That's what I'm mad about. I can promise you one thing. If I ever manage to get an agent, I'm going to make his job hell.
I would be writing for recognition, anyway. I swear, if an agent promised to do EVERYTHING for me, save the actual writing, (and this includes laughing at all my jokes) he could totally have 50%. edit, let's make that 49%. Dominance has to be established...
There's nothing wrong with doing your own work to help the cause. ( Follow me on Twitter and my blog )
Yes there is. Agents need to understand that they have to pull their weight. Being a gatekeeper isn't a service, it's a responsibility that comes along with an actual job. That job is to be the author's bitch.
Dude, I've got a marketing plan to fix that. It includes you side-swiping a Kardashian's car and an ensuing drunken brawl with Kanye. It goes viral, we cash in. I'll take care of your estate until you get released.
Once you get to perhaps 15 rejections with 0 requests, you'll probably want to rework the query and/or your first 5/10 pages. The 10% supposedly shows that your query is working.
There's an awful lot of vitriol on this thread, and to me it honestly just looks as though certain numbers of people are raging because they're failing to find representation, as though agents should be queuing up to take on their manuscripts. It reminds me of the guys who are lovely until you refuse to sleep with them. I think Tenderiser has the right of it in saying that querying isn't perfect, and it is frustrating, but that seeing agents as people doing their job (which, shock and horror, may include saying no to you) helped.
I can't speak for others, but I haven't approached any agents. I know my novel would be rejected out of hand because of its length ...and fair enough. I don't blame agents for that. I understand the economics of printing a long book that hasn't proven itself with sales. I'll be self-publishing, so I don't have a personal axe to grind. My particular annoyance about some agents (and what we get told about how they choose what to read) is the arbitrary nature of what they apparently choose to dump in the reject pile before they've read a single word of it. (No prologues, etc.) That's not the same thing as being told 'no.' It's more like refusing to sleep with a guy because he is blonde, or has freckles. Also the apparent fact that if you are a genre writer you have a much easier time pitching your books. We have published authors on this thread, and those who have landed agents and are awaiting publication. Are ANY of you guys NOT writing (or pitching) within a genre? Just curious. Anybody out there been published in General Fiction?
Genre writing seemed to be a handicap for UK agents, most of whom seemed to prefer literary works or only "upmarket" genre (whatever that means). Cross-genre is another matter entirely. If bookstores won't know where to put it, that's a huge handicap.
Seriously, though, I'm curious. I know you write Romance. Are there any other published (or about to be published) authors on the forum who don't write within a genre? Or subgenre, or supergenre or upmarket genre or crossover genre. Just General Fiction? I'm curious about how they pitch their books. Literary fiction is a different animal from General Fiction. General fiction has more to do with topic, while Literary Fiction generally has to do with the style of writing.
I thought we only had one published author on the forum? At least, only one that posts with any regularity. It'd be interesting to know what % of published fiction is genre. I would imagine a big old chunk?
Well, of course I meant traditionally-published novelists. The only two I can think of just now (probably because of their contributions to forum threads) are Bayview and TWErvin. I'm sure there are others, though. At least a few.
That's exactly the problem. Never knowing if you are being turned down because your book is bad or lacks a market (ie reasonable reasons for turning a book down) or if your book is being tossed out without being read is easily 90% of what's objectionable here. None of us want to hear our books are dreadful but if they are genuinely unsellable then I dare say we could be adults about it. But if they aren't even being read because of some factor we weren't aware of that makes no direct impact on the narrative itself then that's more than just frustrating. Rolling the dice is bad enough. Not knowing if you could ever have rolled high enough to succeed is unnecessarily crap.
I agree, @jannert, general fiction is a bitch to pitch. It's one of the reasons I like YA--YA isn't really a genre, it's just a marketing category, but you can get away with pitching as YA without getting into genre. I have one book that's pretty close to general fiction that my agent tried to sell and was unable to. We were hoping it could be marketed as NA--I wrote it back when people were saying NA was going to break out of romance, but then NA didn't break out of romance and I was left with a hard to sell story. It's got some action/suspense, but not really enough to be sold as an action/suspense book, and the rest of it is just a contemporary story. I got positive feedback from quite a few editors, but they all said they just weren't looking for books of this sort. Now, if one is anti-agent one could blame my agent--she didn't submit to the right editors, didn't pitch it right, or whatever. But she submitted it quite widely, got responses from all the editors that showed they'd read at least part of the book (most of them referred to the entire book, so I assume they at least skimmed it), etc. And she's done a great job of selling my more-easily classified work. So... I think she did her job. It was my book that didn't do its job, and that job was to be something editors thought they could sell. Which I guess is a longish way of saying I think agents are taking a lot of the flack for what editors and/or readers want to read.
But it's not the job of agents to help us out, not until they sign us. I'm not saying it's not a frustrating system, but it's not the agents' responsibility to fix it.
Yes. If agents are simply responding to what publishers want to publish, that's not their fault. I do feel some of this is getting skewed, though. Do you really feel your own hard-to-place book is poorly written compared to your others? If not, you probably have a good notion of what us 'non genre' writers and readers are up against. You're lucky because your main work is genre. Mine is not. I have no interest in writing in a genre. I have particular stories to tell that don't fit genre. This is why I rant at the system. I take your point that perhaps ranting at agents is not the right way to go about this, though. Okay, I'm an old fogey. I admit it. But I am an old fogey who buys lots of books, who attends book festivals promoted by and attended by other old fogeys who buy books. If the baby boomer (old fogey) generation is the largest generation there has ever been, then ignoring us as buyers of books seems short-sighted if a publisher wants to make money? We have money. We're the biggest age group there is, and we're certainly the generation who grew up reading and still reads. Ach well.
How is it 'helping us' to indicate if they bothered to read what we sent them or not? How is it 'helping us' to have two copy-pastable responses; one for 'we didn't like it' one for 'we didn't read it' ? That the agents won't take responsibility for fixing it does not mean it's not their fault or their responsibility.
Here in Canada, there's really only one bookstore these days: the Chapters chain. They're owned by Indigo (who have a few stores with their name on them) and they own Coles and Smithbooks. All this seems designed to make us think we have choices, but in the end, all those stores use the same marketing plan which comes down to: best sellers, little-to-no niche stuff, badly organized genres (fantasy, science fiction and all that Star Trek/Star Wars stuff all on the same shelf) and—I'm disappointed to say—a crap-load of mugs, reading lamps, snuggle blankets and other reading 'accessories.' Over the last 30 years, I've watched Chapters go from being a bookstore when I could find any book I wanted within five minutes of getting in the door to what now feels more like a general store. I expect them to install pickle barrels next year. Except for the accessories (and the pickles), Chapters takes gatekeeping very seriously. As a result, I buy most of my novels online and that's where gatekeeping is really needed. On Amazon, I find it difficult to tell the difference between self-published novels (some good, some bad, some horrible) and novels published by publishing houses (and even some of those are suspect). As a result, I tend to buy only books that I've heard of elsewhere which means I'm subjected to a lot of marketing hype. (And now to swing this back toward the thread topic Even though agents and publishers seem to be blocking us, perhaps that's a good thing. I know I can publish my stuff online and maybe make a few bucks without ever having to convince an agent or publisher that I'm good enough. But I want to know how I stack up against authors I've admired throughout my life and that means I'm going to have to learn to deal with all this gatekeeping stuff, whether it's a good or bad thing. A childhood friend of mine has a niece who had her book launch at a Chapters store in Halifax last year and it made me realize that that's what I want (maybe not Chapters, but I'd take a big store in New York if it was offered). So, here I am, working my butt off to convince an agent that I can do this thing we call novel writing. It may not be the best yardstick possible, but I've finally accepted that it's the one we're all working with.
When I was researching agents and publishers last month, I came across at least one publisher who has an ebook-only 'imprint' (if that's the right word considering the medium). Does book length matter to them? I don't know, but it might be something to look into if you're so inclined. When I was young and single, a lot of women ignored me because I was insecure. But I was insecure because so many women ignored me. Cart? Horse?
Unless it's a big-name author in which case they just put it on the best seller shelf which is, I believe, where that whole up-market thing comes in. I could be wrong, though.
Surely though the gatekeepers should be charged with keeping out the bad and letting in the good, not just looking at the covers? I mean, the whole cause of complaint is that on top of being a good (or at least profitable) writer is that you also need to wade through an invisible, constantly shifting maze. Your direction finding ability has no effect on your book or it's profitability so why are agents asking you to run the maze anyway? And, even more damningly, when we don't successfully pass through that maze why aren't we even being told it's the way we approached the maze, not the book, that is the problem? Why is it presented to us as if our writing is the problem when it's the invisible labyrinth of horrors that tripped us up?
