Do you need an agent to get published, and be published to get an agent?The fact that it sometimes takes getting published to get an agent cannot be ignored.
After first-time author Beverly Brandt queried fifteen agents and found mostly rejection, she decided to take matters into her own hands. Two agents had requested the entire manuscript and turned it down, and a third hadn’t made a decision on it yet, so she queried St. Martin’s press directly, while awaiting a decision from the third agent.
She sent off her query letter to St. Martin’s on a Monday in April, and by Friday of the same week, she had a request for the entire manuscript. After “spending the weekend agonizing over whether it was ready,” she sent the book off the following Monday, unsure what to expect.
“Ten weeks to the day I mailed the manuscript off, St. Martin’s called with a two-book offer,” Brandt said. “This was June 19, 2000—a day I will remember forever.”
Brandt’s first book,
True North, is a contemporary romance, and was published January 8, 2002. After receiving the news from St. Martin’s, she decided that she needed an agent, and she contacted one of the agents who had turned her down before.
“I knew I wanted an agent right away because I’m a terrible negotiator. I did re-contact an agent who had rejected me in my prior agent hunt. She and I didn’t connect at all during our phone interview, so she was pretty much out of the running from the beginning—even though she offered to take a lower commission on the first two books because I’d already sold them,” Brandt said. “When I asked the agent I ended up with [Deirdre Knight of the Knight Agency] if she’d do the same, she said she wouldn’t. Her reason? Because there was so much work to be done after the sale. I liked that answer, because I felt as if I was going to need extra attention from her as I learned the ropes. I have been very pleased with my decision. I have an agent who likes me, who likes my work, who returns my calls and e-mails within an hour (within minutes, usually), gets along with my editor, and is active in the agenting community so she can educate me on what to expect and what not to.”
Incidentally, Knight was the agent who had not yet made a decision on Brandt’s partial when the author decided to query St. Martin’s herself.
Brandt said she was not bothered by the fact that no agents chose to represent her until after she sold her book herself. "I took a lot of comfort in the stories of people like John Grisham and Stephen King who have ungodly numbers of rejection letters in their files. I was just going to keep sending material out until somebody paid attention to me,” she said. “That’s not to say that the rejections didn’t hurt, but I think what helped me was that I had so many things out there that no one rejection was going to end it for me. I was simply going to start the whole process over again by querying different agents at the same agencies with my second book. And my third. And my fourth . . . ."
Brandt believes that rejection is just a part of the writing business, and that an author, especially a first time one, cannot let it stop them. “Getting published doesn’t end that. I’ve been rejected by two movie agents since selling, and at any time St. Martin’s could stop buying my books. I hope that won’t happen, but there are just no guarantees. I guess if I wanted security, I should have stayed in the insurance business!”
Writing since the age of twelve, she said her first rejection came from Mary O’Hara, author of the My Friend Flicka series. She wrote to Ms. O’Hara, offering to write a sequel to the first three books. O’Hara had her secretary send Brandt a kind note telling her that due to copyright issues, she would not be able to write a book in the series.
“That didn’t stop me, though. I dabbled at writing for years as a teenager, moving from horses to romance at about age fourteen. Writing then fell prey to getting a ‘real’ job (at McDonald’s) when I was 16. I stopped writing for years, but was bitten by the bug again after a fairly serious quarter-life crisis, just before I turned 30,” Brandt explained. “It was one of those times in my life when I looked back at all the years I’d spent working and putting myself through college, and I really wasn’t happy with where I was headed. I went on a serious reading binge, which led me back into writing. I got serious about it in September 1999 when I gave myself an ultimatum--finish the book I was working on, or never write again.”
She finished the book, and completed two others, all of which have been sold to St. Martins. Brandt’s other two books are
Record Time, and
Room Service. When asked what advice she would offer new writers, Brandt said, “Don’t get trapped in the premature submission mentality. Write the best book you can write, then edit it, then have it critiqued by a select few trusted critique partners who won’t try to mess up your voice, then revise it, and then edit it again. Being a professional writer is a lot of fun, but it’s also a lot of hard work. Don’t submit unfinished books to agents and editors, no matter how excited you are about the great premise you just thought up over the weekend. What will you do if, as happened to me, you get a request for the full manuscript less than a week after you query? Don’t submit your first drafts to agents and editors, then write them a month later with an updated version of your story. If you’re going to keep revising it after submitting, wait to submit it until you’re certain you’ve done the best job you could do at the time.”
Brandt said new writers spend too much time polishing those crucial first three chapters and the synopsis, and not enough time writing the entire book.
“I know, because I fell into this trap myself about five years ago. But, above all, I would tell you to believe in yourself,” she said. “You are the only one who can tell your story, in your unique voice. Your life will be immeasurably better for having written the stories only you can write!”
http://www.beverlybrandt.com.
