What Some Literary Agents are Saying to Aspirants of the Next Big Book

On June 19^th, I attended a panel discussion hosted by Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop as part of the culminating activities of the annual Lit Fest.  Agencies represented: Dunow, Carlson and Learner, Inkwell Management, Nelson Literary and Bond Literary Agency. All agents highlighted successful publications chosen from the slush pile.  Below are links to the agents, their agencies and examples of wildly successful books from first-time published authors.

Erin Hosier,  Dunow, Carlson and Lerner (NYC) – notable success: SMASHED

Julie Schilder, Inkwell Management (NYC) – notable success: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Kristen Nelson, Nelson Literary (Denver) – notable success: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Sandra Bond, Bond Literary Agency (Denver) (these links came from Sandra’s business card)

 The panel discussion started on this positive note and encouraged writers, published and unpublished, to be tenacious and persistent and believe in the slush pile system.  I’m posting my notes and hope that readers will find comfort and hope as I did.

We all start on equal footing.  Agents repeated over and over again that there is no back door, no secret handshake and lack of personal connections don’t place authors at a disadvantage.   

Some agents have staff assigned to manage and track the publicity and marketing efforts of the publisher on books have been placed.  These publicity strategists and marketing specialists ensure their books are being supported. (Nelson Literary, Inkwell Management).  These people will also give out copies for review in order to get the word out.

From the Q&A:

Authors are responsible for obtaining all copyright permissions if you are using quotes from a published work, lyrics from a song, photographs, etc.  Sometimes this can be expensive, as in the case of song lyrics, or hard to obtain.  Check out the Authors Guild for help with this.

Rejection letters – not all agencies send rejection letters.  Sandra Bond, for example, stated that she is unable to send rejection letters due to high volume of queries and submissions received.  She stated that this is written on her website (however I have not been able to pull up her website so cannot verify this now.)  All agents said that all queries are read which is the good news.  The reader may be the agent, a junior staffer or even an intern.  However, be assured, all queries are read with consideration given and if there is interest, you will be contacted.  If you want to be sure that your query has been rejected, you can always send a second query letter after three months and, if again no follow up is received from the agency, consider it to be a ‘no.’   Erin Hosier suggested that authors, after careful research and study, submit to 10 or 20 agents/agencies/publishers identified for their compatibility and needs.  Julie Schilder also commented 1) don’t send queries or submissions by overnight mail (all submissions are put in the same pile and given the same priority), 2) don’t send baked goods, gift certificates to local restaurants, etc (bribes don’t work and can backfire) and 3) NEVER pay someone to read your work (if an agent requests payment, just say no). 

All agents agreed that authors track their queries.  Authors need to know who was contacted and when and what material was proposed.  All communications between the author and agent/publisher should be tracked. 

Agents say that they will continue to shop a book, sometimes for years.  Sandra Bond shopped one for five years.  The good news today for short story writers – Delphinium Books is looking for new unpublished short stories.  Julie Schilder gave an example where she shopped a book for two and a half years before it was placed with a publisher.  The “niche-ier” the book, the faster agents will run out of places to send to.  But they all emphasized that if they accepted books, they really want to place them. 

When asked about the money (advances, royalties, sales), this is what they had to say:
Good news: Authors never have to pay back an advance, even if book doesn’t earn royalties.
Royalties are typically a percentage based upon sales.  For example, under 15,000 copies sold, earn 10-12.5% and over 15,000 earn 15%.
Publisher will track sales, and once a book “banks out”, meaning royalties are starting to accumulate after the advance has been met, will be paid to author.
Royalties are calculated based on the retail price or net rates (smaller publishers and paperback sales).

Did you know that book sales on amazon.com are all discounted?  Apparently so.  (So if you have a friend who is an author, they would appreciate it if you purchased your book at the local community book store. Note to self.)

Surprisingly, book sales are small.  If you want to get on the best-seller list, an example might be that 3,500 books sold in a week across the country.  Total book sales of 30,000 copies could earn an author national recognition.  According to agents, these numbers are “shocking” (I think because the volumes have reduced as book sales seem to be declining.  Just my assumption.)

Typical advances:

In general nonfiction advances are generally higher but the highest advances can be found in fiction.  Nonfiction books typically do not bank out.

Advances in order of genre, these are just general numbers and variances by author, topic, genre, audience and author’s platform can cause numbers to vary:
Most advances are less than $25,000

Sci-fi, literary fiction, fantasy: $5,000-$10,000

Young Adult and romance,: $5,000-$15,000
I didn’t hear what memoirs were going for. 

Things that turn agents off:

Queries from blaster services.
When agents see that authors have saturated the agent community, submissions tend to be deleted without consideration.

Also when all agents in the same agency are contacted by the same author pitching the same work, then the work and the author are viewed negatively. 

Believe it or not, some authors have reputations for submitting junk to everyone on a daily basis.  Just because they have about 400 different email addresses doesn’t fool the agents.  It would appear that some people are very obsessive about getting their work published and in these cases, tenacity ceases to be a descriptor used. 

Don’t say you’ve been working on the book for ten years, 25 years, etc.  Agents want to represent authors who will ideally publish more than one book.

Don’t call them ever before you’ve sent a query letter.  No pre-query letter calls.  Only call if there has been an expressed interest after the query letter has been sent. 

Things that turn agents on:

Query letters that hook the reader

Query letter suggestions from the agents, include:

your one paragraph about the story, imitate the writing on the back covers of books.  Don’t make it a synopsis, just a compelling paragraph that makes the reader want to discover more.  Send a synopsis only if requested.  Not all agents want a synopsis (2 pages) right away.

Take your story’s compelling point from something that happens in the first thirty (30) pages. 

The first paragraph, the “pitch blurb”, has to catch the reader or they don’t finish reading it.

Write in a conversational style.  “Have a voice.”

One paragraph should be about you – what you write, who you are.  If you write nonfiction, establish credibility on your topic.  Do you have a career trajectory?

This concludes my list of observations taken from the agent panel at Lighthouse’s Lit Fest.  Yes, I got Lit but not in that way.  Or was that only in Chicago at their lit fest as seen on a t-shirt at the Lighthouse Lit Fest?  I hope that these notes prove helpful to any and all aspiring authors.

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