There’s literally nothing I like better than being asked my opinion. Whee, doggies! You bet.
Lady Glamis has a situation going on over on her blog. Someone’s getting some real passive-aggressive treatment from their agent.
Now, all of their questions were answered extremely intelligently by quite a good-sized crowd, so I’m not thinking there’s much new I can tell anyone about the industry. I can tell you not to expect an agent to edit your book, because they are not typically trained editors, they are trained agents, and even if they were the vast majority haven’t got that kind of time. But maybe I can help put this whole issue into some context. And I’ll do it the way I do everything else on my blog. . .by telling you guys a story.
I got my first agent in 1996 at a writer’s conference, although—I know—everyone says agents don’t get clients at those things. She did. I did. I was a newby to book publishing, too. That was great.
I had a novel in early draft (which I never did get into decent-enough condition to send out). What I had that was worth something was a book already at the publisher’s, which unfortunately my co-author and I had already signed a contract for. I didn’t want to just sign it blind. I wanted to get an agent, for heaven’s sake! But my co-author refused to involve an agent on the grounds that it might annoy our publisher’s editor. The book was riding on his name, so I went along with him and only later showed the contract to my new agent.
She said it was a travesty.
So our book came out, and I did another draft of my novel for my new agent (which still wasn’t enough). And I started writing book proposals on new nonfiction works for her to start shopping around. I didn’t know beans about book proposals, but that was okay because I’m not sure she knew a whole lot about them, either. It was a long time ago—the publishing industry has gained about 100% more writers since then, not to mention literary agents, and things like this weren’t as carved as stone as they are now. My agent had a last name that’s extremely well-known in publishing, she was chock full o’ excellent stories about famous people she had hobnobbed with, great fun to visit, and I was doing a couple of book-readings for my just-published book around the San Francisco Bay Area, getting excited about being a published author. Altogether, a pretty thrilling time.
Then I got pregnant and, in short order, sick up the wazoo with morning sickness, and I stopped doing book-readings and book proposals and writing of any kind and just lay on the couch a lot thinking about chucking my lunch. I was in love and newly-married and a published author, so that was all still wonderful. But morning sickness SUCKED.
A lot of other things went wrong right around that time, too, including black mold in the bedroom and our landlord and lawyers and whatnot—you know how drama always seems to dogpile you.
My agent and I were now spending only as much time talking as it took to deal with the fact that our publisher’s editor (the one who discouraged both me and my co-author from letting an agent see that travesty of a contract she wanted us to sign) had not 1) edited our book before publishing it, 2) read the final draft of our book before publishing it, 3) sent me galleys to proof before publishing it, with the result that 4) it came out UP TO THE EYEBALLS with typos. No kidding—to this day, if you look on the page facing page one (page zero), you find a charming quote attributed to “Irish Murdoch.” Plus my co-author inserted various cartoons on his own authority, one of them making light of pedophilia, which he inserted into one of my chapters. This was a book about children, aimed at parents and teachers and educational administrators. Apparently nobody on that project but me knew that pedophilia is not a joke to the people who care for children.
So my agent was sending faxes and making phone calls, demanding some accountability from the publisher, all to no avail. Our editor ignored her. She could afford to—she was the head of her department at that publisher. I’d met the woman and not particularly liked her, so I wasn’t surprised, but my agent and I were both pretty bent. I wrote a letter to the editor threatening legal action after I found out she’d gone to press without sending me the galleys, and it scared her, so she kind of made an effort to act a little more professional after that for about a minute, but not much. Altogether what you could consider an unpleasant experience with publishing.
The book sank. It was important, it was the first of its kind, it was positioned beautifully (it came out the week of a local industry-wide conference highlighting its exact subject matter, which we didn’t know until it was too late because the publisher’s marketing department didn’t do a lick of marketing research). The book was actually timed to coincide with a Presidential edict, if that’s not too rich for you. There was a real possibility we could have gotten a statement from the White House supporting it. But it sank.
I didn’t really care. I was on the couch thinking about chucking.
About a year and a half later, when my son was old enough to walk and I got a chance to go back to work, I finally gave up waiting for my agent to get results and went to the National Writer’s Union, which, to her credit, she’d advised me to join the minute she met me. They told me to collect all the information about her communications with the publisher and they’d help me write a letter to the top brass.
The thing is, my agent wasn’t really interested in taking my calls anymore. I’d been a mom for a year and a half. I hadn’t been a writer. I hadn’t produced any salable book proposals. I hadn’t done a rewrite on my novel. I hadn’t even been tech writing in all that time. Just a walking Need-Meet-er for the toilet-impaired. I knew she was getting tired of hearing from me.
You can pretty much read the writing on the wall.
So I continued to call and leave messages, which I knew she would not return, and to call when I thought I could trick her into picking up, which in the days before caller-ID I could. And I finally got her on the phone and told her what I was doing with the National Writer’s Union and asked her to send me all her communications with the publisher on my behalf. Thank you for everything, sorry you couldn’t get results, that damn editor, I know you did the best you could.
I knew I’d never hear from her again.
What is the moral of my story?
The publishing industry is brutal. It is made up not of a handful of supremely talented, dedicated, genius-level professionals devoting their lives to publishing the books that need to be published and helping deserving authors get their just rewards. It is made up of a GAZILLION people of all stripes and colors, many of them talented, many of them dedicated, a few of them even genius-level, but not one of them guaranteed to make anything happen with all the other gazillion of them involved. Not one. I’m telling you: not one.
It’s all hype, folks. They’re not even the ones producing it. It’s hype that writing a whole book will result in a great query letter. It’s hype that a great query letter will result in a great agent. It’s hype that a great agent will result in a great publishing deal. And it’s hype that a published book will result in a career as an author.
Where does all the hype come from?
Unfortunately. . .us.
Look around, people.
But you know what was worth all this? (Aside from the end of morning sickness). The evening after I gave my new agent my partial to read, she called me at about six-thirty p.m. and said to me, “I never call anyone after six. Ever. But I had to call you. I love this. I love your book.” And while I was standing there reeling—thinking of everything you practice saying for just this moment when a literary agent calls you up and says just exactly that—she started quoting me to myself.
She did. She read my own words out loud to me over the phone.
So I can die happy. I didn’t sell that novel. I didn’t even get the publisher’s editor who screwed us over so badly to say, “Woops, I’m sorry.” I certainly didn’t get my one published book published properly, without too many obvious typos (for heaven’s sake) or with some teeny, tiny modicum of marketing by—I don’t know—maybe the publisher’s marketing department.
But a literary agent called me up and quoted me to myself.
And that’s got to be good enough.
