Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing you don't have a book agent? If not, finding one might be a better strategy than trying to find a film agent. A film agent will only rep your film rights; a book agent, on the other hand, can rep not just your film rights, but any other subrights your publisher allowed you to retain.- Victoria
Thanks, Victoria. Excellent thoughts.
I did indeed have a book agent--a senior agent at one of the most venerable NYC firms--but we parted company because we had very different perceptions about various issues--especially about whether or not overseas publication would be wise.
She contended my book was "too American" to be of interest overseas, but turned out to be "too controverial" to be sold in the US. The book is doing well in Europe, has had some nice reviews, and is going from hardback into a mass-market paperback edition later this year. They have an option on my next book in the genre, and I'm quite happy at present, so I'm not in any great hurry to find a literary agent just yet--and I'm not sure if I should be seeking one in the US or in Europe.
In the case of that book, the publisher has a massive subrights department, and there is no question that they could do a better job of marketing subsidiary rights than I could, and they are beavering away at it. So I'm not worried on that account.
On the other hand, I just (by
just, I mean in the last week) sold another manuscript that has been mouldering in a drawer in a hardback deal to a small publisher. It isn't going to make Publishers Marketplace reel in shock (and the splash from the publication would be no more than a blip on the radar screen of your career). It's no big deal--a 5,000 copy initial run, decent distribution.
But it's a book I like. It's also a book that plenty of agents liked, and one I have a lot of affection for. It's also a book that falls between every possible stool. A "grim cyberpunk political romantic comedy" is probably the best way to describe it, which may be why so many agents sat on it for so long before saying, "I can't sell this but I'm sure somebody else can." Some of them even (very kindly, I love them all) gave me recommendations to other agents. Too sci-fi for the mainstream folks, too quirky for most sci-fi folks, too "techno-thriller" for a lit-fic agent who liked my other work. Well...I'm sure you know the kind of thing I'm talking about.
(Side note: I just had a request via telephone for the full ms. from a good NY agency that admitted sheepishly they'd had the partial since 2002. Is that a record? Do I get a prize? I may post that question over on
Writing Novels.)
I'm not willing to hang out with this ms. while yet another agent looks at it and decides--I already have the glimmerings of a career in a totally different genre, and this book with the small publisher was five novels ago from my current WIP.. But I'd like to see it between covers rather than sitting on my hard disk. And some readers. including agents, suggested it wasn't really a novel, but a "hip summer movie" or "more of a graphic-novel thing."
The interesting thing is: I have all the subrights in my lap; the publisher keeps only North American print rights (as long as they keep it in print; then they revert.) So when I heard about agents who represented specific published properties, I became curious.
I've been lucky in my research since I posted. It's a little bit of an odd business, in that they might be representing a book, or a comic, or a video game, or a theme-park ride, or, in principle, a t-shirt. So there isn't really such a thing as a set of standard "query packages" (Q+syn, Q+syn+first three chaps, etc.) the way there are for books. And some of these folks have made their names and livings by selling properties where the literary agents and publishers had dropped the ball long ago.
Anyhow, thanks for the info--I really appreciate the time you took and the advice you provided, which was well beyond the call.