There’s a classic story and I think a whole ballet -- “Spartacus”-- about
slaves rebelling. You suffer under someone else’s oppressive rules for a long
time and one day, like Spartacus, you think, “Dpz SaFGv WYbje” --
“the hell with this” -- and you do it
your way. It’s the most liberating feeling, figuratively and literally, there
is.
You may know about my novel. I’ve written about it in a post or two
and there’s a whole sub-page about it on the home page, and if that hasn’t
brought it to your attention I’m not sure what more to do here. But I’ve
figured out what to do with literary agents.
It’s galling, when you’ve written something and you’re trying to get
it published, to have to approach someone on your knees. That’s the way the
agent game is played, however, and how you’re expected to play it. That’s the
way I’ve been doing it.
You look up a likely prospect -- an agent who specializes in your type
of writing, your “genre.” They all list the types of material they want and
don’t want to see. They also tell you exactly how they do and don’t want it
submitted, and that if you send something you’d better not expect to hear
anything back from them any time soon. “Responds in four weeks.” “Responds in six weeks.” Never responds at
all. But you send your work anyway.
As I said, that’s the way I’ve
been doing it. Because novel-writing is an aberration rather than my career,
I’ve been pretty lax about it. Send it out and wait. Maybe get a rejection,
maybe get nothing. Send it out again.
Well, no more. This time I picked 20 fiction agents off a list,
starting with the “A”s and pitched them all at the same time. If I’d stopped to
think how easy it is now I’d have done it long ago. No more typing a letter,
addressing an envelope, the stamp, adding the time-honored SASE, the package mailed to arrive three or four days later.
Today’s listings give the agents’ email addresses; you type “Query” in
the subject line, and that’s all the writing you have to do. You paste your
pitch in, hit “Send,” and go on to the next one. And like it or not, they’ve got it in their inboxes
right now.
What’s more important about my new approach, however, is the pitch
itself. For starters, I ignore their precise formulations of what they want you
to send and the format they expect to see it in. I just pitch. But I don’t try
to tell them how great the book is; in fact I don’t even mention the novel
until the end of the pitch. I tell them they can make money off of it.
It’s not hype, either. I honestly believe there’s a big market, and I give them examples where the same subject matter has generated publicity and
book sales -- the mother’s milk of
agenting. And you know what? It’s
working. I’ve had two rejections in two
days. Laugh if you like, but that prompt a response is unheard of in this game.
The last rejection I got took six months. Six
months! What would you prefer: hang
by your thumbs for six months, or get the word immediately? And there’s still
90 percent of the list that hasn’t rejected
it. So I’m revolting.
