Your First Novel

  ON THE TABLE OR HOLDING THE FLOOR

  One way to handle the scenario in which you've gotten an offer but wish to hear what other editors have to say is to have your agent ask the editor if she'll leave her offer "on the table" for a certain period of time while you solicit other offers. Your agent can finesse this by saying that while you're pleased to have the offer, the editor knew that, when the clock ran out, the manuscript would go out to other editors. The editor could either refuse to let the offer stand or agree.

  If the editor agrees, she will likely say it will only stand for a certain period of time. But no one with any negotiating skill wants to look like a doormat, so it is more likely that she will agree only if you and your agent accept her bid as a floor. A floor, when accepted, becomes the first bid in an auction. The auction proceeds without the initial editor, because by placing a floor and having it accepted, the editor is granted another privilege: the option of topping. After the bidding ends, your agent will call the floor-holder to relay to her the highest bid, and if the floor-holder wishes, she can win the auction by topping with an offer 10 percent higher than the last bid. A floor-holder with 10 percent topping privileges does not participate in the auction, but the agent keeps her informed of its progress.

  Floor offers pose something of a dilemma because the other rule of the floor is that, should no auction occur, you are obligated to accept the floor offer as your advance. Therefore, if you and your agent accepted a floor offer that you wouldn't like to accept as your final advance, you'd be stuck. On the other hand, if the floor offer is too high to serve as a reasonable opening bid, it might scare away other bidders and you'd find yourself without an auction when there might have been an exciting one. The right floor is one that can kick off an auction if there's going to be one, and if there isn't going to be one, it's the offer you're going to be happy to get for your first book.

  While some agents routinely make exclusive submissions, many make them only rarely. That's because they've found the best way to get the highest advance for your book is by getting multiple bids. Sometimes you get only two offers. One is higher than the other, and the lower bidder declines to raise his bid. You then have to decide which offer to take. You might assume anyone would take the higher offer, but it doesn't always work that way. Some authors take the lower offer because it comes from a publishing house they particularly admire. And sometimes the lower offer comes with other terms that make it more attractive than the higher offer. As usual, there will be several factors you'll have to weigh and discuss with your agent before making your decision.

  But the big money for first novels comes as the result of an auction. What does a book auction look like, and how can you have one for your book?

  AUCTION FEVER__

  Your manuscript has been sent out to a dozen editors and already, just a day or two later, your agent is getting calls from editors who didn't get the manuscript and want to see it, as well as from editors who've already started reading it and are calling to find out if anything is happening with it. They want to know if other editors have called, if anyone's made an offer, and if your agent is going to set a closing date, which is the date by which everyone who's interested needs to make an offer. If your agent is already getting these calls, chances are very good indeed that he's going to set a closing date as soon as possible. Assuming the editors got the manuscripts on Friday so they could read over the weekend, and that they started calling Monday and more calls came in on Tuesday, your agent may set the auction for later that week—say Thursday—or for the middle of the week after. If more than one editor makes an offer, there will be an auction.

  The agent sets a closing date and calls, e-mails, or faxes the interested editors with the rules. They might go something like this:

  • The closing date for Great American Novel is Thursday, Sept. 21.

  • First offers must be received by my office by noon that day.

  • The auction will be conducted in rounds.

  • Only North American publication rights will be available.

  • The author reserves the right to base his final decision on factors other than strictly financial ones.

  This puts everyone on notice and sets the general rules for the auction. But don't assume everyone follows the rules!

  PREEMPTIVE OFFERS

  First, there will undoubtedly be an editor who calls before the day of the auction and tries to make a preemptive offer. That's an offer that, ideally, is so attractive that it takes the book off the market before anyone else can bid. Your agent cannot shop a preempt —meaning he can't call the other interested parties and ask if they were planning to make a better offer. (When I say cannot, I mean that it's unethical. I don't mean that no one does it. Unfortunately, people do.) A preempt is usually offered with a very tight time frame of, perhaps, five or ten minutes. This is done to forestall shopping. A preempt is a take-it-or-leave-it offer. The agent must call the author and ask him if he wants to accept on the spot. If he says yes, the agent calls the editor and accepts the offer for his client. If you and your agent decide to turn down the preempt, your agent will invite the editor to come to the auction and put in her bid with everyone else.

  LET THE BIDDING BEGIN

  Book auctions aren't held in person the way auctions for antiques are. They're held on the telephone. On the day of the auction, the editor who tried to preempt may be the first to call. If she's smart, she'll make her first offer much lower than the offer with which she tried to preempt your book. You might find this upsetting, but don't worry—she'll raise it if there are other, higher offers.

  With her offer, no matter how low or high, the auction has begun. The next thing is to collect the first bids of all the interested editors. It will be a tense morning. What if no one else calls? What if only one other editor calls? You're going to have to wrap your mind around these possibilities. Your hopes will have gotten high, and your confidence may have been strong the day you turned down the preemptive offer, but today you might have to talk yourself through the more disappointing outcomes before your agent's telephone—and yours-—rings again. Comfort yourself with the notion that, at the end of the day, you will have a publisher for your novel.

  Let's say it's a good day because the telephone does ring again—five more times. At noon your agent has in hand no fewer than six offers for your first novel. One is low, two are the same, and three are higher. This is the end of round one. To begin round two, your agent puts the bids in order and calls the low bidder to tell her what the highest bid was. The low bidder can either drop out of the auction or make a new offer that's higher. If she's going to bid again, you and your agent have to wait for her bid before calling the other editors. When you've gotten the new bid, your agent calls the next lowest bidder and tells her where she stands. In the case where you have two identical bids, the agent calls the editor who made the first bid. When an editor makes a new and higher bid, your agent calls the next editor. And so it goes.

  When all five low-bidders have responded by raising their bids or dropping out, your agent concludes round two by calling the highest bidder from the first round and filling her in. If that editor chooses to make a new offer that's higher than all the others, her bid will kick off round three.

  MORE RULES OF THE AUCTION GAME

  There are some pieces of information your agent must reveal to the offering editors and some he is under no obligation to reveal.

  1. If your book only receives one bid, your agent must reveal this fact to the bidder. The bidder then has no obligation to improve her starting bid. However, your agent may be able to persuade her to improve it.

  2. If there are other bidders, your agent is under no obligation to say who they are while the auction is going on, except in the case discussed under the next point. Although they know better, sometimes editors ask who the other bidders are, hoping to catch the agent off guard. Your agent shouldn't tell the editor who's competing against her because there remains the poss
ibility that the bidding editors could get together and rig the auction in some way.

  3. If two editors from one large publishing house both make bids, your agent is under some obligation to inform each that another person from her corporate parent is also bidding. Some corporations won't allow two of their employees to bid against one another.

  4. In order to allow you to choose the offer you want, which may not be the highest offer, your agent must state at the outset that you reserve this right. If he doesn't, you're obligated to accept the highest offer of the auction, whether you want to or not.

  5. Your agent is under no obligation to reveal your personal information to any publisher.

  6. At the end of the auction, the losing editors—the underbidders—will ask your agent who won and who their competitors were, and while your agent isn't strictly obligated to reveal this information, most don't see any reason to conceal it. If they did try to conceal it, the editor would suspect something out of order—such as the fact that the agent had fabricated the other bids, which some have been known to do.

  WHEN NOTHING HAPPENS_

  The fact remains that with your first novel, you just want to get the damned thing published, so you don't care so much about advances, auctions, and all the rest. But what if your novel just isn't selling? What if contact with your agent has dwindled to the copies of rejection letters you're getting every month or so in the mail?

  This is a dispiriting time. And this is when you have to constandy reconnect with your belief in your own work. If your agent is steadfastly enthusiastic, the one kind of call you shouldn't make too often is the one where you say, "Do you think anyone will like it?"

  Of course you will occasionally need to voice those doubts. But try to understand not only the role but the motivation of your new business partner. As a non-publishing small-business owner once said to me, "It's a numbers game. You're going to hear the word no a lot more often than you'll hear the word yes."

  So, to your agent, a series of rejections isn't nearly the crashing blow you might find it to be. You may want sympathy, and you may get it, but don't be surprised if your worries and self-doubts are sometimes met with bafflement. The agent may have a number of manuscripts circulating at once. He wants your book—and all the others—to sell as much as you do. If he didn't think anyone would like your book, he wouldn't have taken it on.

  A whole bunch of rejections isn't easy for anyone, but they're a lot easier for your seasoned agent to take than they are for you to take. That's one of the reasons you got an agent! Agents take real pleasure in conquering the doubters and proving the naysayers wrong by selling your novel to an enthusiastic, smart editor. Big, overnight-sensation auctions are exciting for everyone, even the bidders, but in many ways it's even more satisfying to see a book through to successful publication after a number of turndowns.

  So take your cues from your agent's attitude. If he remains positive, refresh yourself with that attitude and go back to work on your next book. If, on the other hand, you find a consistency in the rejection letters' criticism that makes you believe you could successfully rework your manuscript, ask your agent if he'd like you to do so. I would recommend bringing this possibility up after several—not, say, fifteen—editors have said essentially the same thing about the book. If you wait too long you may as well start over again with a new book, because the pool of willing readers will have gotten too small.

  Also, in spite of the fact that editors and agents will say they'd be happy to reconsider should the manuscript be reworked, too often, upon such a resubmission, the reader finds the bloom has gone off the rose and declines the book. To explain this, we can point to a few factors:

  1. Taste is fickle. The editor's initial enthusiasm has simply laded. She may not even recall why she liked the book in the first place.

  2. Your craft isn't up to the task. The editor may simply be disappointed with the revision. It could be that she had a vision for a book you can't write or don't want to write.

  3. The editor's mandate has changed. She may have been told to concentrate on acquiring fiction more commercial or more literary than the novel you have written.

  4. The editor is less hungry. This could happen after an editor has published a big book successfully or after she has published a string of successful books. In these cases, the editor may have new books to publish by the successful authors, or may have begun to receive submissions of a sufficiently high caliber that she's become far more selective than she was at the time of the first submission.

  PRESSING AHEAD

  As you can see, having an agent is no guarantee that the road to publication will be completely free of obstacles. But hold on to the thought that a seasoned, reputable agent takes great pride in placing a book he believes in. Ideally, he will have the kind of tenacity in selling a project that you have in writing it.

  If the submissions of your novel continue to result in rejection, and if the submissions of a revised version fail as well, don't assume your agent has given up on you unless other signs point in that direction as well: un-returned phone calls, unanswered e-mails, a lack of interest in or no plan for what to do next. If your communication with your agent remains good and if you hear him say he's still interested, have faith. Don't give up. Get to work on your next book.

  That's what one client of mine did to great effect. I'd taken on her collection of short stories but hadn't been able to place it. Undaunted, she wrote a novel; unfortunately, though that, too, got good readings from excellent editors, it failed to sell. Yet while it was under submission, she began a new one and sent me a chapter every month. Though that's not the way writers and agents usually work, they can, and in this case it just seemed right. After each chapter I was on the edge of my seat until the next one came. Eighteen months later, the author had a terrific new book, and after she'd polished it, I sent it out to editors. It sold like gangbusters: A two-day auction with six bidders resulted in a mid-six-figure advance for this hardworking writer who didn't let a few rejection letters, two babies, and a teaching job slow her down.

  BREAKING UP IS(N'T) HARD TO DO

  What if you read all the signs of disinterest from your agent, yet feel you've grown as a writer and have a strong new book to show? You called. You wrote e-mails describing your new book. You even sent the manuscript in and never got a response.

  Don't beat a dead horse. You gave him a chance. Now it's lime to move on.

  If you are going to go, it's important to go now, with a new book no one has seen. Don't let an apathetic agent—should he respond at all—take your manuscript out to a few people just to see what happens. A manuscript that's made the rounds is as tired as last year's Payless shoes.

  First, you must make a clean break from your current agent. How do you do this? You will need to go back to your author/agency agreement, if you signed one, and read the termination clause to see what you need to do. Be aware that, even after terminating, you may be obliged to reimburse your agent for any expenses that were listed as reimbursable in the agreement.

  In addition, there is an obligation that may come into play if you change agents while your manuscript is still under consideration with editors. Let's say that your first agent had not received rejection letters from every submission—that there were, in fact, two or three outstanding submissions when you switched agents. And let's say, further, that your new agent discovers that one of those editors wants to make an offer for your book. Your new agent is perfectly within his rights to negotiate with that editor. But should you accept that editor's offer, you will be obligated to pay your original agent her full commission. In the end, you may have to pay two commissions, one to each agent. So if you're feeling unsure about whether to continue with an agent, make the break before having him submit a new work.

  STARTING OVER

  Put your query-letter-writer-and-agent-researcher hat back on and pick up the pieces. Should you describe your experience in being agented and having your first novel
rejected? Many writers include this information in their query letters because they think it shows they have been singled out before or that they are experienced in the ways of publishing. Or they simply think they should be honest or that someone will want to hear their story.

  Keep this story out of your new query letter because, as noted earlier, we're all looking for something new and exciting. New and exciting is exactly what your new book is. But including the tale of woe about your first agented book will create an atmosphere of guilt by association. We'll see that story in your query letter and we'll think, not only has this writer already failed, but he's complaining about it. We'll regard your career as an uphill battle and our enthusiasm will die on the vine. It's quite possible that your first agented book should have been the one that stayed in the drawer. Whatever the reason for its failure to sell, keep the tale of woe out of the query letter.

  Should you ever tell this story? Yes—when a new agent wants to take you on. After you've agreed to work together, you can tell what happened, because there may be information in the story that your new agent will need before approaching editors. He'll need to know who saw your first novel and whether anyone tried to buy it and failed, or whether anyone took particular pains to praise your writing or to discuss your work with you. He'll be able to evaluate all this information and either ignore it or put it to use.

  REALITY CHECK: DOING THE MATH

  Most first novels are not sold at auction. They're not usually sold on the first round of submissions, or to the first editor they're sent to, or even in the first month or so that they're out on editors' desks, and there might just be an advantage to this. The higher the advance that an auction brings, the more pressure on the book and consequently on the author. In reality, advances for first novels are usually under $50,000, with most hovering around $10,000 to $20,000. The $5,000 or $7,500 advance is not unheard of, either.