Care and feeding of agents.

They called me Bruce · Aug 2, 2013

Hello everyone,

Having wandered around here a bit I haven't found a lot of information on what an agent needs in a writer. I have communicated with several agents directly and pottered around blogs and websites, talked to booksellers and such.

Below is a list of impressions for comment.

Agents need to eat, this costs. If based in NY, it costs a lot.
Agents need to sleep, so they can only read so much in any given time.
Agents need to be handling many projects, since their slice of the action is 2/10ths of 5/8ths of whatevever is left of the royalty payment.
Agents are salespeople. They are like no other salesperson I've ever seen, because they are trying to sell dreams and escapes made of someone else's ink, or books only engineers, teachers and scientists will buy.

At this stage, I see the fiction writer's role as being;

To provide the agent with a dream made of ink that will engage the agent's imagination- or the agent can't sell it.

To provide the agent with a package that the publisher can handle easily, efficiently and with no market backlash (i.e too controversial) or misplaced expectations of the longer term volume.

To provide the agent with a dream which will sell enough copies to cover the agent's time and effort, plus tax, if applicable. Divided, of course by 2/10ths of 5/8ths of whatever the publisher has left over after printing, shipping...

To provide the readers with something that will interest them enough to recommend it to someone else, because the agent's enthusiasm doesn't show outside the publishing world. It shows inside- the level of enthusiasm is quite heartening. That or all agents are mad.

So now the questions.

The query letter is a two edged thing. It saves the agent's time, at the expense of only giving the agent 10 to 15 seconds looking through a keyhole to judge if the room beyond is worth visiting. Are we, as writers, being unfair to agents if we write really clever query letters?

How much does a 'non standard' novel increase the degree of difficulty for an agent? 'Standard' being 3~5 characters, 3 acts, 65,000 words.

How much does a market estimate help an agent?

Donnie Marsh · Aug 2, 2013

They called me Bruce said:
Are we, as writers, being unfair to agents if we write really clever query letters?

I'm not sure what you mean by "clever." But the query letter should be succinct and professional. There are many posts here on query letters. You're selling yourself and your project to the agent, not how clever you can be.

cornflake · Aug 2, 2013

They called me Bruce said:
Hello everyone,

Having wandered around here a bit I haven't found a lot of information on what an agent needs in a writer. I have communicated with several agents directly and pottered around blogs and websites, talked to booksellers and such.

Below is a list of impressions for comment.

Agents need to eat, this costs. If based in NY, it costs a lot.
Agents need to sleep, so they can only read so much in any given time.
Agents need to be handling many projects, since their slice of the action is 2/10ths of 5/8ths of whatevever is left of the royalty payment.
Agents are salespeople. They are like no other salesperson I've ever seen, because they are trying to sell dreams and escapes made of someone else's ink, or books only engineers, teachers and scientists will buy.

At this stage, I see the fiction writer's role as being;

To provide the agent with a dream made of ink that will engage the agent's imagination- or the agent can't sell it.

To provide the agent with a package that the publisher can handle easily, efficiently and with no market backlash (i.e too controversial) or misplaced expectations of the longer term volume.

To provide the agent with a dream which will sell enough copies to cover the agent's time and effort, plus tax, if applicable. Divided, of course by 2/10ths of 5/8ths of whatever the publisher has left over after printing, shipping...

To provide the readers with something that will interest them enough to recommend it to someone else, because the agent's enthusiasm doesn't show outside the publishing world. It shows inside- the level of enthusiasm is quite heartening. That or all agents are mad.

So now the questions.

The query letter is a two edged thing. It saves the agent's time, at the expense of only giving the agent 10 to 15 seconds looking through a keyhole to judge if the room beyond is worth visiting. Are we, as writers, being unfair to agents if we write really clever query letters?

How much does a 'non standard' novel increase the degree of difficulty for an agent? 'Standard' being 3~5 characters, 3 acts, 65,000 words.

How much does a market estimate help an agent?

I ... ok.

Are you asking if it's unfair to write clever queries if the ms. is not clever?

Standard by what measure?

A market estimate? For fiction? Of what? People?

Kerosene · Aug 2, 2013

They called me Bruce said:
The query letter is a two edged thing. It saves the agent's time, at the expense of only giving the agent 10 to 15 seconds looking through a keyhole to judge if the room beyond is worth visiting. Are we, as writers, being unfair to agents if we write really clever query letters?

Roughly half of the query letters agents get are for the wrong genre/agent/whatnot.
A portion of the remaining half is utter crap that agents either need to dissect through or try to make sense off--wasting their time.
Everything else breaks down into other details and only a small percentage (I'd say 25%) are actually query letters that want to be taken seriously, and of thousands of those that an agent will get they have a set number that they will look at in depth to whittle them all down to a handful that they might represent.
(All of this is just overheard, no statistics)

No such thing as a creative query letter is worth the hassle, or the possible form rejection. You could leave an ending comment that the agent might read, but otherwise stick to the standards in your area. There are standards because that's what agents are used to.

How much does a 'non standard' novel increase the degree of difficulty for an agent? 'Standard' being 3~5 characters, 3 acts, 65,000 words.

Characters doesn't matter. You can have a story with one or a million. What really matters is if the reader can track them all.
Acts, just like the number of chapter doesn't matter either.
The word count does matter, as some publishers have strict limits set for the genre. The agent might be able to talk the novel to the editor, but if it's too short to be called a novel or just wasting paper it's going to be rejected.

How much does a market estimate help an agent?

Estimate? Agents get enough query letters saying, "My book will be the next Harry Potter, and all you need to do is represent me!"
What the hell would an estimate prove? From whom?
If you have high sales from self-publishing, like 10,000sales within a year or some crazy shit, the agent/publisher might be interested. But estimates, no. Publishers have a hard time estimating how well a book will sell, if they can hardly, who could?

Take a look at ShushPile Hell: http://slushpilehell.tumblr.com/
And take a look around Query Letter Hell here in AW in the SYW forums.

Undercover · Aug 3, 2013

It's sounds like too much analyzing to me. Write a really good book and try to query it well. If you want or need to work on your query, there's forums here to help you through that.

CAWriter · Aug 3, 2013

They called me Bruce said:
Are we, as writers, being unfair to agents if we write really clever query letters?

How much does a market estimate help an agent?

Funny you generalize the "we as writers" thing when I think you're really asking about you, yourself (sorry if that's the wrong assumption and you saw a 'clever' query somewhere and are trying to make a point to someone else).

My response to the question though is, the writer of a clever query is perhaps only being unfair to him/herself. If the query misses its mark, it is the writer who suffers as a result. Sure, the agent would like to make a sale, but it's easy enough to pass on a client/query that is too clever to be useful.

To your second point, market estimates in fiction are unreliable things. I don't know that an agent would find a 'market estimate' as helpful as they might find a marketing plan which would be a commitment from the writer as to their efforts in making the book known. (Not that a marketing plan in itself gives an author an edge. The book still needs to be first rate and appeal to the agent/publisher from a commercial perspective. The rest is essentially gimmickery.)

GinJones · Aug 3, 2013

I don't have the link at hand, but before you write a clever query, I highly recommend reading John Scalzi's blog entry on "the failure mode of clever." (Search: scalzi failure mode clever.)

Little Ming · Aug 3, 2013

The problem with the "clever query" is most people are not as clever as they think they are.

mellymel · Aug 3, 2013

Little Ming said:
The problem with the "clever query" is most people are not as clever as they think they are.

QFT.

They called me Bruce · Aug 3, 2013

Thanks everyone!

GinJones said:
I don't have the link at hand, but before you write a clever query, I highly recommend reading John Scalzi's blog entry on "the failure mode of clever." (Search: scalzi failure mode clever.)

I'm familiar with this concept, as 'excessive cleverness' and I've had a lot of practise with the mechanical equivalents, Citroens, Lear jets...This is very useful, thanks Gin.

The market stuff I've seen agents asking for and being recommended in writer's guides all have the same elements, where the potential interest group is, how many people are in it, where to find them. i.e. Browncoats come out of the woodwork at Comic.con and there are umpty thousand of them, x % of whom aren't going to be flat broke that week.

One of these analysis exercises showed 175,000 people in the potential interest group, accessible via several annual conventions (i.e.single point promotion) The pilot testing for this interest group had shown 60% would buy. With appropriate modifiers for confidence level (also known as nasty statistical methodology) 99% confidence of selling 9,000 books. 95% confidence of selling 14,500 books by promoting at 6 events over 12 months. The upper limit was somewhere around 65,000 books, but that's footprints on the moon territory, or Harry Potter.

The weakness is the small sample size of the test group.

They called me Bruce · Aug 3, 2013

mellymel said:
QFT.

I don't recognise this contraction, but don't worry, I have plenty of others!

cornflake · Aug 3, 2013

They called me Bruce said:
I'm familiar with this concept, as 'excessive cleverness' and I've had a lot of practise with the mechanical equivalents, Citroens, Lear jets...This is very useful, thanks Gin.

The market stuff I've seen agents asking for and being recommended in writer's guides all have the same elements, where the potential interest group is, how many people are in it, where to find them. i.e. Browncoats come out of the woodwork at Comic.con and there are umpty thousand of them, x % of whom aren't going to be flat broke that week.

One of these analysis exercises showed 175,000 people in the potential interest group, accessible via several annual conventions (i.e.single point promotion) The pilot testing for this interest group had shown 60% would buy. With appropriate modifiers for confidence level (also known as nasty statistical methodology) 99% confidence of selling 9,000 books. 95% confidence of selling 14,500 books by promoting at 6 events over 12 months. The upper limit was somewhere around 65,000 books, but that's footprints on the moon territory, or Harry Potter.

The weakness is the small sample size of the test group.

Are you talking about fiction or non?

I'd like to know where you saw any agent asking for any writer of fiction to do a market analysis with pilot testing and hard numbers.

They called me Bruce · Aug 3, 2013

CAWriter said:
Funny you generalize the "we as writers" thing when I think you're really asking about you, yourself (sorry if that's the wrong assumption and you saw a 'clever' query somewhere and are trying to make a point to someone else).

My response to the question though is, the writer of a clever query is perhaps only being unfair to him/herself. If the query misses its mark, it is the writer who suffers as a result. Sure, the agent would like to make a sale, but it's easy enough to pass on a client/query that is too clever to be useful.

To your second point, market estimates in fiction are unreliable things. I don't know that an agent would find a 'market estimate' as helpful as they might find a marketing plan which would be a commitment from the writer as to their efforts in making the book known. (Not that a marketing plan in itself gives an author an edge. The book still needs to be first rate and appeal to the agent/publisher from a commercial perspective. The rest is essentially gimmickery.)

'Clever query' appears in the query letter discussions and the blogs and agent's sites with links.

Market estimate would be volume, in my understanding. Market plan would be tactics. It was the usefullness of the volume estimate I was wondering about.

Thanks,

Bruce.

They called me Bruce · Aug 3, 2013

cornflake said:
Are you talking about fiction or non?

I'd like to know where you saw any agent asking for any writer of fiction to do a market analysis with pilot testing and hard numbers.

Fiction.

http://austlitagentsassoc.wordpress.com/ appears in some links & discussions, guidance materials etc. I have seen it in a few submission guidelines. Also in writer's guides published by state bodies. Do you want the specific refernces?

cornflake · Aug 3, 2013

They called me Bruce said:
Fiction.

http://austlitagentsassoc.wordpress.com/ appears in some links & discussions, guidance materials etc. I have seen it in a few submission guidelines. Also in writer's guides published by state bodies. Do you want the specific refernces?

Ok, it goes without saying that those are Australian agents - even so, I don't see where they say that on the page, is there a specific post?

Their link to submitting to an agent suggests you follow the agent/agency's guidelines.

RussPostHoc · Aug 3, 2013

As John Scalzi has noted, "The failure mode of 'clever' is 'asshole.'" That's one thing I definitely worry about when crafting a query.

They called me Bruce · Aug 3, 2013

cornflake said:
Ok, it goes without saying that those are Australian agents - even so, I don't see where they say that on the page, is there a specific post?

Their link to submitting to an agent suggests you follow the agent/agency's guidelines.

One would have to rummage around in the submission guidelines. I'll find the references to the printed stuff for you. The terminology is 'market position statement' I did submit one with the package to my literary assessor and had feedback on it, but so far I haven't had anyone ask to see the package.

They called me Bruce · Aug 3, 2013

RussPostHoc said:
As John Scalzi has noted, "The failure mode of 'clever' is 'asshole.'" That's one thing I definitely worry about when crafting a query.

'smartass' would cover this too, but I can work with a competent smartass. Side effect of working defence-aerospace.

Old Hack · Aug 4, 2013

They called me Bruce said:
I'm familiar with this concept, as 'excessive cleverness' and I've had a lot of practise with the mechanical equivalents, Citroens, Lear jets...This is very useful, thanks Gin.

Bruce, I don't mean to upset you: but I see a lot of "excessive cleverness" in your comments here. It could be that you're trying too hard because you're new here and you want to impress: but some of your posts here are almost unreadable in their cleverness. Your first post in this thread is a good example: there are a lot of words there, but if you'd cut everything but the last three paragraphs it would have been much clearer.

(Incidentally, this point of yours from that long first comment: "To provide the agent with a dream which will sell enough copies to cover the agent's time and effort, plus tax, if applicable. Divided, of course by 2/10ths of 5/8ths of whatever the publisher has left over after printing, shipping..." shows that you don't know how agents or royalties work. Writers should be paid a royalty based on cover price; if it's based on net, then net must be defined; and their agents usually get 15% of all payments. The publisher's printing and shipping costs shouldn't affect the payment the writer or agent receive.)

The market stuff I've seen agents asking for and being recommended in writer's guides all have the same elements, where the potential interest group is, how many people are in it, where to find them.

Marketing plans are usually only provided for non-fiction, not for novels.

i.e. Browncoats come out of the woodwork at Comic.con and there are umpty thousand of them, x % of whom aren't going to be flat broke that week.

Browncoats?

One of these analysis exercises showed 175,000 people in the potential interest group, accessible via several annual conventions (i.e.single point promotion)

Does this 175,000 figure account for those who attend more than one convention, and so might be duplicated in any total amout? And how do you know that everyone who attends such conventions are your potential readers? What about the people who attend such conventions in order to sell their own books? Or who like a niche genre represented at the conventions, into which your book doesn't fit? And what about the potential readers who won't attend any conventions at all?

The pilot testing for this interest group had shown 60% would buy.

It is highly unlikely that 60% of any group of people would buy a new book by an unknown author. Not even a group made up of the writer's family and friends.

With appropriate modifiers for confidence level (also known as nasty statistical methodology) 99% confidence of selling 9,000 books. 95% confidence of selling 14,500 books by promoting at 6 events over 12 months. The upper limit was somewhere around 65,000 books, but that's footprints on the moon territory, or Harry Potter.

The lower limit is just as unlikely, I'm afraid.

The weakness is the small sample size of the test group.

I suspect that another weakness lies in the methods and logic used to reach all these conclusions.

Whoever worked out these numbers has a poor understanding of how books are sold, I'm afraid.

They called me Bruce said:
Market estimate would be volume, in my understanding. Market plan would be tactics. It was the usefullness of the volume estimate I was wondering about.

The volume estimate you gave is worthless.

Concentrate instead on writing the best book you can, revising it appropriately, and writing a great query for it.

They called me Bruce said:
'smartass' would cover this too, but I can work with a competent smartass. Side effect of working defence-aerospace.

The problem is that you're not coming across as clever, or as a smartass, or as competent either. I'm sorry, Bruce: I really don't mean to be rude; but your comments here are confusing, and your conclusions are deeply flawed.

Don't feel bad. Publishing is a complex and often counter-intuitive business, and it confuses everyone--even the people who have worked in it for some time.

To answer your original questions:

The query letter is a two edged thing. It saves the agent's time, at the expense of only giving the agent 10 to 15 seconds looking through a keyhole to judge if the room beyond is worth visiting. Are we, as writers, being unfair to agents if we write really clever query letters?

If by "clever" you mean intelligent, witty and thoughtful then no, we're not: they'll expect all your writing to be intelligent, witty and thoughtful and will be pleased to read more of your work.

If you mean tricky and complex, then again, no we're not, because all that will happen is the agent will find your query incomprehensible and will reject your work unread.

How much does a 'non standard' novel increase the degree of difficulty for an agent? 'Standard' being 3~5 characters, 3 acts, 65,000 words.

There is no such standard for the novel.

Novels can be shorter or longer than 65k, depending in part upon genre.

I know of no novels which are limited to just three to five characters.

The three-act structure is more applicable to screenplays than to novels. Have you been reading Save The Cat? It's a useful, funny book but far too prescriptive for me.

How much does a market estimate help an agent?

If it's part of a non-fiction proposal then it can be a help if it's thorough and has been done well.

If it's based on numbers which bear little relation to the realities of bookselling, then it might well result in a rejection no matter how good your writing might be.

Helix · Aug 4, 2013

They called me Bruce said:
Fiction.

http://austlitagentsassoc.wordpress.com/ appears in some links & discussions, guidance materials etc. I have seen it in a few submission guidelines. Also in writer's guides published by state bodies. Do you want the specific refernces?

I've just had a look through all the agent listings at ALAA. It didn't take long because there are only sixteen, of which three are quite specialised and one is a dead link. I couldn't see any mention of a marketing statement. (I didn't give it my best effort, so I might have missed a reference.)

One asked for information about the author's platform. Another suggested that new authors should send work to a manuscript appraisal service to ensure that it is ready for submission. Generally, the agents asked for the usual --- a brief covering letter, short synopsis and sample chapters.

mccardey · Aug 4, 2013

They called me Bruce said:
Fiction.

http://austlitagentsassoc.wordpress.com/ appears in some links & discussions, guidance materials etc. I have seen it in a few submission guidelines. Also in writer's guides published by state bodies. Do you want the specific refernces?

Bruce, I think you might be misreading - or perhaps you've picked up the non-fic submission guides of some agents?

ETA: Sorry for double posting - computer froze (again). What helix said.

mellymel · Aug 4, 2013

They called me Bruce said:
I don't recognise this contraction, but don't worry, I have plenty of others!

QFT--It's an acronym that stands for, quoted for truth

ETA: And what Old Hack said.

Stop trying to apply probability and statistics and percentages wrapped up in an enigma of labyrinth-worthy cleverness, and just Write a GOOD book. Actually, scratch that. Write the VERY BEST book you can. Then revise, revise, revise, and edit. Do the same with your query. Visit Query Letter Hell here on AW and get that thing in presentable shape and query it. End of story. Stop over thinking this because NONE of it even matters if you write a crappy piece of crap.

GL

CAWriter · Aug 4, 2013

They called me Bruce said:
'Clever query' appears in the query letter discussions and the blogs and agent's sites with links.

Market estimate would be volume, in my understanding. Market plan would be tactics. It was the usefullness of the volume estimate I was wondering about.

Thanks,

Bruce.

Yes, I know the difference between market volume and market plan. As I've written a good number of (successful) non-fiction book proposals, I have included marketing plans. I've never seen any agent or publisher ask for a market estimate.

I agree with Old Hack that your process for arriving at a market estimate is severely flawed when you put it in the context of how publishing works. Your sample must have been very small if you found that 60% would be compelled to buy. Ask any author who has been to a conference or bookstore event--even a meeting/conference/tea/family reunion where their books are for sale. If you can convert even 10% of attendees into buyers you're doing far above average.

To be honest, the primary conclusion an agent/publisher would make after seeing the estimate presented here is that you have an over-inflated view of the appeal of your book and unrealistic expectations. That doesn't translate into sales potential, it translates into someone being a 'difficult author.'

Perks · Aug 4, 2013

I've been at this a long time as well and have never seen an agent requiring anything resembling market analysis for a fiction submission. For one, that would be something that many writers wouldn't be familiar with or able to manage, and secondly, it wouldn't mean anything for a work of unpublished fiction from an unknown author anyway.

Some agents do want to see that you are familiar with where your book would fit on the shelves, which also means having some idea of what type of reader might like your book. But there are plenty of agents and publishers scanning the avalanche of submissions for quirk and good material that might be out of the grooves in the road.

While it's tempting to try a query that strains to be zippy and unusual, it's a risky effort. From reading agents' blogs to talking with them personally, they value competence and professionalism in the query stage. All the better to relax into the sample reading, it seems, if they know the writer isn't kook from the outset.

Polenth · Aug 4, 2013

A good writer knows how to choose their words and communicate clearly with their audience. Most attempts at clever queries are confusing, wordy and obscure. So the writer will look like a bad writer, regardless of how clever or otherwise they appear. As you'll get a deal based on the writing, not your level of intelligence or knowledge, you need to focus on showing you can write.

Care and feeding of agents.

They called me Bruce

Donnie Marsh

DÈẴƊ ḈỂƝŦƐȐ ƉËẪḒ

cornflake

practical experience, FTW

Kerosene

Your Pixie Queen

Undercover

I got it covered

CAWriter

GinJones

Little Ming

mellymel

They called me Bruce

They called me Bruce

cornflake

practical experience, FTW

They called me Bruce

They called me Bruce

cornflake

practical experience, FTW

RussPostHoc

Jackalope of All Trades

They called me Bruce

They called me Bruce

Old Hack

Such a nasty woman

Helix

socially distancing

mccardey

mellymel

CAWriter

Perks

delicate #!&@*#! flower

Polenth

Mushroom