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[Agent] Zack Company / Endpapers Press (Andy Zack)

amergina

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Well, I was curious, and since I have a Publishers Marketplace account, I thought I'd take a look.

Now, not every agent posts every deal, so it's just data points.

In the last 12 months, Mr. Zack has had two deals listed.

One was a three book "very nice" deal to Orbit (SF/F imprint of Hachette). This is a very normal (and reasonable... "very nice" means the deal was for $50,000 to $99,000) trade deal with a well-known SF/F imprint of a big 5 publisher. It's somewhat odd that the deal was posted the date the book came out, though (Aug 5 this year). Deals happen in advance of publication by a pretty good piece, especially for paper books, so the actual deal probably took place in 2015 or 2014.

The other was for a memoir in a "nice" ($1-$49,000) deal to Vantage Point. There's a couple of hinky things with this one. First is though the deal was posted in August of 2016, it's for a deal that happened sometime before Spring of 2012, because the deal lists that the book is due to be published in Spring 2102. The books did come out in 2012, BTW. BUT, Vantage Point, who published it, was a vanity press that went out of business in January of 2013. Now, the book in question was republished (in 2013) with a different press, Quadrant Books, which is an imprint of Endpapers Press, which is a Division of Author Coach, LLC., which is owned by Andrew Zack.

So, there's some info. You can take what you will from it.
 

M.Charles

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Well, I was curious, and since I have a Publishers Marketplace account, I thought I'd take a look.

Now, not every agent posts every deal, so it's just data points.

In the last 12 months, Mr. Zack has had two deals listed.

One was a three book "very nice" deal to Orbit (SF/F imprint of Hachette). This is a very normal (and reasonable... "very nice" means the deal was for $50,000 to $99,000) trade deal with a well-known SF/F imprint of a big 5 publisher. It's somewhat odd that the deal was posted the date the book came out, though (Aug 5 this year). Deals happen in advance of publication by a pretty good piece, especially for paper books, so the actual deal probably took place in 2015 or 2014.

The other was for a memoir in a "nice" ($1-$49,000) deal to Vantage Point. There's a couple of hinky things with this one. First is though the deal was posted in August of 2016, it's for a deal that happened sometime before Spring of 2012, because the deal lists that the book is due to be published in Spring 2102. The books did come out in 2012, BTW. BUT, Vantage Point, who published it, was a vanity press that went out of business in January of 2013. Now, the book in question was republished (in 2013) with a different press, Quadrant Books, which is an imprint of Endpapers Press, which is a Division of Author Coach, LLC., which is owned by Andrew Zack.

So, there's some info. You can take what you will from it.
I did some more looking there too, and he has the same deal listed, just different wording, twice as well. When he first hit my radar, I saw that he had 2 recent deals, and had been in business for over a decade.

Closer look tells me, no, he hasn't had a deal in at least a year, since the one book was just published.

Thanks.
 

M.Charles

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Just to follow up: Publisher's Marketplace told me that the 'recent deal' issue was *their* doing. Something about using a Google spider to update the page since it hasn't been visited in a long time.

So, it wasn't a deliberate issue done by anyone.
 

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Any recent dealings or news about this agent? I hear he still requires hard copies of manuscripts which, in 2020, seems a bit odd to me.
 

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Any recent dealings or news about this agent? I hear he still requires hard copies of manuscripts which, in 2020, seems a bit odd to me.

I suggest you read this thread carefully.
 

macleod1972

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Just got a full request from a very respectable agency. Thing is, the email starts 'Dear Author,' refers to my 'work', and doesn't even seem to specify whether fictiion or non-fiction, but provides guidelines on how to format and send both. Is a 'form request' now the norm? To be honest, it doesn't inspire much confidence that they will take much care of my book, when they can't even refer to me by name??
 

lizmonster

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Had you queried them? There are some scams going around where people use the names of real, reputable agents.

A reputable agent won't ever cold-email you.
 

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Or at least if they do reach out to you unprompted, they'll explain why. Like they read your blog or a short story or something, and they'll ask if you have anything (like a novel) ready for representation. But it would absolutely be personal! I have gotten form requests from querying, but even then they managed to include my name and title of the book I'd queried. This raises red flags for me
 

macleod1972

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I couldn't remember submitting to this company - I couldn't find them in my 'sent' box, then realised on looking at their submission guidelines I must have used their eQuery (TM) form (!) Anyway, they are called the Zack Company. I say respectable, but I guess I mean their website is 'shiny'. Not complaining about them at all, just unused to such an impersonal request for a full manuscript! I won't be sending.
 

mrsmig

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There's a thread about the Zack Company and Mr. Zack here. It makes for...interesting reading.
 

Woollybear

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Twitter feed of TZC is also interesting to browse. e.g. advice to not use the word 'was' more than 100 times in your entire manuscript. <puzzled>

While I understand that it can be a sign of early writing, flipping open a recent trade-published best seller of 500 pages shows three instances of 'was' on the page. If each page has three instances, that means this well-regarded book has 1500.
 

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Twitter feed of TZC is also interesting to browse. e.g. advice to not use the word 'was' more than 100 times in your entire manuscript. <puzzled>

That's astonishingly stupid advice. Was/were are crucial in order to use a variety of modes/tenses/voices in modern English.

That's almost always the kind of advice associated with someone woefully ignorant about passive voice, and English grammar, and they associate was with passive voice, and passive voice as a sin. Neither are reasonable assumptions.