Author: ireneg

What happens when an author has to choose between two equal offers and can’t decide?

Usually there is a call or Zoom between her and her two suitors, but one time something else happened.

One publisher offered to fly her to New York, put her up in a hotel, and fly her back the next day. While she was in town, we were invited to the publisher’s office for afternoon tea. The editor was there. So were the editorial director and someone from sales.

You can believe what a difference that made. She was charmed by the attention and ended up going with them.

But when the other publisher found out about it–I don’t know who told them, but it’s a very small business–they were livid. The editor called me and remarked in biting tones that I had been “busy”. Yes, that was true. I had indeed been busy. They thought that as long as the author was going to be in town, it was only fair that she see them as well.

I did not agree. They weren’t the ones who flew her in and they came up with no strategy–not even money–to change her mind.

I’m not sure what the moral is here, but it does conform to one of THE GODFATHER’s business rules: Always use a personal touch.

Louisa May Alcott, the beloved author of the great classic, LITTLE WOMEN, was born on November 29.

So was I.

She was the second of four sisters.

I am the third of four sisters.

Every girl who reads LITTLE WOMEN identifies with Jo, its heroine. I am no exception. And I am not alone. Many notable women, including Hillary Clinton, Nora and Delia Ephron, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Cheever, and rocker Patti Smith, have cited Jo as their favorite literary character.

What is it about Jo that is so endlessly appealing? Her appeal has crossed centuries, and is available in just about every language. Why does every girl around the world want to be Jo?

She is certainly not perfect. She has many flaws. But she’s real. Her flaws are part of who she is, and they make her all the more real.

She is smart, determined, she has a great sense of humor, and a very strong sense of family. But I think what resonates most about her is her great need for independence. Many girls want to find a loving husband and start a family. Jo isn’t against those things, but they are not her top priority. She does eventually marry and has two boys, but that’s not what she’s really about. She is a writer and she wants to sell her stories and make money for her family more than she wants anything else.

Let’s take a look at the real Alcotts. LITTLE WOMEN glosses over their poverty, which was truly miserable.  Louisa abhorred the poverty in which she was forced to live, mostly because her father, the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, thought he was too noble to work. She was angry all her life and resolved to do something about it.

She did. She wrote unfailingly, insistently, until someone paid attention. At first she wrote the potboilers that were popular in her day, but when she started to write LITTLE WOMEN, something happened. She forgot all about the niceties for girls that she was expected to include, and instead wrote from her heart. She wrote about her family, wisely leaving her father out of the picture. She said if she had included him, he would have taken over the book, just as he took over everything in life. She didn’t want him interfering, so she sent him off to war in her most famous novel and kept him out of the way.

This is a 19th century woman with only a talent and a desire to sell. As an agent, I have to love her attitude. It was elbows out, don’t get in my way, I’m going to do this whether you like it or not. Think of the obstacles she must have faced. But she didn’t think about the obstacles. She kept her eyes on the prize. She became the top selling author of her day, eclipsing even Mark Twain. Not too shabby.

When you sell a book to a publisher, they give you an advance against future royalties. Where does that money come from?

A publisher has a long history and a long list of titles that continue to sell many years after they were originally published. So when you get a huge advance from Random House, where do you think they get that money? They get it from Louis L’Amour and authors from the past. L’Amour was such a huge moneymaker for them that one of their conferences rooms is named for him.

That is the magic of the backlist. While L’Amour may no longer top bestseller lists, he has been a steady presence for a long, long time and he continues to sell.

If I were an author and I had a choice between a flash in the pan bestseller or a solid backlist title, I would go for the solid backlist title. It means you continue to get income for years, and that income adds up. If you wrote a classic, it may even support you for the rest of your life.

Okay, most book don’t fall into that category, but instead of focusing only on current trends, try to think ahead. What might resonate 10 or 20 or 50 years from now? Think about the recent 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live. Sabrina Carpenter was on. She remarked that SNL began before she was born, and before her parents were born. And yet they all can still enjoy Steve Martin’s King Tut, Belushi’s samurai, and Dan Ackroyd’s Jimmy Carter. Those are a part of their backlist.

Most books are on the shelves for a few months, and then they are gone. Unless they continue to sell. Before GPS, one title that always made the lists was the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Maybe not glamorous, but steady.

Slow and steady wins the race. Sure, you’d prefer to have both–the major bestseller that lasts for decades. Who wouldn’t? But just think about the other side of it. The book that refuses to leave is a hidden gem.

Here’s a story about releasing money that was owed to the author.

An author called me to ask why her royalties were so low. She had been told by her editor that her sales were very good, but the royalties she received did not reflect that. This was a book that had been sold before she came to me, so I knew nothing about it.

But I did know that publishers deliberately withhold a certain percentage against future returns. That means booksellers can return what doesn’t sell. They order the number they want, and if the copies don’t all sell, they can send them back. The number they ship is based on the orders–not on what actually sells. They don’t know exactly how a book will sell until it’s out there.

I called the editor and she referred me a guy in Operations. That’s where they decide what to print and how much to withhold. I spoke to a very nice guy and told him the problem. He looked up the title. And lo and behold, he agreed that too much had been withheld, and he agreed to release $11,000. The author received a check, all because of one phone call.

Most people accept royalties as they are, but royalties are in fact a form of fiction. That’s because the math will usually add up, but you never know exactly how much is being withheld. Unless you ask. It’s generally around 20%, but as my example shows, not always.

 

Sometimes a publisher will announce, following a normal period of negotiation, that this is their final offer.

As Huck Finn would have said, that ain’t no matter.

It’s not over til it’s over. Nothing is really final until an offer is accepted or the deal falls through. If it does fall through, I’ve seen it come back to life later on.

It can’t be final until both sides agree it’s final.

The most important sentence in a book is the first sentence. If you don’t like the first sentence, you may not read any further. You could argue that this would be lazy and short-sighted and you might be right, but that is not what you’re going for when you want to sell a book.

Let’s take a look at some of my favorite first sentences:

Guido Maffeo was castrated when he was six years old and sent to study with the finest singing masters in Naples.

–Anne Rice, CRY TO HEAVEN

Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.

–Sena Jeter Naslund, AHAB’S WIFE

We have been lost to each other for so long.

–Anita Diamant, THE RED TENT

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.

This first sentence follows a warning to the reader:

NOTICE

PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted;

persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons

attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

–Mark Twain, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

J.D. Salinger, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

 

Read these over and think about why they work. Do you want to keep reading? That’s the main question. What are some of your favorite examples? Why did they speak to you so compellingly? What made you want to read on?

Let’s talk about THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, a book that most people have read. I never heard of anyone who didn’t like it. It is considered a great work of American literature.

But will its place continue to hold up? After all, all of its characters are white, there is homophobia, and it shows a teenager drinking. Terrible, huh?

That is the problem with too much wokeness. If you are going to cancel THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, you might as well cancel all the great works of American literature. HUCKLEBERRY FINN has already been criticized for showing an enslaved man and the south’s general attitude toward slavery. Never mind that Huck, the hero, stands up to it and says “I’ll go to hell” rather than turn Jim in.

Yes, CATCHER has elements of which we don’t approve today. But it wasn’t written today. It was written more than 75 years ago, when such attitudes were very accepted. Drinking was cool, homophobia was common, and just about every novel or TV show or movie featured only white people. We can look back at that as a time of ignorance or oppression or very limited exposure. But for God’s sake, do not throw this book out the window. It is a masterpiece.

Every person lives in a time that will fade and go away. And after a while, no one will remember having lived in it. Today, we cannot ever really know what it was like to live in the U.S. (either north or south) during the Civil War, but it scarred the souls of everyone who experienced it. That’s for them to remember, but they are gone now. Some people still can remember what things were like during the time of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. Maybe it gives them better insight to the novel, but nothing can detract from its ultimate message. It is the quintessential novel about adolescence. It is about the cost of growing up and the cost of refusing to grow up. That is universal, and despite the references or images that are now considered distasteful, it will always ring true.

If I were an author looking for an agent, here is what I would do.

I would not just send a query and hope for the best. Agents are overwhelmed with queries and they don’t always get read. This is what I would do instead.

The best way is through a referral. That means you have to know someone who is represented by a good agent. Join a good writers group that includes published authors and get to know the other members. Shmooze around. Talk to people. Go to a writers conference. Get a sense of who you might want. Do this with good faith and an open spirit. You want to genuinely get to know people and form bonds. Don’t just do this to pick someone’s brain. You are looking to join a community, not to use people. Successful authors are often open to helping new writers. Make friends wisely. Don’t push it, but keep up the contacts.

The next step is the hardest. You have to be ready and you have to be good. No one wants to recommend shoddy work to their agent. They will have an idea of what their agent represents, and of course you can check out the websites of just about every agent and get a sense of who they are, what they do, and how they operate. There are plenty of good agencies, but you only need one. Before you approach anyone, you have to be positive that what you have to offer is the right stuff. No matter how much you love it, get other opinions from people who would know. That means any publishing professional, your published author friends, or freelance editors. It does not mean your mother, your spouse, your best friend, or your dog. They are not objective and they don’t know anything about the business.

Finally, I would take the big step and ask someone if they would be willing to refer me to their agent. Do this only after you are very sure you have accomplished all of the above. You may get a hedgy answer for various reasons. Or you may get an enthusiastic yes. There is only one way to find out. Ask politely, don’t push, and be ready to keep trying.

Best of luck with this process. I have taken on more new clients through referrals than through any other method. So I can assure you that this does work. Learn how to network, be brutally honest with yourself, and keep your eyes on the goal.

 

 

There are different kinds of agents. You want the one who is the right one for you, which may be different from what your writer friend wants, or what your spouse thinks you should have.

Agents break down into distinct groups:

The big agencies. These agencies are famous and they can do a perfectly good job. But their book divisions are usually not their strongest money-makers. They make a lot more money from movies and TV, not to mention actors. Their book agents are good, and they have access to serious connections. But when you go with an agency that makes a living from books only, it’s more focused and immediate.

The newbies. A young, new agent is going to be excited, eager, and passionate. They are thrilled every time they sell a book, and they are very dedicated. What they lack in experience they make up for in enthusiasm. Will they make mistakes? Sure. But they probably won’t be awful mistakes, and mistakes can often be fixed. If you are a young, eager author, consider going with a young, eager agent. You two will speak the same language and you will grow up in the business together.

Ten Years In. After ten years, an agent really starts to come into her or his own. They  become known, trusted, and respected.  By now they are starting to land books on bestseller lists. They are still fairly young, which makes them both current and with some experience under their belts. They are still hungry and will fight hard.

Seasoned and experienced. This is the middle ground, but it can be the most powerful. These agents are still passionate, but they have the experience and seasoning  to add to the mix. They are in their element and they are on top of their game.

Old Timers. They have the kind of experience that can’t be bought. They may no longer care about the latest, hot new trend, but they can negotiate up a storm and they have all kinds of secrets up their sleeves.

 

All of these are good choices. The most important ingredient is mutual respect and a good rapport. You want an agent who is passionate about your work, not someone who sees a good thing and is just trying to cash in. When it’s a good match, there is a kind of click. That click will last for a long time if you respect it and lean into it.

Humility is a virtue. You can be demanding, assertive, insistent, and even call rank, and still have humility.

Arrogance is not a virtue and it is not desirable in any way. I have seen authors who are arrogant. They are also insecure and needy, and their fears present themselves as arrogance.

A humble author doesn’t need to be arrogant, because that author is confident and secure. I can spot the arrogant ones a mile away. They assume they are the smartest person in the room, they are condescending, and they have a subtle way of putting everyone down. No one likes them, and they don’t care. They just want to be a big shot.

There is a reason why Paul Newman, a once famous movie star, drove a Volkswagon. He liked Volkswagons. He didn’t need a big fancy car, a big fancy desk, or a big fancy anything. He had nothing to prove. That is because he knew who he was and where he stood. Yes, he was insanely famous, and he enjoyed his success and knew how to spend his money. But he was never arrogant.

There used to be a very successful author who would approach crowded elevators and expect people to move aside for her. She actually once said, “Move aside, ladies. With rank comes privilege.” Yuck. That is not the same as knowing your worth. You can insist on a first class plane ticket because you have earned it and you deserve it. And probably need it. You can point this out calmly and without hubris.

It’s hard to be confident and secure as a writer. It’s an isolating profession and it can be lonely. It would be easy to pump up an alter ego that is not a true reflection of you who you really are. Easy, but dumb. Then it will be phony and it takes a lot of energy to keep that up. Spend that energy on your work and on your real friends. You know who they are.