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Five Writers on their Agents

JA November 26

What exactly does an agent do and how do I find one? These questions, and more besides, are probably what many new writers are forced to grapple with at some stage during the writing process. (Whether you need an agent or not is another matter entirely, and perhaps one that deserves its own blog post). In any case, the answer for the first part is, at least in theory, relatively simple. As erstwhile agent Nathan Bransford writes, agents are there first and foremost to act as an advocate for their authors – this can mean helping to edit and revise manuscripts (although the extent of this really depends on each agent), but more commonly involves shopping your novel around to various publishers, both here and overseas, and matching the right book with the right house. As many publishers no longer look at unsolicited manuscripts, this is, needless to say, a good way to get your foot in the door. When it comes to the somewhat trickier territory of negotiating multiple bids, rights, contracts, pub dates and so on, an agent can also be of immeasurable help. All in all, they are there to try and make sure that things go smoothly throughout the entire publication process, and to act as a person in your corner, as well as an intermediary, if they do not.

In terms of finding (and keeping or firing) one’s agent, things get a little more complicated. The Awl have recently published a great piece in which five authors talk candidly about just that – these give a pretty good idea as to the ups and downs of the entire process, although it’s worth keeping in mind that having an agent seems to be much more of a norm in the US than it is here.

Quite a few seem to have found their agents through friends of friends or other contacts. Miles Klee attributes his to ‘[l]uck so dumb that I get a creeping rash of guilt just thinking about it’ – he had a friend who worked in the music division of William Morris, who passed on the contact of a colleague working on the literature side of the company. Klee sent a query letter and got a ‘shockingly enthusiastic response’ which started a process that helped him trim a 700 page manuscript down to 290. Although, if we’re talking luck, the award probably goes to Matthew Gallaway, who again sent out a query letter again based on contacts through a friend:

This query was followed by two minor miracles: 1) within a few hours of sending, Bill’s assistant wrote back asking me to submit the manuscript, which I promptly sent as a zip file (at that point it was over 300,000 words); 2) two weeks later, I heard from the assistant again, asking to submit the manuscript, meaning that he did not receive it the first time. (TIP: Be sure to ‘cc’ yourself on any correspondence you send to an agency.)

The most interesting response though, probably belongs to Alexander Chee – he went through three agents during the lifespan of his debut novel, ending up with Jin Auh at Andrew Wylie, who he’d met at an open mike night early on in his career. His first agent went through a hard slog – attempting to sell his ms to 24 different (big) publishers with no avail, and consequently recommending that he withdraw it:

Agent 1 gave me good advice, even if it was hard to hear: “The first novel you finish isn’t always the first novel you publish.” She said she wanted to withdraw it because she didn’t want to go the small press route with my launch … She felt sure that if I wrote the second book first, it would make the first book possible. I understood, but the idea of setting this book aside and writing an entire other book after all that was agonizing.

Chee eventually ‘took [his] leave of Agent 1’ and later found a small press publisher who set him up with a second agent to draw up the contracts. Unfortunately, the press went bankrupt after publication, with Chee still owed money from a sale: ‘Agent 2 said, essentially, I can do nothing for you there. I fired her, because I needed someone who could do something for me’. It was then that he finally contacted Jin:

All [my agents] were great, but with Jin, I felt she just intuitively got how I worked and displayed a lot of information about approaches to both my future projects and my current crisis in a way that gave me confidence in her … She handled the bankruptcy stuff for me, and even got me some of what was owed me, which, in bankruptcies, is a miracle. I was able to quit that restaurant job, and about a year and a half later she sold my next book as a partial in a 9-day auction.

Despite all this Chee does end on a note of caution: ‘Watch your own expectations… Don’t expect them to wave a magic wand and then everything is better.’

Have a read of the other responses, here.


 

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