Kirkus not giving up yet

by Chasya

Pub Rants points to an article in Publishers Weekly that indicates that Kirkus might not be dead and gone after all. For those who were concerned about where the uber-snarky reviews were going to come from now, you can breathe a sigh of relief.

Why I Am an Agent (Stacey)

by Stacey

I think it's so interesting to learn how people got to where they are. I guess everyone has a story to tell. It might be a stretch, but I'll start at the beginning by saying that my agenting career, or at least the path there, began when I was a professional child actor starting back in the early 80s. I worked with an agent then and got to understand a bit about what they did, and I was also faced with an enormous amount of rejection! During college, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, having spent so much of my childhood in front of the camera, so I studied film, and psychology. Upon graduation, I felt a little lost, like most post-grads do, and found a couple of internships in NY in film development, essentially looking for books to be adapted into movies. I eventually landed jobs at PolyGram Filmed Entertainment and Hearst Entertainment, where I scouted for books-to-film, and got to knows agents, editors, and the book biz in general. I realized pretty quickly that trying to pursue a career in film in New York was an almost insurmountable challenge. I knew it couldn't last because of how dispensable these New York film offices were, and so I planned to move to LA to infiltrate myself deeper into the world of film. With one foot practically out the door, I met my now-husband on a blind date and decided the west coast move was out, and I took a long look at what I wanted to do and realized that an agenting career, or at least a job at an agency, was the right direction for me to take.

When the opportunity to work with the esteemed Jane Dystel came up, my then-boss and mentor at Hearst recommended I jump on it. In February, 1999, a new and exciting chapter in my life began. I have to admit the first year or so was rocky, trying to learn my way around with no clients, lots of admin to handle (a highlight of which was hiring Jim and Michael, and I'm sticking to my story about Michael's blue hair!), and little understanding of what this side of the business was really all about. I remember hearing Jane and Miriam talk so fast about so many things in our morning meetings and wondered if I'd ever really get the language of book publishing. But I was intrigued and up to the challenge, and before long, Jane started passing projects my way. I eventually started coming up with my own book ideas, signed up my first client, and submitted my first project to editors. The moment when I got the call that an editor was "running numbers" on a proposal I'd submitted, I thought I was having a heart attack my heart was beating so fast. I was hooked. One project led to another, and before long, I was selling lots of books in all kinds of different categories. And I was loving every minute of it. I think that being an agent is a little like being a drug or a gambling addict (in a healthy way)--you are always on the prowl for that high you get from selling books, and you never know when that big hit is going to come your way. And of course, once you start, it's hard to stop.

Now almost eleven years later, I can say without pause that I am doing what I love, and feel rewarded in big and small ways with the work that I do. I am very grateful for the opportunities that Jane and Miriam have given me here over the years, and that they believed in me even when I didn't believe in myself. I feel truly lucky that I have found a career that is satisfying and fulfilling in ways I didn't think possible when my journey began so long ago. I have four kids at home now, and I love them enormously, but my extended publishing family of clients, colleagues, and friends is just as important to me, and I cherish each and every one of them. I am looking forward to a big and bright future for all of us in this wonderful and wacky world of words we inhabit.

"And this is a delight."

by Lauren

Aspiring authors, published authors, and non-authors alike, do yourselves a favor and take a moment to check out Ben Yagoda's essay in the New York Times on readers' access to writers in our technological age. 
I can only think of one occasion that I've done it on a purely personal level: I was trying to recall the title of a beautiful novel I'd read in college (Bapsi Sidwha's Cracking India) that had been titled one thing when originally published, another in the US, and a third when made into a film.  Upon googling, I stumbled across the author's website. Uncharacteristically, I took a moment to reach out to her and say how fantastic her book was and how much it had stuck with me. And I was delighted when, over a year later, she came across my email and realizing she had not thanked me, wrote back.

Since I haven't done it again, apparently the reward of hearing back wasn't enough to encourage me (though by that point I was an agent, and ethically it had become more complicated) to continue reaching out.  Obviously the examples in the essay are the odd, amusing, or frustrating ones, but do any of you routinely contact authors of books you've read?  And published authors, what emails do you get to rival Mary Karr's love letters from the incarcerated?

The top 10%

by Jim

I just discovered Adrienne Kress’s delightful blog this morning, and she has posted a list of four questions to ask yourself before you query that can assure you’re in the top 10% of submissions.

From an agent’s point of view, she’s totally right. You look at the numbers, and they can be incredibly discouraging. Yes, agents turn down 99% of what they see. But the chances are that since you’ve gotten this far—that you’re reading an agency blog, that you’re doing research—you’re already at the head of the pack. I say the same thing anytime I speak at writers’ conferences. You wouldn’t believe how much material we get that is so off-base or utterly baffling. Seeing writers show up for conferences or visit our websites and educate themselves on the business of publishing…it’s incredibly encouraging.

Of course, maybe I say this here, but you’ve already queried and gotten a form rejection letter. Does that mean we bundled you in with the people who have no idea what they’re doing? Well, no. The fact of the matter is that sometimes I see a perfectly adequate query letter for a project that sounds a lot like something else I represent. Or I see the right kind of novel for me, but it deals with some topic I can’t stand like parrots or something (note: I have no actual aversion to parrots. It’s just a bad example). Because we do get hundreds of queries a week (that’s really not an exaggeration), we can’t necessarily take the time to differentiate between the queries that were perfectly good but not quite right or the ones by people who seem unacquainted with ideas like sentences and commas.

So what does it mean? I’m such a broken record, but it means keep trying. I’ve always felt that books that deserve to get published do eventually make it through. It may not be an easy road, and it may not be a fast one. You may not even realize until you write your next book that THAT’S the one that is meant to be your debut. But if you keep going, eventually you’ll break through if you’re meant to.

E-Reader frenzy

by Jane

The news coming out of last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is very exciting for our business. An article in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal and another in Saturday’s New York Times announced that in the next several months over half a dozen new readers will be introduced into the market.

I say the more the better. This is definitely going to mean more readers and higher sales of books in all formats. I am delighted.

Bestsellers of the past and the imagination

by Rachel

Here is a link you must click on from the Book Bench blog to read one hilarious tongue-in-cheek bestseller list by Steve Hely (this might cause smirking or laughing-out-loud), as well as a century’s worth of (actual) bestseller lists (this left me wondering about all the wonderful books I’ve yet to read).

Books I will hate

by Lauren

Yesterday, Jessica discussed Laura Miller’s book on CS Lewis, and today I bring you more of her wisdom, this time from Salon. Earlier this week, Miller recommended we all try something new in 2010: read a book we think we won’t like. I’ll admit that while I’ve grown much more open since I began working in publishing, with my personal reading, I invariably leap for the same sorts of books I’ve always loved. My “free time” reading piles at home have the same general character as the ones that were in my college dorm rooms. When taking the luxury of reading purely for my own enjoyment, I rarely think it’s worth reading trying something I’m not naturally excited about. But I know from my professional experience that sometimes wonderful books are hiding in categories we hesitate to touch or under plots that seem at first glance unappealing.

I’m not generally one for New Year’s resolutions (as it’s universally acknowledged that those are merely things we pretend we’re going to do or else we’d have begun them when we decided they were important rather than arbitrarily on January 1st…er, 7th…oh, by early February at the latest), but I’ll take Miller’s suggestion on in 2010: I will read, for my personal reading, at least one book I’m convinced I will hate.

Since I’m the naturally contrary sort, it shouldn’t be too hard to find something wonderful that I’d normally shove aside. And hey, if I do hate it, I might’ve wasted my time, but I’ll also feel totally vindicated.

Is anyone else prepared to take on this challenge? And does anyone have ground rules about what’s unreadable as delightful and random as Miller’s? If anyone has a graphic novel about 20-something magicians living on a ranch in Prague while working in the silent movie business and feeling disenchanted with their relationships with rabbis, they may want to suggest their publicist steer clear of Miller’s desk at review time. (But they should probably send that manuscript to me, because I bet it’s amazing!)

Why I Am an Agent (Michael)

by Michael

I figure it’s my turn to explain why it is I do what I do, as Jane, Jim, Lauren, Chasya, and Rachel have—if only to satisfy the clients who keep asking when I’d do one of these!

It all started at the end of the last decade, December of 1999. It was my senior year, and I really needed a job. I had no idea what to do, and was thinking of finding something in retail, as I love a good discount. But my friend Jim McCarthy told me that the literary agency where he was interning was looking for another paid intern. Now, Jim had told me what he was doing, but frankly I never quite understood. These people were agents for authors? Why did authors need agents? And isn’t publishing for rich kids who want a hobby career? Though I didn’t think it was the job or industry for me, I figured it couldn’t hurt to go in and interview.

Like Jim, I was interviewed by Stacey Glick. If you talk to her, she’ll tell you that I had blue hair at the time. This is not true. I had bright, bleached-blond hair. The blue hair came later. (And the blue dye largely ran out of my hair when I had to make a delivery to one of our most important clients in the pouring rain that summer.) I believe she hired me on the spot, and I started working Friday of the same week.
I had no idea what I was doing in the beginning. I did what people requested, paid lots of attention, and started asking questions. Slowly, but surely, I came to be very interested and involved in what was going on at the agency. I’d loved books growing up, but I’d not been the same kind of reader in college. It was great to get back to reading things that were fresh, new and contemporary. And, as I looked around, I liked what I saw: a group of smart, creative, engaged, interesting people helping authors manage their careers. Just a few short months later, I was hooked—on publishing, agenting, and DGLM. When Jane and Miriam offered me a job in September of that year, I was honored, and I jumped at the chance.

When I started full-time, I was doing much of what I did as an intern, along with managing royalties and helping Jane with submissions. But quickly, I took on new responsibilities. I began assisting the rights director, learning the ins and outs of the foreign and domestic rights markets. When she left the agency a few years later, I took over the agency’s rights, eventually attending the London Book Fair with Jane and selling rights around the world. At the same time, I was building a list of my own, something Jane encouraged me to do within my first year at the agency. I started representing children’s books at Jane’s suggestion, something I was unsure of at the time(!). But quickly I found that I had a passion for middle grade and YA books, and my career as an agent really took off then. Several years ago now, I became a full agent, and the talented Lauren Abramo took over as our rights director, freeing me up to focus on my own projects.
Last year I was very excited to be promoted to vice president at the agency, and just as pleased this past December when I moved to Los Angeles to open a West Coast office for DGLM. I tell people all the time—I’d never have had these opportunities at any other agency or in any other job, and I’m forever grateful to Jane for that.

Our industry is going through big, drastic, challenging changes, and I’m glad that Jane, Miriam, the rest of the DGLM staff and I are working together to attack them head-on. My ten-year journey with the agency has been full of amazing experiences and opportunities, and I am just as enthusiastic about the ten years to come.

The Magician's Book

by Jessica

Over the holidays, I gave myself the gift of a bit of pleasure reading; one of the books on the NYT’s year end best list, Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia. It is essentially a work of literary criticism devoted to C.S. Lewis’s beloved series. Miller, who adored the Narnia series, nevertheless felt bitterly tricked when she discovered they were a Christian allegory. Kids, she argues, are literalists, and as heavy handed as the religious symbolism may be, they lack the general knowledge to see the similarities between a story about a magical lion and the Christian messiah. Years later, Miller returned to the books to examine them as an adult. Hers is a smart and fairly serious undertaking, one that I’ve enjoyed in part because her childhood experience so closely mirrors my own. One idea in particular has really stuck with me. She posits that most avid readers, folks who love books (most of you, I imagine), are forever in search of the purity and pleasure of that first book (or books) that so enchanted us. That as adults, we can never quite recapture that absolute delight when our critical faculties were not yet developed, and our immersion in fiction was complete. That we read, now, in some sense, in an effort to get back to the garden.

For me, the books were, in fact the Chronicles (hence my interest in Miller’s book). But I’ve not reread the series as a grown-up precisely because I fear finding them wanting, hollow, devoid of the pleasure they once afforded me. I’m curious to know what your touchstone book was, and if you’ve ventured to read it now that you can, perhaps, see its shortcomings, peek behind the curtain.

High expectations

by Stacey

It occurred to me as a publishing professional reading this painful review of Elizabeth Gilbert's new book that there is a case to be made for unpublished authors having certain advantages over bestselling authors. No track record can be a very good thing when it comes to selling books. Granted, it's very hard to get noticed in the slush pile given the volume of submissions agents receive, and if you are lucky enough to find a good agent who will fight for your book, the hurdles to get it sold are often high and daunting. But let's say you get there and the book becomes a huge runaway hit. Then what? How does one follow up a success like Eat, Pray, Love, arguably one of the most successful books of the last decade? It sounds like from the descriptions I've been reading about Gilbert's experience, not easily. She wrote and trashed an entire draft of this book (I wince every time I think about the author, the editor, the publisher, the agent, and what they must have gone through during this grueling process), and based on Maslin's review, it sounds like she might have been better off doing the same for the final! For all the money and fame, there are real challenges that come with having a hit like Gilbert did, and while the book has certainly made her a millionaire and this follow-up is likely to have strong early sales based on name alone, it sounds like it might wind up being a disappointment because the expectations are just so high. Once you hit that mighty bestseller list, the conversations get more complicated, and the pressure to perform and beat the last one can be challenging at best and impossible to achieve at worst. Sometimes the dream is better than the reality, but isn't that often the case in life? If you are able to enjoy and savor the process of writing, stay focused on the positives, work hard and passionately despite any obstacles you might face, there's a lot to be grateful for doing what you love, especially at the start of a new year.

Colum McCann loves books, America, Obama

by Jim

Colum McCann published this gorgeous op-ed the day after Christmas.  I was distinctly not reading the newspaper the day after Christmas, so I just found it today. In a few short paragraphs, he covers the impact of literature, the election of Barack Obama, and his own swearing in as an American citizen.

I wish more people could write like him, and I wish more people’s lives were as fully enriched by the books they had read. I have a feeling that visitors here will be able to relate to both wishes.

Happy new year, folks!

Chasya's Questions Corner: On Resubmitting

by Chasya

Question:

I had a manuscript on submission and got double-digit requests for fulls. All were rejections. I had material out to a dozen or so agents when I realized, after a year plus of rejections, that the novel wasn't publishable. I withdrew my manuscript from submission from all the agents and told them I was doing a massive overhaul. All agreed to look at the new work when I was finished. Fast forward two years: I saved about 25% of the old MS, added some subplots, tweaked some characters, and heavily revised the plot. I'll be ready to query soon. I would first like to approach the agents from whom I withdrew the original MS. I still have all the emails, but is it too late to approach them and say, "hey, remember me? I'm back! You wanna take a peek?”



Answer:

It would be one thing to resubmit the manuscript with the attitude that these agents have been waiting with bated breath for two years to read your material, but that’s clearly not what you’re doing. There’s no harm in dropping them a line to ask if they’d like to see it in it’s different/improved state. Remind them of who you are and the circumstances that led you to withdraw your material. If they’re still interested in having a look they’ll let you know.



We need your questions! Send them along to news@dystel.com.

Questions to ask yourself

by Lauren

Just came across this really handy item that SCBWI's Kathy Temean posted on her blog: Top Ten Questions Dutton Editors Ask Themselves When Looking At A Manuscript.  Very useful for all writers, especially novelists, whichever market they write for and whether or not Dutton would be interested.  I recommend you consider these points about your own manuscript before you share it, because most of these are questions that'll be asked down the line throughout the publishing process, in many cases all the way up to readers buying your book.

(via Janet Reid)

New Year, new discussions of e-book rights!

by Miriam

I agree with almost everything Jonathan Galassi says in his Op-Ed piece in Sunday’s New York Times about the fact that books, even the ones penned by authors who are considered literary geniuses, are not the product of just one individual spewing brilliance at the world. I go back to my oft repeated point that in this new era of e-books, blogs, vlogs, and all things digital, we’ll still need agents and publishers to act as gatekeepers, shepherds and midwives. My only quarrel with the piece is, of course, Mr. Galassi’s somewhat disingenuous (he is a publisher, after all) implication that Random House (or any other publisher) should be automatically “involved” in these e-book rights (meaning that they would control and derive revenue from them) because of their work in producing the original book. If, as he says, e-books are just another format of a book (like audio and translations), then these rights should be “in play” when a book is sold. And, if the author retains those rights, he or she should be able to dispose of them in any way they see fit without having to involve the publisher of the original work.

What do you say?

Three New Year's Wishes

by Jane

Over the holiday, I thought long and hard about what I wish for our business in 2010 and here are three things I would love to see happen:

For those who believe the readers of electronic books are the same readers as for hard-copy books, let’s experiment and see. Try publishing both versions simultaneously and with another equally marketable title, publish the hardcover first and the electronic version 4 to 6 months later. It seems to me this is far more sensible than just speculating endlessly on the subject.

I hope that in 2010 editors will take more time to consider projects submitted to them. During the last year, perhaps because of the publishing economy, perhaps because of cutbacks in personnel and increased workloads, it seemed to me that editors were more than ever before “programmed” to say no. Many of them even admitted just sending the proposal back after reading the cover note because they were “sure” it wasn’t for them. Authors and agents work very hard on these proposals and consider carefully to whom they are submitting. If we are going to improve the quality of the books being published, editors need to take more time in considering the submissions they receive.

Finally, I hope the New Year brings a renewal of respect and collegiality in our business. In the last couple of years, for whatever reason, I have seen less of both between author and agent, publisher and author, and even among peers within the industry. If our business is to survive, we have to communicate better, more honestly and more respectfully with each other.

I wish all of you a prosperous 2010--may it be filled with peace, good health and lots of bestselling books.