The Truth About Agents, Revealed!

If you haven't already, I highly recommend you read Jessica Faust's recent post titled, "Agents Aren't the Enemy."

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're probably saying to yourself, "Wow, that Jessica Faust person sure is reasonable and fair-minded, patient and kind. She probably rescues kittens out of trees and travels to foreign countries to help orphans in her free time."

Don't be fooled my fellow writers! I link to her post to show you just how devious these agents can be. Let the truth set you free! We have nothing to lose but our royalty checks! Don't let these agents, with their free advice, and taking time out of their busy schedules to answer questions they've already been asked over a hundred times, lure you into a false sense of security. Because I'm here to tell you right now: Agents feast on the tears of rejected writers. That and massive doses of caffeine.

They do.

We now take you to the agents' evil lair under the IHOP in Queens.



"What do we have here? The writer claims this
revolutionary literary fiction about a frustrated
writer who travels to Alaska to find himself, only
to get bitten by a vampire and become an undead
nature documentary filmmaker, will be the next
Twilight. And you know what, it surely would be!
Especially with all the basic spelling and grammar
errors, those really give the manuscript an authentic feel.
Hah! Who needs to earn a living? Let us crush this
writer's precious dreams underfoot."



"Ah, the distilled tears of a frustrated writer, mixed
with some pomegranate juice. I feel my power growing
already. Nom nom nom."



"So, now that we're done fostering mediocrity and
stifling the creativity of unappreciated literary
geniuses, who do you think is going to win America's
Next Top Model?"

LOLcat can haz agent?

In honor of the impending Queryfail 2: Bigger, Better, Angstier, I've put together a LOLcat query letter. I think if cats could type, this is what they'd say. That and 'feed me.'

#Underfail: Rise of the Agents

For those of you who have been wasting your time with silly things like writing or, you know, spending time with your families and engaging in human interaction, you may not be aware that there is yet another controversy in the Writing/Publishing blogosphere. First, there was the great #Queryfail debate of March '09, now there is the even better and angstier #Agentfail debate of April '09. I don't know what we're doing for May, but I hope it involves Nerf weapons.

For those of you who have been out of the loop, here's a quick run down of what's been going on.

For over a thousand years, a great war has raged between two rival races:



The Agents, and...



The Writers.

Though the origins of this conflict are lost to the sands of time, for the past several decades, Agents and Writers had maintained an uneasy peace, until the great scourge that is known in the Dark Tongue as Twitter sowed discord throughout the land.



"OMG, here's another writer who didn't follow
the submission guidelines, didn't use spellcheck,
and swears their 250,000 word WWII historical
about a Ninja Assassin with a Heart of Gold will
sell more than Harry Potter!"



"We have been humiliated! Unprofessional!
Stop spending so much time on Twitter and
read our queries! And reply! None of this
'no response means no' crap! It's hard enough
being a writer as it is!"



"You guys are so harsh. Agents have feelings too!
You have no idea how busy we are representing
existing clients, drinking blood, fighting werewolves
while wearing tight leather outfits, and watching reality
TV shows."

Will this war between Writers and Agents ever end? Can they find a way to work together towards the same goal? Will Nathan Bransford ever get those Sacramento Kings tickets ? Will Colleen Lindsay ever get over her fear of Nanerpuss? Can this writer stop procrastinating and get back to work on her latest manuscript? Stay tuned.

#Queryfail

Ohaithere! Where have I been for the last week? Oh, ya know, writing, and writing...did I mention writing? A little obsessively. Sometime soon, I'll tell you the wicked crazy dreams I've been having from the viewpoint of one of my own characters. You know why this blog is called Surviving Writing a Book? Besides the fact that's it a play on the title of my first novel, Surviving Matewan? It's because when I get into writing, when I really get into writing, it starts to get a little crazy.

But that's a mental detour for another day. At this moment, I want to weigh in on a controversy, because I cannot ignore the siren song of controversy, it is like the siren song of Coke Slurpees and eventually I must succumb. On Thursday, March the Fifth, a group of agents liveblogged via Twitter the queries they were reading, lavishing special attention on the egregiously bad ones, and sometimes describing what the query sender did wrong. Much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments ensued, as some in the writing world suggested that those involved in #Queryfail day were great big meanies.

First of all, it is very upsetting to see two of my favorite agents, who shall go nameless, fighting. I didn't know agents could do that. It's like finding out Mrs. Claus took out a restraining order on Santa. And yes, I know I'm being naive. OK, I'm still naive. Heh!

Second, yeah, sometimes #queryfail went from informative and funny to mean and sometimes that made me uncomfortable. But as far as I'm concerned, criticism happens and as you develop as a writer and show your work to others, whether it be via blog, query or actual published book, you're going to be able to control the criticism you receive less and less. Get used to it now. If agents were posting entire queries and ruthlessly snarking on them, maybe I'd feel differently, but that's not what they were doing.

Now, on to the content of #queryfail, because this is really why I don't feel badly for most of those who were snarked upon. A perusal of the #queryfails reveal several patterns:

• 1. Queries where the sender hadn't written a book at all. These include people who had a great idea and wanted help writing it, wanted to secure an agent before they had ever committed a word to paper, or were asking agents questions about payment and money.
• 2. Queries where the sender made unreasonable/unrealistic demands. For example, talking about going on Oprah or suggesting that they receive million dollar advances.
• 3. Queries that failed to follow basic guidelines and rules of grammar and civility, such as addressing the query, "To Whom It May Concern" and sending it out to 30 agents all at once, or queries that clearly weren't spellchecked, or where agents were sent genres they clearly don't represent.
• 4. Queries that skimped on the plot and talked about, instead of showed, how great the book was.

What really gets me is that the more egregious and atrociously written the query, the more it tended to suffer from more than one of the problems listed above. The person who's written the 250,000 word Middle Grade Erotic Vampire Thriller who's certain their book will be bigger than Harry Potter and Twighlight combined also doesn't believe in using commas or sending agents personalized e-mails because that'd crimp their creative genius.

All the query senders with problems #1-3 (I'm not talking about #4, because that's a common mistake that anybody can make), they don't respect the craft, because there' s just no excuse to be making those sorts of mistakes. It's not an issue of lack of talent or newbie rawness, we're talking about having a modicum of basic common sense and cursory research here.

Most of the folks sending those types of sloppy queries, they're looking to make a quick buck and they think writing's an easy way to do it, and you know why they think writing's an easy way to do it? Because they probably haven't written much, if anything, because if they did, they'd realize it's really hard and there's no quick money involved.

So no, I don't mind terribly if the agents snark on them, because they're wasting the agents' time, keeping them from getting to the queries of those people who've done their homework, and clearly don't take writing seriously, so why should anybody take them seriously?