NOTE: I wrote this a few years ago after attending the Writer’s Digest Writer’s Conference. I was working as a temp for a retired literary agent who was there promoting a software program to help writers construct book proposals. Or something. Whatever. Doesn’t matter.
The important thing is… Since I wrote this, the publishing world hasn’t improved.
Attending the Writer’s Digest Writer’s Conference the weekend of January 21st through the 23rd, I was struck by more than one “sad but true” revelation:
1) Writers are desperate, needy, and borderline delusional;
2) Literary agents are egotistical and condescending.
Wait, wait, wait. Yes, I am making generalizations about a large group of people, some of whom I did not have opportunity to speak with on a one-on-one basis. And yes, there are exceptions to every generalization made, especially ones made by an opinionated bastard such as myself. But for the most part, my descriptions are apt.
A few exceptions: the woman (a teacher, I think) who writes nonfiction children’s’ books and generally seemed low-key and determined to find representation for her work; the teenage girl accompanied by her mom who appeared more interested in learning about the wonderful world of writing and publishing rather than entertaining fantasies of being signed to a million dollar book contracts; and…
Well, there were a few others. I was most impressed by the father who flew in from Miami in order to seek interest in his seventeen year old daughter’s epic fantasy series. Now there’s a guy who believes in his kid’s talent. Or maybe he was as delusional as the majority of other writers who attended.
Why do I say they were delusional? Glad you asked:
Many of the people I spoke with seemed to be under the impression that if they could simply connect with the right person, speak with a certain agent for a minute or two, they believed it would change their whole lives. All they had to do was get in front of the right person and say the right thing… That’s it.
Say the right combination of words and instantly be granted a million dollar publishing contract for which they could simply sit in their custom built mansion and continue writing their ten part fantasy series or epic science fiction series and never have to worry about doing anything else. Never have to leave the house again, in fact, except perhaps to travel to a bookstore and sign copies of their latest bestseller, or travel to do a television or radio interview and answer fan questions such as “Where do you get your ideas?” and “How do you come up with such interesting characters?”
That last part would be a nightmare for me, but there are many unpublished writers who dream of such things. Probably many published writers who dream of it, as well.
My point is, the majority of the writers I met at the convention seemed unaware of the difficulty of getting published in today’s marketplace. As one veteran agent told me, “It’s more difficult for an agent to sell a book today than ever.” Which leads me to the second biggest disappointment of the convention ‒ the agents.
The literary agents that breezed into the conference in a bubble of rarified air as if they were royalty. As if they were put off by the fact that they had to spend two hours in the company of such rabble as the lowly writer, forced to listen to their ninety second pitches. Yes, that’s right: ninety seconds. Every attendee had the opportunity to stand in line for each agent and pitch their book for ninety seconds. At the end of the pitch, the agent then had ninety seconds to give them feedback – either a “yea” or “nay” – and possibly some constructive criticism to help them refine their pitch so hopefully the next agent did not have to listen to any wasted seconds. Which begs the question, how much can you say in ninety seconds?
Think about it. You spend six months or a year, maybe two years (maybe more) writing a book. You sweat blood for it. You lose sleep over it. You sacrifice your free time for it. Then you want to get it in front of an audience. You want people to read it, not necessarily to make money from it because truthfully, no one becomes a writer because they want to make a lot of money (although that would be nice, of course).
No, we become writers because we love to tell stories. We love to entertain. And more than anything, more than all the money in the world, we want people to read what we write. So once a book is done, our first thought is: How can we get people to read this? Big publishers won’t consider any work not represented by an agent. (There are small publishers out there, but they are swamped with submissions and generally have long waiting periods for acceptance/rejection notices). So writers submit to agents.
The agents are notoriously difficult to sell to. They receive hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unsolicited query letters and manuscripts. They don’t have the time to read all of that, and to be fair, much of what they receive is dreadfully written. So they delegate. They have assistants who will glance at the letter and maybe the first page of a manuscript, and the assistants send out form rejection letters.
Again, I’m generalizing. There are agents who don’t do it this way, but really, they are a dwindling minority. Most agents reject everything outright because they play the odds, i.e., what are the odds that something really great will come through the mail? Most agents get their clients through referrals from MFA programs, referrals from other agents and published writers, and by soliciting writers whose work they see in major publications.
The others? The writers who have a dream of having a book published? The writers who don’t have the time or money to complete a MFA program and don’t have friends (or even acquaintances) in the business? They are shit out of luck. Because when you send a query letter or sample chapters of a manuscript to an agent, the chances the agent will seriously consider your work is close to nil. They simply don’t have the time or energy to read everything they receive through the mail, so they pass on it. Or they read the first couple of sentences of the manuscript and decide, “Meh. Not for me.” Then they send out their form rejection letter.
The submission requirements for most agents ask for a query letter describing yourself and describing your book, generally all within three paragraphs. The first paragraph is supposed to detail how and why you are querying that particular agent (“Because I want to get published!”). The second paragraph is the pitch for what your book is about, and is supposed to be where you sell the agent on your story in three or four sentences (if you think selling your book in ninety seconds is tough, try doing it in four sentences). And the final paragraph is where you talk about your accomplishments and your writing background (“I was the editor of my school paper, then spent twenty years working dead-end jobs so I could put food on the table and keep the heat on in my apartment, all the while trying to find a few minutes here and there to scribble some coherent sentences because I have this burning desire to entertain nameless/faceless readers.”). Most agents base their decision to pass on a book based solely on the one page query letter. But I’m seriously digressing here.
The point is, the attendees of the conference spent hundreds of dollars for admission. Many flew in from out-of-state and had to secure accommodations, which means they spent upwards of a thousand dollars. And for what? As much as the other guests of the conference might want to believe people paid money to come hear them talk about how to market themselves, or the best way to use Facebook and Twitter to build an audience, or how to properly revise their work, the truth is that the main selling point of the conference was the opportunity to meet face-to-face with an agent and pitch themselves. The dream (fantasy?) is that the agent will sense a connection with the writer and will decide to take them on as a client, fight for them and sell their work to a publishing house, and secure that multi-book contract and perhaps film rights.
So the writers lined up for their cattle call and waited and waited until they could get in front of whatever agent they thought would be receptive to their subject matter and/or genre that they write in, and pitched their work in exactly ninety seconds. Then, after receiving their constructive criticism (for exactly ninety seconds), the writer was able to go stand in another line and wait for another agent so they could do it all over again. Stories I overheard (okay, eavesdropped on):
The writer who waited to pitch to an agent who supposedly accepted mysteries. When she found out the protagonist of the proposed mystery was a P.I., she told the writer, “Not interested in P.I.’s.” The writer attempted to explain that it was a mystery, and the agent accepted mysteries (per their published bios offered to all attendees). The agent insisted she did not want any books that featured P.I.’s. The writer had wasted time standing on this agent’s line when she could have been pitching to someone more open-minded.
The young woman who attempted to pitch a fantasy novel that had the misfortune of having a vampire as a supporting character. Never mind that it’s not really a vampire novel and the character is entirely secondary to the story, if the author made the mistake of mentioning the supporting character being a vampire, she was immediately shut down and shut out by the agent she was speaking to. Apparently, vampires are a dead subject (pardon the pun) and agents don’t want vampires in their books.
The man with the pants pulled up to his armpits and the pocket protector in his shirt pocket (yes, really) who waited on line for an hour and a half to speak to two agents about his intergalactic sci-fi epic, only to be shot down by one, and told by the other that they did not represent sci-fi (despite the agent’s published bio stating otherwise). The man would have waited on another line for another agent, but had to leave to catch his bus.
The many people I heard talking about how they “scored” because the agent said to send them the first few chapters of their book. Uh, guys? Hate to break it to you, but many of the agents suggest that in their submission requirements on their individual website. It doesn’t mean you made a sale; it means the agent was suggesting what you could have done for free instead of paying hundreds of dollars to be told to do in person.
As for the agents themselves? They looked like royalty forced to wade among the peasants. They appeared more interested in speaking to each other and deciding where they would be meeting up for cocktails after the conference rather than paying attention to the people who spent hundreds of dollars to meet with them. Were some of them polite? Sure. Did some of them refrain from rolling their eyes when approached by a writer? Of course. But will any of them be taking on a client that they met at this conference? Not bloody likely.
Honestly, being an agent today is a hard job. The publishers are buying less and less and laying off editors. The editors, in turn, become agents. As the pool of agents increases, the pool of editors – the ones who can actually buy the books for the publishers – decreases. So the number of salespeople expands, but the number of buyers contracts. See the problem here?
And why are the publishers buying less? Thank the big book chains. The big chains put the small, independent bookstores out of business. Which meant that the big chains have to be stocked with big bestsellers in order to keep their revenue flowing. Which means there’s less room for the mid-list books. Which means the smaller publishers struggle or go out of business or get shut down/swallowed up by the big publishers. Which means less employees are needed. Which means more people turn to being a literary agent. Which means there are less editors to sell to, therefore the agents take on less clients. Which means the smart agents see the writing on the wall and turn to other related business ideas (like software) to make a living.
The future of publishing? In my opinion, as the technology has gotten to the point where it is relatively cheap to print your own book, and former editors are looking for work, it’s only a matter of time before writers realize that instead of spending a thousand dollars to go to a conference and pitch their book to an agent who, more than likely, is contemplating how many cocktails it’ll take to wipe their conscience clean afterward rather than what the writer standing in front of them is saying, the writer can spend the thousand dollars on an editor to clean up their work, and a print-on-demand publisher to knock out some paper copies of their book, which can then be sold on the writer’s website. Or they can simply upload it for free and sell it as an eBook.
Doesn’t that make more sense? Why attempt to cajole a middleman into selling your book to a publisher when you can submit it yourself to a small publisher? Or, as is happening more and more these days, self-publish.