pwned!!!11!1!!
Busy body that I am, here’s Uncle Jim’s Line-By-Line(tm) from later in above-mentioned thread (edited to remove blank lines, anal-retentive that I am).
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Originally Posted by Georgina Orr
In my role as the VP of Corporate Affairs for the Literary Agency Group I am keen to respond to the postings on this message board.
Excellent!
Isn't it true that Children's Literary Agency was created solely to take some heat off Stylus (ST) Literary Agency? Is it true that you haven't sold any books, ever, to anyone?
Some of you may know me in my other role, as the Senior Agent for our children's division (The Children's Literary Agency).
Great! What books have you sold? Which editors do you know best?
Isn't it a fact that no one knows you in any role? You're a stealth agent -- and that's impossible. An agent's job is to be visible.
Again, in our determination to minimize administration costs, one or two of the personnel within our organization are asked to wear more than one hat.
Are any of those "hats" selling books to publishers?
With that introduction, I apologize in advance for the length of this posting.
No, please, go on. Just remember that anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.
The Literary Agency Group is keenly aware of the negative messages on these boards and frankly we are concerned by them as well.
As well you should be. Anyone searching for your web page runs into link after link of accurate information long before they find your false and misleading site.
Please allow me to give you our analysis of the situation and a suggestion about how to proceed.
Yes, please do. Here's my suggestion for how to proceed: Go out of business. Find an honest job. Pay restitution.
There appear to be three categories of people on these boards.
People who warn writers against scams, writers, and scammers.
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1) The first category are the 'industry watchdogs'. These are people that derive some level of psychological benefits from 'exposing' fraud, scams, etc.
Yes, I admit it. Saving a new writer from making a costly mistake does feel good.
WE HAVE CONTACTED THESE PEOPLE NUMEROUS TIMES AND OFFERED TO ANSWER THEIR QUESTIONS ON A PUBLIC FORUM FOR THE BEST INTEREST OF THE INDUSTRY AND THE WRITERS.
YOU'RE LYING.
Names, dates, places? Oh, you mean you never did contact anyone. But since you're willing to answer questions in a public forum, here we go:
What have you sold? Titles, authors, publishers, dates.
They have refused or ignored our requests.
Another lie.
That you're a liar.
It tells me that they aren't interested in the truth,
There's someone here who isn't interested in the truth, but that person isn't me.
it tells me that they are interested in more visitors to their website.
You're aware that Writer Beware and Preditors & Editors don't sell ads?
Also, they have blocked our rebuttal posts and deleted our prior posts.
Neither Preditors & Editors nor Writer Beware even have messageboards for you to post on. Your posts, and Robert Fletcher's posts, and posts from Paul Anderson and Peter Parente are still here for anyone to read. You're posting right now.
In short, a very one-sided message board!
In short, a crude lie that anyone can see for themselves is a lie.
2) The second category are people that have worked with us, for whom we haven't been successful,
That's "nearly everyone," isn't it? You're talking about the people who paid their money and got nothing but a run-around in return.
and they are blameful, pointing fingers, etc. Basically just jumping on the bandwagon because they would rather feel 'took' than acknowledge that their work wasn't good enough to sell.
The old "Blame the Victim" trick. If their work wasn't good enough to sell why in the world would you have represented it?
If you did represent works that weren't "good enough," actually submitted it to publishers, the publishers would soon learn that you submit trash, and would treat your submissions like any other piece of unsolicited slush. So which is it, Georgina? You're lousy agents or you're scam agents?
We call this the sour grapes crowd.
I call it the "eyes opened too late" crowd.
3) The third category, whom we feel the most sorry for, are authors who stumble into this mess.
Have their eyes opened, and escape in the nick of time.
Many of these authors just decide not to continue,
And save themselves time, money, and heartache.
and may lose the one real chance that they ever had to secure representation.
A bad agent is worse than no agent at all. The ones who avoid your traps, who have commercial works, will find real agents who can genuinely represent them. That isn't any sort of tragedy.
Go out of business. Find an honest job. Maybe if you make a full confession to your local district attorney, turn state's evidence, you won't go to the hardbar hotel with Robert Fletcher.
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First, go through the message board and try to find anything of substance.
There's gobs of it.
What we see is repeat, repeat, and each time something is repeated, it gets more and more outlandish. Our favorite was that "we steal work and sell it to China". ugh.
That claim was made by one individual -- probably based on Robert Fletcher's own claim that he was working some kind of deals in China. It was debunked right here by one of the AW regulars, well over a year ago.
The fact is that ST Literary and its little collection of daughter agencies can't sell works in China. Or anywhere else.
Go through the boards and send me SPECIFIC questions.
What have you sold? Title, author, publisher?
Which editors do you work with most often? Which do you know best?
What's the actual physical location of your office?
What are the names of your agents? What is their prior experience in publishing?
Actually, I'll save some time here, and answer them now because we've heard them all before...
Those are questions you've heard many times, but have never answered.
Q) You charge fees.. that sucks.. no one should charge a writer anything... you should get paid only if you sell something... and various flavors of this misconception.
No misconception. Literary agencies -- real ones -- make their money by selling books to publishers. Not by charging fees. Not by having their authors pay fees to "sister companies" that you also happen to own.
A) We do not charge fees.
No, you send authors to other people (who just happen to be you) to pay their fees.
We ask writers to improve their work and a critique and editing (sometimes) is part of that process.
For a fee. While I can't prove that you ask your writers to pay that fee every time, it's certainly most times, isn't it?
And, we ask for mailing expenses if it happens.
Real agencies get reimbursed for legitimate expenses out of the advance after the book sells. If the book doesn't sell, they eat the loss.
The odds are so against new writers that we've learned that we can only invest our time with writers that are willing to pull their own weight.
That is, pay a fee.
Writers that aren't willing to pull their weight,
That is, pay a fee...
we call the "something for nothing" writer,
A better term would be "professional" writer or "savvy" writer, or "reasonable" writer.
who is regurgitating old mantras about how if an agent charges anything, they are bad.
Which happens to be pretty close to the truth.
Guess what, if your name was President Clinton, we'd waive our fees too.
Waive your fee? I thought you just said that you didn't have a fee. Were you lying before, or are you lying right now?
You know something? My name isn't President Clinton either, but I don't pay fees. Neither do other writers who know what's what.
Q) You've never sold anything... the author sold it.. blah, blah
Very true.
Name them. Title, author, publisher, date.
But tell me -- you've been in business (according to your man Robert West) for "7+ years." Is four deals in seven years what you're boasting of? That's pretty pathetic.
The most recent is with an UK publisher.
Name them.
(Note: because of the vitriolic people on these boards we don't post our deals because the instant we post a name, the really creepy and scary people that hate us start sending this crap to the posted name. We've got the documents and if ever needed our lawyers can pull them out.)
Yeah, I just bet. Those "creepy and scary" people don't seem to trouble real agents. You know, the ones who post deals all over the place, all the time.
Wouldn't the best way to take the wind out of the sails of the "creepy and scary" people be to prove that you've sold a book somewhere, to someone?
We assisted every author with the contract on those 4 deals.
I just bet you did. I'd love to see those contracts to see what you missed.
We actually have emails from the publisher complimenting us on the fair job we did for our author.
Really? Who?
Yes, in two of the deals the author found the relationship, and in two of them, we found the relationship.
So, fifty percent of that pitiful four deals were made by the authors themselves? What did they need you for? By your own admission you've only been able to sell two books, ever?
What were those two books?
In all 4 deals we provided SIGNIFICANT value to the contract negotiation and the post-publishing support.
Oh, yeah, right. You allowed poor Dario to sign a contract for royalties based on net. That's sure some significant value, you betcha.
The thing that is lost in all this is that very, very few literary agents have even one deal under their belt.
Then they aren't really literary agents either. Maybe they're for-a-fee scammers, maybe they're people who woke up one morning and decided to be literary agents without having a single clue what it entailed. All of the real literary agents have sold multiple books, recently.
Also, we did a measurement in April and we had 68 open and active discussions with buyers about our authors' work.
Which means precisely nothing.
We expect a few more deals by the end of the year.
Sure, deals that you'll refuse to name.
Real agents announce their deals. You don't announce your deals (assuming they even exist). Therefore, you aren't real agents.
You might also be interested to note that we also find really bad contracts for our authors and we recommend that they don't accept them.
Operating at the level you do, I bet you do see really bad contracts. When I recall that some of the authors you've boasted about have "sold" their books to pay-to-play POD vanity houses or e-book publishers, well, yes. You've very likely seen some lousy contracts.
We've seen more contracts than anyone you know and we bring that expertise to our clients.
Are you entirely sure? I know quite a few people, and some of them have seen an awful lot of contracts. I wonder if maybe I personally haven't signed more contracts than you've ever seen.
Q) You use Form Letters and you are impersonal...
It's easy to set up an autoresponder.
A) True or false, we have answered every email that that our authors send us? I know the answer is true.
True or false, you've offered a contract to every one of them. Email is easily automated. Merely responding isn't a very high bar.
To me, that's personal service.
To me, that's BS.
Yes, we use form letters for billing, acquisitions, status reports, etc.
And, remarkably, for the rejections that you pretend to get from publishers that you supposedly sent the works to. Isn't it amazing that so many publishers respond to all your submissions with exactly the same words?
Our lawyers like us to say it the same way, every time. Should that really be held against us?
Yes.
By using every method possible to keep our admin costs down, we can spend our money selling for our authors, it's that simple.
And you've sold how many authors that way? By your own admisison, two. Which you refuse to name.
Q) The people who work at your company are scam artists, thieves, and have records... etc.
True.
A) This is the grapevine at it's worst. We aren't, we aren't and we don't. You ever heard of miss-identity and identity theft.
So you're trying to say that the Robert M. Fletcher of 699 SW 8th Terrace, Boca Raton, Florida, who was convicted of securities fraud in the state of Washington is someone other than the Robert M. Fletcher of 699 SW 8th Terrace, Boca Raton, Florida, who ran ST Literary Agency? And it never occurred to him to say, "Hey, wait a minute, that's some other guy"?
We have learned that it's impossible to curb this situation.
Weirdly, other agents don't seem to have this problem.
Also, did you ever ask why writers have used pen names since time began, and why agents are so hard to get to?
Writers use pen names for a wide variety of reasons, which you wouldn't know about or be interested in. Agents are hard to get because it's hard to write commercial-grade books.
One reason is because some crazy writer has stalked every agent that we know at some time.
You don't know a lot of agents, do you?
Why is it that real agents make it so easy to find them? Why do they announce their deals? Why do they post their addresses and phone numbers? Why don't you?
Q) Your office in New York, isn't listed on the sign.
More than that, it isn't in the building.
A) Oh, this is a good one.
It is. It's a killer. I was the person who checked. Not only aren't you on the sign, the security guard didn't have you, in any of your incarnations, listed on his master list of tenants.
But since we're on the subject, could you please describe the sign in the lobby of your building? What material is it made of? Where's it located?
Where is the security guard's station?
Have you ever rented office space in New York? You don't get signs unless you take a floor.
This is purest BS. Tenants who rent considerably less than an entire floor are on signs all over Manhattan. It's the only way multiple-tenant office building can work.
We have phones, desks, and a shared conference room,
Really? What's your phone number? Who are the tenants who rent space to your right and left? What do you see directly across the street when you walk out of the building's lobby?
and if you want a big office to come feel comfortable in, go to an Agency that spills money like water.
I'm not particularly interested in a big office. But an office would be nice. What's your physical address?
We'd prefer to save our money for marketing our writers.
Name one.
Q) They say you take anyone... how can that be?
By using an auto-responder to offer a contract to anyone who writes.
A) We take anyone that is willing to take the steps necessary to improve their work.
That is, pay a fee.
That's why we use the critique
Paid for by the author to some company that happens to be owned by the same people as own Children's Literary Agency/The Literary Agency Group.
to WEED OUT those authors that want something for nothing.
That is, the authors who wisely refuse to pay a fee.
If an author is willing to grow and improve,
And pay a fee....
then we feel that they deserve a shot at success.
Which they'd get if they saved the fee money, worked on their art, and submitted their work to legitimate agents.
We are one of the few agencies that will even talk to an unpublished author.
Another lie. Real agents take on unpublished authors all the time.
This is also inconsistent with one of your earlier lies: If most literary agencies (as you claim) don't have even one sale under their belts, then most literary agencies talk to no one other than unpublished authors.
The critique is an impartial, 3rd party analysis of the work.
How is it "3rd party" if it's performed by one of your "sister companies"? (And it's for a fee, isn't it?)
It shows us where the author is, and it also protects us from an overzealous agent.
Do you have a lot of overzealous agents on staff? What does an overzealous agent do -- try to sell your clients' work to publishers?
Q) If all this is so untrue, why haven't you done anything about it?
Because Robert Fletcher would do anything to avoid entering a courtroom again.
A) We've tried. We're filing lawsuits against Victoria Strauss
Have you actually filed a lawsuit? Or did you limit yourself to sending empty threats via your lawyer-in-a-box who charges you $17 a month for "legal insurance"?
and a few other message board owners,
Who have uniformly ignored you.
but for the most part, anyone can say anything, so we have just learned to live with it,
Since you know you don't have a leg to stand on.
and to hope that the real authors, the ones we want as clients, can see it for what it is.
Real authors can definitely see you for what you are.
So, in conclusion, spend time looking for any real and substantive items on the boards,
What have you sold?
and let us try to answer the question as best we can.
How much does your typical client wind up spending?
But first, please let me repeat our business model.
Charging fees to authors for worthless services.
We want writers who are willing to help themselves,
By paying a fee....
we ask for defraying administrative expenses,
Through fees....
That you're unwilling or unable to name....
Who have the truth and the evidence on their side.
However, in the end, you the writer must be the one that decides what to do.
Work on your art, and submit your work to legitimate agents. A useful agent has sold works that you've heard of.
If you are unwilling to spend any money to improve your writing,
Which happens to be the wise course....
And count yourself lucky.
If you are willing to take a small chance with us,
That is to say, pay a fee...
And kiss your money goodbye.
Either way, we wish everyone the best in their writing careers.
And I wish you the best in your next career.
Sincerely yours,
Georgina Orr, VP Corporate Affairs
Literary Agency Group
Say I wanted to buy the movie rights for one of your clients' works. How would I get in touch with you? What's your phone number? Your street address? How would I even know you represent him? You keep your client list a secret.
Real agents don't work that way, Georgina. The sooner you realize that, the better for everyone.
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All hail, Uncle Jim!