While I'm here I thought I'd balance the previous post somewhat and say what I really love about my job: the authors and their stories.
This week, for example, I've had a picture book author email me in great excitement telling me about the new idea they (intentional use of gender-neutral pronoun) came up with on the train this morning and then send me the story treatment and then call to talk about it, and the conversation meandered from the story itself to the broader scope of their career to how they're fitting in creativity with working life and family.
An hour later I was sending off final editorial notes for new draft of a second novel and the draft was so much tighter and funnier than the first one I saw that I almost flushed with delight at reading it. Then I cheekily suggested a new title to the author - who was looking for one - and got the tick of approval. At least until they go home and think about it.
Half an hour after that a publisher called with an offer for a novelist who has slogged really hard - to effect - to promote their own work in a crowded market, and who has been waiting a long time to hear whether or not the publisher would take the next one. To hear the relief and happiness in their voice when I called with the news made my day.
I also have three new manuscripts queued from clients, just waiting for me to finish helping another author shape a manuscript that has finally found just the right publisher after years of trying.
Sometimes I am the very first reader these manuscripts have, and that thrill of being the 'first eyeballs' never goes away. The thrill of telling an author about an offer never goes away. The fact that I get to read stories in developmental stages, that I have brief windows of time when only the author and I know about these characters, is tremendous. It's all that a former library monitor could ever have dreamed about. And that is the fundamental truth about this Australian agent.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Some truths about being an Australian agent
One of the commenters on this post talked about why s/he had progressed through several Australian agents - the implication being that Australian agents are unprofessional - and now had a US agent.
S/he said, 'What I do want is my emails replied to, say, within a week. And my mss read within two months. I want my agent to have some kind of idea when he/she should be following things up with my publisher (option clauses etc.) and actually give a rats about selling my rights on elsewhere when they become available.' And then went on to say that her US agent could do all those things brilliantly.
So I thought I'd clear up a little something about why agents in one territory may be behaving differently than those in another. The reason is money. Advances in Australia are smaller than those in the US, as a rule, simply because the volume of books sold here is smaller. With fiction, not drastically smaller for first novels, but significantly smaller for the successful authors. And the same is true for non-fiction. Australian agents are therefore not working with the same amount of cash per author, on average. So we have to take on more authors than our US/UK counterparts in order to pay the bills. And that means less time for each client overall. We are also less likely to be able to afford to have assistants or admin help of some kind. Less likely to have a slick office with the latest computer and database.
Australian agents usually also don't have the luxury of being able to specialise. In the US it's not uncommon for agents to specialise even down to one genre of fiction (e.g. romance). If we tried that in Australia we'd need to have a trust fund. It means that Australian agents are probably better versed about the whole market - fiction, non-fiction and children's - but, again, it means that our attention is somewhat scattered.
There's also the simple fact that most of our day-to-day job is taken up by administration, when admin is usually not what we're good at. We're good at finding stories that publishers want to publish, we may be good at giving our authors editorial feedback, we're good at understanding how the publishing game works. I think it's safe to say we didn't go into agenting to do administration. Yet because of the aforementioned cash squeeze, admin is what we spend a lot of the day doing. And, unfortunately, it's what most authors notice most - the email answered days late, the manuscript read late because of the time taken up in admin. Any deal that's done, any support that's given, could vanish in the haze of why-didn't-you-answer-the-three-emails-I-sent-two-days-ago. [Note to commenter: yes, I'm being hyperbolic, but I'm trying to illustrate an extreme case, not the usual case. And it's Friday and I'm excessively tired, so I am barely restraining my snark.]
Agents also spend a lot of time talking to publishers - again, work that is invisible to authors - and these days many of us spend time trying to keep on top of what's changing in the industry, specifically in digital publishing. Two years ago we spent a fair bit of time on the Productivity Commission business. Again, this work is invisible to our clients - until such time as we can use it to help them, and that time is still coming in respect of digital publishing.
As far as I can tell, yes, US agents will do a better job of answering the emails quickly and following up the clauses, because even if they're working on their own they tend to have fewer clients, and if they have fewer clients and have admin help, they are freed up considerably. Even having someone to send out your post and write letters can help enormously.
Given that this sounds a bit like whinging, I shall anticipate the question, 'Why are you an agent then?' I'm an agent because I get up every day believing in stories and authors and publishers, and every day I hope that I'll be able to get through the admin more efficiently and read the client manuscripts I need to, and then maybe at the end of the week I'll get to submissions. It can be a frustrating game - and, as anyone in the industry can tell you, it's been a demoralising year - but I'm in it because I love reading, fundamentally, and I love what the act of reading brings to me and to the world. It just doesn't make me any faster at wading through my inbox. But it does help me find publishers for authors.
S/he said, 'What I do want is my emails replied to, say, within a week. And my mss read within two months. I want my agent to have some kind of idea when he/she should be following things up with my publisher (option clauses etc.) and actually give a rats about selling my rights on elsewhere when they become available.' And then went on to say that her US agent could do all those things brilliantly.
So I thought I'd clear up a little something about why agents in one territory may be behaving differently than those in another. The reason is money. Advances in Australia are smaller than those in the US, as a rule, simply because the volume of books sold here is smaller. With fiction, not drastically smaller for first novels, but significantly smaller for the successful authors. And the same is true for non-fiction. Australian agents are therefore not working with the same amount of cash per author, on average. So we have to take on more authors than our US/UK counterparts in order to pay the bills. And that means less time for each client overall. We are also less likely to be able to afford to have assistants or admin help of some kind. Less likely to have a slick office with the latest computer and database.
Australian agents usually also don't have the luxury of being able to specialise. In the US it's not uncommon for agents to specialise even down to one genre of fiction (e.g. romance). If we tried that in Australia we'd need to have a trust fund. It means that Australian agents are probably better versed about the whole market - fiction, non-fiction and children's - but, again, it means that our attention is somewhat scattered.
There's also the simple fact that most of our day-to-day job is taken up by administration, when admin is usually not what we're good at. We're good at finding stories that publishers want to publish, we may be good at giving our authors editorial feedback, we're good at understanding how the publishing game works. I think it's safe to say we didn't go into agenting to do administration. Yet because of the aforementioned cash squeeze, admin is what we spend a lot of the day doing. And, unfortunately, it's what most authors notice most - the email answered days late, the manuscript read late because of the time taken up in admin. Any deal that's done, any support that's given, could vanish in the haze of why-didn't-you-answer-the-three-emails-I-sent-two-days-ago. [Note to commenter: yes, I'm being hyperbolic, but I'm trying to illustrate an extreme case, not the usual case. And it's Friday and I'm excessively tired, so I am barely restraining my snark.]
Agents also spend a lot of time talking to publishers - again, work that is invisible to authors - and these days many of us spend time trying to keep on top of what's changing in the industry, specifically in digital publishing. Two years ago we spent a fair bit of time on the Productivity Commission business. Again, this work is invisible to our clients - until such time as we can use it to help them, and that time is still coming in respect of digital publishing.
As far as I can tell, yes, US agents will do a better job of answering the emails quickly and following up the clauses, because even if they're working on their own they tend to have fewer clients, and if they have fewer clients and have admin help, they are freed up considerably. Even having someone to send out your post and write letters can help enormously.
Given that this sounds a bit like whinging, I shall anticipate the question, 'Why are you an agent then?' I'm an agent because I get up every day believing in stories and authors and publishers, and every day I hope that I'll be able to get through the admin more efficiently and read the client manuscripts I need to, and then maybe at the end of the week I'll get to submissions. It can be a frustrating game - and, as anyone in the industry can tell you, it's been a demoralising year - but I'm in it because I love reading, fundamentally, and I love what the act of reading brings to me and to the world. It just doesn't make me any faster at wading through my inbox. But it does help me find publishers for authors.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
No more query letters
I've now received more than enough query letters for the critique thingy - thank you to those who have sent and I'll post them soon (with critique). If you were planning to send one and had allowed yourself time to work on it before my initial 30 November deadline, please still send it in and I'll keep it in reserve for the next round. Which may take place over the Christmas break.
The future of publishing
This is a very interesting interview with John Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century. The link is also here:
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/11/express/is-publishing-doomed-john-b-thompson-with-williams-cole
I find his last answer interesting - Thompson talks about books not going away because people are 'love the ideas that are expressed in books; they love the stories that are told through books and all of it'.
Yes, well, ideas and stories aren't peculiar to the artefact that is books: they can exist in the digital and ebook space just as readily. So, again, there's a confounding of 'book' with 'story' or 'content' and they're actually different things. Stories/content aren't going anywhere, but books may well be. Not now; not in five years' time. But once today's ten-year-olds have hit their peak culture-absorbing age, we'll be seeing a lot more digital and a lot less print.
My earlier posts on this topic:
Monday, November 22, 2010
Breaking up is hard to do
Someone I know has an agent she is unhappy with but is reluctant to make the break in case she cannot find a replacement. She has been told it is not acceptable to look for another agent before she parts company with the present one. It made me wonder just what is the correct way to deal with this situation.
I've had an author fire me because - despite lots of attention and support - I hadn't realised their latest draft of a manuscript was the one ready to go out. This was after two years of drafting and me giving feedback and advice. So two weeks after the manuscript was sent in, I hadn't sent it out because I didn't think it was the final, and I was fired. Was I cross? Yes, mainly because there was no warning and no chance for me to fix it. I just got fired. But, truthfully, nothing would have been good enough for that author. Still, I would have liked a warning.
Authors tend to fire their agents without ever flagging that they're unhappy in the first place, which is not really fair on the agent, to be honest. It's a business relationship, but in the termination phase it becomes clear that the author often doesn't see it that way, so they break off the business relationship the way they would a personal relationship: the agent simply gets dumped with the whole 'It's not you, it's me' line.
Author/agent relationships can go wrong for all sorts of reasons. Often the personalities don't fit and you don't find out until you're already enmeshed. Sometimes the agent can't get the author published, feels bad about it and lets contact peter out, not wanting to fire the client but at a loss as to what else to do. Sometimes the author becomes successful and doesn't think they need an agent any more, forgetting the role the agent played in that success. Australian authors have been known to fire local agents in pursuit of overseas representation.
So my advice to your friend is this: let the agent know that there's a problem. A simple email saying, 'I have the feeling that perhaps this relationship isn't working out for us' or actually nominating what the problem is could result in a better relationship. The agent may be able to fix the problem and, with renewed vigour, improve things overall. Then your friend wouldn't have to find a new agent. Agenting is partly customer service - if the customer makes a complaint, then endeavours are usually made to remedy the problem.
If she has tried this and it's still not working out, she can of course leave without having another agent, but she's obviously taking the risk that she won't find one.
And one last thing ... While the agent-author relationship is a business one, agents are people too. We succumb to normal stresses and the push and pull of working. I'd love to get to my to-do list in a timely fashion but I can be mid-task when the phone rings and it's a publisher who then talks for half an hour, then I may have to go to a meeting or I have to read something quickly and that task I was doing goes unfinished till tomorrow. Or the next day. Authors - clients and submitting authors - don't see all of that; they just see the unfinished task. And cranky authors
and unfinished tasks can build up to the point where the agent wants to just not talk to anyone or answer any emails.
Also, you'd be surprised how rarely we hear the words 'thank you' and, in an industry that's not highly paid and long hours are worked, those two words can mean a lot (when they're merited, of course). In the middle of a task-failing, phone-ringing, editorial-report-writing day, they mean a lot. It's a small courtesy but it greases the wheels of social - and business - exchange. Most business relationships that fall apart can be remedied by something that simple (seriously) if people can put aside their pride and sense of outrage or entitlement. So perhaps your friend should first check to see how the relationship has been run from her side, and then work out where it's going wrong before she pulls the plug. She should also give the agent a chance to say 'thank you' back - thank you for your writing, thank you for being my author. But if neither wants to say it, it's time to end it.
I've had an author fire me because - despite lots of attention and support - I hadn't realised their latest draft of a manuscript was the one ready to go out. This was after two years of drafting and me giving feedback and advice. So two weeks after the manuscript was sent in, I hadn't sent it out because I didn't think it was the final, and I was fired. Was I cross? Yes, mainly because there was no warning and no chance for me to fix it. I just got fired. But, truthfully, nothing would have been good enough for that author. Still, I would have liked a warning.
Authors tend to fire their agents without ever flagging that they're unhappy in the first place, which is not really fair on the agent, to be honest. It's a business relationship, but in the termination phase it becomes clear that the author often doesn't see it that way, so they break off the business relationship the way they would a personal relationship: the agent simply gets dumped with the whole 'It's not you, it's me' line.
Author/agent relationships can go wrong for all sorts of reasons. Often the personalities don't fit and you don't find out until you're already enmeshed. Sometimes the agent can't get the author published, feels bad about it and lets contact peter out, not wanting to fire the client but at a loss as to what else to do. Sometimes the author becomes successful and doesn't think they need an agent any more, forgetting the role the agent played in that success. Australian authors have been known to fire local agents in pursuit of overseas representation.
So my advice to your friend is this: let the agent know that there's a problem. A simple email saying, 'I have the feeling that perhaps this relationship isn't working out for us' or actually nominating what the problem is could result in a better relationship. The agent may be able to fix the problem and, with renewed vigour, improve things overall. Then your friend wouldn't have to find a new agent. Agenting is partly customer service - if the customer makes a complaint, then endeavours are usually made to remedy the problem.
If she has tried this and it's still not working out, she can of course leave without having another agent, but she's obviously taking the risk that she won't find one.
And one last thing ... While the agent-author relationship is a business one, agents are people too. We succumb to normal stresses and the push and pull of working. I'd love to get to my to-do list in a timely fashion but I can be mid-task when the phone rings and it's a publisher who then talks for half an hour, then I may have to go to a meeting or I have to read something quickly and that task I was doing goes unfinished till tomorrow. Or the next day. Authors - clients and submitting authors - don't see all of that; they just see the unfinished task. And cranky authors
and unfinished tasks can build up to the point where the agent wants to just not talk to anyone or answer any emails.
Also, you'd be surprised how rarely we hear the words 'thank you' and, in an industry that's not highly paid and long hours are worked, those two words can mean a lot (when they're merited, of course). In the middle of a task-failing, phone-ringing, editorial-report-writing day, they mean a lot. It's a small courtesy but it greases the wheels of social - and business - exchange. Most business relationships that fall apart can be remedied by something that simple (seriously) if people can put aside their pride and sense of outrage or entitlement. So perhaps your friend should first check to see how the relationship has been run from her side, and then work out where it's going wrong before she pulls the plug. She should also give the agent a chance to say 'thank you' back - thank you for your writing, thank you for being my author. But if neither wants to say it, it's time to end it.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Query letter critique update
I've had a good response to the critique thingy so I'll have to revise the deadline and say it's 30 November unless I receive 20 before then, in which case I'll let y'all know.
I'll accept letters for all genres of novel, for non-fiction and for children's books.
Again, to submit it's call [dot] sydney [at] gmail [dot] com.
PS: I only just realised that I said '31 November' in the initial post. Hmmm. Shall amend now.
I'll accept letters for all genres of novel, for non-fiction and for children's books.
Again, to submit it's call [dot] sydney [at] gmail [dot] com.
PS: I only just realised that I said '31 November' in the initial post. Hmmm. Shall amend now.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Send me your query letter
I have a few spare minutes each night at about 11.03 p.m. I've decided to use them to reviewing your query letters for publication on this blog, since in this past this appeared to go well.
A couple of readers sent me non-fiction query letters a little while ago and I haven't yet put them up, so they're automatically in. If you are not one of those two authors and would like to send me your query letter for any type of project - fiction, non-fiction, children's - and are prepared for me to give advice on the blog, then you can email the query letter to me at:
call [dot] sydney [at] gmail [dot] com
with the subject line 'Query letter'.
If you're not sure what goes into a query letter, I've written about the things plenty of times - examples here - and the internets are lousy with tips.
If I receive more than twenty, I'll probably have to cut it off at twenty. I actually have no idea how many I'll receive ...
Closing date: 30 November 2010
A couple of readers sent me non-fiction query letters a little while ago and I haven't yet put them up, so they're automatically in. If you are not one of those two authors and would like to send me your query letter for any type of project - fiction, non-fiction, children's - and are prepared for me to give advice on the blog, then you can email the query letter to me at:
call [dot] sydney [at] gmail [dot] com
with the subject line 'Query letter'.
If you're not sure what goes into a query letter, I've written about the things plenty of times - examples here - and the internets are lousy with tips.
If I receive more than twenty, I'll probably have to cut it off at twenty. I actually have no idea how many I'll receive ...
Closing date: 30 November 2010
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