand just the basic logic of business as you pointed out in your posts. They most often don’t.
Of course, there are some who are smart in business, but as you have pointed out, most are not, and the problem is with writers that we expect them to be and are shocked and stunned when they are not.
Dean & Laura, you two need to capture all of this and turn it into its own e-book on fiction writing and agents.
Suggested titles:
“Something Wicked This Way Comes: protecting your fiction business from poor agents.”
or
“Swimming With Sharks: your fiction business in the era of agents run amuck.”
or
“Caveat Scriptor: everything you need to know about the dos and do-nots of having a fiction agent.”
or
“Dumb and Dumber: why agents think they run authors, and what you can do about it.”
or
“Shooting your agent in the face (with a bazooka!) cautionary tales from the freelancer’s world.”
or
“Taking It Back: how to repossess a fiction career derailed by agents.”
or
“Writer as Boss: 20 reasons why not to let someone else tell you how to run your fiction business.”
… And so on, and so forth.
Thank you, Alastair. I’m a bit surprised to hear that credits even that old are considered relevant, but, regardless, it’s good to know.
Gary
Well, Dean, Laura, you’ve done it. You convinced me. I sent out my novel on the 25th, unagented, to a publisher. I’ll worry about an agent (or a lawyer) later. I freaked out for about two or three days afterwards and then got over it. Big deal. What’s the worse that can happen? It gets rejected. Well, I’ve got a list. And after I do some research, I’m going to have a longer list. Know any good sites?
Amanda,
I’ll say it again, just for good measure: One good website is my Writers Resources Page. Go to LauraResnick.com and click on the Writers Resources link.
Another, that someone showed me recently (which I’m going to add to my page) is an online index of SF/F publishers and editors. If you poke around it, you’ll see that it provides information about who’s working where (and who -has- worked where), who’s edited what, which houses have published what. Note that some of the editors listed are required, moved to another house, or dead; the listings say so, so be thorough about reading them, if interested in an editor or house. The page is at:
http://www.sfeditorwatch.com/index.php/Main_Page
Oh Damn, Laura, that is an EXCELLENT resource. Thank you!
Laura, I’ll echo Brad’s comment on that resource. I’d started on my own such compilation, this is far better.
It’s incomplete (I checked a couple of editors/publishers I know a bit about) but it’s a Wiki, people can add to it. The more the better.
Dean, earlier you wrote, “One of the keys to writing to an assignment is to write your own story inside the assignment. Those are the ones that work. But unless you know how to write your own stuff, you’ll never be able to put your own voice and story inside a general area.”
I agree. When asked to write for a theme anthology, I try to come up with an idea that’s contrary to the theme (but still within it) or stretches the theme. For example, in the Pulphouse anthology, “Rats in the Souffle” (Jon Gustafson’s anthology where every story began “There were rats in the souffle again”), I knew right off that I didn’t want to write anything about rats or souffles. “Rats” did suggest “rations,” which suggested the nonsense phrase could be a mnemonic for remembering critical things in case one were ever adrift in space in a spacesuit. Thus was “Catch the Wotan!” born.
I also try to do something that will make a story stand out. Editors want that, of course. They want lots of voices and a diversity of ideas. I try to make my stories dramatically different, either in idea or setting. Establish a reputation for startling new ideas, all the while staying within a general assignment, and editors will keep inviting you to write for anthologies.
“Writing inside the assignment” even works for assignments like newspaper or magazine articles. In my day job writing for the Homer News, I try to approach each assignment by coming up with a new approach or perspective. How can the story be told differently? Whose story hasn’t been told? Anything a writer can do to make a story fresh will grab reader interest and make the story fun to write. If I’m having fun writing, odds are the reader will have fun reading.
Thanks, Michael for the great comments.
And I had forgotten all about that Rats book. My story in there is about a kid talking to a ghost of an old librarian and a lesson learned in needing to take care of relationships to help them survive. (A long way from any actual rats.) It was in the very first “Rats” chapbook (frighteningly collectible since there were only 100 of them and they were sold for a buck at a convention.) A slightly redrafted version of it was in the second rats book as well as the third rats book. (I published the first chapbook back a marriage or two, Alan Newcomber at Hypatia Press did the second one, and Pulphouse with Jon Gustafson editing did the third one. Great fun.)
Again, thanks, Michael.
I just wanted to reiterate how helpful these articles have been to pumping life back into my writing. A novel I had given up on because agents felt it wasn’t “big” or salable enough, has now been requested dircetly by two major publishers. Granted, these aren’t sales (yet) . But I never would have even considered getting the manuscript through the “transom” if I hadn’t come here and had the agent myths knocked out of me. This is two requests out of three queries so far. I’m only just starting to test the waters with submitting directly to editors. So the myth that you can’t submit without an agent is exactly that…a myth. I now have proof.
Thanks, Dean!
Rob, glad it’s working. Key is to remember that the “get an agent” form response is just the standard form letter. Doesn’t mean they didn’t look at it, just means it didn’t fit what they were looking for or didn’t catch them. Don’t let letters like that get you down.
Cheers
Dean
On this week’s Ninc blog, I explain why I no longer work with agents:
http://www.ninc.com/blog/index.php/archives/author-agent-business-model
I was just reading some of the posts by Moonrat (the EditorialAss) over at her site, and I came across her post on why an author should never submit without an agent. Here’s a link:
http://editorialass.blogspot.com/2008/09/why-you-should-never-submit-unagented.html
I immediately wondered what people’s take would be on some of the things she’s written there. She is apparently an unnamed editor for an unnamed company, and therefore is more than likely just spouting out what she has to so she can make sure she doesn’t end up with a bunch of slush. She even goes so far as to say that.
In several places, she spouts myths as discussed by Dean, and in others she discusses truths as discussed by Dean, Laura, Kris, et al.
I thought this would be good fuel for further discussion, given that so many here are successful without agents for submitting.
However, I should clarify, she says one should never SUBMIT without an agent. She says nothing at all about querying, which I suspect is the distinction.
Jeremy, comments when I get back. I hate typing on this silly laptop. But at least I sort of stay connected as long as I remember my passwords. (grin) Cheers, Dean
Heh. I look forward to it, Dean. And I understand. I use a laptop, but I have a proper keyboard plugged to at at nearly all times.
Laura, I read the post you made at Ninc. I thought it was a very well-written piece that ought to dispel the myth that you feel ALL writers should work without agents.
Jeremy, “submitting” and “querying” are essentially the same thing. For reasons which elude me, though, writers “submit” to publishrs and “query” agents; we don’t “query” publishers and “submit” to agents. (No, I’ve no idea why. It’s just how it gets said.)
I’ve no idea who “Moonrat” is, and–first of all–I don’t respect anonymous commentary. In my opinion, anyone not willing to put their NAME next to their opinions has no business opining in public.
However, this individual’s self-description does clearly tell us one thing: “Editorial assistant.” That job title is at the very bottom rung of the publishing house ladder. An editorial assistant is an entry-level job in publishing, and it’s most often held by someone just out of college. It doesn’t involve acquiring books, editing book, working with writers, meeting with agents, or anything else that Moonrat is giving advice about in the blog.
Editorial assistants aren’t editors, they’re assistants. And they have pretty much the same sort of functions that agents’ assistants have, which are pretty much the same sort of function that -most- office or white collar assistants have: They’re essentially secretaries or girl-Fridays. (Promising editorial assistants eventually get promoted to “assistant editor,” which is the job level at which one starts editing and acquiring. After that, there’s a dizzying array of ascending titles: editor, senior editor, supervising editor, executive editor, editor-in-chief, editorial director, etc. NOT managing editor, though; a managing editor deals with scheduling and production, not with acquiring and editing MSs. Yes, I think they could make these titles even MORE confusing, if they’d really put some effort into it; but, nooooo, they just let it happen by happy accident.)
And with ANY advice, it’s always important to consider the source.
Someone who has recently made a first-book sale, for example, is a good source for some insights into making a first-book sale; but that person is a lousy source of information on maintaining a longterm writing career. A bestselling science fiction writer can usually tell you a lot about the science fiction market; but in most cases, they’ll be a lousy source of information on the romance market. The best advice about pursuing success as a writer usually comes from successful writers, rather than from writers who haven’t sold a word in five years.
And it’s well worth keeping in mind that holding a job in the publishing industry doesn’t necessarily make someone a reliable expert on the publishing industry. For one thing, the world is full of people who aren’t actually any good at their jobs, so that’s as true of publishing as it is of any other industry. Another thing to consider is that publishing has a lot of poorly-paid entry-level jobs with a high turnover rate; so, in particular, people filling -those- jobs don’t necessarily know much about the industry just because they’re working in it. So, just for a start, Moonrat’s anonymity makes it difficult to guess if this is anyone whose advice is worth even what you’re paying for it (nothing); but Moonrat’s job title suggests s/he is in an entry-level position–which further suggests Moonrat may not be very experienced or knowledgeable, and therefore not necessarily a great source.
In any case, anyone who’s been reading these discussion can certainly take an educated guess at how silly I find Moonrat’s comments. (So silly that I couldn’t even get properly annoyed. It’s a little bit like when a small child tries to tell you how procreation works. It’s almost too amusing to want to correct with anything as mundane, oh, actual information.)
I’m not going to go over it point by point, since we’ve already discussed here–at length, in detail, and with many specific examples–the many ways in which Moonrat’s comments are inaccurate.
But I will add that the way Moonrat insists various “promises” she makes about agents are absolutely, always, and univerisally true, etc… suggests a level of naivety and inexperience in the real world that should be kept in mind, if one is tempted to follow this source’s advice about ANYTHING.
Laura
I stand corrected! I gather that Moonrat was promoted to Assistant Editor at some point since starting his/her blog (but for some reason has not changed the bio self-descrip).
This news doesn’t change how silly I find the advice/comments, but it does underscore a key problem with anonymity. The single most relevant (actually, I’d say the ONLY relevant) thing about this post is that Moonrat him/herself is clearly an editor to whom an unagented writer should not submit. That’s the piece of information in his/her post that’s useful or informative.
Except that, er… Moonrat is writing anonymously. So, since we have no way of knowing WHO this is… it’s actually useless info, after all. (And since numerous editors blog under their real names, I’m puzzled about why Moonrat lurks beind anonymity. It is the usual reason–a desire to spout off in pubic without taking responsibility or experiencing consequences? Or am I missing some nobler motive here?)
I also wanted to add, for anyone here made nervous by Moonrat’s comments, I’ve worked with a lot of editors, I’ve been rejected by a lot of editors, and I know a lot of editors socially… and in all that time, I’ve never met anyone who had any problem with my not having an agent, or a problem with numerous other writers whom I know either (a) not having an agent, or (b) doing most of their own business and then just having the agent wrap up the details. (Moreover, as discussed here previously, most mid-size and small press editors, as well as editors of short stories and articles, are ALL used to dealing directly with writers, because agents seldom get involved in such deals.) Anyhow, at major houses, I’ve never encountered anyone who had a problem with me or anyone else not having an agent.
(In fact, over the years, and contrary to the universally and uniformly cozy picture Moonrat paints, various editors have told me what “idiots” or “jerks” they think certain agents are, or how unpleasant and difficult they find certain agents to deal with (and I know a number of anecdotes of agent behavior -preventing- deals, rather than securing them); and, over the years, at least three editors have =congratulated= me upon hearing I’ve left this-or-that reputable agent. One of my current publishers, a major house, jokes about how they have to remember not to say the “a” word in front of me, lest I foam at the mouth. They also, contrary to Moonrat’s predictions, pay me MORE than I got in my agented deals elsewhere, not less.)
The anonymous Moonrat’s contemptuous attitude to writers (whom s/he portrays as ignorant, unbusinesslike, and inept) may be the result of his/her low-ranking position where s/he probably deals primarily with the slushpile and with first-timers who haven’t (as most don’t) educated themselves about the business and don’t know HOW to do business. This will necessarily color Moonrat’s view of writers, just as my having consistently bad agent experiences has necessarily colored my view of the agent-author business model; but, unlike Moonrat, I’m not naive or inexperienced enough to insist that one size fits all and always works out for the best for everyone.
Good post today from John Scalzi, an award-winning and bestselling science fiction writer, pointing out that no one’s advice in this biz is ever 100% accurate or useful for anyone else, and that one should be wary of advice from anyone who insists that -their- advice -is- 100% useful and accurate. Scalzi recommends filtering anyone’s advice through your own knowledge and experience. And he links to a couple of other blogs by writers recommending pretty much the same thing:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/14/various-sundry-21410/
What I always say is: Take what you need and leave the rest.
Wow. I used to think a lot of these things, and thought I must be crazy, because everyone else in the world and all the major writing organizations are saying “Get an agent. Do what they say. Because they are smarter than you are.”
Thanks. I can fire my shrink now. I already fired my agents.
Scott Nicholson
http://hauntedcomputer.blogspot.com
Dean,
I was pointed to your blog yesterday and I’ve been pouring over your advice ever since. With a sigh of relief I have stopped worrying about ‘getting an agent’ as an integral part of building my career in writing. That said, I have a few clarifying questions for you:
1. Should I completely ignore ‘no unsolicited submissions’ warnings from publishing houses?
2. If I do ignore those warnings, do I just send in my query letter and first 50 pages? The entire MS? How did/do you do it?
3. Some say they ‘prefer’ no simultaneous submissions. Heh. I ‘prefer’ to be paid in advance in six-to-ten digit amounts, but I’ll take what I can get. Do you ignore the no simultaneous submissions requests?
Thanks,
Greg
Greg,
First off, be very, very careful to keep the distinction between novels and short story markets clear. For short stories, you only mail one story to one market at a time. (Meaning your story “Title” can only be at one magazine at a time.)
Novels, it is to your advantage to have it at least five publishers at the same time in case one makes an offer. As for your questions, #1 “No unsolicited submissions” was the last door, so 1990’s. (grin) Now the door is “No unagented submissions.” I’m going to answer the question with two questions back. “What’s the worst they can do to you?” “What’s the best that can happen?”
Answer: Worst they can do is just say no. The best is that they buy your book.
No right answer on #2. All of us tend to do it differently. I tend to do a cover letter, followed by 10-40 pages of the book to give the editor a sense of the writing and how it opens, and then a short synopsis of the novel after the pages to let them know the ending, then sometimes more of an author blub after that or reviews that might help on previous books. (I do put some of my general credits in my cover letter of course.)
#3 was answered above.
Hope that helps.
Dean,
Fantastic. That was more or less what I expected, but it is nice to see it spelled out. Now that you’ve responded I have another question. I am a begining novelist. I literally have no ‘credits’ or ‘reviews’ or really anything that I feel isn’t fluff to add to my ‘author’s blurb’. Any advice for those of us who can’t put ‘Dear editor, please find my novel, and by the way, your publishing house has already published 30 of the 120 novels I have written’?
Thanks again,
Greg
Greg, friendly with just your voice showing while at the same time being professional. If you’ve liked a book from their line recently, mention that. That sort of thing if no credits. Or better yet, just great them and be friendly. Credits help but aren’t critical. Any credit remember, including nonfiction and short story credits help. Also job credits if your job is close to your topic. But again, not critical. Book must stand on its own and they will look if you make it sound interesting.
Dean,
Thanks for the advice. I’ll be sending out four more submissions today!
Greg
Three book contract references on my shelf. All read once, though not yet thumbed with experience to be sure of their true usefulness:
Richard Curtis -”How to be your own Literary Agent”
Tonya & Susan Evans -”Literary Law Guide for Authors: Copyright, Trademark, and Contracts in Plain Language”
Tonya Evans-Walls -”Contracts Companion for Writers”
and of course:
Nolo Press -”The Copyright Handbook” because if you don’t understand copyright, then you don’t know what you’re selling and how can you expect to understand the contract?
I loved reading your series about publishing. It is a very different view than from the publishing websites I have been reading, but all the things you are saying make sense to me.
Your argument about agents not having the writer’s interests in mind, reminds me about the critisim about real estate agents in the book Freakonomics.
Here is an article about it
Cracking the Real Estate Code
basically, like a real estate agent, an literary agent only makes a small percentage of the sale, so they have much less incentive than the author to bargain for a higher price.
here is their example from the article
Of course a literary agent makes a higher percentage, so it is a little less stark, but still you can see how the numbers work.
Here is my example,
Suppose you are offered a 10,000 advance. If the agent is able to increase the advance 25% to 12,500, they will only get $375 added to their cut of $1,500. If it takes a week of work and lunches with editors and possibly getting a reputation for being difficult or burning bridges with editors, $375 is not that much money. If instead, the agent lets your book go for 10,000, and uses the week to sign two more new authors for 10,000 advances, they will earn $3,000 on top of $1,500 from your book.
You can see the idea. It is in an agents best interest to have many writer clients, and sell their books quickly, with as little time and effort expended as possible.