When agents attack: My dismal experience with the Jennifer De Chiara agency
Go to hell.
I’m not responding to anymore emails from you, so don’t bother responding.
— Jennifer De Chiara.
Long-time lurker here, grateful for all the wisdom I have gleaned over the years. Congratulations to all the writers who have secured agents. For those of you still struggling, take heart: No agent is better than a bad agent. Per forum rules, I will merely summarize my experiences, which are detailed in my blog (click
here).
In a nutshell, Jennifer De Chiara has ceased communication with me on the eve of the tentative* publication of a book that I ghost-wrote for Artimus Pyle, the former drummer for the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. She had not communicated (phone, email, letter) with either of us for 18 months until I emailed her on Christmas Eve seeking clarification of our relationship.
Her terse - and increasingly rude - responses indicated that she had no idea what was happening with the book. She did not even know that the publisher had been sold, and blamed me for not sharing that news with her.
As you can see from the above quotes, she is officially AWOL right at the time when we need an advocate to negotiate with both the publisher and Audible Books. She is also supposed to negotiate foreign-language rights, but at this stage has arranged just one deal (I don’t know the info) with a publisher in a very small European territory.
I am trying to fire her, since she has not lived up to her contractual obligation to employ her “best efforts” to represent the book “enthusiastically.” Of course she has not replied to my emails. A certified letter is en route.
There’s one moral: Be suspicious of an agent who uses an AOL account, a very old head shot, and can’t spell the celebrity author’s name correctly.
And another moral: Self-publish!
* “tentative” because there are legal issues detailed in the blog; these would not apply to 99.9% of authors.