Finding True Love, Finding a Literary Agent

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November 27, 2012 | 15 books mentioned 30 7 min read

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Typing THE END on your first novel is nearly as epic as saying I DO. Similar to an exchange of vows, after the champagne has been chugged and the celebratory cheers have faded, you wake up to a reality loaded with questions. Most notably: Where do I go from here? This isn’t a paper Jenga on my desk. How do I get my book published? These were my questions, at least. My published author friends answered: find a literary agent.

This is no reinvented love story. Many of you are at this juncture now, so we can be honest with one another. When you have your first manuscript in your arms and are querying agents, you aren’t particularly picky. The focus is on the end result — getting the book to a publisher. So you rush the agent “dating” process. I was guilty of that. I viewed finding an agent as yet another hurdle on my way to the printing press.

I welcomed every agent suitor. Sure, I scanned credentials, but querying from El Paso, Texas, everyone in New York City looked flashy and impressive. Every agent had a Bestseller in his or her clientele list. All sounded enthusiastic in email and on the phone. Frankly, I didn’t want to sit around pondering if I emotionally clicked with my agent or not, so long as they took my novel to Publisher’s Row. I was holding my first “book baby” and eager to get it to the next developmental stage.

“Why not fly to New York to meet the prospective proxies?” one of my friends asked. I laughed. Like, spittle-flying laughter. I had mortgage payments, utility bills, student loans. I barely had two quarters left at the end of the month to buy gum from a candy machine. Fly to New York to meet these people? Only on Santa’s sleigh.

covercoverSo I did the best I could from afar. I gratefully signed with an agency, and we sold my first and second novels, The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico and The Baker’s Daughter, to Random House/Crown in a two-book deal. But within twelve months, the blush of first love rubbed off the bloom, and I discovered that my first agent was not my match. In fact, we were remarkably unmatched. I now empathize for the swept-off-their-feet celebrity nuptials that end in tears and divorce.

Your agent relationship is akin to a marriage. Emotions, finances, and trust are all tangled up and can be easily wounded if you aren’t careful. Similarly, that agent can be one of your most loyal and cherished people on earth. Your literary spouse of sorts. I spent nearly two years silently observing and developing friendships with a select handful of admired agencies until I was ready to “date” seriously again.

This month, I celebrate my one-year anniversary with my new agent and it still feels as if we’re in our honeymoon phase. I recently saw her at one of my book events. To use a canned metaphor: we went together like peanut butter and jelly. She’s editorially brilliant and has the business prowess of a tiger, yes. But more importantly, she gets me and my writing. She believes in my work even when I doubt myself and encourages me to set my sights past the moon to the brightest star. She pushes me, using compassion and insight to buoy me forward, never backwards. She’s someone my husband loves. Someone I will introduce to my children when I have them. Someone I can’t imagine not having in my career or my life.

This is what a good author-agent relationship should be like. Still, I am but one author with a subjective experience to share. So I polled fellow author friends on what makes a good literary agent, in their experience. I ended up with the three essential C’s.

1. The Click.
Definition: that intangible zing through your core alerting you this is no ordinary meeting; the kinetic energy between two people; the magnetic draw that makes you want to not just go into business with this person but invite them into your life.

Testimonials:

coverBeth Hoffman (author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt):

There was an immediate “click” between us. We chattered and laughed as if we’d known each other for years. She has integrity and exudes confidence and professionalism…I trust her completely.

Matthew Dicks, author of Memoirs of An Imaginary Friend:

My agent falls only below my wife in terms of important women in my life (when my mother-in-law is in the room, I assign her the #2 spot, but it’s a lie). She is one of my most honest critics and also my biggest fan… In short, my agent is my friend above all else.

coverMegan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories:

I live in rural VT and [my agent] is my lifeline. I love her energy and her smarts. I trust her deeply…

Sarah Pekkanen, author of These Girls:

Like dating, authors need to find someone who feels like the right fit before taking the plunge into a committed relationship. I definitely found that in my agent. Before we even met, she cracked some very funny jokes—a sense of humor is high on my list of desirable qualities…

coverLydia Netzer, author of Shine, Shine, Shine:

Having an agent that will be honest with you is wonderful. Having an agent you can be honest with is even better.

2. Chutzpah.
Definition: the quality of being gutsy, both personally and professionally; someone who will go to the mat with you every time, as a partner, a cheerleader, a Mr. Miyagi to your Karate Kid. (I’m showing my age here.)

Testimonials:

coverChristina Haag, author of Come To The Edge:

Guidance, honesty, expertise, and chutzpah… She brings an excellent mix of instinct and business smarts to the table; she’s able to nurture a project, as well as fight for it.

Jenna Blum, author of The Stormchasers:

1. Unforced, enthusiastic love for the writer’s work. 2. Consistent and fast responsiveness. 3. Belief in the writer’s career, not just one project. I’ve been with my agent almost a decade and she is my right arm. I can’t imagine being without her. And she’s got the fiercest French accent ever.

M.J. Rose, author of The Book of Lost Fragrances:

While loving your agent is also great – this is 100% a business deal and your agent does work for you – you hired him or her – so it’s a partnership and important to have an agent who respects that and whom you feel comfortable in that role with.

Sarah Pinneo, author of Julia’s Child:

Not merely a lover of books, but a true business woman. She represents dozens of authors, yet still encourages me to copy her on every communication with my publisher, and she’s always on top of the flow… She knows how to talk to authors at those vulnerable moments when their insecurities are sticking out like porcupine quills.

coverLaura Harrington, author of Alice Bliss:

Key to a great relationship: Respect, honesty, loyalty… I want someone romantic enough to be in this crazy book world and hard-nosed enough to help me survive it.

3.  Character.
Definition: moral and ethical quality. (That came straight from Webster’s Dictionary. No expounding necessary.)

Testimonials:

Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Somebody’s Daughter:

A need for mutual respect and ETHICS as well as a sharp literary sense helped me to the right person.

coverKristina McMorris, author of Bridge of Scarlet Leaves:

An agent who: expresses passion for the author’s voice versus a single book, which sets the stage for a long-term relationship; treats the client like a partner, welcoming ideas and input in all areas; reads a client’s manuscript within days or weeks; communicates clearly and promptly, and above all, is a genuinely good person.

Marilyn Brant, author of A Summer in Europe:

Find someone you can trust professionally, communicate with effectively, and feel confident loves and respects your writing style. You want an agent who knows how to steer you well in both strengthening your manuscripts without changing your voice and in matching each of your novels with an editor who will also appreciate it and champion it within the publishing house.

There you have it. Like matrimony, your literary representation must be your better half in the publishing community. Never settle for mediocre. Take a cue from the love gurus and matchmakers: look in the mirror and tell yourself, “I’m worthy of a respectful relationship. I’m worthy of my one, true agent and nothing less.”

Image: Shelley Panzarella/Flickr

is the author of the international bestseller and 2012 Goodreads Choice Award nominee The Baker's Daughter (Crown) and The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico (Random House). Her novella The Branch of Hazel will be a part of Grand Central anthology (Penguin, July 2014). She is currently working on her third novel, to be published by Crown in 2014. You can learn more about Sarah at www.sarahmccoy.com or follow her on Twitter or Facebook.  Married to an Army doc, she currently lives in El Paso, Texas, but calls Virginia home.

Lists

Best American Short Stories: By the Numbers

Lists
November 10, 2009 | 15 books mentioned 14 2 min read
The Best American Short Stories, of all the annual story anthologies, seems to have the biggest following among readers. The series has been around in one form or another since 1915 and has published short fiction by pretty much all of America's best-known (and many more lesser known) practitioners of the form. The series' long history and comprehensive reach makes it a unique chronicle of the form. With that in mind, when I got a note from a reader about a collection of BASS data he had put together, I was very intrigued. Jake has spent the last year or so reading his way through the last 30 years of BASS collections and writing about it at a site called Years of BASS. As part of this project, he put together a spreadsheet of all the 639 stories that appeared in the collection from 1978 to 2008. Folks who want to dig into the info can find it as a Google Spreadsheet here, but I went ahead and pulled some numbers from the aggregated data. Interestingly, Alice Munro, though Canadian, has made the most BASS appearances over the last 30 years by a wide margin with 18 appearances. After her come some more of the leading lights of short fiction: Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike with nine stories each; Mavis Gallant (another Canadian) with eight; Joy Williams and Tobias Wolff with seven stories a piece; Lorrie Moore and Rick Bass with six stories each; and Charles Baxter, Raymond Carver, and Tim Gautreaux with five stories each. All told, these writers have accounted for about 13%. Writers with four or more stories have accounted for 21% of all the stories in the series; writers with three or more, 31% of the stories; and writers with two or more, for 52% of the series. This means that writers who had only one BASS story during the 30-year span accounted for about 48% of the stories in the series during that time. The gender split, meanwhile, turns out to be quite equal: 47% female and 53% male. If you dig into the spreadsheet and uncover anything else interesting, let us know. And as a point of comparison, check out New Yorker Fiction by the Numbers.
Lists
| 15 books mentioned 14 2 min read
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Lists

Father’s Day Books for Dads Who Actually Read

Lists
June 10, 2015 | 15 books mentioned 7 12 min read
Let’s say there’s a father in your life. Maybe you’re married to him. Maybe you’re his child. Maybe he’s just a buddy of yours. Last year, on Father’s Day, you bought him a tie in his favorite colors. The year before that, it was a calfskin wallet, which you’ve noticed he still hasn’t used. This year, with Father's Day just a week and a half away, you're leaning toward buying him a bookstore gift card because he likes to read, but you don't know what book to get him. Resist this impulse. For a lot of busy dads, a store card is less a gift than a chore, one that can be skipped. (Don’t believe me? Take a peek in his sock drawer, upper right hand corner, just behind that unused calfskin wallet: Yep, a small stack of unused gift cards.) More importantly, a gift is a way of telling someone that you value them, that you know them a little better than they realized, and few things do this better than a well-chosen book. Below are book suggestions for 11 different kinds of dads who read. These suggestions assume that the fathers you’re shopping for have read most of the more popular books about the topics that interest them and may be looking for something new. Most of the books on this list are in paperback and should cost less than $20. 1. Big Game Book Hunter Dad A certain kind of man views his bookshelves the way a leopard sees bleached bones on the veldt -- as evidence of past kills, the larger the better. Hence, the popularity of the Doorstop Novel, the 500-, 600-, 700-page social novel or family saga. Every year publishers lavish splashy advances on the latest epic that might appeal to that most elusive of literary beasts, the middle-aged male fiction reader. A few years ago, that book was Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. Last year it was Matthew Thomas’s We Are Not Ourselves, which, not so coincidentally, has just been released in paperback in time for Father’s Day. Both are solid novels, and brag-worthy kills for the Big Game Book Hunter in your life, but for sheer ambition neither can touch Phillipp Meyer’s cowboys-and-Indians epic, The Son. Meyer’s nearly 600-page Western contains three overlapping narratives, but the most gripping is that of family patriarch Eli McCullough, who is kidnapped by a Comanche raiding party in 1849 and raised as the chief’s adopted son before returning to white society. A particularly fearless reader-hunter will want to pair Meyer’s tale of the settling of Texas with Canadian writer Joseph Boyden’s equally audacious novel The Orenda, a fictional retelling of the bloody clash between French missionaries and local Huron and Iroquois tribes in 17th-century Canada. 2. Literary Fiction Dad He’s read Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. He’s braved the languors of the Las Vegas chapters of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. He’s read Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, and Jeffrey Eugenides. Why not branch out, see a little more of the world? In recent years, American readers have been treated to a bumper crop of first-rate literary fiction by immigrants from around the globe. If the Literary Fiction Dad in your life is open to reading women, he may want to try Americanah by Nigerian-American writer Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, or The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, an American of Bengali heritage. Among male writers, Nam Le, a Vietnamese-born writer raised in Australia and educated in the U.S., wrote a gripping collection of stories, The Boat, in 2008, and Chinese-American author Ha Jin, has turned out a steady stream of novels and story collections, perhaps the best of which is War Trash, set in a POW camp during the Korean War. But the Big Kahuna of American diaspora literature is Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has a legitimate claim to the title of best American novel of the new millennium. By turns hilarious, tender, and harrowing, Oscar Wao follows an overweight, Dominican-born sci-fi nerd in his search for love and the secret to survival in his cursed homeland. Diaz’s plot and characters are riveting, but the real pleasure of Oscar Wao is Diaz’s narrative voice, which combines slangy, high-velocity prose with penetrating insight into the political black hole that is the Dominican Republic. 3. Big Bad Noir Daddy Here’s a pro tip: To find a smart, well-written crime novel by a guy for guys, search the roster of writers for David Simon’s cable series The Wire. George Pelecanos, who was a writer on all five seasons, has somehow also found time to crank out 20 crime novels in roughly as many years, most of them set in and around Washington D.C., and focusing, with bracing honesty, on the sorry state of race relations in our nation’s capital. The Cut, from 2011, is as good a place to start as any. Another of Simon’s writers, Dennis Lehane, based out of Boston, runs hot and cold, but his 1998 novel Gone, Baby, Gone is a nicely twisted bit of noir, and 2001’s Mystic River would qualify as a work of literary fiction if a child didn’t die in the early pages. But the top thoroughbred in Simon’s stable, and arguably the finest American crime novelist at work today, is Richard Price. His books are structured as police procedurals and feature his famously razor-sharp dialogue, but Price is at heart an old-school social novelist in the mold of Charles Dickens and Émile Zola. His novels grab you by the ears and drag you into the hidden corners of modern America populated by immigrants, the poor, and those who prey on them. His latest, The Whites, written under the pen name Harry Brandt, offers a riveting look inside the minds of New York City police detectives who live their professional lives chest-deep in depravity and injustice. Price’s 1992 drug-dealer novel Clockers, later made into a Spike Lee joint, is another must-read. 4. Politically Incorrect Dad He’s inappropriate. He can’t control his appetites. He sweats a lot. His sense of humor is, well, different. But underneath all the layers of gruff and odd, beats a well-meaning heart. Meet Milo Burke, unlikely hero of Sam Lipsyte’s 2010 novel The Ask. Milo is a husband, a father of a young child, and a seething mass of misdirected grievance. “I’m not just any old hater,” he says early on. “I’m a hater’s hater.” In the opening pages, Milo loses his job wrangling donations for a third-tier university in New York City after he insults the talent-free daughter of one of the college’s wealthy donors, but is offered a chance at redemption if he can reel in a sizable gift from a rich college friend, who has, mysteriously, asked to work with Milo. Lipsyte specializes in the humor of white-male resentment, and when he misses he misses big, but The Ask is a tour de force of verbal pyrotechnics and shibboleth-skewering social insight. 5. World War II Buff Dad Big fat books about honorable wars are to grown men with mortgages what Call of Duty video games are to 10-year-old boys: mind-travel devices granting sedentary, suburban beings vicarious access to a world of danger and heroism. As with video game franchises, the options for quality reads about the Second World War are quite nearly boundless. For a broad overview, there’s Max Hastings’s Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945, but World War II was so huge and so complicated that it can be wise to take it in pieces, using, say, Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers as a window onto the American war effort in Europe or Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken to gain a finer-grained understanding of the Pacific Theater. A middle-ground approach that can satisfy the Big Game Hunter impulse while also offering a sharply observed portrait of the conflict that helped create the modern American military is Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy, which focuses on the American war effort in Europe. The three-volume set, An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, and Guns at Last Light, span a collective 2,349 pages, making it a prime trophy for anyone’s shelves. But Atkinson shifts so effortlessly from the panoramic to the close-up, giving the reader a day-by-day, sometimes minute-by-minute, account of what it felt and sounded and smelled like to be an American soldier at battle with the Axis powers, that trophy-hunting readers will be compelled to eat what they kill. 6. Civil War Buff Dad Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy is practically a novella compared to Shelby Foote’s three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, which clocks in at a mammoth 2,968 pages. Everything in Civil War historiography is big. James McPherson’s single-volume history, Battle Cry of Freedom, consumes 952 pages. Ken Burns’s TV documentary The Civil War spans more than 10 hours of airtime. And that’s not even touching on the vast shelf of biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee or the rich scholarship on individual battles or lesser-known generals and leaders. This is Big Game Hunter territory, and if the dad in your life is new to nerding out on Civil War minutiae, you may want to shell out for the first volume of Foote’s epic, Fort Sumter to Perryville, a comparatively slim 856 pages. But if you are looking for new perspectives on the era, check out T.J. Stiles's Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. As its subtitle suggests, Stiles’s biography frames the legendary bank robber not as a Robin Hood of the Wild West, but as a disaffected Confederate Army veteran bent on reviving the Lost Cause by any means necessary. Stiles writes well and is a scrupulous scholar, but he is also a gifted storyteller who reaches beyond cardboard outlaw stereotypes to bring the James boys to life on the page. 7. Business Maven Dad If the dad in your life goes in for business books, you can’t go wrong with Michael Lewis. Like his fellow bestseller-list regular Malcolm Gladwell, Lewis is perhaps too faithful to the journalist’s dictum to never let the facts get in the way of a good story, but he is a superb shoe-leather reporter and over the years Lewis’s eye for the big-picture truth has been unerring. His best book is probably The Big Short, about the 2008 financial collapse, but his 2014 book, Flash Boys, about computer-directed high-frequency trading, is also excellent. But anyone who reads business books will already have a shelf full of Michael Lewis. If you want a different take on American business, look for Beth Macy’s Factory Man, about John Bassett III, heir to a once-powerful North Carolina furniture-making company, who took on cheap imports from China and won. One longs for Lewis’s tale-spinning prowess in some of Macy’s background chapters that drag under the weight of her too-earnest reporting, but Bassett, the would-be furniture baron, is a colorful figure, and Macy’s core message, that a smart, driven factory owner willing to take some risks can beat offshore manufacturers at their own game, more than makes up for the book’s flabbier passages. 8. True Crime Dad Perhaps no section of the bookstore is more heavily stocked with schlock than the one devoted to true crime. For every classic like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or Dave Cullen’s meticulously reported Columbine, there are dozens of sensationalist gore-fests written by the likes of Ann Rule and R.J. Parker. Good true-crime writing should do more than pile up the bodies. It should use crime to shed light on an underside of a society, teaching us the unspoken rules of the world we live in by telling the stories of those who break those rules in the most aberrant ways. Few recent books do this as well, or as hauntingly, as Robert Kolker’s Lost Girls, about the murders of five prostitutes buried in shallow graves along Long Island’s South Shore. Lost Girls is an unsettling read because the murders remain unsolved, but Kolker provides a fascinating look into the shadowy world of Internet escorts. Unlike prostitutes of an earlier era, modern sex workers can connect with their johns online, eliminating the need for pimps or brothels. This means the women can keep more of their earnings and are freed from what is often an abusive and controlling relationship, but as Lost Girls illustrates, this freedom costs them the physical protection of a pimp, making them especially vulnerable to violence. 9. Sports Nut Dad As with true crime, the sports book genre breeds schlock. How many books on how to straighten out a golf shot can one man read? A good sports book, like a good true-crime book, should go beyond the details of its subject to make a larger point about society or about athletic excellence. Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, about the subculture of high school football in Texas, does this. So does Andre Agassi’s surprisingly engrossing autobiography Open, about the trials of a man who succeeds at a sport he has come to hate. To one degree or another, all sports books try to answer the question of what makes a great athlete tick, but in The Sports Gene, David Epstein takes this question literally, using science to explore mysteries like why Kenyans win so many marathons and what it takes to hit a major-league fastball. The book’s message that there is no one path to athletic success may trouble the sleep of those Little League dads dreaming of turning their eight-year-olds into future Hall of Famers, but Epstein’s intelligent use of sports science, and his willingness to embrace ambiguity, makes for absorbing reading. 10. Vinyl Collector Dad The return of vinyl records has emboldened a generation of Boomer and Gen X dads to haul their high school LPs out of the garage and give them pride of place in the living room. But they need something to read while they’re listening to all those dinged-up copies of Kind of Blue and Exile on Main St. Launched in 2003 and now published by Bloomsbury, 33 1/3 is a series of more than 100 short books about classic albums, ranging from Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones (No. 53, by David Smay) to AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (No. 73, by Joe Bonomo). Each book in the series is by a different author, mostly music critics and musicians, with the occasional novelist like Jonathan Lethem (No. 86, the Talking Heads’ Fear of Music) thrown into the mix. Some books in the series put the focus on the music while others take a more biographical or social-historical approach. One of the titles, No. 28 by John Niven, on The Band’s Music from Big Pink, is written in the form of a novella, telling the true story of how Bob Dylan’s one-time backup band created its iconic 1968 album from the perspective of a fictional observer. Overall, the series skews heavily toward Music White People Like, though acts like Public Enemy (No. 71, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Christopher Weingarten) and J Dilla (No. 93, Donuts, by Jordan Ferguson) do occasionally appear. 11. Aspiring Writer Dad If you want to take the how-to route with your Aspiring Writer Dad, your best bet is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. While Lamott’s reflexive (and, to these ears, highly calculated) hippy-dippy whimsy can grate, she is a gifted teacher and her chapter on writing shitty first drafts is justifiably legendary. But giving an aspiring writer Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is like buying a pocket dictionary for a college-bound high school graduate: It’s a cliché, and he’s probably got six copies at home, anyway. If the aspiring writer in your life is, like most aspiring writers, already up to his ears in well-intended advice, switch gears and give him Boris Kachka’s Hothouse, a gossipy insider’s history of how the sausage gets made in New York publishing. In this dishy corporate biography of the publishing firm Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which has published everyone from T.S. Eliot and Roberto Bolaño to 1950s diet guru Gayelord Hauser, Kachka serves up enough sex and intrigue to keep the lay reader turning pages, but the book is fundamentally the story of how one headstrong publisher and a handful of talented editors struggled to maintain an independent publishing vision in a rapidly consolidating industry. Image Credit: The Athenaeum.
Lists
| 15 books mentioned 7 12 min read
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From the Newsstand Lists

New Yorker Fiction By the Numbers

From the Newsstand Lists
January 4, 2011 | 15 books mentioned 8 4 min read
Several years ago I started cataloging the fiction published in The New Yorker in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet began merely as a way to keep track of what I’d read, but I soon became curious about what the spreadsheet’s data-sorting capabilities could reveal. I added details like the gender of the authors, their nationality, and the number of times they’d been published in the magazine. I began reading New Yorker fiction fastidiously in 2003, the spreadsheet’s original first year of data. But this year I went back and added in 2001 and 2002 as well, bringing this year’s spreadsheet to a full ten years. If you’d like to tinker with it yourself, you can find it here. To me, the most notable thing about this year’s crop of fiction is how American it was. Of the 54 stories the magazine published, 36 were written by Americans. That’s around 66 percent, significantly higher than the overall ten-year average of 53 percent. Much of this increase stems from the New Yorker’s "20 Under 40" project, in which they selected twenty writers to represent the future of American fiction. That project in itself indicates a key part of the magazine’s ambition: to cultivate and shape an American literary culture. The New Yorker is uniquely positioned to do so. No other magazine in the country (or even in the world, I would venture) publishes as many stories for a readership as large as The New Yorker’s. Back when reading short fiction was a more widely popular form of entertainment, there were multiple mass-audience venues for writers to publish in. Now, essentially, there’s the New Yorker and there’s everyone else—a few monthlies like Harper’s, and then the ever-burgeoning market of university-affiliated and independent literary magazines whose comparatively small readership does not deter the hopeful from filling their slush piles. It’s tempting to see these smaller magazines as a sort of farm system and the New Yorker as the big leagues, but of course there are great writers who have never been published in the magazine, and there are plenty of New Yorker stories that fail to move me at all. It’s hard work to make a story come alive, to show the reader a new world, or put the reader convincingly into the mind of a disturbing character, or make the reader care about a moment of moral choice, or simply observe human beings with great perceptiveness. The people who devote their lives to the creation of such things need encouragement and support. On a very practical level, the New Yorker helps cultivate an American literary culture by offering a kind of brass ring for writers to dream of grabbing. Of course, it also pays good money for stories. The New Yorker’s support has, for example helped to sustain the career of Alice Munro, a fantastically good writer whose entire output has, essentially, been in the short story form, which typically does not provide great financial remuneration. Here’s what Munro herself said about the magazine: Selling to The New Yorker made the whole business of being a short-story writer valid in a way, because I still had these recurring fits of I must give this up and write a novel. And then, afterward, I didn’t have as many of them, I didn’t have the same urgency, I didn’t any longer think of myself as a writer who had halted at some, you know, intermediate stage of development. And I became content with doing stories. he magazine’s showcasing of short fiction helps support the genre itself and, for me at least, increases the pleasures of that genre. I find that I enjoy an Alice Munro story (or one by George Saunders or Steven Millhauser or Louise Erdrich) more when it stands alone in a magazine, framed like a work of art in a museum, instead of collected in a book with ten or twelve others, or even, sometimes, as part of a novel. Looking at the stats, one might gripe about the recurrence of certain names. There are certain writers that I could do with less of, but over a ten-year period it’s hard to complain about getting to read seventeen Alice Munro stories, twelve by T. Coraghessan Boyle, or nine by George Saunders. Each year, the New Yorker presents its readers with a gigantic anthology of fiction, dribbled out at the rate of about one story a week. Many subscribers, I suspect, read little of that anthology. Others read it religiously. For a few years I read the entire thing; lately I’ve been getting to about half of it. In any case, my spreadsheet offers something like a table of contents to that ongoing and often quite rewarding anthology which, like all anthologies, represents a vision of literary history and a statement of literary value. With ten years of data compiled, we can get some hard info on the New Yorker’s tendencies when publishing fiction. Frequency: The first thing we always look at is if the New Yorker is bringing new writers into the mix or sticking with its old standbys.  The "20 Under 40" project this year helped skew things toward newer names this year. Still, Just 10 writers account for 114 (or 22%) of the 514 stories to appear over the last ten years. Just 28 writers account for 215 (or 42%) of the stories. The New Yorker is sometimes criticized for featuring the same writers again and again, but it appears to be getting better on this front. The 28 "standbys" noted above and listed below accounted for only 13 of the 54 stories published in 2009 (or 24%). On the flip side of this argument, 17 writers appeared in the New Yorker for the first time in 2010 (at least since 2001). Gender: Of the 514 stories in the New Yorker from 2001 through 2010, 184 or 35.8% were penned by women. 2010 was 37% female. Nationality: As noted above, New Yorker fiction artificially skewed American in 2010, but overall over the last ten years, 54% of the sories in the magazine have been penned by Americans. Coming in second are the Brits at 43 stories and in third the Irish at 34 stories. Returning to the frequency question, below are all the writers who have appeared in the New Yorker at least five times over the last ten years. These are the superstars of New Yorker fiction (stars indicate the number of stories, if any, they had in the New Yorker in 2010.): 17: Alice Munro* 14: William Trevor 8: T. Coraghessan Boyle* Haruki Murakami 11: John Updike Tessa Hadley* 10: Louise Erdrich* 9: George Saunders* Roddy Doyle* 8: Roberto Bolaño** 7: Jonathan Lethem Annie Proulx Antonya Nelson E. L. Doctorow** 6: Aleksandar Hemon Charles D'Ambrosio David Means** Julian Barnes Thomas McGuane 5: Ann Beattie Jhumpa Lahiri Edward P. Jones Jonathan Franzen* Lara Vapnyar Joyce Carol Oates* Marisa Silver Tobias Wolff Yiyun Li*
From the Newsstand Lists
| 15 books mentioned 8 4 min read
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30 comments:

  1. Reading this post was perfect timing for me. I am five weeks into querying agents about my debut young adult novel. I’ve been studying a few for over a year, hoping we would be a fit, only to accidentally hit send on the wrong query email message to one of my top choices! I got a no rather quickly and expectedly, my bad for sending it with a sick little one and not much sleep- but I was so excited.

    I want to find someone who loves my book and will be a champion for me and the work. I hope to be friends- that my agent will be able to handle my multiple personalities- the neurotic writer and pragmatic business person. I tell myself every no takes me one step closer to a yes. Come on yes!
    -Holly

  2. It’s clear to me after writing my second novel that I’ve got the wrong agent. He won’t touch it, and I’m afraid he doesn’t understand my work at all. The trouble is that he hasn’t sold my first novel yet. I’m halfway through a third, which is YA and may be what he considers “more commercial,” but the relationship has become painful to endure.

    As yet, I’m unpublished anywhere, and given how distinctive (read: weird, uncategorizable, “subversive”) my work is, I don’t like my chances in the slush pile. My gut tells me to hang on to this agent until I make a sale, either on his steam or my own. It seems like without a book in the world I’ve got little chance of finding my one, true agent.

    Any advice from the Millions-verse?

  3. Thanks for the post. My only comment is to the line “I welcomed every agent suitor.” This makes it sound like you put out a mating call and agents came running. Truth of the matter is, most authors have the opposite problem: even hearing back from agents, who are drowning in slush piles.

    New writers need to know how difficult it is to get any agent to even pay attention, never mind picking the right one.

    I think there’s an opportunity for you to talk more about landing an agent, which involves 1) writing something great 2) that agents think they can sell and 3) networking more than querying.

    cheers

  4. Too many new authors do think of their work as a beautiful new born and believe that everyone see their work as they do. If they would view their manuscript as something that has to be commercially viable as they are putting their words down or editing, the end result would be more favorable.

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  6. Thank you all for reading! I so appreciate you taking the time to comment and share your stories. It makes the process of finding a literary “match” feel less cumbersome to hear other writers’ experiences.

    Holly, good luck and keep at it! Finding an excellent representation match takes time. Like dating, the “no’s” are just folks moving aside so you can find the agent that fulfills all three of the Cs. Wishing you all the best!

    Stu, Just know (as I learned the hard way) that once your agent sells your book, you are committed/stuck to them for the duration of that contract. So, in my humble opinion, if you aren’t happy and are resolute that this is NOT your agent match, I’d chance requesting your manuscript back from the said agent and finding someone who you feel confident to “represent” your body of work and you as an author. Just my two cents to take or leave. Good luck, my friend!

    Todd, words of true wisdom! Thank you for commenting. Yes, there is oodles more to landing an agent than I’ve discussed here. There ought to be a course on it… a handbook or something! As a “new writer,” I learned from the school of hard knocks. I’m forever grateful to The Author’s Guild and their legal team for shepherding me through most of the legalities involved. I encourage all authors to do the same. Be wise and know all your options and rights! (http://www.authorsguild.org/) Thanks again for bringing up that it ain’t all roses and love songs, Todd.

    Great discussions. Thank you all again!

  7. Zoinks. That’s food for thought, all right. For some reason it had never occurred to me that I might be asked to sign a contract for a certain period of time.

    Since I’m basically repping my first two novels by myself at the moment, sending them to houses that don’t require agented manuscripts (like McSweeney’s, Small Beer, and other oddball small presses open to cross-genre weirdness), I suppose I could always break optimistic and plan to sell one on my own.

    Thanks so much for your input, Sarah.

  8. Absolutely my pleasure, Stu.

    If you aren’t already a member of The Authors Guild, I highly encourage you to sign up. There’s a minimal yearly fee and they are BEYOND amazing in helping authors read between the lines of agent contracts. They were instrumental in my “love story.” Once you are a member, all of their phenomenal legal services are at your beck and call. Whatever you decide to do with your manuscripts, I suggest you check in with them. They may not be able to give you an absolute solution, but they’ll give you the finest, unbiased advice in publishing. That I can guarantee… and you can quote me to them.

    Good luck, friend!

    http://www.authorsguild.org/

  9. That’s funny — I just got off the phone with them! They were wicked helpful from the first word and gave me far more confidence than I woke up with this morning. It sounds like as long as I’m in the minor leagues, I can get by just fine with a membership there, then use their advice to find the right agent.

    That’s it, then. My mind’s made up not to hand my new MS to my old agent. This has been a torturous month, but I’m feeling all sunshiney now.

    This is internet serendipity at its finest. Many thanks.

  10. Stu!

    I am clapping (literally) my hands for you. Congratulations! “Wicked helpful” = The Authors Guild. You penned it beautifully.

    So glad you took my advice to call them, and that you now have a plan for moving forward! Trust me: You have saved yourself months–*years* even– of heartache.

    Lord, I know we’ve just met here, but I could pop a bottle of champagne in your honor. Happy day to you!

    Most truly,
    Sarah

  11. Great post! – As new authors, I think there is the urge to get somebody-anybody- who will offer to be our agent. My first novel had 15 rejections, and by that time I was onto novel 2 which is what I’m focusing , and coming to the end of now. So this was fantastic advice. In it for the long haul, like a marriage is a great analogy, and I shall definitely look into joining the Author’s Guild. Thanks so much :-)

  12. As a penniless country bumpkin from rural Iowa, I can relate with the hilarity of any pie in the sky thoughts of jet setting to New York. Where I fail to ‘click’ is the part where I have the ability to pick and choose an agent. I gave up some time ago submitting cold called, slush pile queries. There may be a mere five degrees of separation between any two souls, but it appears as though I am lacking degrees number three and four to ‘network’ with anyone in New York. Currently, I am working on my fourth self-published Iowa based novella. It’s a lot of work to market and distribute, etc., but I really get to know my readers and have developed a niche market that is genuinely devoted. The whole agent query process definitely soured me. Let the gatekeepers have their keys. The modern world has tarnished the sparkle of them anyhow.

  13. I never could get an agent. I got my book read by James Frey, Eric Simonoff, and Michael Signorelli (Harper/Collins).
    The book made the short list of the SFU/Anvil Press First Book Contest.
    I have pieces of it published in SubTerrain, a quarterly literary magazine.
    There is something missing in the above essay. Why did you have agents courting you when most novice or unpublished writers find it harder to retain an agent than to get a publishing contract?
    Are you really that good? Are you a journalist? Something doesn’t make sense here.
    Wait! Let me rephrase that. Why let the facts get in the way of your slick, breezy, dishonest essay?

  14. Charles Schwend wrote: “If they would view their manuscript as something that has to be commercially viable as they are putting their words down or editing…”

    I would take the “as they are putting words down” out of this sentence for a couple of reasons. Writing is hard for some, and when you’re newly working at it, inserting a self-editor at this stage might be self-defeating. Second, you’ve got to love the book you’re working on, focusing on that as you’re doing the first draft more than commercial possibilities, or no one else is going to love it.

    But for editing…definitely. If you’re serious about trying to publish, then everything you do after writing “THE END” on the first draft needs to keep “commercially viable” in mind.

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  16. @Jesse

    “Why did you have agents courting you when most novice or unpublished writers find it harder to retain an agent than to get a publishing contract?”

    Agreed. I posted above questioning the same thing. Sarah, this is a good, inspirational article but there is indeed something missing. 99% of authors do not have agents courting them.

    What special circumstance did you find yourself in where this was the case?

    Elaborating on this would provide great context while also managing the expectations of your audience, who are probably beating themselves up because they dont have agents courting them.

    cheers

  17. 99% of authors seem to view agents as the keepers of the magical keys to the kingdom, as if the only thing standing between them and a flourishing career is representation.

    The truth is that you need an agent once your career is already rolling. The only special circumstances I’ve seen involve conspicuous excellence and/or family members who are A-list career bestsellers.

    If you’ve got a great novel, you still need to become noticeable — through short stories, awards, or networking — before you can get an agent who’ll do you any good. Your career is in your own hands; an agent usually just manages it.

    There are exceptions, of course, but they’re so rare that it’s far healthier to take a serious look at the market and acknowledge that this is a long game indeed.

  18. A.K.,
    Thanks for sharing your struggle to find an agent. Your positivity and determination is just the kind of drive that will propel you right into the hands of the excellent agent meant to represent *you*– your writing and you as an author. Good luck and never settle!

  19. For a handful of folks who are curious about the line “I welcomed every suitor.”

    This was an essay about finding your one, true match. My first match was not, so I can’t accurately write an essay about that first process as I, obviously, completely botched it. What I meant by “welcoming every suitor” was that if an agent showed interest in my work, I *flung* open my door: “Come on in!” I’m sorry I didn’t elaborate on the painful 9 months of querying for my first manuscript (The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico). It was my thesis novel, having just graduated from a three-year, in-residency creative writing MFA program. So if you add that on top of everything, I’d say I sat alone with my writing for nearly 4 years in an attempt to get my foot in the publishing door.

    For every positive suitor/response, I received two rejections. However, I didn’t let it deter my resolve to get my book published. I pushed on… sent three new queries for every rejection. I inundated NYC with my letters. A majority, I simply never heard from– lost in slush piles across Manhattan. In the end, I probably sent my work out to nearly seventy agencies from NYC to California. So yes, I had multiple “suitors” but I cast a WIDE net and wasn’t particularly picky… as this essay warns.

    That’s my hard knocks story. Again, mine is not at all unique. Every writer has been through some semblance of this tale of desperation, frustration and nail-biting hope breaking into the biz. Many have had it far harder than I did, so I can’t write a piece expounding on the trials and tribulations. Nobody wants to read a pity party and I, especially, don’t want to write it because in my case, the ending of my first literary marriage was a sad and painful one (i.e. author-agent divorce).

    So please forgive me, kind readers, if I chose to focus on what *does* work, what I wish I would’ve known to look for, what makes a good relationship with your agent– not just from my perspective, but from all of the fabulous authors that graciously shared their own literary agent stories. My aim was simply to aid those that could use both the applicable advice and a little cheerleading in the midst of this exasperating and often very long process. Don’t give up, don’t rush, wait patiently for the one that will be your champion.

    Are we all friends again?
    Cheers!

  20. Except it’s all totally different for non-fiction. I found this interesting, and sort of wished for a minuet that I wrote fiction. But I ams what I am, as Popeye wisely said.

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  24. Sarah,

    Thank you for the information in the article and for your follow up comments.

    My questions pertains to your comment: “What I meant by “welcoming every suitor” was that if an agent showed interest in my work, I *flung* open my door: “Come on in!” I’m sorry I didn’t elaborate on the painful 9 months of querying for my first manuscript (The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico).”

    So with hindsight, would you have said, “no” to the first agent? I would like to understand what you would’ve done differently.

    I’ve signed with a small press for two novels. They specialiaze in romance. My women’s fiction manuscripts do not fit their niche, and I’m seeking representation for those works. How do I avoid the pitfall of “first agent divorce”?

    Warmest Regards,

    Linda Joyce

  25. Thanks. One of the more helpful pieces I’ve written on agents, a subject that bewilders me.

    Ms. McCoy, is there a place or a way to find agents who specialize in taking stories to film?

  26. Dear Linda,

    First off, congratulations on your upcoming two novels! Thanks for reading this essay and taking the time to reply so thoughtfully.

    To your questions: What would I have done differently? How do I avoid pitfall of agent-author divorce?

    A: I’m a woman who believes that every event has a purpose–even the ones that may be perceived as “mistakes” and “bad.” The bottom line for my Ex agent was written in dollar signs. I’m eternally grateful to her for negotiating my first two-book contract with Random House. I count myself entirely blessed to have gotten my foot into the publishing world with such a phenomenal start. However, where we failed to see eye to eye was on the personal level. She didn’t fit the three C’s for me, personally. Irreconcilable differences, to use a divorce settlement term.

    I wish I would’ve known that business deals and being a power negotiator are excellent attributes for one’s literary representation; however, if that’s the total package, you’re in for some heartache. It’s like marrying someone because they look fabulous on paper. They’ve got a good pedigree. Well off. Good credentials. Good family. Good job. They present all shiny and smiling. You say the vows, make it legal, then move in together and realize you simply do *not* click.

    Clicking, chutzpah and character are as important as being able to sell-sell-sell. Thus, this essay’s content. Doing it differently… if I couldn’t have met them in person, I would’ve had more telephone conversations with all my prospects. Chatted with them more than just a couple of times to see how they were over time. That’s what I did during my two years of “dating” to find my treasured, current agent– my match.

    I hope that helps somewhat. Good luck, Linda!

    Yours truly,
    Sarah

  27. Dear Shelley,

    To be honest, I’m not terribly familiar with literary agents who deal exclusively in book-to-film. I assume that many of those might be located in Los Angeles/California so it might help to focus on researching specific agents in that area.

    Also, it helps to simply ask. That’s another great piece of advice I wish I would’ve taken– ASK QUESTIONS. Ask the agent all the questions you like. If they are your match then they want to hear them. As your possible “representation” in the broader publishing community, they need to embody all the factors that are important to you.

    So, Shelley, if book-to-film is high up on your list, ask what book-to-film projects they’ve worked on and get the name(s) of their dramatic/film sub agents in Hollywood. A quality literary agency will be open with sharing that information. Once you have a name/company, you can Google around and decide if that suits your career vision.

    Also, you could look at the contemporary books that have been made into films already (Ex. The Help, Lincoln, Brokeback Mountain, Twilight). Find the authors and their agents. There’s a place to start!

    I hope that gives you some ideas. Happy agent dating, Shelley.

    Yours truly,
    Sarah

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  29. You people are pathetic if you akin your agent to a partner. They are just an ugly part of an even uglier wall of pretenses which make up publishing. I find that agents juggle you on their own terms not yours–how is that like a marriage? Sure I get along with my agent but unlike you people I actually understand that it all falls on my shoulders. It’s my book. My career and I’m only a fraction of my agent’s thoughts. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll start thinking about them in the same way.

  30. I did get a publisher for my book. I have some bitter experiences with agencies but I can’t relate them here because my publisher doesn’t want me cutting loose with the pathological stuff anymore. It alienates people.
    Early Out, published by Mountain Springs House. Nice new cover, new day, new me. Different you. Maybe.

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