In Answer To Your Questions--a post by Jenny

I recently received an email from Chris Branam, a graduate student at Antioch University Midwest.   As part of his course work for their creative writing program, he is required to interview a literary agent and he sent me the following questions:


1.       When did you realize you wanted to become a literary agent?
2.       How was the process of becoming a literary agent?
3.       Where should someone wanting to become an agent begin?
4.       Is New York an essential pilgrimage for anyone wanting to become an agent/writer?
5.       There are clearly trends in the publishing world that spread like wildfire (vampires, YA dystopian novels, etc.) Are there many agents still willing to look at authors who are not genre based and work in literary fiction/non-fiction?
6.       Is it prudent to get some work out there in literary magazines or otherwise before looking for an agent?
7.       Has the publishing world changed since you began your career and in what way?
8.       Is it advisable for an author to keep a blog?
9.       What makes you choose one writer over another?
10.   Is there any further advice for new authors that comes to mind?

I asked Chris if I could answer his questions on my blog, since it struck me that this might be good information to share with aspiring agents and writers alike and he graciously agreed.   

Here are the answers to Chris's questions.

1.  When I was a kid, my mom got me this great book called something like, "careers for people who love to read."   I have no idea if it's still available but it pretty much changed my whole life because it was then that I realized I wanted to be in publishing.  Then, in college, I took a terrific class called "Magazine Editing and Publishing" and Joyce Johnson, author of IN THE NIGHT CAFE, came and spoke to us.  I'll never forget it because she told us, in so many words, "When you're an editor, you can't buy what you want to because you have to answer to a bunch of different people in house who will tell you what you can and can't do.  Be an agent--you have a lot more freedom."   And so that pretty much decided it for me.  I knew I was pretty independent and entrepreneurial and that I'd probably be a lot happier if I could make my own decisions about what books I wanted to work with.

2. It was hard, really hard!  I started out as an assistant to an agent.  I sort of had it in my head that I would be an assistant for a while and then one day I would magically get a promotion and someone would say, "congratulations, you're an agent!" and I would start selling books right away and be paid a salary for it.   But it really didn't work that way--my boss, understandably, wanted an assistant, not a junior agent.  So after a few years I left that job and went to work for an agency that paid me on commission alone.   I had a mortgage and no salary, so I had to really hustle to make a living--looking back, I think it was a great way to start, because if I didn't sell books I would have been in a lot of trouble.   I also thought it was going to be really easy to sell books and it turned out it was hard.   I had  to create a name and a reputation and I had to get a sense of what editors were looking for--and I also had to build a client list from scratch.

3. I think with an internship or at a publishing course or really both.   And then start as an assistant either for a publisher or for an agent.  I always wished that I had some experience at a publishing house so I had more first-hand knowledge of how the acquisitions process went.   I did work at a book store for a while though, and that has been invaluable experience just in terms of understanding how people make decisions about what books to buy.

4.  Not necessarily.   Kristin Nelson, for one, has been a very successful agent without ever living in NYC.

5.  A great many agents focus still on literary fiction.   Look at people like Eric Simonoff, Bill Clegg, Marly Rusoff, Leigh Feldman, and Zoe Pagnamenta, just to name a few, who are very successfully focusing on selling literary works.

6. There are a lot of ways to attract the attention of an agent these days.  You can publish in literary magazines, you can create a successful blog or vlog, you can build a twitter or Facebook audience, you can self-publish successfully, or you can just be a great writer with a great concept.   I tend to advise people to focus on what they do best--if you are a good short story writer, for instance, focus on magazines.   If you are good at social media, focus on that.

7. I blogged on this recently and so I'll be lazy and just link to it here.

8. Well, see my answer to 6. above.  I think if you are good at it and you enjoy it and you know how to drive traffic to it, yes, you should blog.   Otherwise, not.   If you don't like it, you probably won't be consistent, which is important when you're blogging, and if you don't know how to drive traffic to it, it's not going to do much in terms of building your audience.

9. Quality of writing, quality of ideas, in a nutshell.   There are other factors but those are the biggest.

10. Tenacity is more important than anything else.  It even trumps talent, I would say.   Believe in yourself and never give up, no matter what.  

Thanks very much to Chris Branam for contacting me with such good questions and for letting me share them with you.   Chris can be found blogging here if you'd like to reach him.

Have a great weekend everybody!

Jenny

Beginnings, Endings, and the stuff in between--a post from Jenny on editing your ms

Lately I've been reading some really otherwise great manuscripts that seem to share the same three problems.  Since I'm seeing these missteps so much, I'm figuring that maybe I should write about them in the hopes that my advice will apply to the books of some of the readers of this blog as well.  The good news is that these problems are all very fixable--so read on and see if you think your book might be suffering from these same three writerly mistakes.

1. You don't need the first 50 pages.   Let me clarify.  You needed to *write* the first 50 pages.   You needed them to understand your characters better by giving them a back story.   But now that the book is done, your characters are alive and interesting and informed by the knowledge that these pages gave you.   So while you needed to write these pages, the reader doesn't need to read them.   Trust your characters to reveal themselves in the rest of the book and cut out the back story that is now slowing your book down.  

2. Your characters need to *feel* more.   I think "show don't tell" has been drummed into our heads so long and so often that we forget that we do need to let the reader into our characters' heads.   While we don't want you to do a big info dump of character development and we do want your characters to reveal themselves through action, you still also need to tell us sometimes what they are thinking and feeling along with that.  Let's call your main character Bob.  If you put Bob in a crazy situation, remember to tell us what his reaction is to that situation--or poor Bob will feel flat and lifeless to the reader.

3.  Your ending is rushed.  Readers love a satisfying ending.   Think of all the times you raced through a book only to feel let down by the ending.  Try to go in the opposite direction with your book.   I find a lot of writers want to have ambiguity or loose ends in an ending and I think that often that's the wrong impulse.   The beauty of a book, as opposed to life, is that we can have an ending that ties things up, or at least ties a lot of things up.   An ending should also provide a thorough, complex explanation of any motivations or happenings that seemed mysterious throughout the book.   I'm noticing that many of the endings I am reading in unpubbed manuscripts these days would be improved by adding at least an entire chapter of material.  

Do you feel your manuscript might share some of these issues?  Let me know in the comments.   And happy revising!

Jenny