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TriadaUS Literary Agency

Uwe

What I am looking for

I just read your message.
I will admit that on days where I receive over 80 queries via email and snail mail, I will sometimes revert to the "not right for me at this time" or "not what I am looking for right now."

While your query was well written and the topic interesting, in nonfiction, if I am signing True Crime, I am looking for a more high profile project than the one you presented. My editorial contacts are looking for "national platform" for (either) author and/or project so if you wrote me, for instance, about the Phil Spector case, I would have asked to see the proposal. This is not a value judgment on you or your project, I just don't think I can sell that particular project. (And it might be the perfect project for another agent or another time.)

As far as what I am looking for: great fiction of pretty much any genre and in nonfiction I am looking for "national platform" projects of all kinds and excellent how-to and self-help. I am more open to nonfiction at this very time (although memoirs or narrative nonfiction should be of the "national" platform variety, but I will always take a look at a fiction project where the query "blows me away" (whatever that means in this subjective field).
Best,
Uwe
 

vipersmile

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Uwe. I think you're doing a great thing, I've said before, at least when you give me the rejection in about two weeks from now after reading my vampire submission it won't feel like I'm being burned alive at the stake. I said earlier that I can't wait to be shot down in flames by you because of your constructive critiscism and ability to tell aspiring writers why the particular's aren't there.

I have always been this positive, yes...yes I have.

More agents should be like you, buisness like, precise and with humor.

And for anyone else reading this, I recommend Dr. Stender. His canter and ability to respond in a timely fashion more than make up for any lack in trust or judgement.

The truth sometimes hurts but it is necessary to explore the inner chambers of our creative abilities and assess the difference between opinions,facts, and what's needed in today's market.
 
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triceretops

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I like the personal touch too. TriadaUS is on top of their game when responding to each and every email in a timely and polite fashion. Out of all my agent rejections recently, 65% of them were Non-Responders, when in fact, most of them declared that they got ahold of the writer, either way. This is totally distressing since I don't know if I can cross them off my list or what.

Tri
 

LucyEllenH

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To email or not to email

Latest update on Uwe Stender/TriadaUS:

Looking for an agent and running across his site in the course of my research, my take was that he's new, hungry, and friendly. I ran into a problem with the fine print on his site though. Although he says he prefers email queries and seems to take pride in how fast his turnaround time is and how much he respects the writers' time, his submission guidelines say that he only responds to email queries if he's interested. From his site:

If we haven't responded after two weeks, we are either not interested in the material or have not received the email.

He doesn't seem to realize that if he doesn't respond, we have no way of knowing which of those two things is the case. Ordinarily that policy (no response if not interested) makes me pass on submitting, but in this case I'm sending him a snail mail query with a PS pointing out this discrepancy, figuring that his response (if any) will be revealing. I'll keep you posted.

BTW: The crawl on his sidebar now talks about 3 sales of books slated for publication in 2006 and 2007. Can't tell if they're the only ones or just the recent ones. FWIW he has what appears to be a client list containing 28 names.
 

triceretops

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Hi, Lucy.

Uwe just took me on about thirty minutes ago, and is going to request rewrites. Anyway, I noticed the email thing too, and my computer browser was acting up at the time, so I sent a hard-copy query with appologies. He called me on the phone and requested the full hard-copy manuscript, which was a total shock. He read the book within six days and said he liked it, so I'm to call him tommorow with the idea of minor revision ideas and some grammar problems.

This is the fastest turn around time I have ever had for an agent reply, submission and read out of 95 submissions. Also the most personable. He's new, hungry, and totally aggresive, knowing that it is not easy to join this industry. He has a great attitude and aspires to follow within AAR guidelines.

He's made about 4 major non-fic sales. I haven't heard any fiction sales yet, and he's still buidling a stable of writers. Could be that his site needs an update. Fiction will be the most difficult break-through for him as it is for any new agency, but once he begins to make sales, he'll find his stride, I'm sure.

His background and education impressed me. In fact the PHD in literature kind of frightened me, because I knew he would catch every nusiance in my script...and guess what? He nailed over 200 errors. That means he wants the best from me, and that's the way I like to work.

Tri
 

LucyEllenH

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Hi, Tri;

Your description of Uwe sounds about what I've gleaned from his site and other feedback, which is why the "no response if uninterested" seems so out of character. Usually it's a deal-breaker for me, and I won't even submit to someone with any form of "non-response" as a matter of policy.

Other concerns earlier on this thread center on his relative his slow start in making sales. (Others seem unimpressed with 4 sales since April 2004.)
As it happens, my book is a children's book, which he says he's also looking for, but which seems to be rather a specialized area, so we shall see what, if anything, he does with it. I also enclosed all 5 pages of the MS with my query, so the thing should take a whopping 2 minutes to read, which puts a different spin on reading/re-writing.

I'm not as frightened (impressed?) with the PhD, mainly because I have a more than passing familiarity with academe, including a pretty realistic idea of what a PhD really does (and doesn't) mean.

But believe me, no one knows better than I what's involved in starting up and building a business. Hungry is good, which is why I'm looking forward to hearing from him.
 

triceretops

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Lucy, I can only agree about the non-responding part of the equation. I'm one of the loudest advocates against it on this board. My email responses have been terrible, and it might be due in part to my shotgun methology. Yet I have experimented and taken my time to personalize each email just recently, and even that has not worked to my satisfaction. There have been dozens of agents that do not respond back to me, while others on this board have gotten at least the negative form email back from the same agents, and vice versa, so it looks like it is some kind of a crap shoot. No sour grapes here, it's just that I cannot properly track submissions this way, and have no idea if my subs have been lost to cyberspace or have indeed been deleted for non-interest.

Not only that, how am I to know if webistes have not been udated and policy changes have occured for the sub process? How am I to know if a certain agency has just filled their roster (recently) and is no longer taking queries. Just one example, I had to find out through the rumor mill that one agent I was after did not taking off-planet science ficton, and there was no mention of this in the Writer's Market or on their website. All they would have had to do was tell me. There are many little quirks like this that could be cleared up if simply the agent or editor would type a sentence and respond back. Then said agent wouldn't ever have to deal with me again. NOT FOR ME.

There's a caveat to this: I'm new to the internet (11 months), but I'm not new to being publishing multiple times. So perhaps I'm over-reacting on this. But I simply see this as some form of "cyber genocide" where we are getting the boot en masse, and this trend, if it continues and widens, would greatly disturb me. Just my thoughts.
Tri
 

LucyEllenH

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Sassenach said:
I follow up once. If I receive no response, it's obvious there's no interest.
Sounds like a reasonable policy, though if the first message disappeared into cyberspace, there's as much reason to suspect that a second email (sent to/from the same addresses) met with the same fate as that the party is uninterested.

I just think it's rude not to respond at all. It's the principle of the thing to me.
 

Sassenach

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LucyEllenH said:
Sounds like a reasonable policy, though if the first message disappeared into cyberspace, there's as much reason to suspect that a second email (sent to/from the same addresses) met with the same fate as that the party is uninterested.

I just think it's rude not to respond at all. It's the principle of the thing to me.

Whenever I send a message to the wrong address, it bounces back to me. It rarely disappears.

Yep, it's rude, but the way it is.
 

The Scribbler

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I wouldnt say it is rude, but I do think it is a tad unprofessional. I know agencies received hundreds if not thousands of queries but honestly how long would it take to shoot an email out that said "No Thanks". That way writers are not out there hanging in limbo.
 

Aconite

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Miss Snark, who in her mundane identity is said to be a NY single-person literary agency (AAR member), agrees that it's rude for agents not to reply to submissions.
 

Uwe

response

I respond to ALL emails or snail mails (if the SASE is included.)
Since I do not respond to mass produced or tool produced emails (like scriptblaster...I don't even read them) I had a line on my website that stated that we won't respond unless interested (since I am not interested in scriptblaster mass submissions).

Thanks for pointing out the potential ambiguity of that statement, I have removed it from the submission pages.

I have ALWAYS responded to every message addressed to me I received (barring it being caught in a spam filter which might happen on occasion!) and will CONTINUE to do so. I take pride in that and consider it a minimum level of courtesy.

I hope this clarifies that particular point. There are many agencies, however, who do not always respond and I would appreciate it if this particular discussion about responding or not would be continued elsewhere as it does not represent TriadaUS' policy. We ALWAYS respond.
Best wishes and a great 2006 to all,
Uwe
 

LucyEllenH

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Hi, Uwe;

Thanks for the clarification, including your recognition of the ambiguity of the statement in your guidelines. I thought it seemed out of character from the rest of the impression you were trying to project.

Having read this whole thread, I agree there's been a lot of extraneous discussion (some rather *heated*) that has nothing to do with TriadaUS. I'm not sure how much dividing it up would help (having made my point about repsonses and having Uwe agree, as I suspected he would), but that's why Gd made moderators.

Uwe: you should be getting my snail mail query shortly (SASE included
smile.gif
) but please ignore the PS. Thank you for fixing the line on your website. Now if you want to fix that comma-splice/run-on sentence at the beginning of that paragraph...

/signed/
The Phantom Proofreader
 

triceretops

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Yes, we got off the ball there. In my diatribe, I was implying about all the other past agents in my inventory. TriadaUS is kind of a fresh breeze for a change. Uwe is exacting, honest, and precise in detailed observations. He could have and should have tossed my manuscript for all of the grammatical snafus, which were way over what he tolerates. Instead he took endless hours out of his time to flag them All and still remained cheery about the whole thing. No agent has ever done that for me, and I can tell you one thing...what does a manuscript copy-edit cost for a 400-page book? From 50 cents on up to a couple of bucks a page! So I've learned a lesson here--make damn sure the product is bullet proof before it ever goes out. I went over mine four times, when it should have been eight times. These weren't simple comma and period mistakes--I left out over 150 WORDS, for god's sakes. So if you send him something, Please, don't do what I did. It wasn't fair to him. He's not a copy-editor, he's got sales to make and people to meet.

By contrast let me give you the low-down on one the largest, most prestigious agencies that I belonged to from 1988 to 1990. Of course I had one of the sub-agents, and this guy makes Virginia Kidd look like a lemonade stand. They loved three of my books, but really never had the time to even suggest changes that would have improved them. I got lost in the shuffle, and ended up talked to the least about anything. They were always too busy. Well they informed me that they sent one of my books to Hollywood straight away. The director John Badham and the producers, the Cohen Brothers, fell in love with the manuscript because it was so visual. So they prepared for an option. Two weeks later I get the news that my book is too similar to Michael Crihton's (sp?) Jurassic Park, and that there was a rumor that Spielberg was going to jump on the JP book. So my book, Dinothon, was rolled over and used for a door stop until they said, "the fervor dies down." Guess what? The JP fervor never died down.

Here's the clincher: Dinothon was about piloted, robotic dinosaurs in the year 2035, and it was a 500-page demolition battle to the death of the giant machines over a 48-hour period.

What in the Chuck Dickens did my book have in common with JP? Do you see it? Am I mad yet? Nope. I guess I can understand a film marketing problem with it. Although you'd really have to spell that one out for me.

I got hurt and dispondent, when for the next two years they didn't even attempt to sell it as a paperback. As diverse as the two books were, Jurassic Park somehow put the pox on me. It was then that I broke all my pencils, burned every manuscript I had, and sold my computer, having never wanting to deal with writing again. My other books lanquished on their desks also, with no mention of letters of submission. And this man was the God of science fiction agents.

I came back to re-break back into the industry just 11 months ago after this long hiatus with three new books ready to go. Moral of the story: There is something to be said about a smaller or newer agency that doesn't cringe when they hear your voice on the phone. There's something to be said about a friendly voice, who enjoys your company, and you actually get a chance to find out about them, just like they were a new neighbor. There's something to be said about the personal touch nowadays that's been lost immeasurably in the shuffle of time-cramming and go-go get em' out of the way mentality.

I never want to fall into the great fanny crack of life again when it comes to an agency or publisher. I'd like just once to stand upon a firm buttock and look around, down, and at eye level like everybody else. I only want just a smidgen of a chance to be reconized, just once, and then I won't bother you any more. It's every writer's "now I lay me down to sleep" prayer that one day, somehow and somewhere, somebody gives you acknowledgment for a job well done and some unsolicited praise. And that's when you can let out the breath you've been holding all your life, and know that all those hours and years were somehow worth it. Then, as a writer, you have arrived.

Well, TriadaUS gave me that. And regardless of if we don't work out, or part ways, I will always remember that I got my dignity back with them, and I was reminded that there are really great agents out there that aren't afraid to be kind and helpful.

And I wish we had more of them like him.

Tri
 

triceretops

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Just thought that I would post the news that Uwe at Triadaus sold four novels last week after a long dry spell. I'm really happy for him and know that he's been net-working with as many editors as time allows. I also signed with him tonight, completely pleased with such a monsterous edit on my manuscript that covered every base having to doing with plot, grammar, consistency, sentence structure, and plot arcs. Happy day, happy day. I think he know qualifies for AAR, which pleases him to no end.

Tri
 

victoriastrauss

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Just got a message from Uwe Stender.

I have received congratulations from writers for having sold four novels last week and I was wondering why (as I had not, although I wish I had!). I searched and found the source: In the TriadaUS thread on absolutewrite, there is mention of me having sold 4 books. I don't know how that conclusion was reached or why, but it is not true. (And I have NEVER made a claim of that nature, so I am befuddled).

Please, remove that statement and the follow up response.
To avoid any appearance of censorship, and also to forestall questions, I'm leaving the posts in place and posting Dr. Stender's correction.

- Victoria