by Marge Piercy
How Do I Get An Agent?
There is no shortage of books available that list agents’ names and specialties. A simple search for “literary agents” on the internet will yield hundreds of thousands of sources. A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers, published by Poets & Writers, Inc., however, lists not only the names and addresses of writers but for some, their agents as well. Another variation on this strategy is to look at the acknowledgments page in the books of authors with whose work you feel a kinship. Most authors thank their agents and if your work is something like theirs, you now know the name of an agent to contact who represents that kind of work. But the best experience Ira ever had searching for an agent was made possible by the National Writer’s Union. Previously he had relied either on referrals from friends who spoke highly of their agents but really had no idea whether their agents would be a good match for him or whether they had any expertise selling the kinds of things he wrote. Having spoken to so many writers disappointed in their experiences with their agents, he had come to the conclusion that he wanted to know as much as possible before tying up his time, and the agent’s, for what is seldom less than a year or more of submissions. The agent’s database of the National Writers Union solved the problem.
Far more reliable than any of the available books on agents, and less expensive than a popular service that offers to fully research a small number of agents for a steep fee, the database is now available online for members. It lists all the obvious information—addresses, contact information, specialties (cookbooks, mysteries, children’s books, fiction, non-fiction, romance, etc.)—but something invaluable as well: various members’ candid experiences with each agent. He could find out who, in various writers’ opinions, was really good for non-fiction, for instance, and who was a great editor; who really respected writers and treated them accordingly and who, in their opinion, would be very enthusiastic for the first six months and lose interest when the going got tough. Indeed, visiting the database was like a gab fest with a room full of writers and their very subjective opinions. After a few hours with the database, he had six solid leads, sent query letters to each agent, got a call back from four and visited them in New York. He ended up with an agent with whom he was very happy. We’d like to emphasize the importance of a face-to-face meeting with the agent before you make your final decision. There is often a chemistry involved between you and an agent and that is difficult to determine without a meeting. All new clients are treated well, and why not? You are brimming with potential. It is only after the manuscript is returned a few times that the relationship can be truthfully evaluated. Is the agent giving up on you? Is she returning your calls? Does she sound discouraged on the telephone, or worse, is she beginning to blame you for the failure of your book to find a publisher? While an initial visit can’t answer these questions, you can get an inkling of what the future might hold. You can observe them in action. Do they speak dismissively to people on the telephone? Ira once had a meeting with an agent who put him on an extension phone and allowed him to listen as the agent dealt with a publisher condescendingly. Although he felt like an insider at the moment, it didn’t take him long to realize that this agent might very well treat him or his publisher like this one day.
Does their office seem disorganized? Is their staff friendly? (You’ll be spending a lot of time dealing with the office staff, especially if you are not one of their top selling clients.) Are they forthcoming with the list of clients they represent? Good agents are proud of their client list, which tells you their authors’ names, their latest books and with what publisher their titles were placed. Are they open to considering independent and university presses? Make it a point to visit a few potential agents. Just a half-hour chat—an office visit may be better than lunch; you can observe them in their environment—can provide a hint about your potential relationship later on.
Are New York Agents Better Than Those Outside New York?
Many writers do prefer to be represented by an agent with a New York office (or those located in a media center like Los Angeles, or within a quick day trip to New York, in Boston or Washington, D.C.) because it is felt that these agents are more likely to be in the loop, or industry insiders. There are a growing number of good agents who are located in cities around the country who specialize in representing writers from their regions, and others who have worked many years in New York publishing and, having developed their contacts, have set up shop in places that can afford them another lifestyle. Still, there are changes taking place in publishing regularly and you should ask any potential agent how they manage to stay current. Some are on the phone all day every day and manage their contacts with editors on a regular basis. Not all publishers, certainly not independent and university presses, are located in New York. It is easy for someone to call themselves a literary agent no matter where they live. These are sometimes referred to as “business card agents” and they prey on writers. They advertise their services and get themselves listed in many of the books that purport to help writers find an agent. Again, always ask the agent to tell you who they represent and what they have recently sold. Determine whether they are members of the Association of Author Representatives, whose members subscribe to an impressive canon of ethics. Never pay an agent for reading your work, even if they tell you they will reimburse you from the proceeds of your first sale. The job of agents is to read the work of writers. If they take you on, they will attach fifteen percent (twenty percent for foreign rights) of everything of yours that they sell. This is how they earn their money. While you may be billed for postage, copying, bank fees, messengers, and the like, you are not responsible for paying for their reading time.
Publishers Take So Long, Can I Make Multiple Submissions?
This is a question that, as writers and publishers, we fall on both sides of, and can probably be answered best by telling a story. After Ira had spent two years attempting to get The Kitchen Man published in New York, he was impatient. He sent the novel out to two small presses. When it was accepted by one, he took the offer immediately and wrote a courteous note to the other press, stating (untruthfully) that the Crossing Press editor had heard him read at a library, loved the excerpt, offered to read the manuscript over the weekend and called up first thing Monday offering a contract. Total bullshit, of course, but somewhat plausible. He heard nothing back from that other press. Three years later, when he was submitting his next novel, Going Public, he received the following note: “Dear Mr. Wood, Some years ago you submitted The Kitchen Man to us and withdrew it while we were in the middle of reading it. Good luck with your Going Public elsewhere.” Did he get arrested? No. Was his career over? Of course not. There are no laws saying you can’t make multiple submissions, even if the press explicitly asks you not to. But small presses have long memories and it has always been our habit to attempt to curry friends in the very small world of publishing rather than enemies. If a press says no multiple submissions, honor their request. Agents, however, routinely make multiple submissions to publishers, hoping to use one publisher’s interest to spark another’s (something is always more valuable when somebody else wants it) and seeking to receive a bid that another publisher must top. It is courteous, in the least, to admit that the book is on submission to another house.
Isn’t It Better To Be Published By A Large Publisher Than A Small Press?
If you are looking for a sizeable advance against royalties, you should indeed try to place your book with a large publisher. If the publisher feels the book has significant commercial potential, if their sales force is able to sell-in a substantial number of copies to bookstores (that is, get a large advance order), the big corporate-owned publisher may assign the book a large marketing budget. It may decide to place ads in national newspapers and magazines. It may send you on tour, pay the promotional fees required by bookstores (both chains and the large independents) to insure prominent shelf and newsletter placement, and attempt to arrange national talk show intervie
ws for you. (It should be noted that online booksellers also offer promotional programs, to have your title on the page that pops up when you enter the site, for instance; to link your title with another or to send out e-mails about your title.) You need to be aware, however, that the size, famous name, and wealth of a publisher, no matter how many books it has on the best seller lists, is no guarantee that your book will get that treatment. A large publisher publishes a large number of books. It cannot possibly allot a huge marketing budget to each one. While most large publishers are very good at sending out review copies, and while book review editors might have a certain prejudice for the titles published by them, being published by a New York press is no guarantee of being reviewed. Space for book reviews in newspapers is extremely tight. Many writers are surprised that a publisher would fork out what seems like a very sizeable advance and not back up that advance with marketing support. But again, the large publisher has a lot of titles to market and will throw its support behind those books that have gotten the really big advances (after all, it’s a bigger investment to protect), those that have had a terrific sell-in (it makes more sense to support books that are in the stores than the warehouse) and those sleepers that come along and catch fire. According to the “Report to the Authors Guild Midlist Books Study Committee” by David D. Kirkpatrick, the average literary book gets less than $5,000 of total marketing support by a conglomerate-owned publisher, “but just to get a book put on a table at the front of the store in one of the chains can cost $10,000.” Writers are also devastated when their books go out of print, a situation that is quite common because large publishers, required by their conglomerate owners to watch the bottom line, have to pay taxes on their inventory. If a book is not selling at a certain rate, it will be shredded.
Independent, not-for-profit presses tend to keep books in print for a long time, and even small presses that don’t have not-for-profit status keep enough copies on-hand to make it available for sale years after publication, when a writer’s reputation has grown and she is more likely to be asked to do readings, workshops, and so on. These presses tend to publish far fewer books a season, so every title gets more of the publicist’s time, if admittedly a smaller budget. Many small presses do send writers on tour and may have excellent contacts with the media. Some small presses are also very good at getting books reviewed. It is not uncommon for a dogged and enthusiastic publicist with unconventional marketing ideas to obtain more visibility for a book than a large and busy publicity department.
How Much Money Do Writers Make?
At a lecture in Flagstaff, Arizona, some years ago, Toni Morrison was asked, “What advice would you give a young person who wants to be a writer?” Without a second thought, the Nobel laureate and best-selling author answered, Don’t quit your day job. Tony Morrison was writing brilliant novels long before they began to appear on the best-seller lists. While raising two children, she worked for many years as an editor at Random House, where she not only had to juggle her writing, her career and her family life, but observed countless writers who had to do so as well. I would date it to be some time in the 1980s, but it may have been long before, that the notion of the writer’s life became confused with that of the screenwriter’s life; that is, that the definition of the “successful” writer was one who was rich instead of widely read. In earlier decades, writers were assumed to be intellectuals rather than personalities, renegades as opposed to millionaires. People might dismiss your latest book by saying, “Never heard of it,” but rarely by asking, “Is it a best seller?” as if to insinuate that if it were not, it wasn’t worth mentioning. Only a very small percentage of writers reach the best seller lists. Because there are so many titles printed every year, readers tend to opt for the books by authors with whom they are familiar as well as books heavily advertised by the chain bookstores. A perusal of the bestseller lists will yield the same names year after year. Well-known writers are brand names and we are a society that trusts brands. So the rich writers are getting richer and the poor ... well, you know how it goes. Which is not to say there aren’t surprises. New people break in all the time. Publishers have not stopped publishing literary books and, in fact, shelf space for them, as a result of the proliferation of chain mega-stores, has increased. It’s just that it’s getting almost impossible for them to get noticed. In his “Report to the Authors Guild Midlist Books Study Committee,” Kirkpatrick gives an example of “the best possible outcome for a midlist author.” He sites the example of David Foster Wallace’s novel, Infinite Jest, which sold 30,000 copies in hardcover, and 60,000 in paperback. Mr. Wallace received an $85,000 advance from his publisher, Little Brown (after his agent’s 15% commission), and another $42,500 in royalties, totaling $127,500. The book took him five years to write. You do the math. The report sums it up: “Writing books is a losing proposition financially for most writers. Serious authorship is not now and has never been self-supporting, except in a rare handful of cases.” In 1981, the Authors Guild Foundation commissioned a report on authors’ incomes from the Center for Social Science at Columbia University, which found that the median income for an American writer is about $5,000. According to Mr. Kirkpatrick’s informative study, copyright 2000, “That figure has probably not changed substantially.” Don’t quit your day job.
You Mentioned That You Don’t Consider It “Vanity” To Publish Yourself. What Then Constitutes A Vanity Publisher?
Even in the very difficult publishing environment we’ve mentioned, there are opportunities for writers, especially with publishers who are creative, willing to look at new models. Electronic publishing is an attractive model because an e-book is inexpensive to produce, easy to update, and does not present the costly problems of paper-book inventory and can theoretically then remain in print indefinitely. But few publications review e-books and unless they are best-selling titles, it’s tough to get the word out about them. Science fiction sells well and increasingly women’s romance and erotic novels. (Privacy of browsing online seems to be an attractive feature.) In spite of a recent upsurge of e-book sales, they have yet to live up to the high expectations predicted for them. A new generation of e-reading devices, supplementing the proliferation of electronic book-ready handhelds may yet drive their popularity. A more promising model might prove to be print-on-demand, in which a publisher or bookseller will literally print a book when it is ordered or print a small number to satisfy anticipated demand.
Some paper-and-ink publishers, as well as publishers who work with the new technologies mentioned above, encourage authors to subsidize the production of their own books and here the author has to be especially careful. Costs can be high; some that I’ve heard quoted almost double that of producing the book yourself. But this estimate may cover review copies, publicity and marketing. Marketing is the key. If the publisher is going to produce an agreed upon number of books, including bound galleys to be submitted for review, warehouse the book (or print it on demand), include it in their catalog, make it available through national wholesalers, such as Ingram and Baker & Taylor, as well as the online booksellers, then the money you spend might be seen as an investment in your work and your writing career. I would contrast this with what has been known as a vanity publisher, who will produce (or promise to produce) a large number of copies, send you your share, and let the rest rot in their warehouse. Sometimes they never print the books that are supposed to be in the warehouse. The difference, of course, is the commitment to get the work out to the reading public. An honest subsidy publisher will treat your book like any other publishing house. A vanity publisher will ship you a garage full of books. In spite of their promises, that is all you will get.