Now you wait. It's easy for me to say you should think of something else while waiting, but I don't know how easy it is for you to do. On the one hand, you should get on with your life; on the other, you probably shouldn't leave the country, since publishing people tend, when dealing with the new-new thing, to want instant gratification, and if you're not around to return the message, they might move on. Like all busy people, they rely on momentum to take them into new projects or through a big one, since it goes without saying they're perpetually overextended. So if you're slow to respond to their enthusiasm, you might lose their attention until the Ferris wheel comes around again.
THE WAITING GAME
Chances are that you'll be able to go to Timbuktu and back twice before you start hearing back from people. And chances are even greater that everyone you've written will reject your query. If they write back at all. Statistically speaking, it's unlikely anyone will pick up the telephone to call you, much less to offer representation. Even should everyone answer, it could be four to six weeks before you hear a peep out of anyone.
The best thing to do while you're facing eternity alone is to prepare a second list of ten agents. Follow the same steps in compiling it that you followed for the first list—matching tastes or interests, getting referrals, researching each agent and agency. Start getting your new query letters ready, tailoring each one, again, to the person to whom it's addressed. Make sure you have a couple of fresh copies of your manuscript ready—just in case. Then go to the movies. Take up yoga. Adopt a kitten. Do whatever it takes to keep yourself refreshed and busy so you won't fall prey to black despair or Holly Golighdy's "mean reds."
WHEN AN AGENT DOES CALL_
Let's say—pie-in-the-sky time—that three of your A-list agents have asked to read your manuscript. You've sent it off to all three, and you've told each that two other people are reading the manuscript. (It's important to be as specific as possible. "I've had some people interested," a writer told me recently as I was leaving the country on a business trip, "let's talk after you're back." When I did call her after my return, she called back a day later to tell me she'd signed with someone else. If I'd had more specific information from her, I could have given her work a higher priority. The good news is that she signed with an excellent fellow agent.)
Then, let's say that anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months after you've sent the requested manuscript, you hear back from one of the agents: He wants to represent your manuscript. What do you do? Do you say yes right away, on the spot? Or do you say you've got to think about it, not to mention that you've got to give the other two agents who are reading the manuscript a chance, and tell the agents who haven't answered your letter that you've been offered representation? Ideally—meaning, in the most businesslike scenario—you thank the agent profusely for his interest, but ask him for a day or two to give your answer, because you've got to get in touch with the other agents involved in the submission.
In addition, you can ask some or all of the following questions to help you come to a decision:
1. What kind of publishing house do you think will want to publish my book? The agent won't be able, of course, to tell you who will publish your book, but his answer will tell you whether you and he see eye-to-eye on what type of book it is. If you've written a romance that would be perfect for Harlequin and he wants to show it to Far-rar, Straus and Giroux, a very literary hardcover publisher, you've got to question whether he'll be the right agent for you.
2. What kind of commercial potential do you think my work has? You
may want to hear that he thinks it will be a number one original mass market paperback bestseller. But if you've written a literary coming-of-age novel, you should be realistic enough to recognize blowing sunshine when you see it.
3. What's your process like? Do you give me input and ask me to revise my manuscript before sending it out? Do you like to talk to editors about my work first, or do you send it to people you know who you think will respond to it? Some agents will be entirely comfortable with these kinds of questions and some won't. Sales strategies and styles vary from book to book and are influenced by timing, intuition, relationships, and serendipity, so it's not always easy to predict what the process will be like. However, if you encounter agents who won't answer these questions at all, be wary. Especially if they are charging up-front fees, they may not have a sales process because they've discovered the real money lies in the fees, not in sending out your manuscript.
4. Will you send me copies of rejection letters if I want to see them?
The only correct answer to this is yes. Not everyone wants to see rejection letters, of course, but the decision should be yours, not the agent's.
5. Should I come to New York to meet editors? The agent will probably tell you that this will not be necessary, and he will be right. With fiction, the decision to publish comes down to the book, not your pretty face or sparkling personality—although those could help a lot later.
6. Do you have your clients sign an author/agency agreement? Some excellent agents do not have their clients sign an author/agency agreement. Most do. It's my opinion that the presence of this agreement underscores the business aspect of the partnership and is therefore necessary. (I'll discuss author/agency agreements in greater detail on page 226.)
7. What can I do to help you help me? There isn't one correct answer to this question, but if the agent says "absolutely nothing," you might wonder what kind of a partnership requires nothing from one of its members. At the very least the agent should say, "Write wonderful books."
In my experience, most people say yes immediately over the telephone. That's fine when I'm the only agent who has the manuscript and the writer has researched me and decided I'm the agent he wants for his work. But when I'm one of several agents who have a work under consideration, and I receive word that the author has signed with someone else without giving me the courtesy of an interim telephone call, it always strikes me as incredibly unprofessional.
If the agent who's calling is the only one with the manuscript, you should certainly feel free to say yes immediately if that's what you want to do. (If you get a call like this from an agent you haven't researched, you should ask to sleep on your decision overnight, during which time you'll feverishly research the person, consult with your friends, spouse, shrink, or accountant, and get a tarot reading.)
But, if your manuscript is with two other agents, you have an obligation to at least call them—they might have begun reading it, and if you're going to sign with someone else, you don't want them to put any more time into your book. If you're going to give them a chance to represent you, you want to give them a heads up so they know they've got to hurry and make their decision. Any good agent should understand and accept that you need a little time to make a decision like this and should recognize how professional it is that you want to give the others a chance to come to a rapid decision.
If you've left it with the offering agent that you're going to talk to the other two agents, you should agree on some rough ground rules, mainly about the timing. You might ask when the agent would like to hear back from you. You might promise "by Friday," "after the weekend," or "by tomorrow." When you call the other agents, chances are you'll talk to an assistant or need to leave a voice mail. Be succinct. Say, "I sent my manuscript to Ms. Jones at her request last month. It was a multiple submission, and I've had an offer from another agent. Would you please let me know the status of my manuscript with your agency?" Responses will range from utter silence to "We've already sent it back" to "I'm halfway through and I love it! Can I have until tomorrow?" Utter silence has the advantage of making your decision easy. Try not to dwell on the fact that your manuscript, the one you worked on so hard and the one that agent actually asked to read, was met with ... utter silence. If you get the next response—"Oh, we just turned that down"—try not to dwell on the fact that your manuscript has been rejected, because it has also been accepted by someone else.
Moving up the scale of palatable responses, you could well be met with a polite, if slightly opaque, "What good news for you. Thanks for letting me know, and good luck." Upon receiving this kind of answer, you are not permitted to ask whether the agent has or has not read your book and what he thought of it. Your answer is going to be a simple "Thank you."
IF EVERYONE LOVES YOU
The toughest scenario will actually be the one where—you should be so lucky—one or more of the other agents has read or is reading the book and wants to offer representation. We agents see this as the equivalent of entering a beauty contest, and we have mixed feelings about it while recognizing it as a fact of our professional lives. The onus is on you to handle the contest professionally.
Set certain rules for yourself. You've already followed through on a couple: You let each agent know that other agents were looking at the manuscript at the same time, and you told the first offering agent that you needed to give the other agents an opportunity to respond.
Having behaved professionally to this point, there's no reason to stop. Keep communicating. Let's say you're in the very lucky position of having three agents who want to represent your work. Hear each of them out, ask the questions listed above, and tell each of them, "Thank you. I need to sleep on this, but I'll make my decision tomorrow morning, and I'll call you before the day is out." Then do it. Make your decision. You've got three good offers—you've identified these agents as qualified and effective—so how wrong can things go? As I've said before, if you've done the research ahead of time, there aren't as many questions to weigh. You're left with one: How do you feel about each of them? Your brain has done its work—now you have to let your gut decide. When you wake up in the morning, you'll know.
After you've called and accepted the offer of the one you want to work with, you're going to take a deep breath and make the other calls immediately. Just try to keep the conversation short and repeat these words as necessary, even as you are hanging up on a screamer: "Thank you for your interest in my work."
THE COMPATIBILITY FACTOR_
Ultimately, when it comes to choosing an agent, you're going to have to decide exactly what kind of style you think is most effective. Years ago I heard that a well-known television talk-show host fired her first agent because everyone in the business liked that agent. Word on the street was that the host believed she would be better served by someone who was feared and possibly hated. And who's to say she was wrong? On the other hand, I recently sat on a panel with several well-known novelists. One, who has made a great deal of money from his first book and less from the two that followed, expressed regret that he has never had an agent who was nurturing and supportive in the way described by the other novelists there. It was clear he started out wanting an agent who could get him the most possible money but, once the first book was an enormous success, grew disenchanted with that style of agenting and wished for more career guidance than she'd given him.
The decision is yours to make. If you want someone you feel you can talk to, you need to know that about yourself. If you want an aggressive agent who might have stepped from the pages of Glengarry Glen Ross—someone who might not call you very often, and will certainly not buy you a coffee, until you become a "closer" (in this case, a novelist whose book sells and sells well)—that's your call. If you've done your research ahead of time and narrowed your list down to agents who, no matter what their style, are known to be effective, you won't need to spend time wondering whether the agent runs a fly-by-night agency or an established one. You'll just need to decide if the person's style is going to work well for you.
How can you really tell if it's going to work? You can't. But most writers who have had bad agent experiences will admit that, when first signing with the agent, they were so elated to have someone offer to represent them that they ignored little signs that turned out to be alarms they should have listened to.
THE AUTHOR/AGENCY AGREEMENT
The author/agency contract is designed to make clear and lasting the terms of the business partnership. It spells out certain basic terms of the agreement:
1. What the agent will represent. This book only? Every book you write? Screenplays and other writings?
2. The time frame of representation. The most natural term is the one that proceeds until one or both parties decide to terminate. You're usually asked to give written notice and wait thirty days. But if the agent wants to terminate, he has to do the same thing.
3. The commission connection. The agency will continue to receive commissions on any contracts it negotiated on your behalf, whether you continue to work together or not.
4. The commission and how it's paid. Commonly 15 percent, sometimes 10 percent, the commission is deducted from amounts paid to you in the name of the agency as they come in. If you receive a ten-thousand-dollar advance, half of which is paid upon signature of the contract, and half of which is paid upon publication of the book, the commission will be deducted from each payment. No agent should deduct the entire commission due from the first payment.
5. Other commissions for which you're responsible. These are chiefly the commissions paid to co-agents in foreign countries and in Hollywood. Traditionally, the basic agency commission will be split evenly with the film agent so each agent receives 7.5 percent. Foreign co-agents, however, receive 10 percent, so typically the contract will require a 20 percent commission on foreign sales so each agent is paid 10 percent. Recently, film agents have begun asking for this arrangement, so some new contracts are requiring a 20 percent commission on film deals—10 percent for the original agent and 10 percent for the co-agent.
6. Expenses for which you're responsible. It's common practice to have authors provide copies of the book or manuscript that the agent can use in selling. It's usually cheaper and more efficient to have the agent make the copies and charge the fee back to you, whether by sending an invoice or deducting the amount from any payments that come in. Some agents charge for postage or overnight shipping and long-distance telephone charges. The contract should list whatever expenses you've agreed to bear.
The contract will also stipulate how both parties agree to handle disputes and might ask the author to "indemnify and hold harmless" the agent against any kind of claim for copyright infringement, libel, or any other like matter that arises out of anything you've written that the agent has represented. Agents must have this protection because they don't hire fact-checkers or legal teams to read your manuscript before sending it to publishers. They have only your word that the work is original. You will see this clause in any publishing contract you sign, for the same reason.
The controversy over factual problems in James Frey's A Million Little Pieces brought to light this fact of publishing. His agent and publisher proceeded on the strength of his word that everything in his book was true. When he signed a contract with Doubleday, he assumed full responsibility for every word in his book. The public debated whether the publisher should have questioned details in the book more closely, but the fact remains that Frey was entirely responsible for what he wrote in his book and represented as fact.
I don't recommend that you sign a contract that locks you into the relationship for a specific period of time. That's not to the advantage of either party: If you would both like to continue for as long as it takes to sell your books, there's no point in having to renew the contract every yea
r or two. And if either or both of you decide to call it a day well before the time period has expired, it would be tedious to have to wait. However, there are agents who require you to agree to a time period. There are also agents who want you to agree that, if you sell your book within a year or two after leaving that agency, you will pay them their commission. I don't recommend agreeing to this.
Once you've read the agreement, get in touch with the agent with any questions you have. Many people ask a lawyer to look it over for them, which is a good idea. If you decide to negotiate for modification of some of the terms of the agreement, try to do so without hostility, since your aim is to form a good working relationship. I can't speak for what other agents will agree to change in their author/agency contracts, so suffice it to say that you'll have to decide what you can and can't live with before you sign.
IF EVERYONE PASSES__
Let's say you do hear back, and every one of the ten agents you wrote to sends a rejection letter. Since you have a second list, you can make a second submission of query letters. And while you wait to hear back from the second group, you can make a third list and research everyone on the list the same way you did for the first and second lists. In this way you'll keep yourself busy and hopeful while waiting to make the right match. It goes without saying, too, that you'll be working on a new book now that you've got the first one off your desk.
But what if you can't bring yourself to go on sending query letters out? What if you've found the whole thing too heartbreaking, too nerve-racking, too debilitating, or too exhausting? If that's the case, you've got some decisions to make:
1. Too heartbreaking? Was your faith in your novel so weak that one round of rejections killed it? Or did your heart break because it was suddenly clear to you that your book really was not ready to be published? This might be the one that goes into the drawer. If not, get
together with a supportive friend who will remind you of what good work you've done and encourage you to get back on the horse.
Your First Novel Page 21