• have written a new story or book and your agent has asked you to mail it rather than send it electronically
CALL WHEN YOU:
• want or need to discuss any aspect of your career in greater or less structured detail
• need to go over a list, an author's questionnaire, or your manuscript
• have a simple procedural question or clerical matter that can easily be handled by an assistant
• have some very good gossip
USE AN OVERNIGHT SERVICE OR MESSENGER WHEN YOU:
• returning a signed contract or tax form
• sending flowers
Whatever form of communication you use, try not to ramble. Long, unpara-graphed, misspelled e-mails are not likely to get an immediate response. The agent may not easily be able to sort out what it is you need to know, or may need time to digest the contents and form an answer. People in publishing generally don't like e-mails that are written entirely in lower case. As one editor said, "How lazy can you be?" Try to make your e-mails easy to answer by setting questions off with space before and after or with bullets.
After you and your agent have worked out your communication style, keep in touch. While not everyone returns calls promptly, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Yet a screeching wheel is vastly annoying, so try to be the one that works beautifully when oiled periodically. There's nothing more difficult for a busy person than having to repeat himself. If you don't respond to the attention you do get, you'll get less. If you're responsive—if you think of ways to make your business partner's work more interesting; show a lighter side; improve your work; continue your efforts with getting published in literary journals, magazines, and quarterlies; meet other writers—you'll be a joy to have around, and your agent will want to pay you even more attention.
LET YOUR AGENT DO HIS JOB__
It's hard to know, at first, when to stay out of your agent's way and when to jump in. But before we discuss submission strategies in the next chapter, there is definitely one thing you should not do: Don't make any submissions on your own.
Sometimes a writer will call and say, "A friend of mine read my manuscript, and she loved it so much she wanted her editor to read it, so she sent it to him. I thought you'd want to know." It's true that we do want to know. But it's unlikely to make an agent happy to hear this, for a number of reasons:
• Your agent may have promised the manuscript to a different editor at the same house.
• Another editor at the same publishing house may already have the novel under consideration.
• If the editor does turn out to be interested, the agent's negotiating leverage is considerably weakened by his inability to set certain expectations in the editor's mind from the start.
• Another editor at the same publishing house may already have rejected the novel.
• The agent may not have wished to submit your novel to that editor because of issues involving other clients. This may be difficult to swallow. But think about it: If you've gotten an agent for your Western who has something of a specialty in Westerns, he'll have to juggle at times. Perhaps he has another client whose work, ready at the same time, might be overshadowed by yours. He might have a strategy that includes submitting these novels to certain people in a certain order. He might have planned to send yours to someone more senior than your friend's editor. Or he might have planned to send your manuscript to someone less senior—sometimes, junior editors are more enthusiastic, and with first novels, the editor's enthusiasm is an important driving force.
So if you do meet an editor who expresses interest in your work, refer her to your agent—and let your agent know right away. Similarly, don't withhold information about writing-related activities. Have you given any readings lately? Submitted stories, essays, or pieces of your novel to journals or magazines? Begun a new novel? Accepted a magazine assignment? Tell your agent! It could be just the ammunition he needs.
DON'T BE A "WHAT-HAVE-YOU-DONE-FOR-ME-LATELY?" CLIENT
It's true there's not much you can do while your book is "out there." But try to refrain from calling only to ask, "Have you sold it yet?" When you call, try to bring something to the table. First of all, it should be obvious that if there had been an offer, you would have heard about it. However, there are times when an editor expresses great enthusiasm to your agent, says she's going to buy the book, and then—nothing. Not even a returned call or an e-mail. At other times an editor might call or write to say that she'd brought the manuscript up with her editor-in-chief and been shot down. In any case, many seasoned agents don't call an author the instant an editor makes that I'm-going-to-try-to-buy-it claim, because we've all been burned often enough that we don't want to get our client's hopes up only to have them shot down.
We usually do, very cautiously, let the author know of an editor's interest, if only to give him the pleasure of knowing that someone out there loved the book. There are times when the agent needs the author to answer questions the editor has about the book or the author's plans for a next book. And there are times when the editor wants to have a conversation with the author about editorial input and direction.
These conversations are invariably stressful, but when there's no way to proceed without such a conversation, the editor and author get on the phone. The editor is usually in a positive frame of mind because she liked the book enough to initiate the conversation. But the author is usually a wreck because he is terrified of saying the wrong thing, or thinks the editor didn't understand the book, or (back to that "waiting for a real editor" mind set) doesn't want to promise to make the changes until the editor actually buys the book. These authors are essentially offended by the very idea of this conversation. In the cases I know of where they weren't offended and entered the conversation with an open mind, the book sold to the interested editor.
RECOMMENDED READING
Read interviews, profiles, and biographical notes about the top writers in your genre or category. A librarian can be a great help in putting this together.
As Ever, Scott Fitz—Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent Harold Ober, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, with Jennifer Atkinson. This book is out of print, but if you can find it, you'll have a great model to follow in F. Scott Fitzgerald's business dealings with his literary agent.
RECOMMENDED WEB SITE
Carver: The Raymond Carver Web Site (www.whitman.edu/english/carver/ carver.cgi). The epigraph at this site is a quote from Carver himself: "If this sounds like the story of a life, okay." A writer's life, that is.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:
getting to yes
By now you've learned the best way to communicate with your agent.
He may call, e-mail, write, send copies of rejection letters, or use all these means of communication with you. But how does your book get on editors' desks, and what's going to happen next?
Let's discuss submission strategies first. There are any number of ways to sell a book, and rarely does the sale of a first novel happen in a truly predictable way. The elements of the equation that add up to a sale are: (1) your book, (2) your agent's contacts, (3) the needs of the market, and (4) serendipity.
The first and most important part of the equation is your book. Your agent's submission strategy will rely on what kind of a book it is and how much he believes in it. An agent takes on a first novel for any number of reasons:
1. It's a page-turning commercial novel he's sure he'll sell.
2. It's a good piece of genre writing.
3. It's beautifully written and executed.
4. It's the beginning of a brilliant career.
5. It came with the endorsements of several highly regarded writers of the same kind of fiction.
Having decided your novel is (1), (4), and (5), your agent may choose to make a multiple submission. Unlike the kind of multiple submission an unknown writer makes from a list of names he has collected from directories and referrals, your agent's multiple submission will b
e based on personal knowledge of each of the editors on the list.
Developing a submission list is fun. It's one of the challenges that make our job so stimulating. If we're reading a manuscript and liking it a lot, chances are we're already making a mental list while reading the manuscript. We're matchmakers, and in addition to the editors' names and addresses we have in our address books, we keep a lot of ephemera about each editor we know in our heads. Even when we read novels that have already been published by editors we know, we're cataloguing the elements of the work at hand and combining them with what we know about the editor who saw it into print. So when we decide to take a manuscript on, we have a pretty good idea of who might want to publish it.
Even after you and your agent have decided you need to revise the novel before it goes out to editors, your agent will be formulating the submission list. There are any number of ways we do this. When we lunch with editors, as discussed earlier, we find out what kinds of things they've already published, what kinds of things they'd like to publish, and what kinds of things their bosses are asking that they publish. If everything aligns, we can pitch your novel over coffee. (Why wait until the coffee comes? Because one rule of sales is, "When you've gotten to yes, shut up." If you don't stop the pitch when they say "I want to read it—send it to me," you may unwittingly give them time or reasons to reconsider. If you can get them to say yes just as the check comes, you've made a presale and you can wrap things up and get out of there before they have time to think it over.)
Other ways we add names to the list include:
• going through our contacts or submission lists from previous sales to refresh our memories about who's interested in what
• reading Publishers Weekly for job changes, launching of new imprints, profiles of editors and publishers, what's new on the best-seller list, and its surveys of specialty markets like mysteries, romance, young adult, and other genre fiction
• reading Publishers Marketplace to find who's buying what from whom
• calling other agents to go over the list and see if we've overlooked anyone
GETTING IT OUT THERE_
When your manuscript is ready to roll, your agent goes to work. First, he'll call all the editors on the list who expressed interest in it to alert them the novel is on the way, and he'll call the others to pitch the book and ask if they want to be included in the submission. The list is in formation up to the very last minute due to job changes, unexpected meetings, and calls from editors who've heard that a hot new manuscript is going out, asking to be included.
Then, the agent writes or puts the finishing touches on the cover letter, personalizing each one as necessary. This letter, like your query letter, should never be longer than a page. It will include only a brief description of the novel—not only are overlong plot descriptions boring, but the novel is going to have to stand on its own merits—and as much ammunition about the author, (his curriculum vitae, contacts, and overall salability) as the agent can gather. Increasingly, editors are forced by their sales and marketing departments to compare a new novelist's work to the work of well-known or best-selling writers, so we have to come up with the kind of pitch Buck Henry did so wittily in Robert Altman's film The Player—something in the spirit of: "It's Run Lola Run meets Infinite Jest," "Michael Crichton meets A Beautiful Mind," or " The Lovely Bones as told by Emily Dickinson."
The manuscript is then put into a crisp new manuscript box that's labeled at the foot. Many agencies use colorful boxes that will stand out on an editor's crowded shelves. In effect they're branding their product by doing this, and an editor can tell at a glance where a manuscript comes from—one well-known agency uses handsome matte orange boxes, another shiny red, a third bright yellow. In my office we devote a lot of attention to the label that's placed at the foot of the box, choosing a font for the tide that somehow conveys the style of the writing, and making sure the tide and author's name are readable from across the room, where it will be buried in a stack of other manuscripts.
Into the box go the manuscript and any other materials that will help the editor make a favorable decision: essays the author may have published in prominent publications, a list of short story publications, even a list of the author's well-known or published friends and acquaintances who have promised to blurb or review the book when it comes out. The manuscript will be a good clean copy, as will the accompanying material. If we receive bad copies or unreadable or messy lists or reviews (of, say, an anthology the author has contributed to), we retype them so they look as sharp as possible. The box is then closed, and the cover letter is placed on top, then rubber-banded to the box. Most places record each submission, and we want the information they need to log in the submission to be easily available. We also want the editor to be able to quickly review the submission before making the decision whether to open the box and start reading then and there, assign it to an assistant to read, put it on the stack of manuscripts to be read, or put it or the first fifty pages into her bag or briefcase to take home or to read on the train.
Some editors insist that agents inform them if they're submitting a project to anyone else in their vast corporate empire of two dozen separate publishing imprints. I don't, as a matter of policy, ever inform an editor of this, simply because one man's meat is another's poison—meaning that one editor may love the book and another may hate it, and the editor who loves the book doesn't need to know that it was turned down by one of her distant colleagues.
LIMITED MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS
While first novels that feel commercially "hot" to an agent will undoubtedly be sent to a dozen or more editors, many manuscripts are initially sent out on a limited multiple submission. This is where the agent chooses only three or five editors to read it simultaneously. The agent may employ this strategy with a manuscript, such as a literary coming-of-age novel, that marks the beginning of a serious writer's career but that might not stand up to a lot of hype or a high-pressure multiple submission. The editor should know that there's enough interest that she's not alone in wanting to read the manuscript, but should be allowed to read the manuscript with a certain degree of calm in order to appreciate its quieter or more serious qualities.
EXCLUSIVE SUBMISSIONS
In a clamorous marketplace it's essential to employ a strategy that will get a novel the closest possible attention. That, and those stacks of manuscripts in every editor's office, may lead an agent to go against expectation and make an exclusive submission of a novel. In this case the agent calls the editor at the top of the submission list, pitches the book, and, if the editor displays a great deal of enthusiasm in expressing her wish to read it as soon as possible, promises that she can have it alone—exclusively—for a brief period of time before it's submitted to other editors.
Another reason to make an exclusive submission is that the editor may have met the writer at a conference, seen an earlier draft of the novel, referred the writer to the agent, or read a short story the author published, and called the agent first to express her interest in the writer's work. Or, since this is a business of relationships, the agent may owe the editor a favor, or may even wish to make an exclusive submission of a prestigious or hot commercial novel to curry favor with an editor. No matter what the reason, an exclusive submission conveys the idea that the agent has chosen this editor for her particular skill and ability and wishes to present her with something special.
A manuscript on exclusive is likely to be read more quickly than a manuscript that's sent out widely or indiscriminately. But the agent must set up the rules of the submission at the beginning. The editor may be given the weekend to get a head start on reading the manuscript, after which the agent will automatically send it out to other interested editors. Or the editor may be given a period of ten days in which to read the book, get other readings from colleagues, and make the offer.
In either case, after making an exclusive submission, it's important that the agent follow through on the time constraint se
t at the beginning: If the editor has been given the weekend, the agent must get an answer on Monday. If no answer is forthcoming, or even if the editor says she's enthusiastic and wants to get some of her colleagues or her boss to read it so she might put together an offer, the agent must be prepared to widen the submission immediately to the other interested editors on his list.
If any more time passes, it becomes awkward: Suppose that the agent lets the editor have another week in order to get her ducks in a row, then, with no offer in hand, sends the manuscript out to the other editors. Two days after the other editors receive the manuscript, the first editor finally comes through with an offer.
What is done in this case? It depends on several factors, but it ultimately depends on you, the author. If you like the offer, like the sound of the editor and feel the house is right for you and your book, you can accept the offer on the spot. If your agent has been clear with the other editors—that the editor who had it on exclusive for a brief period of time hadn't made an offer or rejected it before the manuscript went out on a simultaneous submission—you have every right to take the bird in the hand and leave it to your agent to explain to the editors what has happened. They might be slightly annoyed, they might have begun reading the book and may like what they've read, and they may even yell, but they also know that it's business as usual. No one did anything wrong and those are the breaks.
Another course of action would be to turn the first offer down and wait to see what the other editors have to say. What's the risk here? It's obvious: You might not get another offer. In that case you'd be in the position either of going back to the original editor, hat in hand, and saying, "We were wrong, can we have the offer back?" or of having your agent continue to submit the novel until he finds another interested publisher. The first course of action has been known to work, but it's also been known to backfire. Sometimes the editor is miffed that her offer was turned down and wishes to wash her hands of the author who didn't appreciate her enthusiasm and the work she put into making an offer. Sometimes she'll revive the offer but lower the amount of money, because she knows you've struck out elsewhere and she realizes she can now get your manuscript at what amounts to an end-of-season price reduction.
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