It’s August already – Ferragosto in Italy; everything’s closed down but here people are working like maniacs. The agency’s new website is up – www.foliolit.com – still many updates to come, but things are slowly taking shape. Many cool marketing and PR plans starting to coalesce. If only there were more hours in the day. I’m thinking that I need a vacation – just one day off, please (don’t forget we agents are stuck reading manuscripts on the weekend – which is fun, but it’s still work, y’know?). I actually have a day off at the end of the month – flying off to a writer’s conference, and I get there the day before the conference starts, so I get to bum around and hang out and relax (or at least try to / pretend to relax, which is more or less the same thing) until 5 PM, so it almost counts as a full day off. The problem is that it usually takes me four or five days to get into the groove of vacation – I spend the first few days incessantly checking email and voicemail, and dealing with whatever crisis has come up; and then, once the sand and the surf really get into my blood, I become completely comatose for the rest of the trip. My wife has to pry me out of the hammock with a stick…
Anyway, no use thinking about vacations, because work is all-consuming at the moment. Natalie’s asked me to talk about agent guidelines today, and I think that’s a great subject because all of us are so different, and the criteria are such weird things.
Jeff’s Guide to Agent Guidelines
Step #1. Understand the context. The first thing to understand is that when you send in your query letter, you’ve actively begun the publishing process (Just so we’re clear on the terms, right off the bat: “Query Letter” is the cover letter that asks the agent if s/he wants to take a look at your stuff. I’m not going to talk about query letters here; I’ve written about them elsewhere, and there are a million other websites and books written by people far smarter than I am who can give you the skinny on these. Briefly, though, a query letter is a single page that succinctly and compellingly discusses your book, and asks the agent if s/he wants to take a look at it). That letter is the first, and may be the only, contact you’ll have with the agent or editor. So it makes sense to do it right – to go in with the right attitude and include the right kind of materials. Here are some thoughts on how to formulate all of these.
Step #2. Come up with a List of Agents Worth Approaching. Hundreds of agents are out there, desperate for the Next Great Manuscript – the question, dear writer, is how you find ‘em. Some suggestions, in order that I think are the most effective (if not the most practical – hey, I’m a literary agent, remember? My dad wanted me to be a corporate lawyer; if you’re not happy, complain to him). One quick suggestion, when hunting for an agent: do not type “literary agent” into your search engine and be done with it – there are far more effective ways of proceeding. Here are a few:
- Referrals. Befriend bestselling authors, and ask them if they’ll recommend you to their agent. We agents don’t want to offend our bestselling clients, so that’s a surefire way of making sure that we read your submission asap. It’s also ideal, of course, if the agent represents the kind of genre you write in (I’m not getting into genre here, by the way), so your bestselling author friend doesn’t feel foolish recommending your fabulous spirituality memoir to their agent who only handles literary fiction.
- Conferences. Writer’s Conferences (see my previous posting, above) are one way of meeting an agent and making a personal connection.
- Acknowledgments. Go out to your local bookstore or library and find books that you feel really are similar to yours. Don’t go with brand-name authors; find first-time authors (if you’re trying, for example, to publish your first novel) or authors that have credentials similar to yours (regular appearances on local TV or radio, a national or local or regional speaking gig, and so forth), or books with a voice similar to yours, or a message similar to yours, or subject matter similar to yours, and check in the Acknowledgments section of the book. Well-bred authors thank their agents for their help on the project, so that’s a great way of getting the agent’s name.
- Writer’s Guides. Lots of ‘em out there, especially on the Net. Of course check out the AAR’s website , Bill Martin’s very thorough www.agentresearch.com, or www.publishersmarketplace.com; but there are literally hundreds of other places, including Natalie’s own agent pages. Another possibility that’s worth dealing with is just going to one of the great writer’s community websites – my favorite, of course, is Backspace but www.writers.net is also a goodie. These places will all have listings of agents, and may say something useful about them.
A few key things to keep in mind as you research the agent:
- Genre. Make sure the agent handles the genre you’re writing in. If you don’t know the genre of your book, go to your local large chain bookstore and figure it out. Where would your book go on the shelf? Find the one shelf that would best house it. Books that cross genres often get misshelved, and lost in the store, and disappear prematurely.
- Acceptance of new clients. Make sure the agent is accepting new clients. Many aren’t, or will only accept clients from referrals.
- Beware of scammers. All agents aren’t created equal. In order to be able to qualify for the vast and heady experience of being a literary agent, the prospective agent needs to be able to type “A-G-E-N-T”. You’ll be surprised how many people can do that, frankly. One easy warning sign is to find agents who charge fees – reading fees, marketing fees, etc. They may be perfectly qualified, fabulous agents, but generally the industry frowns upon this kind of fee-charging, since the A-G-E-N-T may be making his/her money from the fees, rather from selling your books.
- Determine exclusivity. Some agents will only read your book if they have it “exclusively” – which means it’s not sitting on the desks of other agents at the same time. Many agents do this, and it’s not a problem (unless they sit on your manuscript for months at a time), as long as you’re aware of this, and are willing to abide by it.
Step #3. Figure Out The Agents’ Submission Guidelines.
Step #3A. Figure Out How The Agent Likes To Be Approached. All agents like to be approached differently. Some (like me) are happy to be emailed; others abhor email. Some refuse to read faxes; some stand, salivating, at the fax machine, waiting for the next submission to arrive (well, that might be a slight exaggeration). For some agents, it’s a fact of life that how you approach them is as important, or maybe even more important, than what you approach them with.
Here’s why: the job of being a writer often means taking directions. You, as the publishing house’s next bestselling author, are a player in a big corporate machine – you’re a big player, maybe; you’re the public face, the lead singer of the band; but you’re still just a player. An editor needs to be comfortable thinking that, if they make some suggested edits, you’ll address those edits (you might not have to actually make the changes, but you’ll at least think carefully through the editor’s comments and respond clearly and effectively). Copyeditors need to be sure you’re going through the proof pages and reacting appropriately. Publicists need to be sure that you’ll say the right kind of thing at the right kind of time. A bookseller needs to know that you’ll be appearing where you say you’ll be, when you say you’ll be there. Those are a few examples.
It’s my job, as an agent, to assure the publisher that you will be able to do these kinds of things. Sure, we get it wrong; sure, not every author’s easy to work with. But it’s easy to screen out the people who clearly can’t follow simple instructions, folks whom we know (or at least think we know) will be a problem later.
Moral of the story? Go research the agent and find out how they like to receive materials. They’ll tell you.
Email or Snail Mail? Such a question. All will depend on the agent. I, for one, prefer email (it saves trees and time). Other agents like to have the paper to haul around with them. Agents will tell you in their submission guidelines. If they don’t tell you, play it safe and go the hardcopy route.
- If Email:
o Never include attachments without checking with the agent first.
o Don’t expect the agent to just click on your website – we rarely do it. You can include a link to your site, if you like; if you’ve intrigued us, we might check it out, but don’t count on us to check it out.
o Don’t send repeated follow-ups.
o Don’t bcc a million agents at once – target each agent individually.
o If you don’t hear back from the agent within eight weeks or so, move on.
- If Snail Mail:
o Include a SASE.
o If you don’t hear from an agent within eight weeks or so, move on.
Step #3B. Figure Out What To Send The Agent.
You’ve put your list together of agents you’re wanting to contact, gone through their submission guidelines, figured out how they want to be contacted. Last question is what to send ‘em. Agents will generally want to see some, or all, of the following (What specifically the agent wants to see will depend on the agent):
- Query letter (or cover letter), asking the agent if they’re interested in seeing more.
- Sample pages of the materials.
o If a novel, agents will always want to see the first pages (if your first pages aren’t your best pages, don’t send anything out til those first pages are your best pages). They may want to see a page, ten pages, fifty pages, three chapters, or the entire novel – this will depend on the agent.
o If nonfiction, agents may want to see a proposal, a selection from a sample chapter, and so forth.
- Synopsis. A synopsis is a fairly brief abstract of the project – fiction or nonfiction. It may be anywhere from one to four or more pages – I never know what the Rule is for this, but my suggestion is, as with almost everything in this business: keep it short. A single page, singlespaced with 1.5” margins, might be fine; two pages, doublespaced, may also be fine. (Note to purists: I know that everything’s supposed to be doublespaced, but a synopsis is the one place I think you can make an exception – if there’s a lot of white space, to make the page look inviting.) I, for one, hate reading synopses of novels – I hate to know what happens ahead of time – but sometimes I like to have ‘em, just to be sure that the author can finish the book and end the book in an interesting way.
- Outline.
o If a novel, this is a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the entire novel. Each chapter is somewhere between a couple of sentences and a couple of paragraphs long.
o If nonfiction, this is a crucial portion of the book proposal; I wouldn’t think you’d send it without the rest of the proposal.
- Clips & Other Supporting Documentation. Sometimes other book reviews (if glowing), clips from articles you’ve written (especially if you’ve written for national or very prestigious publications), or even endorsements from bestselling authors can all help make the case that you are an author to pay attention to.
Again, what you send an agent depends on what they want to see. I know that, after a few rejections, first-time authors will panic and think that if they do one thing wrong, they’re doomed to Never-To-Be-Published Hell. I don’t think that’s quite true, but I can see why this would be a concern.
Here, though, is the reality: agents who are looking for great projects will pretty much ignore protocol, if this is a very very cool project that they’re very very excited about. As long as it’s written in English, they might leap on the project if it’s something that really has a great author attached to a fabulous concept. But for most others – that is, the 99.95% of other projects out there – it’s always a good idea to try to follow the rules.
#4. Exceptions & Contradictions To Everything I Wrote Above. As you may be able to tell by now, if you’ve slogged through what I’ve been writing every month, I’m not one who’s really in love with Authority and Rules. So I think you should feel absolutely free to break all the rules – as long as you know what they are to begin with, and as long as you’re convinced that breaking the rules is the way to go. So if what I’ve said above doesn’t work for you, ignore it.
Some stuff that I suggest you do in any case:
- Include the first page of your manuscript. Some agents will say that they only want to see the cover letter; others will ask for the first chapter, or the first three chapters, or the first 50 pages. That said, we all understand that finances may not allow a beginning writer to send the first 50 pages to 50 agents. So, at a bare minimum, include a variation of the following sentence in your cover letter: “I know you like to see the first 50 pages, but I thought I’d include the first page of the manuscript, just to give you an idea of my writing style.” [Note: for nonfiction, it’s fine to send the first page of your sample chapter – since a “sample” chapter might not be the first chapter.]
- Let the author know if the submission is exclusive or nonexclusive. At this first initial contact, the agent’s not obligated to respond to you in a timely manner – although it’s only polite, of course. But if you make it absolutely clear that you’ve targeted the agent for All The Right Reasons (see above), it’s a little more likely that the agent will respond more promptly, and maybe more positively.
- Write as if you were writing to a friend. Not too personal (always use business address conventions), but friendly and open.
Good luck!
Anyway, no use thinking about vacations, because work is all-consuming at the moment. Natalie’s asked me to talk about agent guidelines today, and I think that’s a great subject because all of us are so different, and the criteria are such weird things.
Jeff’s Guide to Agent Guidelines
Step #1. Understand the context. The first thing to understand is that when you send in your query letter, you’ve actively begun the publishing process (Just so we’re clear on the terms, right off the bat: “Query Letter” is the cover letter that asks the agent if s/he wants to take a look at your stuff. I’m not going to talk about query letters here; I’ve written about them elsewhere, and there are a million other websites and books written by people far smarter than I am who can give you the skinny on these. Briefly, though, a query letter is a single page that succinctly and compellingly discusses your book, and asks the agent if s/he wants to take a look at it). That letter is the first, and may be the only, contact you’ll have with the agent or editor. So it makes sense to do it right – to go in with the right attitude and include the right kind of materials. Here are some thoughts on how to formulate all of these.
Step #2. Come up with a List of Agents Worth Approaching. Hundreds of agents are out there, desperate for the Next Great Manuscript – the question, dear writer, is how you find ‘em. Some suggestions, in order that I think are the most effective (if not the most practical – hey, I’m a literary agent, remember? My dad wanted me to be a corporate lawyer; if you’re not happy, complain to him). One quick suggestion, when hunting for an agent: do not type “literary agent” into your search engine and be done with it – there are far more effective ways of proceeding. Here are a few:
- Referrals. Befriend bestselling authors, and ask them if they’ll recommend you to their agent. We agents don’t want to offend our bestselling clients, so that’s a surefire way of making sure that we read your submission asap. It’s also ideal, of course, if the agent represents the kind of genre you write in (I’m not getting into genre here, by the way), so your bestselling author friend doesn’t feel foolish recommending your fabulous spirituality memoir to their agent who only handles literary fiction.
- Conferences. Writer’s Conferences (see my previous posting, above) are one way of meeting an agent and making a personal connection.
- Acknowledgments. Go out to your local bookstore or library and find books that you feel really are similar to yours. Don’t go with brand-name authors; find first-time authors (if you’re trying, for example, to publish your first novel) or authors that have credentials similar to yours (regular appearances on local TV or radio, a national or local or regional speaking gig, and so forth), or books with a voice similar to yours, or a message similar to yours, or subject matter similar to yours, and check in the Acknowledgments section of the book. Well-bred authors thank their agents for their help on the project, so that’s a great way of getting the agent’s name.
- Writer’s Guides. Lots of ‘em out there, especially on the Net. Of course check out the AAR’s website , Bill Martin’s very thorough www.agentresearch.com, or www.publishersmarketplace.com; but there are literally hundreds of other places, including Natalie’s own agent pages. Another possibility that’s worth dealing with is just going to one of the great writer’s community websites – my favorite, of course, is Backspace but www.writers.net is also a goodie. These places will all have listings of agents, and may say something useful about them.
A few key things to keep in mind as you research the agent:
- Genre. Make sure the agent handles the genre you’re writing in. If you don’t know the genre of your book, go to your local large chain bookstore and figure it out. Where would your book go on the shelf? Find the one shelf that would best house it. Books that cross genres often get misshelved, and lost in the store, and disappear prematurely.
- Acceptance of new clients. Make sure the agent is accepting new clients. Many aren’t, or will only accept clients from referrals.
- Beware of scammers. All agents aren’t created equal. In order to be able to qualify for the vast and heady experience of being a literary agent, the prospective agent needs to be able to type “A-G-E-N-T”. You’ll be surprised how many people can do that, frankly. One easy warning sign is to find agents who charge fees – reading fees, marketing fees, etc. They may be perfectly qualified, fabulous agents, but generally the industry frowns upon this kind of fee-charging, since the A-G-E-N-T may be making his/her money from the fees, rather from selling your books.
- Determine exclusivity. Some agents will only read your book if they have it “exclusively” – which means it’s not sitting on the desks of other agents at the same time. Many agents do this, and it’s not a problem (unless they sit on your manuscript for months at a time), as long as you’re aware of this, and are willing to abide by it.
Step #3. Figure Out The Agents’ Submission Guidelines.
Step #3A. Figure Out How The Agent Likes To Be Approached. All agents like to be approached differently. Some (like me) are happy to be emailed; others abhor email. Some refuse to read faxes; some stand, salivating, at the fax machine, waiting for the next submission to arrive (well, that might be a slight exaggeration). For some agents, it’s a fact of life that how you approach them is as important, or maybe even more important, than what you approach them with.
Here’s why: the job of being a writer often means taking directions. You, as the publishing house’s next bestselling author, are a player in a big corporate machine – you’re a big player, maybe; you’re the public face, the lead singer of the band; but you’re still just a player. An editor needs to be comfortable thinking that, if they make some suggested edits, you’ll address those edits (you might not have to actually make the changes, but you’ll at least think carefully through the editor’s comments and respond clearly and effectively). Copyeditors need to be sure you’re going through the proof pages and reacting appropriately. Publicists need to be sure that you’ll say the right kind of thing at the right kind of time. A bookseller needs to know that you’ll be appearing where you say you’ll be, when you say you’ll be there. Those are a few examples.
It’s my job, as an agent, to assure the publisher that you will be able to do these kinds of things. Sure, we get it wrong; sure, not every author’s easy to work with. But it’s easy to screen out the people who clearly can’t follow simple instructions, folks whom we know (or at least think we know) will be a problem later.
Moral of the story? Go research the agent and find out how they like to receive materials. They’ll tell you.
Email or Snail Mail? Such a question. All will depend on the agent. I, for one, prefer email (it saves trees and time). Other agents like to have the paper to haul around with them. Agents will tell you in their submission guidelines. If they don’t tell you, play it safe and go the hardcopy route.
- If Email:
o Never include attachments without checking with the agent first.
o Don’t expect the agent to just click on your website – we rarely do it. You can include a link to your site, if you like; if you’ve intrigued us, we might check it out, but don’t count on us to check it out.
o Don’t send repeated follow-ups.
o Don’t bcc a million agents at once – target each agent individually.
o If you don’t hear back from the agent within eight weeks or so, move on.
- If Snail Mail:
o Include a SASE.
o If you don’t hear from an agent within eight weeks or so, move on.
Step #3B. Figure Out What To Send The Agent.
You’ve put your list together of agents you’re wanting to contact, gone through their submission guidelines, figured out how they want to be contacted. Last question is what to send ‘em. Agents will generally want to see some, or all, of the following (What specifically the agent wants to see will depend on the agent):
- Query letter (or cover letter), asking the agent if they’re interested in seeing more.
- Sample pages of the materials.
o If a novel, agents will always want to see the first pages (if your first pages aren’t your best pages, don’t send anything out til those first pages are your best pages). They may want to see a page, ten pages, fifty pages, three chapters, or the entire novel – this will depend on the agent.
o If nonfiction, agents may want to see a proposal, a selection from a sample chapter, and so forth.
- Synopsis. A synopsis is a fairly brief abstract of the project – fiction or nonfiction. It may be anywhere from one to four or more pages – I never know what the Rule is for this, but my suggestion is, as with almost everything in this business: keep it short. A single page, singlespaced with 1.5” margins, might be fine; two pages, doublespaced, may also be fine. (Note to purists: I know that everything’s supposed to be doublespaced, but a synopsis is the one place I think you can make an exception – if there’s a lot of white space, to make the page look inviting.) I, for one, hate reading synopses of novels – I hate to know what happens ahead of time – but sometimes I like to have ‘em, just to be sure that the author can finish the book and end the book in an interesting way.
- Outline.
o If a novel, this is a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the entire novel. Each chapter is somewhere between a couple of sentences and a couple of paragraphs long.
o If nonfiction, this is a crucial portion of the book proposal; I wouldn’t think you’d send it without the rest of the proposal.
- Clips & Other Supporting Documentation. Sometimes other book reviews (if glowing), clips from articles you’ve written (especially if you’ve written for national or very prestigious publications), or even endorsements from bestselling authors can all help make the case that you are an author to pay attention to.
Again, what you send an agent depends on what they want to see. I know that, after a few rejections, first-time authors will panic and think that if they do one thing wrong, they’re doomed to Never-To-Be-Published Hell. I don’t think that’s quite true, but I can see why this would be a concern.
Here, though, is the reality: agents who are looking for great projects will pretty much ignore protocol, if this is a very very cool project that they’re very very excited about. As long as it’s written in English, they might leap on the project if it’s something that really has a great author attached to a fabulous concept. But for most others – that is, the 99.95% of other projects out there – it’s always a good idea to try to follow the rules.
#4. Exceptions & Contradictions To Everything I Wrote Above. As you may be able to tell by now, if you’ve slogged through what I’ve been writing every month, I’m not one who’s really in love with Authority and Rules. So I think you should feel absolutely free to break all the rules – as long as you know what they are to begin with, and as long as you’re convinced that breaking the rules is the way to go. So if what I’ve said above doesn’t work for you, ignore it.
Some stuff that I suggest you do in any case:
- Include the first page of your manuscript. Some agents will say that they only want to see the cover letter; others will ask for the first chapter, or the first three chapters, or the first 50 pages. That said, we all understand that finances may not allow a beginning writer to send the first 50 pages to 50 agents. So, at a bare minimum, include a variation of the following sentence in your cover letter: “I know you like to see the first 50 pages, but I thought I’d include the first page of the manuscript, just to give you an idea of my writing style.” [Note: for nonfiction, it’s fine to send the first page of your sample chapter – since a “sample” chapter might not be the first chapter.]
- Let the author know if the submission is exclusive or nonexclusive. At this first initial contact, the agent’s not obligated to respond to you in a timely manner – although it’s only polite, of course. But if you make it absolutely clear that you’ve targeted the agent for All The Right Reasons (see above), it’s a little more likely that the agent will respond more promptly, and maybe more positively.
- Write as if you were writing to a friend. Not too personal (always use business address conventions), but friendly and open.
Good luck!