Stone Bench Associates

Autarchia said:

First time writers need to understand that we are the lowest of the low. We are not likely to get the bigger name literary agencies to look at our manuscripts, let alone represent us. Do you know that most agencies reject 99% of submitted material?

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I don't think it's as high as 99%--96% or 97% maybe.

Whatever the percentage, there's a good reason for that high rejection rate: most what's submitted doesn't even approach publishability. Aspiring writers often make the mistake of assuming that they're in competition with every other writer out there. They're not. If their work is marketable, they're only in competition with other marketable writers--who probably make up less than 10% of all submitters.

Another damaging belief common among aspiring writers is that good agencies aren't interested in new writers because they're a bigger risk, or something of the sort. But hand in hand with bigger risks goes the possibility of bigger returns. Every agent is looking for the next literary star or bestselling author, and they are well aware that these often come from the ranks of the previously unpublished. Also, agents' client lists aren't static: writers move on, or die, or stop writing. Agents have to be on the lookout for new clients, or they'll wind up going out of business.

Here are two ways you can tell that Stone Bench is legitimate:

1) No fees are charged. The agency gets a percentage of an author's royalties. In other words, they don't make money unless you do.

2) Most submissions to Stone Bench are rejected. This is not the behavior of a business out to scam writers out of money.

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Both are good practices. But without actual industry experience (lacking which, the agents won't be able to represent their clients effectively) and a track record of commercial book sales (hey, if you hire a real estate agent you want to know she's sold houses before--why wouldn't you look for the same level of professional accomplishment in a literary agent?) they aren't enough.

Remember that for every one writer you turn off to Stone Bench, there are five more willing to fill their place.

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I know. That's what keeps folks like me and Dave K and Uncle Jim so busy (and often makes us want to tear our hair out).

- Victoria

Crunchy Frog said:

Some people seem to decide certain agent is legit/trustworthy because they replied courteously/promptly/favorably/or whatnot.

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Yes! I run into this a lot, and it drives me nuts. Although I can understand it. I think that many writers are so bruised by rejections and form letters that their criteria get turned around, and a courteous response becomes more persuasive than professional competence.

- Victoria

thanks

Thank you James and Jenna, for your reponses.

And to any new writers out here, I'm a new writer myself. I started writing in 2002, and only in the past 8 months have had really made decent submissions or gotten major interest in my work.

I'll put it like this. When you tell people that you're a writer, there are plenty of hacks that cannot make sales that have nothing better to do than waste your time. These people aren't con artists, instead their are inept and/or delusional.

Though there are major differences between film and publishing, some similiarities exist. These days I only submit to producers and directors who have worked on projects similiar to my screenplays. I'm only interested in agents who have represented similiar projects.

And I get a much better calibur of response. I've known both novelists and writers who stayed with totally inept agents for years. One guy I met in Los Angeles stayed with an inept manager for 8 years, and never got a sale. But his manager was very friendly, and always went over his scripts and gave him advice. But that doesn't lead to a sale, does it?

I remember once when an inept manager I knew personally (I met him at a social event) talked me into sending him a script. I had figured what did it hurt. Well, that imbecile actually SUBMITTED my first draft. Which of course had structural errors. When I found out, I told the guy basically he is never to send out anything that I've written again. The fact that he couldn't catch the errors in my FIRST draft shows his complete incomptence. I had only sent him that script because I wanted his assetment on the overall concept and feedback.

So basically, an inept red may send out your work before it is ready to be sent out, and actually this person is doing you a lot of harm. I stopped this manager before my name could be made mud around town.

So basically, listen to James, Victoria, Jenna, Dave, etc!

JustinoXXV said:

So basically, an inept red may send out your work before it is ready to be sent out, and actually this person is doing you a lot of harm.

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Excuse me. I've only been making a living writing since 1969, so I may be too inexperienced or too old to understand this. Never once in 36 years have I sent a piece of writing to anyone that wasn't polished, finished and in every way presentable to anyone. It seems to me horribly unprofessional to go throwing your first drafts about.

It also seems to me, having read this thread, that a beginning writer is probably better off with a beginning agent. Their dreams coexist much more harmoniously.

Or perhaps old decadents like me should just butt out. I haven't read a book published after 1970 that I liked, or for that matter that I hadn't read before in it's original form.

"It also seems to me, having read this thread, that a beginning writer is probably better off with a beginning agent. Their dreams coexist much more harmoniously."

Never mind dreams - that's just inflicting twice the inexperience on your book.

Inexperience

If experience is responsible for what finds it's way into print today, inexperience is a blessing for readers at least.

bookman said:

. I haven't read a book published after 1970 that I liked, or for that matter that I hadn't read before in it's original form.

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Curious.... have you put out a book since then?

edited: Saw on the other thread that you do have books out. Well if you started in 1969 and you have more than one book out then you have books out after 1970. Did you not like them? For one to have such a distaste for the industry, it does seem to be your livelihood. Good thing you aren't a professional swimmer as you'd be peeing in the pool.

There are a couple of other flags on the Stone Bench site indicating that this is not really an appropriate agency for current consideration.

• No names. Anywhere. Even agencies that have trade names name who their agents, or at least their principals, are. For example—and I'm not recommending this agency, I'm just using it as an example!—Scott Meredith has been dead for a while now. There is still a Scott Meredith Agency; and it's easy, in all of that agency's publicity materials, to find out that its principal is Arthur Klebanoff.
• Extremely broad scope of representation. Yes, there are a few agencies that represent everything under the sun. They typically have ten or more successful and experienced agents (named in public, of course). I'm aware of no agency with fewer than five agents that effectively represents the broad scope. (And then, too, listing "speculative fiction" right next to "science fiction" as if they're separate categories indicates another kind of "breadth" problem…)
• Affiliation with a display site. Need I say more?

Non-Fiction writer

I have a great distaste for the industry, I write non-fiction in areas in which I am expert and wouldn't go near a major publishing house on a bet. Gravity's Rainbow is about the only passable thing to come out of them in the last quarter century and they screwed up both the promotion and distribution on it. If it wasn't for vanity presses, POD, and self-publication we'd have no literature at all. Thus inexperienced agents and beginning writers are about the only chance we have to improve things. Curiously, the people who have to know literature or go broke, antiquarian book dealers, had this to say about last year's output:
http://abbookman.com/ABBookman_E010705.html

Frankly, I'm amazed that any serious artist would even consider a major publishing house. Publication there just marks you as a hack with no talent or feeling for literature. Unless you get serious about writing as an art form, you might as well get a job twisting a bolt in a factory, and the derivitive books put out by the major publishers are written by writers who do very little more than that.

bookman said:

Gravity's Rainbow is about the only passable thing to come out of them in the last quarter century

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Ah. That explains a lot.

- Victoria

too inexperienced

"Excuse me. I've only been making a living writing since 1969, so I may be too inexperienced or too old to understand this. Never once in 36 years have I sent a piece of writing to anyone that wasn't polished, finished and in every way presentable to anyone. It seems to me horribly unprofessional to go throwing your first drafts about."

It seems to me you know nothing about the film industry, and are making yourself look like a fool. It's quite common for screenwriters to have other people read over their first drafts and give them feedback. The only bizarre thing that happened is that the idiot submitted it without my approval.

Screenwriting in some ways is quite different from novel writing. Regardless of what draft your screenplay is in, if you've gotten interest from a director or an actor (because after the script it sold it will always be rewritten by the original screenwriter or other screenwriters) then you've pretty much done what you need to sell the script.

Novelists, by the nature of novel writing and the nature of the publishing industry, tend to be more perfectionist oriented than screenwriters. The film industry is more about who do you know and what names you can throw around to even get people to consider talking to you.

If it wasn't for vanity presses, POD, and self-publication we'd have no literature at all.

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Are you serious?

A lot of the times when agents are criticized, they come here to defend themselves, under either their real names or assumed identities. To same some of the things he said, Bookman obviously has an interest in Stone Bench Associates.

The bottom line, is an agent worth dealing with has a verifiable sales records. New agents do start out somewhere, usually for experienced agents at big agents where they build up the necessary expertise and connections. And where they build up their own sales records.

The biggest agencies, the William Morris and ICM, often hire MBAs and lawyers for their agent trainees.

Of course, Bookman is only interested in Vanity Presses, so I assume he has no need of a major agent.

Literature

Just a little something I happen to believe, and it hasn't changed since Arthur Symonds wrote it in the final issue of The Savoy: "...And then, worst of all, we assumed that there were very many people in the world who really cared for art, and really for art's sake. The more I consider it, the more I realize that this is not the case. Comparatively few people care for art at all, and most of these care for it because they mistake it for something else."

I came here because I do have a few concepts that would work as books, but I'm certainly not going to turn into a hack, writing queries, kissing agent's rear ends, and destroying any artistic content in them to do it. Which is really all I see here. Follow what we tell you and you too can publish hack written crap.

I grew up in one of the most literarily create times ever. In France, nouveau roman was just beginning, and Girodias was tearing down the old walls publishing Nabokov, Reage, Battalie, reflected by Barney Rosset here in America and Colder/Boyars in Britain. The beats were making an impact. Small presses like City Lights, Olympia, Grey Wolf were publishing the beats and the New York School.

Can you imagine Kerouac writing one of the suck-up form letter queries that all the writing sites on the net have? I was looking for alternatives, the new Ferlinghetti's, James Laughlins, Eugene Jolas', and all I seem to be finding is a bunch of people who seem transfixed by the notion of being published by some corporate monstrosity that wouldn't know a piece of literature if it bit them on the a**.

And yes maestrowork I'm dead serious. If it wasn't for vanity presses, PODs and self-publication, we'd have no literature at all.

Interest in Stone Bench Associates?

I assure you, no such interest exists. I learned about them on this thread, and, in many ways, as an editor off and on for many years, both in books and periodicals, that is not particularily a good recommendation. I have dealt with a Morris agent, twice actually back about 1982 or 3. I wouldn't have trusted him with my hand written grocery list, the man was an absolute snake.

Bookman: Don't be so coy. Tell us how you really feel about agents and publishers.


(Of the authors you named, I confess I have never heard of Reage, Battalie, Barney Rosset, Colder/Boyars [2 people?], James Laughlin, or Eugene Jolas. Perhaps I would have if they had been published by larger houses. But then most of what I read is history, actually.)

What a bizarre performance.

Vomaxx said:

(Of the authors you named, I confess I have never heard of Reage, Battalie, Barney Rosset, Colder/Boyars [2 people?], James Laughlin, or Eugene Jolas. Perhaps I would have if they had been published by larger houses. But then most of what I read is history, actually.)

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Pauline Reage, pseudonym of French author/editor Dominique Aury who wrote the best selling French novel of the 20th century, The Story of O.

Georges Battalie, leading French surrealist.

Barney Rosset, publisher owned Grove Press and published Kerouac, most of the beats, Henry Miller, and many other ground breaking writers.

John Calder and Marion Boyars broke the British Obscene Publications act defending their publication of The Last Exit to Brooklyn.

James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions, published William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller and many of the best authors America has come up with.

Created as a refuge for experimental writers by journalist, poet, and linguist, Eugene Jolas, his wife Maria and Elliot Paul, transition was, perhaps, the single most important journal of the modernist literary tradition. The object, from the beginning was to create an outlet where diverse and innovative writers could express themselves and experiment in a "laboratory of the word" free from the restrictions of overly commercial publishing houses and conventional criticism. Finding the United States, at the time, far too restrictive, while working at the Double Dealer, Jolas established transition in Paris in 1927 as a fitful quarterly. transition was initially compounded of early modernist writers, and rebellious American expatriate authors, such as James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Alfred Kreymborg, Gertrude Stein, Kay Boyle, Samuel Beckett and Muriel Rukeyser, along with political writers, Negro voices from the Harlem Renaissance, and various other artistic schools. This mix brought about a philosophical combination of irrational surrealism and language innovation, labeled vertigralism. transition expanded into other art forms accepting a far greater variety of artistic genres including sculptors, civil rights activists, carvers, critics, and cartoonists. transition continued through the Spring issue of 1938 and is credited with establishing the avant-gardist tradition in new literary philosophies

James D. Macdonald said:

What a bizarre performance.

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And Horribly off topic.

Not Exactly Tina

You have a group of unknowns, Stone Bench Associates, being crucified, why? There is not a single shred of evidence, of anything really. Their crime, they are friendly to beginning writers. Horrors. And that is exactly typical of what goes on here. If you want to follow S. S. McClure and rake the muck at least investigate. Instead we all know the right way. Destroy all artistic content in your work, kiss bu** and become a hack. Don't investigate some new, unknown idealistic agent, heavens no. Crucify them first and ask questions later. It's all the same topic, dear. Why the United States of America no longer has a literature.

But interesting.

"If it weren't for tangents, I'd have nowhere to go."

(Me)

For all who are interested:

In the upper left corner of your screen you'll find a link to "User CP."

If you click on that, in the left-hand column near the bottom (under "Miscellaneous") you'll find "Buddy/Ignore lists."

If you go there, you can add a name to the "Ignore" box, then click on the "Update Ignore List" link.

I'm planning on experimenting to see how it works.

=======================

And ... yes! It works the way I expected.

[even more off topic]

Man, I miss the crotchety old guys who used to hang out at the 'ol college writing groups. I once had a guy tell the entire class, after reading several of our stories, that we were collectively responsible for the ruination of America. I can still picture the guy sitting there, quivering with righteous anger. His fury was intoxicating.

We could talk/argue/hurl accusations for hours and hours. And afterwards we'd all go hang out at a bar, and he'd tell us hilarious stories about growing up in a boarding school.

[/even more off topic]

Stop That !

Uncle Jim,

You just knocked me off my desk chair, because I couldn't stop laughing! <g>

Chacounne