Do you make your parameters known to the people who's work you judge? Is there a place they can go find them without crawling through random tweets? Because if you don't tell them then it's not them refusing to see something. It's you refusing to show them. If you play fair and show them what you want, no problems at all. But agents don't. They don't tell us everything we need to know. That is unfair. Can we agree that that would not be a fair process?
I'll throw my hat into the ring of saying that I believe LostThePlot has. I'm afraid I'm only seeing anger and frustration and no real substance beyond a child screaming "But WHY?"
Since you didn't read what I wrote, how would you know. Or is it my accountability to explain to you again rather than yours to investigate? Because if you feel it's the former that would explain a lot.
@NiallRoach yes the idea that agents are maliciously out to get authors is weird. They're book lovers, generally. They're looking for books to accept. They all want to be blown away. But they can't read every book front to back. I read slush piles for a few years. At first, I read each story all the way through. When it got to the point I had more submissions to read than time, many were getting rejected after one page.
Then you should read again for clarification. What I object to is anyone suggesting that the present system is fair. Is that simple enough for you? It is stupid to dismiss a work that could make you money because it starts with a prologue. It is counter to your objective as an agent. So why are people queueing up to tell me why that's perfectly fine and fair and rational when it is clearly not. Or are we supposed to be above that? Are you not a serious writer if you don't lick agents arses and tell them how wonderfully fair they are and please sir can I have another.
There's another side to the database approach that might be a real bad trip. There are lots and LOTS of fake agents out there. By fake, I mean agents who claim they want to represent your book, but it turns out you have to pay them money to do it. A database of wannabe authors plus their offerings would be a real grab-bag for this kind of operator. Which might turn the tables quite badly. Suddenly it's the author sifting through crap looking for an honest agent? Yikes. I guess, for me, this argument isn't winnable. I accept that agents have to filter the crap/unsuitable stuff, and that they don't have a lot of time to do it. I also feel that they often miss good manuscripts (such as the ones that eventually become bestsellers, but were previously rejected by umpteen agents.) Worst of all, their unwillingness to operate outside the box discourages authors whose books don't fit inside it. Agents and publishers claim they want something new and fresh that stands out ...then they set up their criteria to make it difficult for that to happen. A new take on an old format is fine. But a new format altogether? Something that can't be crammed into a genre? Nope, not interested. "It won't sell." I don't know what the answer, is, honestly. If you write from the heart, because you have a particular story to tell, and your story doesn't fit what they think people will buy, well, you're wasting your time, apparently. Very discouraging. Reminds me of a few years back, when I went into our local Thornton's. I was looking for a few of the little bags of dark assorted chocolates that I'd seen in there before, as well as in other Thornton's shops. All I could find were the milk chocolate bags, so I asked at the counter if I'd missed the display. The woman behind the counter said, "We can't sell those, so we don't stock them." (In a chocolate shop, you can't sell dark chocolate...?) Keeping my temper, I said, "Well, you can't sell them if you don't stock them, can you?" "But nobody buys them," was the rejoinder. I said, "Well I'd buy some, if you had them." I went in two weeks later, and guess what. They had some. I bought them.
Why are you so attached to the prologue thing? There are a million other things that will make agents decide your book is not the book for them. In fact, let's list the things which I expect will make agents reject my current WIP when I get there with it. Rape as a plot device. Sex scenes involving characters under 18. It's a contemporary novel set in a middling English town. Drug use. Swearing. Lengthy passages describing the town. All of these things and more are things that many agents will reject a MS at the sight of. This will not be made explicit by all of them. What's the solution? Send anyway. Yes, plenty of agents will reject you, but you don't lose anything by that. You should always expect to hear an overwhelming chorus of "no", buy that doesn't matter. They would probably have said no regardless. You send a ton of queries out in order to dig up the agents who will like your stuff, and they are NOT the one's who will say no just because of a prologue. If they think it will sell, they'll say yes, prologue or not. If that sounds like too much work, wah wah, I shouldn't have to send dozens of emails, wah wah, consider the work you're expecting them to do in reading a significant portion of every MS that crosses their inbox. It's a damn sight more than doing a few more emails. Secondly, consider if your prologue is good, it's good. If you know you're being rejected because of it, make it better! Good writing triumphs over everything in this business.
@jannert these days it makes no sense whatsoever, in my opinion, not to pursue a hybrid publishing model, at the very least.
In exchange for being all but invisible to agents? No thanks. I want to be a pesky little number by their unread folder, not an entry on an endless list that they can ignore forever.
I keep harping on it because it's a good example of something unrelated to content that we actually know agents do judge books by and I'm really hoping someone somewhere will actually give me an answer as to why that is ok. All I'm looking for is for one of you to stop skirting around the issue and tell me why this very obviously unfair thing is fair. I'm not interested in blithely rationalizing them as the almighty inscrutable agents. I'm not interested in hearing that really it won't affect my career particularly. I'm not interested in hearing how busy agents are. These are not answers. These are deflections. As is suggesting that the person asking must only care because they are upset and/or have a personal stake. That doesn't change the facts of what we are talking about. These are all forms of sophistry designed to avoid answering while seeming to do so. If you want to say that you don't care or you have bigger stuff to deal with, then fine. That's your choice not to care. But please do not rather patronizingly explain to me why I shouldn't care. If you are too apathetic to give a damn then that's a fair position to take on this issue. If you don't have an answer, that's fine. If that's what you feel then say so. Don't stand there on Mount Pious and tell me that this is fair. Particularly, don't frame me as the bad guy for posing these questions. If you think this is fair; directly defend that position. If not, join me in being outraged. If you don't care then don't care. Don't dress your apathy up as virtue and call me the bad guy for giving a damn.
I beg your pardon, but please point me to the moment when the how, why, and when of our replies suddenly became a thing that answers to your say-so. Again, I see deeper currents in you of which the question (ha, question) you pose is but a surface rippling. We are not at your beck and call. Kindly remember that. Your tone of misappropriated authority does not serve your cause.
Not to mention that the answer was explained, over and over again, in another thread. It just wasn't the one he wanted to hear so it didn't sink in.
Guys, question. Let's say A snags an agent, who snags a publisher, and then A gets famous. What's to stop A from dropping his agent and his publisher, and then self publishing on Amazon in the future?(forgive me if we've talked about this already)
The contract with the agent and/or publisher might prevent this. Always read the contract. Are they getting options on future work? Are they trying to take an interest in the work being represented? Etc.
One of the least appealing - yet often quite valid - answers to any question is that the question itself is broken. Particularly when the question flagrantly suffers from the argumentative fallacy of begging the question.
Hmm my novel will need some tweaking then. I've got four uses of the word 'wizard'. Two of them involve a character reading the Wizard of Oz. - So he'll have to read something else. The other two I can easily change to sorcerer. I'm safe so far. The other words I use are all in your depending on mood section. I use Monster (100 times), Evil,(5) Hero,(17) War,(3) Warrior,(2) combat,(2) sword(11) and ruler(3). That seems too many to give me sensible odds for you to be in the right mood for all of them. I can easily eliminate warrior, combat, sword and ruler easily enough, by using synonyms and different weapons. My 100 uses of monster might be a problem though. I guess I'll follow you on social media and wait till a day where you're posting really cheerful tweets and status updates.
It's not fair. And it probably won't ever be. Just like most things in life. How many people are treated fairly? And if they are it's probably by accident. Everyone has a dollop of prejudice in them so to think that your ms or my ms is going to be treated fairly is a laugh. We'll be judged on salability first off and then our writing. So right there you're not exactly in a fair position. If your tagline or concept doesn't rock the socks off the agent chances are he/she won't request anything - therefore your writing skill at that point don't mean diddly-squat. How fair is that?
Why do you think this should be fair? Is it fair that some people have more time to write than others? Fair that some seem to have more natural talent? Fair that some people are naturally more suited to marketing and other socialization-heavy activities? Fair that some people are raised speaking a language with hardly any book market and must therefore sell in a non-native language or not at all? Why are you picking this one tiny bit of unfairness to obsess over? Nobody, including agents, owes you fair, not when it comes to getting a book published. It's not about fair, it's about reality.
I am neither for nor against prologues. I want to be clear about that up front. I also want to point out that this message is placed randomly in the thread and is in no way meant as a reply to the post directly above it... or the one before that... or the one before that, even. Or any other post. But I have a pretty good idea why so many agents/publishers reject novels with prologues. The average prologue—I'm not talking about your prologue, but the 5'-8"-person-with-brown-hair kind of prologue—the average prologue says, in a loud and clear voice: There's something I have to tell you before I tell you my story. And every 99 times out of a hundred the agent/publisher fell for that one before, he sat through something really boring like... Imagine walking into the hair salon (or barbershop) and the barber/stylist wants you to browse through a book of photographs of every head he's had the pleasure to have known (to borrow McCartney's words) before he/she will cut your hair, just to make sure you know what you're getting into. Or you go to the car dealer to buy a car and the salesman wants to give you a tour of their repair depot to show you all the pretty wrenches they'll be using when you bring the car in for service before he'll let you admire the new cars in the showroom. It's called postponed gratification and we don't like it. We want our cake now. So do agents and publishers. So, even though I don't care one way or another if a novel has a prologue—especially if it's your novel—I can understand why agents/publishers do.
