Need an agent? Stalking might do the trick ... if you're not arrested first

David Henry Sterry, best-selling author, award winning actor/comic and book doctor, recently lectured on the art of getting an agent. Here's an excerpt from Galley Cat.

SCBWI's Agents Party ... How Nobody Was Bitten ... Plus Some Monster News

Last night was a big night for British SCBWI people, the Agents' Party is one of the truly packed events on the SCBWI calendar - an opportunity to look Rejection and/or Success in the eye.

But if there was trepidation in our hearts, we tried not to show it:


In fact some of us looked positively gleeful:


Indeed we were hilariously joyful despite the nerves fizzing all over the room!

On the panel were two artist's agents and two literary agents (there were supposed to be three but one had to drop out because of a personal emergency).

This was my fourth Agents Party - and yes, yes, I have an agent, but who else was going to take the pictures and write up the report ... okay, I admit it, I just love going to SCBWI events and getting together with all the people. Sad I know.

Anyway, though there were some people who didn't make it at the last minute, the pub was absolutely packed!

The agents very kindly didn't bite anybody, and the audience had the restraint not to offer the agents full body massages (yes, some of us are that desperate).

In attendance were:

Illustrator Agents - Edward Burns of Advocate Art and Mark Mills of Plum Pudding.
Author Agents - Daniel Neilson of PFD and Eve White, who is a solo agent.

Edward Burns (right) described his clients as "artists who can look after themselves" - "professionals who are sending their children through school".

Mark Mills (left), who is married to the art director at Little Tiger Press (cozy!), said his agency plan to set up in US and France.

The bad news for illustrators is that editors are becoming more choosy, "The price of oil affects the price of paper and the price of paper affects what publishers do," Mark said. "The net result is we have become more careful of the kind of artist that we take on."

Interesting though that the illustrators' agents take 30% commission while the author agents take 15%.

The author agents had some good news for picture book writers ... PB texts are selling again (hooray) - Daniel said: "PB texts are selling very, very well. We are looking for picture book texts that revolve around ethnic backgrounds such as African and Asian stories." How refreshing after the dire PB is Dead stuff we were hearing all of last year.

As it is every year, books for boys are much in demand - "For me, humour goes a long way," Daniel said.

Eve White (pictured below) tells the story of Andy Stanton who was working his way from A to Z in the Writers and Artists Yearbook with little success. After five or six rejections, he gave up on A to Z and started working his way through the list from Z to A, eventually finding Eve's agency.

"He phoned me and said what do you think of this book? I said it sounded wacky and probably very difficult to get published," Eve said. "But I loved it and he sent me the rest of the mansucritp and I said, don't talk to any other agents until I have finished it."

The result was the award-winning You're a Bad Man Mister Gum.

And that is definitely NOT You're a Bad Man Mister Gum, in the picture but From Where I Stand by Tabitha Suzuma.

There is more of course but I've got to rush through this blog post so I can bake a chicken. Sorry. Hopefully Anita Loughrey, who was spotted taking copious notes will blog about the rest! Sue Hyams blogged about it hours before I wrote this on her excellent new website - in a post interestingly titled 'Too Busy To Write' ... she should add: 'But Not Too Busy to Blog' ... Sue organised the Agents Party - thank you, Sue!

On another note, how serendipitous that last night's Agents' Party happened the night before the formal launch of Authonomy - Harper Collins' social networking site designed to spot the gems in the slushpile. It's been in beta for three months and now it's live ... it works on the basis of aspiring writers reviewing each other on the site and supposedly will save editors the need to actually read their slushpile.

Former slushpile reader Aida Edemariam wrote a piece in the Guardian with the cute title File it in the Bin (hollow laughter) and describes the business of spotting talent from a stack of submissions as a "deeply fallible system":

The slush pile is the great awkward albatross of the publishing industry. Writing must come from someone, and go to somewhere, and not everyone has a friend whose boyfriend happens to be editor of a literary imprint: every day someone decides that there's nothing for it but to post their precious manuscript to someone they've never met, at a company that is receiving stuff from people like them all the time. And even in the best-case scenario - where every word of every submission is read - it is a deeply fallible system.

Rebecca Swift of The Literary Consultancy pointed out that

I think to leave it completely to peer management might be fantastically chaotic.

Which pretty much evens out the score:

No less chaotic, some would argue, than taking pot luck with a student on work experience, or an overworked editor who might be having an off day. Publishing is, in the end, a triumph of hope over logistics.

And now, having done my duty and reported on the Agents' Party, I must bring you the incredible and much more important news that my friend, Fiona Dunbar (The Truth Cookie, Toonhead) has this summer been seen with the Loch Ness Monster!

In Search of Voice

There has been a fascinating and wide ranging discussion over at the British SCBWI list serve about VOICE.

How many editor/agent panels have I attended in which the Holy Grail to publishing, apparently, is Voice.

I am looking for a fresh Voice that draws me in immediately.

Last year's SCBWI (UK) anthology competition focused on voice - hence the anthology's title UNDISCOVERED VOICES. And yet when I search the mountain of How to Write books I've accumulated through the years, I am hard pressed to find one with a clear guide to finding your Voice.

What is Voice anyway?

It's not point of view, although the list serve discussion swung in and out of the merits of third person, first person, omniscient etc etc.

I can cite examples of novels with clear, compelling voices - Anthony McGowan's boy with a wisecracking brain tumor in Henry Tumour, Meg Rosoff's anorexic leading lady in How I Live Now, Geraldine McCaughrean's hearing-impaired teenager who has an Arctic explorer for an imaginary friend in White Darkness.

I've been re-reading Geraldine McCaughrean's earlier novels, A Pack of Lies, The Stones Are Hatching and A Little Lower than Angels. And although the quality of writing is formidable, clearly, McCaughrean had not yet found the Voice that makes White Darkness such a triumph.

I would venture to guess that a unique Voice is something one develops over time.I would also guess that though every novel is unique to itself, each author has a particular, unmistakable voice.

If you checked out the very earliest posts on this blog (see this piece in 2004 on multicultural writing), you will find a completely different voice. When I started out, I had imagined myself reporting in the manner of a journalist. But personality will out and the journalism is now buried under... well, I've found my Voice.

Newbie bloggers often experience that same groping and searching suffered by authors seeking their Voice.

Comes the modern reality of an over-publishing, over-crowded children's market.

We don't have the luxury of time to discover that Voice. There are no publishers willing to publish two or three books so that an author can discover that fresh, unput-downable Voice.

Interestingly, there are some who are up to the challenge.

It's a bit sad that my social life revolves around critique groups. But at various critique groups I've attended, I heard some fine unpublished examples: Anita Loughrey's tough-talking (and hilarious!) teenage blogger, Miriam Halahmy's island girl who finds herself hiding an illegal immigrant, Angela Cerrito's grieving heroine trying to understand her sister's suicide. At the reading of Anita's newly penned chapters, we just wanted her to read on and on, the voice was so extraordinary.

It was clear to me that for these talented writers, getting an agent/publisher was probably only a matter of time (or finishing their manuscripts!).

Good Titles are It - and Some Shameless Advertising

I've just found out that the new book of my good friend Steve LeVine is now listed on Amazon (out this fall!!!) and it's got a beautiful cover and this humdinger of a title:

As it happens, the book of my other good friend, Elizabeth Pisani, is coming out next week and she's got a terrific title too which is amazing given her subject which is AIDS and the bureaucracy surrounding it.

Here's a screenshot from the outro I made for her video (that's the opposite of intro - and I'll talk about the video in another blog post):

I know, I know, this is a blog about children's book writing but there's no harm in a bit of shameless publicity between friends? That's what the internet is for.

Anyway, the main point I wanted to make was TITLES MATTER.

This became crystal clear to me at the recent SCBWI before-Bologna conference when a panel of agents read the first pages of blind submissions from the audience. They were asked to react the way they would to any submission.

Agents shredding submissions at SCBWI's Bologna conference

And react they did. It was at times a painful experience. It was like American Idol or any other show from TV's humiliation genre. It made me think of all the rejections I ever received and it made me imagine how agents must have opened my submissions and snickered over my leaden words, my unprofessional presentation, my ... but let's not tread that path again.

The main thing is: the agents always, always, ALWAYS wanted to read more when there was a good title.

So work on that title, folks. It opens doors.

Meanwhile, do feel free to buy Steve's and Elizabeth's books. I mean, it's sooo important that we children's authors inform ourselves about affairs in Putin's Russia and the state of the AIDs industry.

Agent No Longer Undercover

So many of you guys are asking me who my new agent is. But being an be incredibly kind and thoughtful person, I'm not revealing her ID on the blog to prevent her inbox from immediately being inundated with my fan mail. Not.

Which brings me to Daphne Unfeasible.

Followers of Maureen Johnson's hilarious blog have for years enjoyed Maureen's unfeasible tales about her agent, Daphne Unfeasible - here pictured with MJ, as usual, incognito, hiding behind Free Monkey (Free Monkey is a monkey Maureen acquired, free, on her travels, who is a kind of sidekick, soothsayer, companion and who once kept a travel diary).


Anyway before I digress further, Maureen is currently blogging writer in residence at the wonderful Inside a Dog website ("Outside a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read." Groucho Marx) and has just revealed Daphne Unfeasible's true identity. Daphne Unfeasible is actually Kate Schafer and Kate Schafer is getting married, moving to Colorado and opening the KT Literary Agency which is now open to submissions from middle grade and YA authors!

And with Daphne unveiled, Kate has also started blogging at Ask Daphne - go ahead, ask her anything you like about agents and getting published!

Johnny Geller: COST AND CONTRACTS

If you get through the door and an agent decides to take you on (Woo hoo!) then here's Johnny Geller's advice about cost, commission, contracts.


Other videos in this series:
Literary Agent Basics
Finding the Right Agent
Approaching An Agent
Following Up With an Agent

Johnny Geller: FOLLOWING UP WITH AN AGENT

Should you return to the agent with a rewrite? What if I can't get an agent? Is it time to give up? How determined do you have to be?




Other videos in this series:
Literary Agent Basics
Finding the Right Agent
Approaching An Agent

Johnny Geller: APPROACHING AN AGENT

With such thorny questions as How can I make myself more attractive to agents? Previous videos were Literary Agent Basics and Finding the Right Agent.

Johnny Geller: FINDING THE RIGHT AGENT

The second of a series. The first was Johnny Geller on the Basics of Getting an Agent

Johnny Geller on the Thorny Question of Agents: THE BASICS

Johnny Geller of Curtis Brown Literary Agency appears in a series of videos answering FAQs about getting and keeping an agent. There are five videos and this is the first - on Literary Agent Basics:

Yes It's You: Good News Strikes

It felt a little bit like winning Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

When the moment came, it took me ages to process what was actually happening, Rejection having been my default setting for so long.

The phone rang and I took a message. The message was: YES.

Yes, I like your book.

Yes, I want to represent you.

Yes, it’s going to happen.

Come to think of it, that was David Almond’s inspirational message this past SCBWI Writer’s Day. “It happened to me, It’s going to happen to you.”

I got the call last week and I’m only blogging about it today because today, I had my first meeting with My Agent.

I tried to explain to the Husband what a different experience this meeting had been from a previous agent near-miss that had ended in disappointment. Was it the way this agent expressed an interest in my other work? Was it the fact that she urged me to chase her on the phone when I needed to follow something up? Was it – ? The Husband stopped me in mid whinge.

There’s no point looking back. The difference between then and now is this book. You have written another book.

And that’s the thing.

I’ve written another book. And it’s better than the previous one. Which was better than the one before.

So after more than 10 years, three novels and dozens of rejections, I’ve got an agent.

One can only get better at it.

Authors or Agents? Picking the Shortest Queue

So Sarah Megibow at the online friendly Nelson Literary Agency was carefully explaining manuscript submission rules to a Denver writer's conference when someone asked, "are those rules the same for all agents/editors?"

GULP! No, they aren’t. I’ve been thinking about that question a lot this month. There are so many rules and regulations that writers must feel overwhelmed. I mean, Nelson Agency only accepts email queries (no paper mail whatsoever), but other agents only want snail mail. Some agents want query letters and yet others want a query pitch and a synopsis. Others will want you to include the first ten pages of the work. Then there are the editors. Some will read unsolicited submissions and others won’t even look at them unless submitted by an agent. It’s enough to make any writer’s head spin. So while I don’t have a submission rule that’s true for all agents or editors, I can give this suggestion: Do your research online before submitting. Tips From the Slushpile, November 2007 issue

And sometimes online research doesn't do the trick.

If you checked out the website of Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury, the submission guidelines are clear:

Unfortunately, due to the enormous volume of material sent in to our Children's department, Bloomsbury can no longer accept unsolicited children's manuscripts.

But last week soft-spoken Emma Matthewson, Deputy Editorial Director of Bloomsbury Children's Books told a group of SCBWI authors that yes, submissions will be read.

Cause for celebration? Weeeell. Editors speaking at writer's events (and I can claim to have attended quite a few of these) very kindly always say they will look at your manuscript. My theory is that confronted with the fresh-from-the-garret faces of suffering writers, editors feel they just have to be nice.

And yes, they really do read the manuscripts. Now before you print off another copy of your 1700 page wizard fantasy, beware.

I asked Emma if agents had to wait as long as authors for their submissions to be looked at. She said, no, though agents had to wait a few weeks, they pretty much jumped the queue of direct author submissions. The authors submitting directly have to wait months. And the sad number of books from the slush pile that make it to publication (I think Emma said they published four in the past five years) just isn't funny.

So which queue — Editors or Agents?

At the end of the day, it's only time.

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Are you a facebooker? Join our group The Waiting Room - for all writers and illustrators who are waiting, waiting, waiting for that call from a publisher or agent. Published people are welcome to join and mock. But please no spitting.