Literary Agents Answer Your Book Publishing Questions

This Literary Agent Q&A is hosted by the authors of
The Making of a Bestseller: Success Stories from Authors and the Editors, Agents and Booksellers Behind Them ,

The Publishing Primer: A Blueprint for an Author's Success

and the novel, Over Time, Love, Money, and Football: All the Important Things in Life.

QUESTION: Hi, Thanks for answering our questions. What's your opinion on stating in the query letter after the outline of the novel, that I state to which one of the first publishers I'd like to have the subject novel submitted.

It's a publisher who doesn't require an agent but by rumor has a huge slush pile.

Jean Nagger’s Answer:

My feeling is that once you have established a relationship with an agent who wants to work with you, it is fine and usually welcome to discuss preferences.

However, if you are an unpublished writer looking for an agent, the query letter is not the place to start laying down the law. Unless you are a bookseller or other book-related person, it is probable that the agent will know more about which would be the optimum publishers to approach first. A good agent will have thought this through before taking on your project, and will have a strategy based on a combination of editor, publisher and the movement of personnel within the publishing industry, so to discuss your preferences when the agent has presumably not even expressed any interest in the project is putting the cart before the horse.

We are all the last people who can truly be objective about our own work, and the first-time novelist who dreams of being on the Knopf list may turn out to be happier and much better published by Avon. It is the agent's job to make those connections through a long and thorough knowledge of the industry and an understanding of your work within that larger context.

I always love to hear the dreams of my clients and to share my own observations about submissions, but this takes place after we have decided to work together, and with the understanding that my job is sometimes to provide a reality check.

width="250" align=center>

QUESTION: Do you actually read the queries that come in?  How can you judge a 100,000 word book by a one or two page query letter?

Katharine Sand’s answer: Yes, I read queries. Agents read both snail and e-mail query letters, and many have editorial readers sifting through the leaning tower of queries to choose the most viable potential projects. Your query letter is your job interview, your audition. When reading through submissions I read as a dowser - with an internal divining rod that starts to hum when I came across an author-to-be. I read to see if I connect with your work, your voice, your lens on your subject in nonfiction; the movie trailer you are showing me in fiction. Initially an agent is looking for sparks, for elements, for talent to jump off the page, for a reason to keep reading.

QUESTION: I am the published author of two books, written for the educational market. I am shopping a third children's nonfiction photo-essay/picture book/concept book to literary agents and publishers. Of course, as many writers, I am impatient. I send off my manuscript per guidelines and wait, and wait and wait. What can I do, if anything, to expedite this process? Also, I do not query publishers that seek "exclusive submissions," but would like to in the future. Any tips for this period of waiting?

Miss Snark’s Answer: You can't hurry the process because you have no control over when an agent reads your material. Sending emails or notes of any kind is not advisable. Use the time to find more agents and publishers in this area. Use the time to come up with more ideas to shop. Don't just stand around fretting or you'll go crazy.

QUESTION: I worked really hard on my novel and PublishAmerica has published it. They are NOT a vanity publisher, just like they say on their website, but a traditional publisher who pays royalties.

Why does everybody say I'm self published?  I didn't pay one thin dime to get published.

Peter Rubie’s Answer: This is a difficult subject to broach without appearing to be elitist, or patronizing.  Also, this response is not about this author or his book, because I haven't read it and don't know him.

Generically, though, the truth is PublishAmerica has a poor reputation among mainstream publishing because it purports to be other than it is, and makes no attempt to discriminate what it publishes. So most agents and editors don't take anyone published by them very seriously.  Of course, if you can substantiate sales of say 5,000 copies or more (and that's a low figure these days) regardless of who published you a mainstream publisher will look at you twice and consider your next book.  But PublishAmerica is holding out a dream, it is POD (Print on Demand) and the fly in the ointment with print on demand is the demand part.  Your readers have to know about your book, and then go to the trouble of ordering it, so that you can increase your sales numbers.  For most authors this just doesn't happen.  (Barnes&Noble won't stock PublishAmerica books I believe.  They do stock some iUniverse books however because I believe they have interest in the company these days.)  What's more, I have read that in numerous cases it then hits up its authors to buy copies, and pay for "extras."  I would urge anyone considering these guys to think twice.  I have received many letters from people unsatisfied with the company and how the book looked and performed, expecting me to somehow swoop in and "fix" the problem.  I can't, and in most cases wouldn't want to even if I could because I didn't like the books or the writing very much.  Google them and see what others say.  At the end of this are two urls out of many and sample comments from the articles.  One from an article in the Washington Post, and other from a writer centric website.  I found these in two minutes without even really trying.

This is from an article about self publishing by iUniverse.  My guess would be, as they don't appear to publish any numbers that I could find, that PublishAmerica's numbers are similar.

Iuniverse-star program

Recent numbers released by iUniverse testify to the relatively low sales of their average title, and you can easily see this for yourself on Amazon. One of the headline numbers to come out of the Publishers Weekly article was that only 14 iUniverse titles were stocked in Barnes&Noble stores in 2004, a subset of the Star program titles. That's 14 titles out of over 18,000 published, or less than one tenth of one percent. The average book published by iUniverse in 2004 sold less than 50 copies, and the mean (the number of copies a typical title sold) was lower still. I'm equating the reported total of books printed with sales in this case, but a good chunk of the books I'm counting here were purchased by the author. Another chunk was purchased by family and friends. It's not really a business model for anybody except the producers, iUniverse and their printer, Lightning Source.

There is a greater philosophical issue here:  and that is, that because you work hard and strive in the arts you should be rewarded for that hard work by being published or recorded or whatever.  But that attitude encapsulates artistic envy not artistic creativity, which by its nature should emphasize the unique and the different, the outlandish and the startling, not more of the same.  (American Idol, for example, is commonly agreed by those in the business to be ruining the Broadway musical, and Broadway's ability to cast singers with unique and interesting voices.)  It totally misses the point of creativity, even highly commercialized creativity which mainstream trade publishing epitomizes.  Creativity isn't about how hard you worked to achieve an appropriate level of technique.  It's about what you have to say. Writing is about THINKING.  And true art, by it's very nature, is elitist in the sense that few people can really do it and have something interesting to say.  My job is to find those who actually have something interesting to say, and have spent some effort learning to say it well, and then help them get published and disseminated them and their work to a broader audience than they have so far found for themselves.  What Publish America, and American Idol, and such things are doing, is making "fame" available to the barely talented so that they can briefly live the fantasy of being famous creative people (Andy Warhol's infamous "15 minutes of fame") without ever having to actually develop the intellectual capacity and the genuine talent needed to achieve recognition for having an insight and vision of our world and the human condition.  The shame of it all is that it is proving to have some commercial validity because we have so trashed real arts appreciation in our education system over the past 30 years that a lot of people can't distinguish good "art" from "bad" and don't care and don't see how it can apply to their everyday lives (which of course it does.  How many ugly buildings and remakes and sequels do you see now? just as one example.).  The people who make money from these projects are not the "artists," it's the publishers and producers.  Go and watch The Incredibles.  If ever there was a movie that captured the animus of our times, this is it.

PublishAmerica and companies like it, are based on exploiting the envy, egos, and ambitions of its clients.  The test of PublishAmerica and such like is the lasting value of a writer's experience with them.  Did you get into mainstream book stores?  Did you manage to sell any meaningful number of copies of your book?  Did you get any reviews?   Did anyone read what you wrote?  If not, from a crassly commercial perspective, your creative endeavor was not successful and mainstream publishers rightfully will not be interested in you.  PublishAmerica believes that authors should reach their audience themselves. That, as far as I can see, is exactly the definition of  "vanity" publishing.

Now, we can have a discussion about the growth and value of "self publishing" in mainstream trade publishing and how it is evolving into a genuine alternative avenue to getting published, by a small number of writers who are able to both write well AND connect with their intended audience in a way that is displayed by the number of books they manage to sell.  But that's a wholly different topic.

Washington Post Article: To Larry Clopper, president and co-founder of PublishAmerica, the company, in relying on its authors to largely sell their own books, is "revolutionizing" an elitist industry. It has, he says, "always operated on the highest principles of honor and integrity." PublishAmerica's authors often knew "decades of failure, dozens of rejections and life-changing disappointment," adds Clopper, who twice failed to find publishers for his own books. "Now they hold their books in their hands, and they are sneering down at the publishing industry that shunned them."

Many of his authors have no complaints. Humor novelist H.B. Marcus of Burton, Ohio, for example, says that his royalties amount to "cigarette money twice a year" but believes that if he just keeps plugging he can build a readership. Yet others are sufficiently angry to launch a campaign against the 5-year-old publisher.

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America pulled a super stunt: They got together to write the worst book in existence (boy, did they ever) under the name Travis Tea, and it, too, was happily accepted and received much media attention-- see http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire2005/i...ory=0&id=30389 and http://www.lisamaliga.com/AtlantaNig...gelesTimes.htm.

In reality, PublishAmerica does not read the submissions they receive and will happily publish anything sent their way if they believe an author will shell out money to pay for copies of the book, or will supply addresses of friends and family who they can solicit to buy the book. Good or bad, it does not matter.

There are lots more questions and answers here.