output and agents

Yesterday, I seriously applied myself. I wrote 8 pages. This is a lot for me. I know some of you regularly crank out upwards of thirty, but for me to write 2,534 words in 24 hours (I’m writing TNR 12 double spaced at the moment) is pretty damn amazing. Maybe my output is closer to Robin Owens, whose blog I just started reading. Good stuff, by the way.

How did I do it? I applied my ass very seriously to the well, in this case, to the carpet, since was writing at the coffee table, and made myself a pot of cinnamon tea, and just got to work. Is it any good? I think it needs what Julie would call “layering” becuase right now it’s a bunch of dialogue. It’s good dialogue, but it’s pillow talk. I don’t know if that’s interesting enough. Ten pages of pillow talk. Though again, maybe it’s time. Poor Amy (that’s my heroine’s name, Amy) has been on the go since chapter one. I’ll have to run it by my CPs.

But enough about my amazing output (which by the way, has better be repeated today, per soddisfare gli Italiani. Let’s talk about agents. I am lucky enough to have a total peach of an agent. But she wasn’t easy to get. It took more than a year, several books, several attempts and a huge stack of rejection letters before I triumphed.

The best advice I ever heard about getting an agent is as follows: If you have a well written, extremely marketable book and/or a good track record as an author, getting a good agent should be pretty straightforward. That’s the advice. It’s similar to Gena Showalter’s Magic Formula To Getting Your Book Published. Write good books. Sell them.

The real question is, how do you know that your agent is any good? Here’s a short checklist:

1) Does the agent regularly make sales to a variety of well-respected publishing houses for a variety of authors?
2) Is the agent a member of AAR?

There you go. Simple again. Now, it gets a lot more complicated than that, becuase some decent agents are better than others, and there are some agents who fit those two requirements that I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, and everyone has their own requirements about what is going to make an agent work for them — and despite following those two guidelines, you can still wind up with an agent that isn’t working for you or has a sucky contract (life of the copyright clause, anyone?) etc. etc., but you’d be surprised how many pitfalls can be avoided by cleaving to these two standards as your absolute bare minimum.

In fact, the list of what you don’t want in an agent is a lot longer. For instance, you don’t want an agent who does thisor any variation of it (it’s your agent’s job to know the market. If he or she doesn’t, find a new agent). You don’t want an agent who has been having a “building year” for the last three and can’t claim a single sale. (I’m sorry, but “under consideration” is like being “almost pregnant.”) You don’t want an agent who claims sales he/she hasn’t made, lies or manipulates the client list to make it look more impressive (I call that cooking the books, frankly), or in general who you catch lying about anything, ever, that isn’t in direct advocacy of their client to the publisher (e.g. “omitting” the fact that the client’s sales at his or her previous house were somewhat less than stellar in order to sell him or her into a new house, or perhaps not revealing that the author is late on her deadline because of a stint in rehab is okay, but anything else is beyond the pale). You don’t want an agent that advertises his or her “Critique Services.” EVER.

I’ve actually observed each of these. It makes me sick. It makes me sick that writers would put their trust in these scam artists — and they aren’t even the type of scam artists that Preditors and Editors warns you about — you know, the ones that charge fees and make you hire pricey “book doctors” (that are part of their company, natch) etc. etc. These people present themselves as legitimate agents, and I honestly believe that a few of them (not all) are trying to be. But they are going about it in all the wrong ways.

Now, before you jump down my throat, I know that every agent has to make a first book sale, have a first client, etc. Most of them do it as junior agents or assistants to already-established agents, and that way, they have the backing of their established boss or agency to help them break in. The ones that don’t usually have their boutique agencies burst onto the scene with property so hot that you hear about the agency’s inception at the exact same time that you hear about that sale. Agent comes from the Latin verb for “to do” or “to make” — agents “do,” they “make.” No one becomes an agent just by hanging out a shingle. They become an agent when they make a deal.