Purgatory's Pit of Doom

(((Steve))) I'm also full of righteous indignation on your behalf. Damn.

That really, really, really sucks, Steve. {{hugs}}

Welcome to the Cordero Wing of the sub-Pit.

Sorry to hear the news, Steve. You're in good company.

Thanks again, Pitizens.

The situation is fluid and I'll have to see how it plays out Monday. The thing is, it may turn out that I'll have to be the one to end it if that's what I want. The "magic words" haven't been said by either side yet, but you know they're floating in the periphery. I'll let you guys know what happens.

Courage and clear head, Steve. It's always best to make a decision yourself, stay or go.

If "stay" means trunking books, that's a big consideration. I think manuscripts should at least be tried in the marketplace before they are trunked. If we were just doing this for our health, writing would involve more cardio and less booze.

{{{Steve}}} This is just wrong on so many levels. He took on your MG and should have subbed it, seen it through.

Your decision needs to be your own, so I won't say anything more. Just know that there are agents out there who very well might love your YA, won't have concerns, and WILL be able to place it.

Let us know what happens. Really, I'm so sorry. What a kick in the teeth.

Steve, what Kellion said. I obviously don't know the full of the situation, but you gave your agent a damn good book. If he doesn't think he can sell it, his job is to either 1) help you work it into something that he thinks can sell, or 2) give you a very clear, very good explanation why he doesn't think it's the right book. In either case, you get to decide whether you agree or walk.

After what happened with your MG, I'm sensing a pattern here.

Steve: Before parting ways, I would see if I could pry some more information out of him about what problems he sees with the story itself. After the time you put in, the least you deserve is a detailed and helpful beta response.

This doesn't mean follow his advice or revise, but it's good to gather opinions to see if a pattern emerges.

ink wench said:

Steve, what Kellion said. I obviously don't know the full of the situation, but you gave your agent a damn good book. If he doesn't think he can sell it, his job is to either 1) help you work it into something that he thinks can sell, or 2) give you a very clear, very good explanation why he doesn't think it's the right book. In either case, you get to decide whether you agree or walk.
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Once upon a time, I believed that too. But really, that isn't his job. His job is to make money for his agency.

He works on commission and if he spends too much time revising and editing, soon he'll be looking for another job. With average advances between $5,000 and $10,000 he has to consider whether 15% of that is worth the hours it takes to edit a manuscript, not to mention trying to sell it, then if it sells, all the work involved with a contract.

Do you like my form of agent love? I totally sympathize with the difficult position agents are in. I'm a natural bleeding heart, right Steve?

Um. Lots of irony in "agent love" and "Teriann" in the same post.

I'm really a cold hard cynic, which is why I hang out here.

kellion92 said:

If we were just doing this for our health, writing would involve more cardio and less booze.

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THIS IS FULL OF WIN!

I just heard back from my editor who said the art dept. considered my gripes about my cover and...will do nothing about them. My cover stands as is.

Here I come, Teri! I'm slowly inching over to your side, where author autonomy rules above all else. If they butcher my ms during edits, I'm moving in with you and your husband so we can start a small army.haha

Steve, you are getting some good advice here. All I can offer you is support and the fervent desire that things turn around in your favor here. That the best path opens up for you, whatever that may be.

I would like to have sympathy for agents, I really would. Honestly though this isn't the first instance of hearing that an agent isn't willing to even try to sub a client's manuscript. How do you really know that it can't sell unless you try?

It just feels like another example of not being willing to take risks. You can't find success, real success, by subbing knock-off books. Finding the real break-out book is about finding something different, original. It is becoming glaringly obvious to me, as of late, that there is a huge disconnect between the tastes and desires of real readers and the opinions of agents and editors.

I think there are agents out there who sell books with no editorial, and that's an agent I don't want. I know S@r@ Meg!b0w is like that. All she wants are mss that are ready to be subbed. It's about money, yes, but I find her to be a lazy agent, albeit an honest one.

But there are agents who offer editorial and they're very good at it and will help shape the ms. And I know plenty of people who have agents just like that and have garnered a sale. Agents don't have to do anything, but my agent, if I ever get one again, will.

Thanks for all the reps and kind words. My dad was released from the hospital yesterday. They think it was a combination of things that are all relatively minor. That being said, they are testing him to see if his blood is susceptible to clots so they can give him something should that be the case.

alias octavia said:

It just feels like another example of not being willing to take risks. You can't find success, real success, by subbing knock-off books. Finding the real break-out book is about finding something different, original. It is becoming glaringly obvious to me, as of late, that there is a huge disconnect between the tastes and desires of real readers and the opinions of agents and editors.

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Agents have to calculate their risks. It's a business decision.

Let's say the average advance for a book is $10,000 (a little high, but the math is easier.)

15% is $1,500.

How long does it take to read and edit a manuscript? Let's say 3 days @ 8 hours per day. If a manuscript needs 3 full reads, that would be 72 hours.

If you submit the book to 15 editors, and follow up with those editors, you have to add at least another 3 hours, which includes tracking submissions.

Negotiating a contract, going back and for between the writer and the editor would be, say, 5 hours.

That's 80 hours.

Let's say the agent's sell-through rate is 1 book sold for 3 submitted. That means the editor has to put in 240 hours to earn $1,500.

I've got a calculator here. That comes to . .. drum roll please . . .

$6.25 per hour.

You cannot earn a living that way, certainly not in NYC or the major cities.

Teriann, the cold hard realist.

That's great news, Cricket

Thanks again, Pitizens. I'd be interested in knowing why he thinks he can't sell L1ST3N in it's current state, but that might not be feasible.

I do finally have his substantive comments on DR@G0R0, but it's only for about a 3rd of the book. Also, it's no longer MG. Yep, it started at YA, I revised it to MG, and now he wants to go back to YA.

That said, I'll know more on Monday and see how things will proceed.

Teri, you're right--an agent's job is to make his client and agency money. This is a business and I'll have to make a business decision. He hasn't made money for me in 9 months since signing, and with a 1 yr contract, I don't know if he could with the 3 months remaining. It's time to make money. I think L1ST3N is that vehicle in the short term, but there is an obvious disagreement there.

Catwoman said:

THIS IS FULL OF WIN!

I just heard back from my editor who said the art dept. considered my gripes about my cover and...will do nothing about them. My cover stands as is.

Here I come, Teri! I'm slowly inching over to your side, where author autonomy rules above all else. If they butcher my ms during edits, I'm moving in with you and your husband so we can start a small army.haha

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But you have to remember, Cat, I am still strongly in favor of being traditionally published.

I am doing both, which is a fabulous learning experience, but my self-publishing experiences have not convinced me that there isn't much to gain from being trade published. I think "do both" is the best advice I've heard yet. If nothing else, two potential income streams are better than one.

But you're welcome to move in!

My husband used to refer to himself as my "formatter and proofreader" (for the self-pubbed stuff.) He has given himself a promotion and now refers to himself as my publisher.

(((Cat)))) for the cover.

Steve, do you trust him on revisions? I'd be hesitant to undergo months of work for someone who reads just a portion and says "nevermind."

I'm conflicted about revisions. I think my agent helped me, but she didn't sell my book. I know many of us (myself included) would like an agent who could provide editorial and career guidance. But until an agent's advice turns into a sale, and even better, career growth over time, there's no way to know if the advice was helpful but not quite enough, a time-waster that had little impact on the book's appeal to editors, or completely wrong and damaging to the book and the writer's prospects.

From a business model perspective, sometimes I think editing skills and the skills required to do the other aspects of an agent's job are really different.

My former agent mate who is back at WH just told me that her agent there wants her to revise her latest novel to make it into a memoir. I'm not sure that's a suggestion for revision as much as "write a different book."

I'm sorry, Cat. *hugs* for the cover. My friend went through this recently. The good news? She wasn't thrilled with it but the rest of us thought it was good. I think this is hardest on the author *more hugs*

I know it is all about business, Teri. I just don't understand why an agent takes a client on, goes through revisions (or some work) and then says, "No, I just don't think there is a market for this." I've seen many variations of this recently and it boggles my mind. Is the industry contracting that rapidly? Their contacts are gone? What?

Kellion raises some good questions about revisions. Often what I suspect is that the agent has a vision for the book in question and if they can reshape the book to match it, they will sub it. If not, then they lose interest. The only vision I'm interested in is the author's.

My rant wasn't meant to be logical. It is just my emotional response to see good books and good writers being shelved and not given a chance.

Octavia, I think it's an extension of the same mindset/conditions where you see a big publishing house paying good money to acquire a book, then more money to edit, design a cover and produce it, and then decide to throw it out into the world without any support, advertising or marketing. That makes absolutely no sense to me either.

I think that agents who are willing to spend a lot of time on revisions -- well, first, some of them, if you are a potential new client, won't sign you until it's clear that you can execute the revisions successfully. Either way, it's a gamble -- for most, they are investing in a client that they hope is a good long-term investment.

Octavia, I feel your anger.

I was really mad at S@r@ Cr0we, my first of three post-2005 agents. She sent TS book to 5 editors, and after hearing from 4, said, "This book needs something but I don't know what, so I'm stepping aside."

She sent it out in April and made that pronouncement the following January. At the time I felt like she "owed" me more than that -- after all, I waited 2 months for her to get around to submitting it, yadda yadda.

Of course now, she seems angelic to what I dealt with since then.

She just made a business decision that it wasn't worth any more of her time. She didn't really owe me anything.

SteveCordero said:

Teri, you're right--an agent's job is to make his client and agency money.

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Tee hee. You changed my quotation a bit. I said the agent's job is to make money for the agency. Full stop.

I think to be precise, the agent is supposed to make a "good faith" effort to sell the writers work yadda yadda.

I think the part that Octavia is stewing about is the "good faith" part. It can't really be good faith if it was never sent at all -- or sent to 5 editors and dumped.

The problem, of course, is holding someone to it. Employment contracts are impossible to enforce. You can't make someone do something they don't want to do, specifically including work

-- because of the Thirteenth Amendment, actually. (The anti-slavery amendment.)

OL said:

Octavia, I think it's an extension of the same mindset/conditions where you see a big publishing house paying good money to acquire a book, then more money to edit, design a cover and produce it, and then decide to throw it out into the world without any support, advertising or marketing. That makes absolutely no sense to me either.

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This makes sense to me from a particular business standpoint.

If you put enough books out, a certain number will just take off by themselves. So it's a statistics game. Some will sell, others will not, and nobody can really predict which will and which will not, so one alternative is put out a bunch of books, see what sells, and then get behind those books.

Basically, the publisher averages income over hundreds of titles. Putting lots of money into lots of titles is bad business because not all will sell for quirky reasons which nobody can predict. Publishing only a few titles but putting lots of money into all of them is not necessarily the best model either because it's safer to play the odds. With more books you have a better chance that one will take off.

The justification for this business model is that there isn't much hard evidence that marketing and advertising helps books much in the long run.

I'm not saying I agree or think it's wise or pretty, just that I understand the business model. (Of course, they'll pick favorites and put lots of money into those, but of the hundreds of others, wait and see is not a bad business strategy -- for the publishing house. It sucks for most writers.)

(((Steve))) I'm so sorry. Everyone else already gave good advice, so I'll just make up a fresh round of maggotinis and see you at the bar. May it all work out in your favor regardless of what you decide to do.

(((Cat))) Sorry about them ignoring your concerns on the cover.

Silver, going to see HG tomorrow.

Teri, I think you're probably right about that. Where I think it falls apart is in long-term profitability -- as I understand it, today's mid-list is tomorrow's backlist, and backlist is a substantial chunk of a house's profits.

I've been involved in a discussion elsewhere about advertising and marketing and what works and what doesn't, and the professional marketeers/publicists will tell you that it does work and still could be done better (test-marketing covers, for example). That discussion was generated by this article, on the making of a blockbuster, and how much in-house enthusiasm and hand-selling has to do with that. The marketeer responded that good, targeted advertising actually has a lot to do with sales.

I said this in Purgatory, but should say it here as well ((((Steve)))). And rather than put a positive gloss on it, in keeping with the Pit I'll just say that it sucks.

Teriann said:

Tee hee. You changed my quotation a bit. I said the agent's job is to make money for the agency. Full stop.

I think to be precise, the agent is supposed to make a "good faith" effort to sell the writers work yadda yadda.

I think the part that Octavia is stewing about is the "good faith" part. It can't really be good faith if it was never sent at all -- or sent to 5 editors and dumped.

The problem, of course, is holding someone to it. Employment contracts are impossible to enforce. You can't make someone do something they don't want to do, specifically including work

-- because of the Thirteenth Amendment, actually. (The anti-slavery amendment.)

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Of course I changed your quotation because, you know, it would be wrong otherwise.

Why? Because there is no way an agent can make money for her agency unless she makes money for her client first. That's how commission works.

There is no way for the agent to get paid the commission without the client also getting paid.

SteveCordero said:

Of course I changed your quotation because, you know, it would be wrong otherwise.

Why? Because there is no way an agent can make money for her agency unless she makes money for her client first. That's how commission works.

There is no way for the agent to get paid the commission without the client also getting paid.

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I'm so glad you're back, Steve. I can't think of a better thing to do on a rainy Saturday then argue with you.

Just as a publisher spreads out their income over hundreds of books for an average, an agent spreads out their income over dozens of writers.

Hypothetical:

1. Client #1 has an issue with his contract. If it is resolved, the writer may get an additional $500. The process of resolving the issue will take at least one full day of the agent's time, maybe longer. If successful, the agent's take is $75.

2. Client #2 has an offer on the table for $25,000 and other editors are interested, which means there may be an auction. The price could end up going very high -- but there are phone calls to return now.

3. Client #3 wants the reversion clause renegotiated because the client's IP attorney said the reversion clause may cause the client to lose money down the road -- say 5 or 10 years into the future. The negotiation will take at least 2 days because it involves a complex point of IP law. There is no money to be gained now.

What's good for the agent is not necessarily good for each one of his writers.

Did you read that funny agent cat who says he doesn't bother with no-comma-money? There is no comma in $500.

Of course, remember my sinister suggestions purely hypothetical and any agent working for any writer here on AW would tackle each of these tasks with the same energy and time commitment.