The End of the Silver(berg) Age

When I heard Ira Silverberg got offered the job of Literary Director of the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), I was simultaneously overjoyed and depressed. Ira and another agent, Betsy Lerner, have always been on the top of my Agent Wishlist.

Publisher's Marketplace broke the news on Twitter, linking to this Observer article that Ira huad accepted the offer. It's good news for books and the authors who will benefit from having him at the NEA and bad news for all us would-be writers who hoped to send our queries to Sterling Lord Literistic, Silverberg's home since 2008 before his departure.

But why am I so sad about losing an agent that I may have never had a shot with? Simply put, Silverberg understands writers and what makes a work worthwhile or not. Every thing I've ever read about the man suggests that if Ira believed in you he would go to bat for you and what new writer wouldn't want that energy and devotion to their work?

As a writer I think I fall through the gaps somewhere. Where I'm not sure because I'm still struggling not to find my voice, because I am certain to the core that I have a unique voice. I'm just not sure it's a voice that people necessarily want to hear. I'm not going to be commerical or I am. I can't know until my book is printed and I see the response of the reading public.

Ira was always the go to guy if you were gay or a freak or didn't "fit" somehow. He had a talent for making a square peg fit into the round hole. I always thought he'd be at some agency somewhere, wearing paisley, and that when my query came along - well, I'm a realist so I imagined it going several ways.

1. That my work wouldn't be good enough and I'd get some email rejection.
2. That he'd ask for a few pages and then tell me my work wasn't good enough.
3. That he'd look at my work and see a hint of promise and take me under his wing.
4. That my query would be ignored entirely.

Of course what I wanted most isn't on that list, but what are writers if not dreamers? We fuel our fires with whatever scrap we can get our hands on. Or at least I do. One word of encouragement can keep me going for quite awhile. I always thought this would be one of my biggest strengths in my literary endeavours and it is.

So maybe me & Ira won't be kismet. I've learned from this that all the hope in the world isn't going to make literary success happen. You need hope, luck, talent, hard work, and especially discipline. And maybe it's good news in a way. Maybe instead of sending Mr. Silverberg a query I've something new to aspire to. An NEA grant awarded to me by Ira Silverberg.

Congratulations Mr. Silverberg, I really mean it. I'll stop being such a selfish bitch now.

By finding this picture I also found an interesting blog by another writer. Check it out here.

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Beyond the Nuts & Bolts

Since producing a rough draft of a manuscript, I've been more and more aware of what the heck I should be paying attention to as the time approaches for me to seek representation and eventually, publication.

It's a vast and confusing world out there for writers. What kind of agent should you be looking for? What kind of contests can be a springboard for your career? What should you avoid? All kinds of questions are filling my head these days, and I've been dedicating one hour a day to answering these questions.

I found a very useful resource for this kind of information, but I can't repost anything here without permission. Hopefully I'll hear back soon and will be given permission to share, but in the meantime, here are a few things I've learned from my searches this past week that I've noted as particularly important for us first timers:

• Start learning how to read contracts and fine print.
• It might not be a bad idea to have a lawyer in mind that is used to working within the publishing industry for when you need one, and undoubtedly you will.
• Same goes for an accountant.
• Make sure the agents you query are "reputable" meaning:

1. They've sold work for other authors to commercial publishers. There are a lot of scams out there. Agents who try to refer you to vanity presses they own for example. In the end you pay an agent and you pay to publish your own book.
2. The fees they charge are not out of the ordinary. You have to find out exactly what fees the agent would charge you in advance. While certain fees are just outright scams there are some fees which appear to be "okay". Such as fees incurred over the ordinary cost of business to market your manuscript to potential publishers. In this case you need to know if they're going to charge you, what for, and how you will be billed. Ideally your agent believes in your work and agrees to deduct fees from your advance.
3. The agent provides a service worth paying for. Is your agent going to represent your manuscript? Or is the agent going to shove it with a bunch of others and send them off? Very few publishers accept non-solicited (meaning agent represented) manuscripts. An agent is almost mandatory. Is your agent going to make sure your manuscript gets read? Do they already have ideas of which publisher might want to accept your manuscript for publication? These are questions you have to ask and answer before signing anything.

Now when it comes to agents, I'm working on making my top three choices. I'm looking for agents who have a lot of experience with what I think of "after publication", meaning not only will they shop your book, but they will help you with film options, foreign rights, etc.

My weapon in finding an agent besides "The Writer's Market" is a little website I found www.querytracker.net.

I am really impressed with this website, and if you're going through the same process as me, you might be too. I didn't take a premium membership, but I'm not sure I'm not going to if only to toss a little money (it's $25 a year) towards the people who made this site.

Here's a quick run through of why I like this site:

1. You can search by author to see who represents them.
2. You can also search by agent.
3. Once you find the agent that represents the author, or you would like to represent you, there is an option to generate a "query report". The query report allows you see reponses of people who use the site as regards to their interaction with said agent/agency from the delay in response time, how they agent/agency prefers to be queried, how many people were asked to submit a partial MS or full MS, and whether or not they were offered representation.
4. You can see how people were rejected. Form letter, helpful rejection, etc.
5. You can keep track of agents you'd like to query in the future or have already queried.

Here's a snapshot of the querytracker website, click on it to enlarge for a closer look at the report the site generates or visit the site and perform your own search.

Now using this website has been a bit disheartening. The two agents on the top of my list aren't really accepting manuscripts at the moment. Great. They also have relatively small amounts of queries. I happen to know they're pretty good agents and rep some pretty fantastic authors, so to compare, I clicked on one of the most queried agents via querytracker, Diana Fox at Fox Literary.

Now keep in mind Diana Fox seems to accept almost every genre I can think of, and when I clicked on the Amazon links of her clients it came up with a lot of horror/sci-fi/fantasy type stuff mostly written by women. Now if that was my genre I'd take that as a good sign given I'm a woman, but it's not my genre.

When I generate the report for Diana Fox I learn that she prefers emails, doesn't send paper rejections anymore, and that she's been queried 1700+ times, of which she rejected 1400+. She did send out 85 helpful rejections though.

If you're in the querying phase now, be sure to check out this site. I however will never be in the querying phase if I don't get some actual writing done, so I'm off to walk the hound, and spend my afternoon doing exactly that.

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