What’s in a name—the agent version

On Wednesday, superstar mystery writer Jenny Milchman came through Lawrence and had lunch with seven local writers, including me. We had a delicious and wonderful meal full of interesting conversation, stories tall and small, and lots of yam fries (because who doesn’t love yam fries?).

The group was full of variety—three traditionally pubbed Big Five writers; two querying writers; a self-pubbed author; an agented author (me) and a reader.

Before our meals (and yam fries!) arrived, Jenny posed a question to the group. And this is basically it but I’m paraphrasing because we discussed it in different facets: Is it necessary in today’s publishing industry to have a big-shot agent?

While it’s true that you need an agent to get a traditional deal with the Big Five, do you need a “name” agent to be effective? When looking for an agent, is it best to focus on the names you see repeatedly in Publisher’s Marketplace? (Sorry, Jenny, had to paraphrase here.)

My answer was this: you need the agent for you. If that’s the big-deal agent, it’s the big-deal agent. If it’s a freshman agent you really connected with, it’s that excited newbie.

The four of us that are agented agreed, though two of us have agents who aren’t big and two have agents who are huge names in their categories. Our experiences have been vastly different, but we agreed that for an author-agent relationship to be effective:

1. You need an agent who gets you as an artist and a person
2. You need an agent who knows the industry and your category
3. You need an agent who knows how to negotiate

It’s funny because before I was agented I would’ve been happy just to have ANY agent say yes to me. But now I understand the “behind the scenes” part of things and that’s definitely changed my opinion. I feel very happy with my agent and my experience, but I know several people who have run from their agents in tears because things didn’t work out for each of those three reasons above.

And when it doesn’t work out, often your confidence takes a hit, you must query again, AND any book the agent has shopped that didn’t sell isn’t something that another agent would likely make the rounds with again.

I thought Jenny’s question was very important, especially given the negative experiences of people I know. And given that many writers want representation very badly so that they can have a “traditional” career.

For those of you who have queried, what stands out to you about the agents you most hope to connect to?

Sometimes, You Have to Hear No

I’d like to use today’s blog to create an addendum to the truth Linda Rodriguez shared here a few weeks ago in her post, “Advice AboutPublishing Your Novel.”

There’s a lot of mystery in publishing, and I thought I’d take Linda’s thoughts and use them to springboard into something I think is completely misunderstood about the agent-author relationship by those who haven’t been in that situation. (And, yes, I know not everyone reading this is looking for an agent, but I’m hoping this bit of information might be useful to those who want to publish in general.)

Ready for some truth?

An agent is not a “yes man.”

If you end up working with an agent, it will be because, yes, an agent loves your work and you think that going into a partnership with said agent will be a great way to get your manuscripts in the hands of fabulous editors.

But here’s the thing: An agent doesn’t have to sell everything you put in front of him/her.

Yep.

Just because an agent loves one manuscript doesn’t mean he or she will love the next thing you write. Or, he or she might not think it’s marketable, know how to sell it or believe they have the connections to make it happen.

This has not happened to me (yet), but I know several really talented writers who have written full manuscripts only to have their agents say, “Nope.”

Will this happen to me? Yeah, probably. If not by my agent, then by my editor.

Because, here’s the thing: Agents (and editors) aren’t there to make you feel all sunshine-y about your work. They DO, but that’s not their job. Their job is to spot and nourish a manuscript into book form.

And sometimes that means saying no.

What would be the point of an agent (or editor) saying, “Yes, let’s put that out into the world,” when they aren’t a hundred percent behind it? Just like good critique partners and beta readers, they are there to tell you when something isn’t working. Only for them, their honesty is critical both to their success and yours.

I value my agent’s honesty. When we talk over revisions for my work, I know she’s telling me what she thinks I need to hear. And, conversely, when she’s telling me what she loves about it, I know she really truly loves it.

If she were a “yes man” how would I ever improve? How would I know where I’d gone off course? And how would I really know if I nailed something on the head?

So, if you have dreams of getting an agent, understand going in that at some point, he or she might have to tell you no. And that’s OK. They aren’t doing it to be mean or super critical or squash your dreams. They are doing it because it’s the best thing for you. And, if you don’t agree (and you might not), it’s always OK to reevaluate whether you have the same vision.

Who is the anti-“yes man” in your writing life?

Big Personal Risk for a Big Personal Reward, AKA How Sarah Got Her Agent

In my last post, I talked all about lessons learned from Pitch Madness, a fabulous contest created to help writers get a precious bit of agent attention away from the inbox slush.

Working as a slush reader for the contest, which had nearly 500 entries, I got to read a LOT of the sort of things landing in agency inboxes each and every second of every day. It was enlightening to say the least.

My takeaway: contests are a great thing for writers on many levels, and, just like in an agent’s inbox, you have to stand out if you want to get picked.

And I told you I understood this quite well because I found my lovely agent, Rachel Ekstrom of the Irene Goodman Literary Agency, through a contest called PitchWars.

I had several people who wanted to know a bit more about that experience. So, in a phrase: It was crazy awesome.

And it nearly didn’t happen.

Because, here’s the thing: Putting yourself out there is hard.

Really, really hard.

And though I’ve been in newspapers far too long and write a column every week, it was quite another thing to put work out there that wasn’t true-to-life and came straight from my brain. I knew that if I entered PitchWars and made it through to the agent round, I’d have to let a pitch and 250 words sit out on the Internet for DAYS, waiting for agents to comment as to if they wanted a partial or full or nothing at all. Everyone in the contest would know if I had requests or didn’t. And who was asking.

Plus, everyone I knew could read those fictional, straight-from-my-brain words.

And, as you’ll see in a second, those first 250 words are pretty much a doozy. They do not jibe with the sweet Midwestern vibe I project in both my newspaper career and real life. They don’t, AT ALL.

Somehow, in my mind, this juxtaposition would be fine if it were in something official, like say a book, but the idea of putting something up that may or may not go anywhere was pretty much terrifying.

So, I thought long and hard about entering. And nearly didn’t. But my good friend and critique partner Joy was entering, and so we kind of dared each other to do it.

Honestly, I didn’t think I stood a chance. I knew how many people were entering this contest (nearly 500). I knew that because of how it was set up, there were only six spots (initially) for adult works, with thirty more reserved for YA and NA.

And, furthermore, I knew my book was not for everyone. It’s pretty much Top Chef meets the most gory episode of CSI you’ve ever seen and dumped onto a discarded set from Dexter.

Now, if you read my last post, you probably know what I’m going to say next. The thing I didn’t realize about my manuscript was how much it stood out.

It stood out like a sore thumb.

Or maybe like a pulled pork sandwich in a sea of lightly sautéed kale.

Here’s what agents (and everyone else) saw the two days they could request off my pitch and 250:

NAME: Sarah Henning

MENTOR: Rebecca A. Weston

TITLE: DEAD MEAT

GENRE: Foodie Thriller

WORD COUNT: 100,000 

PITCH:

When a sadistic killer begins butchering South Florida’s hottest chefs, Detective Ellis Cash and ex-cop-turned-culinary-school-professor Chase Bowman wade through a veritable stew of knife-wielding chefs, vindictive food editors and ice-cold investors as they race to find the culprit before he incinerates the Palm Beach restaurant world from the inside out.

FIRST 250:

Funny fact: Human flesh sears just as easily as lamb. Crisp skin on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside.

Not that anyone would be eating this bit of flesh any time soon.

It’d been seared, strangled and baked off the bone.

Plus it was mostly raw.

A good portion didn’t make it into the well-salted cast-iron pan on the stovetop for a nice cheek-fat 

sear or into the oven cavity for a good off-the-bone roast. No, the majority of the meat was rigid, sprawled on the floor in the middle of a kitchen in one of Palm Beach’s hottest eateries, bookended by sky blue garden clogs and a face that was now just another anonymous crust on the bottom of a hard-working oven. 

But the face wasn’t the worst part, believe it or not.

No, the worst was the neck. Maybe twelve hours ago it was a stout eight inches in diameter, bent over a computer screen balancing the books after a successful dinner service. Now, it was at best a constipated hourglass, a muddy hash of vocal chords, windpipe and whatever’s to be found in an Adam’s apple.

I swallowed hard, my arms crossed against the hum coming from the hallway—a payroll’s worth of restaurant workers milling behind yellow crime scene tape, all wanting to know when clean up could begin. Just so they could start a late lunch service and go back to earning tips the size of my car payment.

Soooo, yeah. Different than you’d expect from me, right? You can see why I was terrified. Yet: I ended up with five requests from the contest. And, come the next week, I had four official offers of representation.

That contest changed my life.

And it paired me with Rachel, whom I adore and trust completely.

I will forever be a fan of writing contests, especially the kind that allow writers to step out of the slush pile and into a special situation that can shine a spotlight on what makes them unique.

And you know what? Even if I hadn’t made it through the first round of PitchWars, or hadn’t gotten a single request, I was still glad I did it. And I’d still be a fan and enter anything I had prepared. Writing is hard. Publishing is hard. Putting yourself out there and letting a neon sign light up with “This came from my brain!” is hard.

But doing something hard is almost always worth it, because it gets you closer to where you want to be.

Lessons Learned from Pitch Madness Slush

I’m a firm believer that contests are very, very good for writers.

And I’m not just saying that because I snagged my agent thanks to one. (Though, that does help!)

You see, as a querying writer, you know you have competition. Lots and lots of it. And that competition is faceless, nameless and possessing of talent and ideas of a completely unknown quantity.

Which is annoying.

Because, unless an agent gives specific examples of your competition over Twitter or on his/her blog, or you get a chance to read a friend’s query and first 10 pages, it’s really, really hard to gauge what’s hitting an agent’s inbox at the very same time your query makes its appearance.

Now, first, let me be clear: Getting an agent is about your writing. It’s not about whose query is shiniest or who you met at such-and-such conference. Those things help, but ultimately, it’s about the writing.

That said, agents get hundreds of query letters each week. And chances are, they’ll read a good fifty in one giant gulp of yeses (“Please send more.”) and nos (“Not right for me, thanks.”).

So, it helps to stand out in a crowd.

And contests help you do this in a couple of ways:

1. Most have an exclusive window where, if you advance, a number of agents have committed to giving their time to looking at contest entries and making requests.

2. Even agents who weren’t originally committed might hop on and join in on a request-a-thon (my agent was one of those).

But there’s an even larger reason these contests can help you stand out, no matter if you make the agent round: You get a chance to see what everyone is else doing.

And learn from it.

I learned quite a bit from the contest I competed in — not only about what genres were big and better ways to word a pitch, but I ended up with some great critique partners, and my marvelous agent (something I’ll talk about in my next post Sept. 15).

And, you know what? Even though I have an agent, I’m still learning from contests.

This week, I got to work as a slush reader for one of Brenda Drake’s fabulous Twitter/blogcontests: Pitch Madness. I’ve done this once before for Brenda, but I didn’t get to read as much slush as I wanted because I happened to be stuck at a three-day stage trail race in backwoods Arkansas with no Internet. Horrible scheduling on my part.

But this time, I got to read the majority of the 470-something entries in Pitch Madness. Yes, nearly 500 entries, all of which consisted of a 35-word pitch and the first 250 words (about one page) of the actual text.

Now, I know we writers would like to believe this isn’t enough on which to judge a manuscript — especially when you write 100,000-word behemoths like me. But here’s the thing: There’s no guarantee that an agent will read any more than that. Just because you sent a query, synopsis and three chapters does not mean that will get read. In fact, he or she might take one look at your opening paragraph or outrageous word length and send a form rejection.

I know I sound like a jerk when I say this, but in some cases it’s true. And it stinks.

And here’s what you can do about it: Make yourself stick out.

As I mentioned, I read nearly 500 pitches and excerpts over the past few days. And probably 99 percent of them were really good in one way or another.

This is your competition.

So, I want to share a bit about what I learned from reading entry after entry. Now, none of these “rules” really account for subjectivity, which is something impossible to control, but I want you to take a look at your query and sample pages and make sure you’ve taken care of every one of them. Because the competition is fierce and I truly don’t want you to be left behind.

1. Show, don’t tell. This is the first cardinal rule of writing. We’ve all heard it a hundred times. Yet, I saw quite a bit of telling in both the pitch and the actual copy. Yes, it’s beneficial to have both showing and telling in your writing. A mix is great. But in a story’s opening, telling can come off as heavy-handed and un-earned. And in a pitch or a query, you do yourself a disservice by telling. A query or pitch should give your reader a hint your writing’s flavor and if you’re too direct, you kill any benefit.

2. If you start with dialogue, it better be fantastic. Dialogue can be a fine way to begin a manuscript — it puts a reader right in the middle of a scene, giving them a chance to “hear” your characters. But it also can be very tricky in that if it’s basic or too out there, it’s not going to mean a lick to your reader. And they’re going to stop reading. Go back and make sure your dialogue crackles, especially if you’re opening with a conversation.

3. Names, names, names. I absolutely love unusual names for main characters. This sets them apart, gives them personality and, if done well, is a perfect part of them. That said, if you’re going to use an unusual name, make sure a reader can pronounce it in his or her head without much help. If someone stumbles on your main character’s name in the very first instance, that’s a stumble you may not recover from depending on how well the reader/agent likes your premise and writing. Believe me: You can’t afford this. Ask your friends and family to read the name aloud to you to see if they get it right. Seriously. On the flip side, if you use a “basic” name, you might want to make sure it hasn’t been overdone or check other query contests and writer groups to see how many times it’s been used by others. I saw several Jakes, Devs (yes, Dev), Jane/Jaynes and Hopes.

4. Sentence structure and paragraph starters. In the heat of writing and editing, you might be looking for just the right word or phrase or bit of dialogue. But when you’ve got the copy to where you need it to be, take one final pass and look at how your paragraphs appear on the page. If you find more than two paragraphs in a row that start with the same word (usually I, He, She, They, etc.), change it up. I can’t tell you how many little 250-word excerpts I read that over-used the same sentence structure several times in a row. Sometimes, this can be done purposefully to create a certain rhythm. But most of the time? It’s just a go-to way of describing the action that needs to be changed up. The same goes for sentence length. Vary it. Once you start looking, page-by-page, at your manuscript, these things will appear if you’re overdoing them. I swear.

5. A 35-word pitch isn’t a query, but it’s dang close. When you tell someone you’re a writer, they probably ask about what you’re writing. How do you describe it without regurgitating your query? Even if you never use it, you need to perfect how to tell someone what you’re writing in as short of a space as possible. Not only will this help them understand what your book is about, but it’ll help you learn what your book is about. Seriously. Before I start writing any book, I write myself a short pitch and basically the meat of a query. I learned this trick from one of my writer buds and I think it’s genius. It really helped me zero in and go from this nebulous idea to something that has great shape, detail and direction.

I hope you’ve learned a bit from what I saw in those nearly 500 entries. I know some of it sounds like stuff we all know, and we probably do, but knowing it and implementing it is something different altogether.

And if you’re a Pitch Madness person reading this and freaking out because you have an unpronounceable character name, a page full of dialogue and a boatload of “telling” shoe-horned into sentences that exclusively start with I?

Don’t worry.

Seriously. Because, in the end, it all comes down to the writing. You can break every rule in the book and still be successful.

Just make sure you stick out.

What do you learn from reading the work of others?

Sounding Retreat to Write Another Day

I wrote a synopsis for my third novel in the Skeet Bannion series and sent it to my agent the other day. I felt pretty good about it and ready to start working on it as I can during this crazy book-promotion time right before Every Last Secret (the first Skeet book) launches. I had my novel-writing group (there are three of us who have met monthly for years) take a look at it, and they liked it.

My agent, who is wonderful, sent back a reply, saying it had lots of interesting characters and good suspense and plot complications. Then, she asked me, “How is Skeet being tested anew?”

 

I stared at it and realized that, unlike the first two books where the story had risen from Skeet’s character and the things she needed to be forced up against to create growth in her character, with this book I got carried away with great situations and quirky characters and left that most important consideration out of the equation altogether.

I packed up my laptop and marched myself to my local coffee shop for a full day of total focus on revising this synopsis and fixing it. I could do this thing. I just had to tie it into Skeet’s character development. That was all I had to do.

By the end of the day, I was ready to cry. My great synopsis was not going to work. All those terrific characters and interesting situations didn’t fit Skeet’s character arc—at least not at this point in the series. Oh, I won’t throw them away. But this is probably going to have to be a later book—or maybe even someone else’s book. I crawled back home, defeated.

 

After much thought about it, I emailed my agent and said I needed to start from scratch to be sure this book would have the same level of quality the other two had. I wondered if she’d think I was a lousy writer because I couldn’t make the synopsis fit. I had visions of my name falling down to the bottom of her priority list.

She told me not to worry, that now my concern was to promote the first book, and she knew I’d come up with the right book with time. (I told you she was a wonderful agent.) The weight lifted off my shoulders, and I looked one last time at the synopsis. Lots of good stuff there, but for another book. I would go back to Skeet’s character and situation at the end of book two and look for natural outgrowths and integral elements that will test her and cause her to learn things she doesn’t want to face.

Sometimes it’s best to say, “This is not working. Let’s try something else.” And sometimes, if we’re very lucky, someone else will lead us there before we’ve gone too long down the wrong road. A Southern friend’s grandmother always used to tell her, “You’ve never gone too far down the wrong road to turn back.”

Have you found yourself mired in a story that ought to be working but isn’t? Have you ever wandered from the strengths of your original work to something lesser and realized it with horror? Have you ever gone down that wrong road?