I intended to post this yesterday as a follow-up to my morning post, but the day got away from me. I’m sure you have had similar days.
The last
writer’s conference I attended made agents available for advance reader
submissions. For forty dollars you could submit the first five pages of your
novel to an agent for their input. For a lot of folks, myself included, this
was a big deal. Until then the nearest contact I had with an agent was a
rejection letter (lots of them), either via US Mail or email (actually, I did
make it to second base with one editor, only to get shot down in flames).
So agent day came. Lots of anticipation. There were some success stories. I didn’t hear of any outright offers of representations, but a lot of agents handed over business cards and said, “Call me.”
There was also a lot of grumbling from writers. The ones I saw fell into two categories:
“The agent didn’t get me.” One fellow came back from his agent interview mad and upset. “Who is this person to judge?” he asked. “They didn’t take the time to understand my work.” If I’d been the confrontational type I would have said any one of several things: 1) Yeah, well I was in several critique groups with you and I didn’t get your work, either. 2) I heard you already grumbling before your agent meeting. Did you research writers of your genre? Did you read their online blogs and interviews? It didn’t sound as if you had done either. 3) Maybe your writing is not good enough. Practice the craft some more. 4) Did you wear your big boy pants? You’re a writer, and if you want to get published, that means you take the criticism.
Some of these are baby agents. An agent young enough to be my granddaughter is not going to work. As I get older I have come to realize that the cops are getting younger, along with doctors and just about everyone else around me. Last year I took the twelve-year-old in my house to the dentist and I’m not even sure this guy could buy liquor. Again, did you research the agent? I seem to recall that they had pictures and things like that. You could see these things coming. There are a whole bunch of baby boomers who have retired from other professions and are turning their efforts to writing. As a baby boomer, though, you have to pick and choose agents who are going to understand stories of mid-life crisis, adult children, and why the fact that you didn’t go to Woodstock really pisses you off.
There are other types when it comes to advance submissions to agents. These were the two I saw. How did it turn out for me? Not bad. I received some encouraging words, and the realization that I have some work ahead of me.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Comments