I’m Asking Literary Agents to Query Me

I felt like a real chump last weekend. I spent over a hundred dollars for two ten minute meetings with literary agents to tell them about my next book.

The latent hope there was that one of them would recognize some spark of talent in my work and represent me to big publishing houses.

Long story short, they didn’t and they won’t.

But it’s cool because I’m flipping the script on them. I’m asking literary agents to query me. You might be thinking, “Is that going to work?”

Nope.

The meetings

In my first meeting, the agent warned me not to use words or concepts with which readers aren’t familiar, because it makes my book less attractive. After that meeting I went down to the hotel bar and had two vodka sodas in hopes of processing that advice without making choking noises.

What kind of insufferable assneck would I be had I never learned anything from a book? At a guess? Prodigious.

In my second meeting, the gentleman said he could sell my book if I had sales to back it up. Okay. But if I have sales, then why do I need an agent?

I’m lucky because I like meeting people. I enjoy stuff like sales, marketing, and public speaking which most authors are loathe to do.

But I’m in a crap loop right now. I can’t go to bookstores, libraries, or festivals to sell my work because my work isn’t distributed traditionally. As such, I don’t have very good sales. To get that distribution, I’m told I need an agent, and an agent’s first question is, “What are your sales like?”

I can sell online all I want, but the internet is a gabbling cacophony of people shouting about their unedited self-published erotic fan-fiction novellas. No disrespect meant. I enjoy a ribald Pokemon novella as much as the next man.

Upshot: The traditional wisdom is if you want a career you get an agent. To land one, your choices are slush piles or writer’s conferences like the one I attended. And yes, people really do use words like “land” when talking about getting an agent, the same words Steve Harvey uses on daytime TV.

I don’t believe in slush piles

I’ve sent a lot of queries to slush piles about my previous novels and gotten nowhere. In most cases I never even got a response. Once I contacted an agent with a publishing contract in hand. He said he couldn’t represent me, and then asked if the premise of the book was essential.

Well, you know, it’s a little important to me, I guess, yeah.

Another time I heard from a junior agent when I followed up five weeks after my original submission. She said, “If you don’t hear with us within six weeks, you can assume we’re not interested.”

I responded, “Great! I’ll talk to you next week then.” Silence.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZB4hPyPR2M

I used to play in rock bands for a living. I have seen slush piles in person. They are literal piles of manila folders containing letters, some form of media (e.g. CD, cassette, manuscript), plus hopes and dreams. The piles I’ve seen come in by mail so fast the intended recipients can’t keep up with throwing them out. I’ve heard a record company employee say he hates CDs because at least when applicants sent tapes the tapes could be recorded over and reused.

Now imagine how big an email slush pile is. Applicants don’t even have to go out and get a hard copy of their work or a manila folder. They just shit ’em out like the Great Crapping Albatross of Zanzibar, and you know how that sumbitch can shit.

Look out below!

This feels like bad dating

I have felt frustrated like this before, when I could not get a girlfriend. I could get dates, but not the kind of serious partnership I wanted to have. I looked long and hard at myself, and I realized — mind you, this was obvious to the rest of the universe — that the problem was me being too needy.

Maybe it was because I’d just lost my Mom to cancer, or because I had some lingering feeling of self doubt, but for whatever reason I was chasing women away by trying too hard to get them into my life. Nobody is interested in being idolized.

Many years and a fair few relationships later I have met the woman for me. More than that, though, I was ready to meet her when she came along. So what does that tell me?

I don’t think anyone is going to be interested in the kind of work I do if I am going around begging them to check it out, be it via email or in person. Part of that is because I want to write weird stuff, but part of it is also because people are just naturally averse to neediness, and authors (apparently) are desert-ass thirsty for agents.

I’m not doing that anymore. I’m going to focus on writing the work I want to write and trust that an audience will find me if I can manage to be honest with myself and work hard. If they don’t, the problem is most likely me. But that’s cool. I can improve me. Done it before.

In the meantime, I don’t see anything wrong with having a little fun with literary agents by asking that they query me. I do ask that they follow my submission guidelines to the letter, and if I don’t get back to them within six weeks, well, I guess I wasn’t interested.