Q&A – Part 1 of 2
1. Let’s talk about the AAR’s Canon that prohibits an agent from charging authors for readings and editorial evaluation. Does that make sense to you? Does that have to change?
The idea of an agent charging reading fees has been taboo for quite a while. The reason is somewhat obvious—it creates a false promise of potential representation to the client based on something other than merit. However, there was a time when reading fees were common. It was before my time, but agents like Scott Meredith had experienced teams of editors who would read and edit manuscripts for writers willing to pay for the service. I do feel that as long as this service is something that does not come with a promise to represent, an agent should be able to add this to their business. But it’s a hot-button issue, and it probably won’t happen anytime soon.
2. How do you see “self-publishing” among the range of publishing options? Can it be a legitimate commercial choice?
Self-publishing, as we knew it a few years ago, was frowned upon; it was vanity publishing. It was expensive. It was for writers who couldn’t get their book published and had no alternative but to go at it alone. Companies provided editorial service, created a cover and did limited print runs – all of this costing up to $10,000. As digital publishing emerged, places like IUniverse surfaced who were able to do the same service for a lot less by using the print-on-demand technology, but it was still considered less than prestigious. Today, self-publishing is very different. We are all self-publishing via online reviews, blogs, Facebook, Twitter. This is fundamentally what the internet offers, the opportunity to easily and cheaply be a content creator and reach thousands of readers. As time goes on, there will be little distinction between publishing and self-publishing. You will just publish.
3. Can an agent be helpful to an author self-publishing? If so, how should the agent charge for that service?
I see the agent role in this scenario as a partnership or manager. We are looking at a project now with another company where we are co-publishing. We will help introduce opportunities, navigate the new technology and be involved from the idea through the publication. We will be more intricately involved. The new form of a book has not yet been created, and I feel we as agents, by being closest to the authors, will have a very central role helping figure out what that’s going to look like.
4. Do you recruit writers by looking at blogs and self-published books? Can you elaborate on how you look and what you look for?
My agency has been very active with pursuing bloggers who have book potential. One of the agents working at the agency, Byrd Leavell represents Tucker Max who wrote I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL. Tucker has sold more than one million books because he started with a huge, built-in audience. That’s what the blogger gives you, a potential audience. This past year, Byrd signed a book off Twitter by Justin Halpern who posted off-color pearls of wisdom and sold the book quickly and well. You have to have a nose for what will translate to book form because most won’t. Not unlike traditional journalists, bloggers are usually better in short form.
5. Do you ever advise authors to blog or self-publish while you are in the process of selling a project of theirs?
There’s always the standard need to be on Facebook, Twitter, and other micro-blogging sites. Of course, you harden how someone can use this effectively if everyone is doing it, but it’s about building your network. So really, you need to be building your following before your book comes out so that you can let this larger number of people know the book is now available and begin the viral word-of-mouth. If you have a small-friend list, the announcement won’t do much. The more active you are on Twitter, the more followers you will have. That’s kind of obvious, but you need to realize it won’t happen overnight and takes consistent attention.
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With a (mountain) of salt
I was at the Backspace conference this week and the South Carolina Writer’s Workshop a couple weeks ago and as always happens when you lump a group of writers in one place, I met a ton of fascinating and talented people. And yet time and time again so many of these smart, talented writers I met expressed relief bordering on elation when I or another agent said I don’t care if it’s Helvetica or Courier, I don’t care if there is one typo on page 219, I don’t care if your email and mine collude to strip the formatting, I don’t even care if I’m addressed as Mr Root–it’s clearly by accident, no really we won’t autoreject it, so long as the writing is amazing.
There’s a ton of ink spilled online over do’s and don’ts for writers, and while I am a firm believer that knowledge is power and all, too much information can be paralyzing, and some of us on this side of the desk are guilty of making it seem much harder than it already is. If you really read and adhered to every.single.thing. every agent said online you would never finish a book or a query letter and if you did it would probably be a bland groupthinked mess, which actually will get you rejections.
Learn what you can from the resources available online, absolutely, particularly with regard to craft. The best writers are always growing, changing, improving. But oftentimes the industry stuff gets overstated or misunderstood then passed along as fact, like a game of telephone except with your career.
Perhaps even more distressingly, I have heard from so many writers who are terrified of “offending” agents or breaking some rule. Nothing about this process should be anywhere near that scary, and shame on those of us professionals who have made it so. It’s publishing—not nuclear disarmament. I am an agent, not Emperor Palpatine. Of course agents are busy, but after all you are too, and why are we even in a busy-ness arms race to begin with?
There are a million different ways to end up with a book in your hand with your name on the cover. But guess what? Without you, yes you specifically, there in the blue shirt—none of those roads, or those books, would exist.
So here’s what you can take away from the bajillion bytes on the subject: Write the best book you can, then the best query you can. Submit written materials to agents. The worst they can say is no so don’t worry about fine-tuning that to the nanometer, just look for the right ballpark (i.e., alive, still in the business). Then press send.
That’s it.
Take the rest as it comes. And never, ever let any of the voices on the internet, no matter how helpful or authoritative they aim (or claim) to be, take away from your ability to hear your own unique authorial voice.
Filed under: Holly Root | 49 Comments
Farley’s Frankfurt Confidential
The Frankfurt Book Fair starts next week and I’m nearly finalized with preparations. An author recently asked me to explain what the Book Fair was like and I realized it wasn’t so easy to encapsulate. At its most basic, it’s an international rights bazaar in which agents and editors from all over the world sit in intensive 30 minute meetings over several days and decide which books they want to license for their territory. As an agent, I’m there to sell, and my primary goal is to market the books we’ve sold in the US for which we have retained translation rights into as many territories as possible. If we haven’t kept translation rights then that means it’s the publishers job to market them internationally, and there’s an entire air hanger-sized hall full of them (and that’s just English language publishers) furiously reviewing rights lists with potential licensees.
In fact there are about eight air-hanger sized halls at the fair, each housing publishers of certain languages, with the Italians on the first floor, say, and Spanish language publishers on the next floor up. They’re not that close together these halls, and they’re housed together in a complex called the Messe. Thousands of people are always streaming to and from them, walking or crammed into buses, going up and down escalators, and crowding the hallways inside to talk, gawk and meet. Publishers set themselves up in elaborate or simple booths, the way any trade show would be, and they prominently feature the amazing variety of book covers to the books and authors their companies are so well known for. To wander around these halls is to realize the unfathomable number of books and bookstores, writers and readers there are around the world. It’s at once a dizzying and comforting thought to reckon with.
Agents meet in what’s called the rights center, on a floor in one of the halls with little more than desks and chairs to meet over, and that’s really all we need. I have fifty meetings scheduled, over a three and a half days, and I’ll carefully review the catalog of our books with our foreign subagents and publishers from countries around the world. Sometimes I think fifty meetings seems like a lot, though I know many people do a lot more. Still, it’s an exhaustingly repetitive process, pitching and pitching the same books over and over again. And it’s a process that yields far more no’s than yeses. But it’s a process that’s leavened by irregular encounters with friendly and familiar faces, bursts of unexpected enthusiasm from a sleeper title on your list, and the most exciting and downright old-fashioned phenomena I can imagine: an offer for a book relayed to you in person. The good always outweighs the bad.
Over the course of the fair, and all those meetings, it’s easy to forget how easy it is to forget the things you talk about with your appointments so I have to keep careful and legible notes or I’ll be kicking myself when I follow up. The only notes I keep are requests to see material, as opposed to rejections, and when I get back to my desk I begin to send out manuscripts or books to the people who’ve requested them. In recent years it’s almost become preferable to get material by email, so that makes it a lot simpler (and cheaper) to provide materials. It’s not often the case that I’ll hear if a foreign publisher has rejected a project. But should they want to bid for the rights our subagent will relay an offer. This can take weeks and months after the fair and offers range in all sizes. But even small offers add up and make the hard work worth it.
In spite of the hard work involved, I realize that we’re very lucky to have this fair, and to have a market that’s so interested in American authors. While there are notable exceptions, it’s very rare to see books (and especially nonfiction) come the other way, and be translated into English and published by US publishers. Demand from different countries ebbs and flows, with some being more acquisitive of our titles than others depending on the year, international relations, pop culture trends, or who knows what. But I always have confidence that I’ll come away from these meetings with strong and widespread interest in our books and the probability that I’ll get to relay the exciting news to a client that we’ve been able to secure them a foreign deal.
But don’t take my word for it. If you want to really know what’s it like to go to the book fair I recommend an article some months ago by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in Harper’s magazine. He hits the nail on the head.
Filed under: Farley Chase | 3 Comments
Frankfurt and E-Publishing
As we prepare for another Frankfurt Book Fair, there is lots to think about this year. While references to the last hours of the Titanic were rampant at last year’s fair, we will see whether things are as bleak as people have predicted. I’m sure attendance will be down, but like every other year, deals will be done, drinks will be raised, and the pleasures of sharing stories with colleagues will continue. I will be traveling over again with Farley Chase who handles the direct sales of our foreign rights, and we are excited about several of our titles this year, from romance fiction to a historical vampire series, a new book from golf great Tom Watson, humor books based on popular blogs, narrative non-fiction about the rare discovery of ambergris, a history of the discovery of the Amazon river, and so much more. We will be meeting with foreign publishers from all over the world who will hopefully find something to like on our list this year. It’s hard to predict what the “hot book” will be, and often, it’s a total surprise.
Also, I’m sure there will be a great deal of attention on the e-books this year, and I will be taking some meetings with various companies on the technology side of things. We are beginning to experiment with our own authors in this area and trying to stay as current as possible. If the numbers on Kindle are what they say (48% of sales where both print and digital are available on Kindle) we are in for some powerful changes even sooner than we thought possible. I don’t see a Napsterization of publishing as some have predicted, as reading is a more active experience than music and the format matters; still, the growth is amazing. More on that topic in our next post.
Filed under: Scott Waxman | 2 Comments
Letting the market speak
There’s a virulent and contagious illness going around, and it’s got ties to the barnyard. Not swine flu, but a little guy I like to call cart-before-horseitis.
I am all for authors having career goals and knowing what success looks like for them (bonus points if you can recognize and enjoy it once you meet those goals). Write ‘em down, ask your grandma to pray for you, do whatever it is The Secret tells you to do, yell them at midnight the third day after the gibbous moon, whatever makes you feel empowered.
But don’t put it in your query letter;
And don’t expect that those hopes should be the Operating Manual for your agent or your editor;
Above all don’t get angry when others fail to fall in line with the timing you think is Right;
Because if you do you ignore the reality that publishing is a business, and the market has to have its say for those goals to truly be achieved.
Object lesson: I see, all the time, queries from unpublished authors that say: “I am a very prolific writer and want an agent who can get me four to five books a year under contract for two or more houses.”
Now, I freely admit I am cantankerous, but doesn’t that sort of make you, too, want to say, “Great. And I would like to only sell books for a million dollars. Also, a pony.”
In this example, writing multiple books for multiple houses is putting the cart before the horse, who I am pretty sure is still chilling in the barn in fact. Writing multiple books/multiple houses would in fact be a lovely goal I support wholeheartedly, if that’s the right thing for your career, and you can’t know if it is until you are at the point where that’s a real choice you face.
It could also be the absolute worst thing for your career. Until you’ve written a book on deadline, while copyediting another and promoting yet another, you just don’t know for sure that you can write that fast and that often (to say nothing at all of quality). And if you did by some miracle wrangle this veritable cornucopia of deals before you have a sales track that suggests there is a market to support that kind of output, how do we know it won’t be the book equivalent of throwing a party that no one attends? That your publication schedule won’t outpace the reading public’s hunger for your work? (Ouch, right? But it happens–and then you may be toast, because you’ve got not one book with one house that sank like a stone, but multiple books with multiple houses that sank like stones, and who pray tell wants to get on board that train?)
If you’re dead-set on Multiple Publishers Now, or Getting A Multi-City Tour Financed By the Publisher, or Selling to Albania, or A Six-Page Feature in the New Yorker About Your Debut Cozy Mystery, and in my thoughtful professional opinion any of those things do not benefit the career you actually have, this can create conflict. A good agent will explain why in his/her professional opinion these things aren’t prudent/useful/likely, but an author has to be willing to hear that.
There is so much in publishing you can’t control, and it’s hard for an agent to help you if you’re fixated on things that you really extra can’t control, particularly to the detriment of things you can. Take subrights sales. It’s totally valid to dream that your work will find readers worldwide. But if you set a (arbitrary) goal of selling in 10 territories, how exactly can you make that actionable? If your agent sends it out, pimps it at Frankfurt and London, and everyone says “nein danke,” are you a failure? No. It just isn’t meant to be with this particular book at this particular moment, for any of myriad reasons (pixies don’t play in Prussia, the second runner-up of German Idol just published a similar novel, your book is extremely American and doesn’t translate, Taiwan can’t get enough of werewolves but hates vampires, you name it. [Also none of those are real, so nobody ask me if we should change from pixies to fairies in order to crack Prussia. Also there is no more Prussia.]).
Same goes for film. I’ve heard of instances where authors fired their lit agents who are otherwise doing good work for them over not getting a film deal. Now, look, every relationship is different, or maybe those agents said no thanks without asking the author when Paramount called with a bag of money. But I think in some of those instances it’s a particularly rough case of CBH-itis. You certainly don’t want an agent who pretends there is no Hollywood, or refuses to even explain how the whole film thing works and whether it’s viable for your book (virtually every author thinks their book is a movie but relatively few of them get seriously shopped, much less optioned, much less made), and it’s perfectly valid to ask for a serious conversation about all that. But an agent can no more make a film deal happen on an author’s timetable than he or she can make it rain gumdrops.
All of these things–subrights, film, international fame and glory, letters from fans, multiple houses vying for the chance to publish even one of your gems–are results of success, and that’s why I’m calling it cart-before-horseitis. And let me define “success” not by these external signifiers, but in its truest form: Success is writing a book that speaks to people. Hits ‘em where they live. If your book does that–these things follow. Maybe not all of them at once, or on the timeline you expected, but trying to force it is like asking a flower to bloom before it sprouts.
Letting go of an external timetable opens you up to opportunity, for your new goals to be realized in amazing ways you never could’ve planned. Why wouldn’t you want to leave room for the amazing surprises you’ll encounter along the way? It also allows for the truth that there are down times and up, no’s as well as yes’s, and you will weather those turns better if you’re focused on playing the hand you’re dealt rather than trying to turn a spade into a heart, just to tick it off your List of Stuff I Decided Meant I Was Successful Before I Really Experienced This Whole Publishing Thing.
It’s tempting to look at these things that come as results of a book that people adore and try to reverse-engineer them, but it can’t work that way. Write the best book you can. Then, to steal a line from one of my client’s manuscripts: you just “do the next right thing.” Think long-term, yes. Partner with your agent and house to do everything you can to help that book find its people. But don’t get so hung up on chasing those external markers of success that you forget to do the hard, hands-on-keyboard work being a successful author requires.
And leave that horse right where he can do the most good.
(Update: Here’s a great take from an award-winning author.)
Filed under: Holly Root | 29 Comments
Summer Reading
I’ve been spending a lot of my summer on trains back and forth to where my family is spending the summer (yes the Hamptons) and that’s given me time to do some pleasure reading. While I spent last summer tackling the Patrick O’Brian books, originally inspired by my love for sailing but quickly became its own obsession, this summer I decided to go in a different direction.
While I spent the early part of the summer reading upmarket fiction like Netherland and Man Gone Down, both highly admirable, I wanted to really have some fun reading for a change. So I downloaded a whole bunch of free samples on my Kindle and decided to buy the ones I liked the most–in print form (As much as I like my Kindle for reading proposals and manuscripts I just don’t derive the same pleasure when I’m just reading for fun).
I immediately fell in love with Lee Child and starting reading the Jack Reacher novels. They are just a blast and he’s maybe the coolest main character I can remember. Total badass, morally superior, lady killer, just a ton of fun to be around. So, for anyone looking for some good reading fun this summer, go for the Reacher books. And while I’m at it, Scott Waxman the agent is very much on the look out for this kind of contemporary, testerone-infused, fast-paced thriller. If you’ve think you’ve got that ready to go, send it on over to scottsubmit@waxmanagency.com.
Filed under: Scott Waxman | 5 Comments
One thing I’d love to see
Two books I read and loved recently, that are representative of something I’d love to see cross my desk:
Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande
and
Pure by Terra Elan McVoy
Both books are about Issues (creationism and virginity, respectively) on the surface, but really they’re about teens figuring out what they believe when their received beliefs are challenged, both inside the context of their faith traditions and outside them. Both are nuanced portrayals of belief without even a hint of preaching. I’d love to see a YA novel along these lines, and kudos to Robin and Terra for crafting some truly gorgeous novels. If you care about teens or faith or both you’ll be glad to have read either book.
Filed under: Holly Root | 15 Comments
After spending some quality time in the query trenches I wanted to address a (seemingly common) misconception about how an agent’s stated areas of interest should be interpreted.
On the Waxman site, my bio says:
She is actively seeking upmarket and commercial fiction, including women’s fiction, mystery, urban fantasy, romance, and YA, and voice-driven nonfiction projects, with particular areas of interest in narrative nonfiction, lifestyle, psychology, self-help/relationships, science, and practical spirituality and religion.
If you’re writing a project that’s any of those, query away. It doesn’t need to be all of them! I’ve been seeing lots of “My novel doesn’t have a religious element but I am hoping you’ll take a look anyway” or (worse) “My project crosses over all your areas of interest, from science to religion to self-help and urban fantasy.” You really don’t need to be all things to all people, and very few books are. So just pitch me your project as best you can, and don’t fret about needing to tick off every interest or affinity. It’s a menu, not a mandate.
Filed under: Holly Root, Uncategorized | 4 Comments
Some YA thoughts
Check out this Wall Street Journal article on the trend to the dark in YA. If you’ve even strolled through a B&N or Borders you can see this move to the darker/edgier play out in the cover designs especially.
I’d point out particularly the last line referencing YA novels “which initially seem frolicky and fun but are actually creepy and morally bereft and leave you feeling utterly hopeless” as a particular pet peeve of mine. I love a fun read but do also feel, as many of the authors interviewed in the article express, that YA authors especially have a certain calling to present a world where a moral code, any moral code (even if in the course of the action it’s violated) exists. Amorality is a bigger qualm for me than immorality–one is a choice, the other is unrealistic.
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Why I Say Yes
Someone asked on Twitter, why so negative with the last post? How about the reasons you say yes?
Well, they’re even more subjective than the nos, honestly, and not so interesting. But here you go, why I say yes:
I love it, I can sell it, it plays to my strengths as an agent.
(Told you it was a bit boring.)
Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments
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