tao

LITERARY AGENTS AND LYING AND SENDING OUT FORTY-FIVE SUBMISSIONS AT ONCE

If I were a literary literary agent with a book that I believed in I would probably lie to editors.  This isn't unfortunate.  This is good.  This is like going up to a pile of money; using that money to (1) promote a literary book, (2) take attention away from John I-exist-in-the-fourth-dimension, I-live-off-the-grid-inside-of-a-holographic-house Twelve Hawkes, and (3) force the media to care about real literature, because that is where, after I lie to forty-five editors, the money will be.  So yeah, I'd lie and feel good about it.  I would send out forty-five submissions at once, wait one or two days, then tell those forty-five editors that several offers had been made.  This would create buzz, enthusiasm, urgency, etc.  It would get the editors to read my submission right now.  It would guarantee a bidding-war.  The book would receive a huge advance, forcing the publisher to like it and the media to think about it.  Less people inside of the world would think about Dan Brown; more people about literature.

   

I asked Sam Stoloff, my agent, an agent with the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, what he thought about all this.

 

I asked him, Is it possible for an agent to lie to an editor and say that a book has had an offer, in order to create buzz and/or get the editor to more quickly and enthusiastically read that agent's manuscript?  Do you think that this happens?  He said:      

On agents lying.  There are some legendary stories about agents doing this, and some agents who have that reputation.  I believe that most do not, partly because it's so easy to check--the editorial community is pretty small, with lots of social interconnection, and lies can be very easily exposed.  But the temptation is strong, and I'm sure some succumb to it.  I think we all fudge a little bit, but in general my policy is strict honesty, and I certainly don't invent offers that don't exist.

 

I once heard an editor say that an agent had invented a competing bidder in an auction that this editor was involved in.  The shocking thing to me was not that the agent did this, but that the editor did not seem to be outraged.

Agents will usually send a manuscript out to ten or so editors at one time.  But why not send a manuscript out to, say, forty-five editors at one time.  Wouldn't that almost guarantee more than one offer and therefore the possibility of a bidding war?

Why not 45 submissions?  I will sometimes make a submission to more than 10 at one time, but only if it's something I am very sure of.  If I have doubts, I will make the submission more limited.  That way, I can get feedback and can suggest that the author make changes before every available market is used up.  Even in the strongest case, however, 45 would be too many--I'd rather pick the 15 I thought were best suited for a given book.  On the other hand, one thing that used to keep us from making wider submissions--the cost of copying, packaging and mailing--has evaporated with the rise of email submissions, so I'd expect the number of places a given project is submitted to to go up.

HOW TO GET A FIRST BOOK OF SHORT STORIES REVIEWED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Todd Hasak-Lowy's first book, a story collection, The Task of This Translator, came out on June 1st.  It was not thematically-linked.  It got a few reviews in small papers.  He was interviewed by something called Reader of Depressing Books.  Nothing happened for a while.  The book was finished probably.  "That book is doomed," I thought.  But then on July 27th it was reviewed in the New York Times.

I asked him how this happened.  I said to him, incoherently, "Can you tell me everyone you know about how come your book was reviewed in The New York Times?"  He said:

Here's everything (everyone?!) I know about how my book was reviewed in the NYT:

Somehow Richard Eder got it and liked it and wrote about it.

That's it.  I'm not trying to be coy, but I really just don't know.  In fact, as far as I know, no one at Harcourt, not my editor or even my publicist knew this was coming.  We had been under the impression that the Sunday Book Review was going (hopefully) to write something about it in the Fiction Chronicle section, and then Eder's piece appeared.  My agent stumbled upon it online during the afternoon of the day before it was printed in the paper.

Then I backtracked and asked him how his book 'happened,' overall.  I've edited out most of my questions, leaving a sort of narrative:

We started sending out the manuscript in late 2001. Some of the places that turned it down had more than politely nice things to say about it, some were truly excited by the stories, but all these couldn’t get past the problem that they were short stories by an unknown.

My agent hadn’t given up, but he did think (correctly I believe) that we were getting very close to having to turn to publishers who would have great difficulty getting the book adequately circulated and exposed.  He felt that these stories deserved at least a crack at a large audience, and the fact of the matter is today smaller presses have great difficultly reaching such an audience.  He read me some of the longer, praising letters.  In general he kept most of this stuff away from me, which was a very good idea on his part.

At this point, I quoted something Hasak-Lowy'd said earlier:

But if your collection--in terms of setting/subject matter--is pretty coherent (I don't feel like mine was) then a publisher may not care as much about it not being a novel, since then they can market it as a novel, in the sense of selling the content and not you, which is part of what has to happen with a story collection.

And asked him about it.  He said:

I think I heard this primarily from my agent, and it strikes me as pretty reasonable.  I don’t follow the marketing of short story collections for the most part.  But I think in terms of selling a writer, if he or she has a clear audience based on his/her personality, profession, background, then the publisher will use this.

As for my collection being thematically-linked, we came up with the link during the editing process, building on formulations my agent had come up while shopping it around (and probably things my editor thought up when she was trying to get her publisher to okay her acquisition of it).  My biography (the Jewish part in particular) and my profession (Hebrew professor) has helped to get various Jewish publications and organizations to take notice.

At certain points when we were still trying to sell the stories we included a couple page summary of a novel I hoped to write, in order to show them that I was thinking about a novel down the road.  But this ploy didn’t help at the time.  One publisher, who had already passed, suggested linking the stories, which I thought was fairly silly.  I am know writing a novel, when not working on my academic writing, which takes up most of my time.

Here's a timeline I made:

• Late 2001: started sending it out.
• November 2003: sold it to Carroll & Graf.
• June 2005: Harcourt publishes it.
• July 27th, 2005: the New York Times reviews it.

Here's Hasak-Lowy's "main advice":

[...] keep writing, be patient, and don't get too excited about anything that isn't a genuine offer.

PULITZER, PEN/FAULKNER, NATIONAL BOOK; STATISTICS FOR THE LAST ELEVEN YEARS

To find out what publisher originally published the award winners (and not who did the paperback or the reissue or UK or whatever editions), and therefore which publisher really got the most awards, I LexisNexis'ed thirty-three books. It took me over an hour, on my brother's Laptop, without a mouse, in the middle of the night, sitting on an air mattress.

                                                               Pulitzer     PEN/Faulkner    National Book 

Farrar Strauss & Giroux                     3                        1                      4                     

Knopf                                                         2                        2                      1      

Houghton Mifflin                                  2                        2                      1

HarperCollins                                         1                        1                      1

Pantheon                                                 0                        2                      1

W.W. Norton                                          0                        1                      1

And seven other publishers each won once. 

Interesting things I found out:

• Two authors won the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner in the same year.  Richard Ford for Independence Day and Michael Cunningham for The Hours.
• Two authors won three awards for three different books.  Philip Roth (One of each award.  Good for him.) and Ha Jin. (Two PEN/Faulkners and one National Book.)
• All the winners had full reviews in the New York Times before being nominated, except for four:
  • Gina Berriault (PEN/Faulkner 1997) had a 200 word or so "Books in Brief" review.  She did not get anything more after nomination and winning.
  • Rafi Zabor (PEN/Faulkner 1998) recieved no New York Times review, ever.  After winning he got a 3000 word profile called "Who is Rafi Zabor," and an accompanying chart that listed the PEN/Faulkner winners for the last ten years, called "WINNING WORDS: Not Necessarily Best Sellers."  It included  bestsellers Don Delillo, Annie Proulx, Richard Ford, Philip Roth, David Guterson, E.L. Doctorow, and T.C. Boyle; and Gina Berriault, Rafi Zabor, and James Salter.
  • Julia Glass (National Book Award 2003) also was never reviewed in the NYT, and also got a profile after winning.  Hers was 700 words.  She did not get an accompanying chart.
  • Lily Tuck (National Book Award 2004) got a "Books in Brief," 200 word review.  When she won, she got a 900 word profile.  No full review. 

RICK MOODY: PRETENTIOUS? OR, ACTUALLY NOT THAT PRETENTIOUS?

Rick Moody, in the Atlantic Monthly's Fiction Issue:

On the first day of my workshop with Angela Carter, in my sophomore year, Carter was charged with reducing the number of would-be participants in her class to fourteen.  Maybe thirty people were in the room, and she simply stood before us and tried to take questions.  Some young guy in the back, rather too full of himself, raised his hand and, with a sort of withering skepticism, asked, "Well, what's your work like?"  You have to have heard Carter speak to know how funny the next moment was.  She had a reedy and somewhat thin British voice, toward the upper end of the scale, and she paused a lot when she spoke. There were a lot of ums and ahs. Before she replied, she cocked her head and said "um" once or twice.  Then she said, " My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis."  The room emptied out at the break, and I'm not sure a quorum of fourteen returned.  Maybe only eleven or twelve ...

Quo·rum  (kwôrm, kwr-) n. The minimal number of officers and members of a committee or organization, usually a majority, who must be present for valid transaction of business.

Facts: Angela Carter needed to reduce the members to less than fourteen, not raise the members to a minimum of fourteen.  And that Moody was able to attend the class shows that fourteen was not the minimum needed for the class to ... validly transact its business.

Analysis: I know what Moody's trying to get at, and it makes a fleeting kind of sense--if you just let the logic of it all pass quickly by, in the periphery, like a panhandler.  I mean I know what he means.  So I guess that makes it okay.  And also he's dyslexsic, I think, so maybe that explains it.  But still, I have never seen anyone use this word, quorom, not even in scrabble.  And even if he is dyslexsic--shouldn't a dyslexsic person know to avoid a word like quorom?

Conclusion: A little pretentious, dyslexsic or not.

Solution: Don't overstate things.  Just say what happened.  If eleven or twelve returned, don't foreshadow that with fourteen unless you are knowingly making fun of yourself.  Just say, "The room emptied out at the break; maybe eleven or twelve returned."

KMART, KMART REALISM; THE RISE, STRUGGLE, AND DECLINE OF

The Rise 

1977-1980

• S.S. Kresge Co. changes its name to Kmart Corp.
• John Gardner, teacher of Raymond Carver, publishes On Moral Fiction, a sort of attack on Postmodernism.
• Raymond Carver stops drinking with the help of alcoholics anonymous, publishes Furious Seasons and Other Stories.  Writes What we Talk About When we Talk About Love.
• Mary Robison recieves a Masters degree from John Hopkins, publishes her first story collection, Days.
• Ann Beattie plays a waitress in the movie of her own novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, which is released twice.

1981-1987

• By the end of 1981, there are over 2,000 Kmart stores in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico.  Probably in other places too.
• Bobbie Ann Mason publishes Shiloh and Other Stories, wins the PEN/Hemingway Award.  Raymond Carver says, "These stories will last."
• Frederick Barthelme publishes his first story collection, Moon Deluxe, 13 stories of which (out of 17) appeared previously in the New Yorker.
• Joy Williams publishes Taking Care, her first story collection.  Raymond Carver says, "Joy Williams is simply a wonder."  Ann Beattie says, "One of our most remarkable storytellers."
• Raymond Carver publishes Cathedral. 
• Kmart starts relationship with Martha Stewart as spokeswoman and consultant.

The Struggle

1988-1993

• Raymond Carver dies of Lung Cancer.
• Joy Williams publishes Escapes.  Four of the stories appeared previously in Best American Short Stories.  One won an O'Henry Prize. But one story is bizarre.  It is called "Gurdjieff in the Sunshine State," and is literally that, and is ignored by all reviewers.  Zoe Heller says, " ... the market is flooded with laconic little slices of life [...] Joy Williams is undoubtably part of the factory team."
• "Less is Less," Madison Smartt Bell's anti Kmart realism essay, previously published in Harper's, is translated into Japanese and published in Switch.
• Kmart buys stake in OfficeMax, The Sports Authority.  Buys Borders, the book chain.

The Decline

1993-1999

• Kmart sells its stake in The Sports Authority and OfficeMax.
• Mary Robison divorces her second husband, Jim.
• Frederick Barthelme publishes a story in Ploughshares.  Has not published a story in The New Yorker since sometime before 1992; will not publish another story in the New Yorker ever.
• Kmart realism attacked by Frederick Busch, Tom Wolfe.

2000-2002

• Kmart buys its BlueLight.com Internet service.
• Joy Williams publishes The Quick and the Dead, a novel with wild, abstract, and affected language; a ghost who comes back to haunt and make-fun of its husband; and strange, woozily self-concious, postmodern-y sort of introductions to each section of the book.  Blurbed by Don Delillo, Bret Easton Ellis.
• Mary Robison publishes Why Did I Ever, a novel told in over 500 fragments, of which she says can pretty much be read in any order.
• Ann Beattie publishes an essay in the New York Times, reminiscing about how at readings people used to talk to her about Joy Williams and Raymond Carver.  Complaining about how now at readings people just ask her "specious questions to ellicit amusing answers."
• Kmart files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

WHO'S RESPONSIBLE?

editor: Stacey Creamer, Doubleday

agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman & Schneider

encouragement: The Rocky Mountain News, "The season's must-have accessory."

legitimacy: Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker Award Winner, "It teaches [my 13-year old daughter] practical things about the world and what might face her."

pride: Margaret Maupin, Book buyer, in The Rocky Mountain News, "You shouldn't be shamed of it because a lot of it is about finding out about pop culture."

we can do it again: MarySue Ricci, Simon and Schuster. August 11th, 2003, Publisher's weekly: "MarySue Rucci emerged the victor in a hot auction for the next novel [...]"

let me get some of that: David Rosenthal, Simon & Schuster. "Lauren Weisberger's untitled, unwritten third-novel ... in a major deal, for seven figures ..."