Justine MuskJust another Storytellers Unplugged weblog

Notes on the Hunt for An Agent
(The Conclusion)

Justine Musk

So as I wrap this up, I’d like to stress again: these nuggets are what I’ve gleaned from my particular trek through this process. Your nuggets could prove very different.

Nothing is written in stone, particularly in an industry that changes with the times.

Then again, the more things change…the more they stay the same. So take from this what you will.

EXCLUSIVES.

A quick word about exclusives. They suck. This is how you get into a situation where one agent – or even one editor – ties up your manuscript for a year or more while you wait with bated breath (although if you’re smart and sane, you are working on another project) only to finally reject it.

My advice here is: Don’t. Just don’t let that happen.

For the love of all higher powers, do be courteous and honest and upfront and professional with all agents at all times, but when an agent does ask you for an exclusive on a manuscript – which means you promise not to show it to any other agents while waiting for him or her to come to a decision – and you feel you must, state a definite time frame. Anywhere from two to six weeks seems okay to me. If the agent does not respond by the end of that time, let the understanding be that you will continue to show the manuscript around – but you will not accept an offer of representation without first consulting this particular agent and giving him or her a chance to counteroffer.

Don’t promise exclusivity in your query letter; let the agent be the one to bring it up (some agents won’t).

Don’t be sly. Don’t tell one thing to one agent and a different thing to another. Don’t make one agent believe he or she has total exclusivity when that’s not the case. Aside from the fact that you don’t want to be the kind of person who brings shame to your mama — like the song has it, it’s a small, small world, especially in publishing. And the people in it tend to talk. Even if they’re not living and working and socializing together in New York, they’re running into each other at conferences and book fairs and various industry-related events across the country. And Murphy’s Law has it that the one time you’re not straightforward with agents is the one time you’ll be found out. They will not look on you kindly.

REJECTIONS

A quick word about rejections. They suck.

They’re also part and parcel of the writing life. You know this already, but the point bears repeating.

The two great constants of the writing life: you will always be waiting for some agent or editor to get back to you about something (I have two novels in the publication pipeline with two different publishers, which means I am waiting for two editors to get back to me with two editorial letters which will lead to two sets of revisions, which I will then submit and wait all over again), and you will often be rejected. For once you finally get that magic YES from a publisher, there will still be plenty of foreign publishers and movie producers who will be very happy to reject you. Hell, every time a potential reader picks up your book – only to put it back on the shelf, thinking Nah, I’m not interested in this – or, perhaps, starts to read it only to hurl it across the room in disgust – is a rejection.

You learn to blow it off and keep on truckin’.

Understand that writing and publishing is an art, a business, a game of luck, a game of numbers. You can develop your art, learn the business, cross your fingers for luck, and play the numbers game. When you know you have an excellent query letter and a polished, engaging, publishable manuscript, don’t stop at ten or twenty rejections. Go for a bare minimum of fifty, aim to take it past one hundred.

And when agents give reasons for rejecting you, listen with an open mind but a grain or two of salt. It is not the agent’s job to give you an extensive critique of your book, even if she did request a full manuscript and kept it tied up for nine months on exclusive (which you shouldn’t have given to her anyway, remember?). The more impressed an agent is with you, the more of a response you’re likely to get, the more thought and care will go into your rejection letter; but ultimately it comes down to, I loved it, or I didn’t love it, and the reasons why we fall in love (or don’t) are so complex that it’s near-impossible to sum up in a few typewritten lines. So an agent will make a very general point – “I didn’t find your characters as engaging as I would have liked”, or “I found the pace to be very slow.” File these points away in your memory to see if they come up again. If the same point comes up over and over – if agent after agent has a problem with your characters – then that might be a sign pointing the way to future revisions.

In my case, with the Post-Graduate-Transgressive-Literary-Novel I referred to in Part One of this little saga, it was the novel’s structure and plot. I grew up reading popular fiction – as a teenager, King and Koontz and John Sandford were my mainstays, and I was also a fan of a thriller writer named David Wiltse. I absorbed a healthy sense of plotting from them, but somewhere in the university years I lost it. Which also coincided with my deepening love for literary fiction. I’m not one of those types who natters on about how lit-fic is pretentious twaddle with no plot, which I don’t believe; or that genre fiction is all plot and crappy writing, which I don’t believe either. But things like language and characterization have always come more naturally to me than plot. When rejection after rejection stressed my novel’s ‘awkward structure’, and when my then-agent rejected revised draft after revised draft for the very same reason, and I realized that not only did I have a problem, I didn’t even know how to fix the bloody freaking thing, I took a deep breath and went back to the drawing table. I started learning all over again about plot: what it is, how to do it. Now I think that structure is often the most intellectually satisfying element of fiction. But that’s a whole other essay.

So ignore rejections, except when they become personalized and consistent enough so that you see a pattern in them.

At the same time, an agent is not a writing workshop. Let me repeat: an agent is not a writing workshop. The most common mistake writers make is submitting stuff before it’s ready; and half the time they’re well aware of this, but go ahead and do it anyway. They’ll submit a manuscript that isn’t finished because they want to find out if they’re “on the right track”. Don’t do this. There’s no upside to this. Either you get rejected – based on nothing more than an incomplete early draft, but you’ll forget this fact and feel so discouraged you might throw in the towel right there – or the agent will enthusiastically ask to see the rest of the manuscript, and you will be forced to admit that, as of yet, it doesn’t exist.

Write the best book you can. You know this already, but the point bears repeating. Seek out constructive feedback, revise and polish until you can’t look at the thing any longer, and then revise and polish just a little bit more. Then send it out to agents. It’s at that point – when you’ve taken the book as far as you can on your own, when you’ve put everything you have into the making of it – when you’re ready to find out who you are and where you stand (or don’t) in the marketplace; when you’re ready to absorb this new knowledge and go and grow from there.

HANDSHAKES AND CONTRACTS

When they finally do offer representation, some agents will have you sign a contract. Some agents won’t.

Writers often want a contract to sign; they feel this makes the relationship more stable, more legitimate. Also, this is what makes sense in normal day-to-day life: you sign contracts, you follow through (“Did you receive that package?” “Have you read it yet?”). But this is not normal life; this is publishing. And I am wary of agent-author contracts; I don’t think they’re necessary, for one, and any contract a writer does sign is likely to skew against the writer and advantage the agent in some way.

My agent didn’t offer a contract. What she sent me instead was an ‘introduction letter’ that clearly laid out the terms. I had done my research beforehand, so I already knew those terms; I also knew they were perfectly standard. I didn’t sign an actual contract until my book sold – and that contract was with the publisher and not my agent.

Needless to say – be careful about contracts. (You know this already, but the point…) Some agencies will charge you for ‘office expenses’, and this is legitimate – as long as those expenses are reasonable and accounted for. Any contract that makes you pay anything at all upfront should be, at best, regarded with extreme caution, and most likely instantly shredded.

You should also make sure you can disentangle yourself from the agent; that you’re not unduly locked into the relationship. And if not with the agent, then with the agent’s agency; otherwise your agent might leave Agency X for Agency Y and you desperately want to follow her, but can’t, because you signed a contract that committed you to Agency X for a period of five years, during which time you’re stuck with the new replacement agent who inherited you from the old one. Which is a bit like going to a party with someone you really like only to leave with some strange dude the host just randomly chose for you.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

After you get the agent, you enter a whole new era of waiting.

The agent will probably suggest some revisions. (The agent might work with you on revisions before offering representation – I’ve seen this happen a couple of times – as if the agent is taking the writer for a test drive.) My own agent didn’t, but the manuscript in question – BLOODANGEL – had already been pretty thoroughly revised, so that she offered representation on a Tuesday and had it on an editor’s desk by Friday. However, the next book I submitted to her – a YA supernatural thriller – was underdeveloped in parts and still needed heavy lifting. She sent me a lengthy email, I might have given a weary little groan or two, and then hunkered down to work. I submitted it again a few months later, she pronounced it ready for the marketplace, and sold it not long after.

An agent can sell your book in a day, a week, a month, a year, two years. There’s no way to tell. The only way to keep sane is to put that book out of your head and get straight to work on a new one. If you’re lucky, by the time the first rejections start coming in on your old book, you won’t care as much because you’ll be so deeply involved with the new one.

An agent will draw up a ‘marketing plan’ – a list of publishers who seem perfect for your book, and possibly a back-up list of publishers if and when the first list rejects you. The agent then contacts each editor in question, establishes that the editor is actually interested in reading the manuscript, and sends the book along. Some agents believe in submitting the manuscript to just one or two editors at a time; others will have it out to six or eight. In the case of the YA thriller mentioned above, my agent sent it out to a few editors as a way of testing the waters; when the first feedback came in positive, she sent it out to a few more.

Submitting the manuscript to, say, twenty editors at a time is generally the sign of an inept agent. This is a “scattershot submission” and is akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. At best, very little; and usually nothing at all. Editors lead busy, crowded, underpaid existences, which means they’re forced to prioritize. Which means they’ll read manuscripts submitted by those they know and trust, those agents who know the kind of material they’re looking for and can be trusted to deliver it. And from what I can tell, this group – of known, trusted agents – is a hell of a lot smaller than any doorstop Directory of Agents might lead you to expect.

Because, let’s face it, anybody can hang up a shingle and call themselves an agent. They might not even be conning you out of your money; they could be perfectly decent and mildly reasonable people who also happen to be clueless about how the industry works, how you break and rise within it. And it’s just as important to avoid these people as it is the hucksters and swindlers. The latter are easy to spot, because they ask you for money. They can’t help themselves.

As for the former – well, this is why research is good, and in this age of the Internet there’s no reason or excuse not to do it. (You know this, but the point…)

Also, an instant tip-off for me was location. People will say that in this age of electronic communications and cheap airline rates, an agent doesn’t need to live in New York to be an effective agent. There are some good literary agents along the west coast, and there was a great, late agent named Jane Jordan Browne who worked from Chicago, but during my own search for an agent it was basically New York or bust. If only because a Manhattan overhead is so absurdly expensive that an agent has to be legitimate just by virtue of affording to work there. (And if he’s not legit, then one hopes that all the agents and editors who do work within that radius will pelt him with tomatoes. I mean that as a metaphor, of course. Or maybe not.)

But if an agent’s given address was not east or west coast based, to me that was an instant red flag.

There is a chance your agent will not sell your book at all, despite the best of skill and effort. Sometimes things just roll this way. When an editor falls in love with your book, he or she still has to sell it in-house: usually back-up reads are required from other editors, and then the book gets taken to an editorial committee, where final approval is given or denied. Needless to say, in many cases it’s denied, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the writing or the book’s marketability – in the end, there’s just no room on The List, which only has so many slots per year. Could be there’s another book on The List that is much too similar to yours. Bummer. The other guy – and his agent — got there first.

ONE MORE THING

We’re all in this together.

We are. We really are. Writers both unpublished and published, agents and editors and publishers: we’re all trying to produce good, entertaining fiction, however we define those terms (one person’s trash is another person’s treasure). And we’re doing this in a culture that would, for the most part, rather go to a movie or hang out at the mall or spend some quality time with the Xbox.

Agents aren’t the enemy, even when they keep rejecting you.

Don’t get bitter about the process; the process is what it is. Write for the love of writing; and as for the rest of it, become as learned as possible. Think long-term. And long-term, unfortunately, means exactly that: not six months or two years, but five or ten or fifteen or more. And there are no guarantees.

I often compare the process of trying to make it as a writer to trying to climb Mt Everest. Because writing is such a democratic, egalitarian thing – all you need is pen and paper and a library card, nothing more complicated or expensive than that – and because you can’t turn around without hearing about the latest six-figure advance by the latest hot young thang (or smokin’ middle-aged or even, in the case of Frank McCourt, the newest rockin’ senior), it’s easy to forget the sheer, near-impossibility of what it is we’re trying to accomplish. And publishing, like the world itself, owes us exactly nothing, no matter how much work and time we’ve invested, no matter how much we want it or know we deserve it.

Which is why we need to celebrate each small success along the way and take pride in the attempt itself.

And which is why we must strive to be nice to one another.

Even agents.