Category Archives: authors

November 21, 2012   Miriam   authors, controversy, creativity, culture, debate, editors, great books, Miriam, opinion, platform, publishers, Publishing  
3

Why some authors hate publishers

A long-time client, who is very dear to our agency, pointed us in the direction of a piece by Michael Levin in the HuffPost that I’d missed when it ran last week.  Our client was distressed by Mr. Levin’s assertions about the nefarious tactics mustache twirling publishers use to victimize authors.  Understandably, since Mr. Levin writes with such passion and seeming authority, she was concerned that the picture he paints is an accurate depiction of the culture of book publishing as 2012 draws to a close and we count down to the  Mayan apocalypse (which, of course, if it comes to pass will make this discussion irrelevant).

After reading the piece Jane and I had basically the same reaction which boiled down to “Why do the people talking trash about our business always seem to be the ones who understand it the least or who have a bag full of sour grapes they’re carrying around with them?”  And, then I got all happy because I didn’t have to scrounge around looking for a blog topic this week.

We promised our client that we’d go through Mr. Levin’s arguments and respond to them from our point of view and this, more or less (with my usual digressions and irritating asides), is what I hope to do here.

Mr. Levin’s argument boils down to four salient points:  (1) Publishers hate authors even though authors and the work they produce are their lifeblood. (2) Publishers are reducing advances and royalties across the board with the added perk of also reducing marketing and promotion for their titles. (3) Publishers’ dependence on BookScan (the tracking system for sales) guarantees that unless an author has a boffo success, their career is over faster than you can say “reserve for returns.”  And (4) by lowering the quality of the product because they refuse to pay what good authors are worth, publishers are ensuring that the public stops buying books and turns to other sources (the Internet) for their information and entertainment kicks.

Alrighty, then!  This should be quick(ish).

(1)   Publishers are the partners and adversaries of agents.  We work with and against them for the good of our authors, who have our first allegiance.  That said, most publishers (and the term includes all the people who make books happen at a publishing house from the CEO to the intern who opens the mail) we deal with daily, sometimes hourly, are incredibly hard working, thoughtful, engaged, and compassionate.  I’ve said this before and it bears repeating, very few people go into our business to achieve their dreams of Trump-like wealth.  Salaries are low in publishing compared to those in other media, and the work is painstaking and, often thankless (Exhibit A: Mr. Levin).  Publishing types do their jobs—which entail long hours after they’ve left the office sitting with a manuscript that needs to be shaped on a granular level—because they LOVE books.  Period.  With all the challenges publishers are faced with in this increasingly digital world, the level of care they bring to the curating of great (and even not so great) books is impressive.

(2)  Not sure which publishers Mr. Levin is talking about but our agency has had its best year ever.  We’ve sold over 100 books this year and have been paid advances, ranging from five to seven figures, on every one of them.  Perhaps there are some tiny houses that are embracing the “no advance” model but we work with the Big Six as well as many, many smaller independent publishers and have not seen this no-advance/lower-royalty model Mr. Levin describes.

(3)  We depend on BookScan too when we are considering signing up an author.  It’s a tremendous tool that lets you know what you’re up against when trying to find a new home for a previously published author whose book didn’t do well.  Has BookScan ever been a deciding factor in not signing up a book?  Probably, but only if we were very much on the fence about it anyway.  I’d venture to say that this is the same process publishers go through because we’ve had numerous authors whose BookScan sales, how to put it delicately?, were in the toilet and we still sold their next book and the book after that.  Bottom line, if your next idea is great or your genius undeniable, or your platform has reached critical mass, BookScan will not destroy your career.

(4)  Really?  Take a look at the best books of the year lists that are cropping up all over the place right now and tell me if you think important, brilliant, exciting fiction and non-fiction isn’t being published any more.  And, given the fact that book sales have risen in the digital age, it seems that a new generation of readers is turning to…books…for their information and their entertainment kicks!

Seems to me that publishers don’t hate authors any more than authors hate publishers.  In this complicated new world we live in, we all (on both sides of the business) need to take responsibility for our own failures and flaws as well as advocate for our strengths and successes rather than succumbing to paranoid fantasies about how much “they” hate us.

November 20, 2012   Yassine   authors, food, fun, holidays, Thanksgiving, writing, Yassine  
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Does writing take a holiday?

Being the e-book manager here at DGLM, I am in possession of a wealth of copyedited and polished manuscripts, ready to be uploaded and unleashed onto the various e-book stores on the internet. Therefore, I only see one side of that manuscript, the finished article. What I don’t get to see is the process that writers go through to hand me their completed work.

I have always been fascinated with the variety of routines that writers impose in order to let the creativity flow. With Thanksgiving approaching rapidly – too rapidly for those in charge of turkey duties – I’m wondering if any writers out there will be modifying their schedule to accommodate visiting family, trips to visit family, or to fit in a post-Thanksgiving nap. After reading this piece on writers’ routines, I tried to imagine how the writers mentioned in the article would or wouldn’t break their schedule.

Susan Sontag certainly adopted a pretty stringent itinerary, so would she have invited over guests other than Roger Straus? Hemingway strived to wake at first light when working on novels, but surely Papa would have afforded himself a wee bit of a lie-in over the holidays? And with the increased level of consumption that marks the holiday season these days, would Ben Franklin be able to remain so frugal?

Do you cut yourself some slack in your writing habits over the holidays? Or will you find yourself a quiet corner on Thursday to continue writing?

October 18, 2012   Jessica   authors, fiction, Jessica, what we're looking for, writing  
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Fall for Fiction

Trees are ablaze, apples are sweet, air is crisp, and for me, fall spells fiction.  My to-read pile is as deep and inviting as the leaf pile on my lawn, with Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, an ARC of Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs  and Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety.  Reading good books makes me hungry for new projects.  Very hungry.  It’s not unlike having a tapeworm.  So e-mail me your queries, attach your first chapters, and know you have an interested audience.  My tastes are wide ranging—recently I’ve liked The Forgiven (shades of Paul Bowles and Laurence Durrell) the twice Bookered Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, Ann Patchett’s glorious State of Wonder  and  J. Courtney Sullivan’s intergenerational tale, Maine, whose  characters were as real (and prickly) as folks I know.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m always on the lookout for smart nonfiction, but today’s post is an open invitation to the novelists among you.  I do represent polemics on my nonfiction list, but I am suspicious of novels conceived to further an obvious agenda—whether political, humanitarian, or spiritual. When a query letter begins cause first, story second, I worry. In the framework of a novel, it seems to me that readers care about characters and not issues, and nothing is worse than a story inhabited by sock puppets, each rehearsing the arguments of their author.  I am a fan of historical fiction, characters that travel to far flung settings, first person narration, and rueful humor (think Lorrie Moore).

I’d love to see a well-turned spy thriller, a literary fantasy along the lines of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians or Susanna Clarke’s masterful  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,  or a novel that plumbs the relationship between sisters (I have three) .  I have trouble with high fantasy and space opera—my knowledge of the genre is just too shallow–and I am too lily-livered to linger much with horror, serial killers or kids in peril.   So with those few caveats, drop me a line. I’d love to see my inbox ablaze with fiction!

September 20, 2012   Jane   agents, authors, Jane, rejection  
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What in the world was he thinking?

Last Friday, I ran across this story on Galleycat and I was really amazed and troubled by it. I sincerely hope this is an isolated, freak incident, but it made me think about our process and how it is perceived by the authors who approach us.

We agents work very hard to encourage new writers and to help them find a home.  Often our business depends on unsolicited queries (I know mine does).  Finding something wonderful in the “slush” pile gives everyone a sense of real satisfaction and during the last twenty-five years I have had my share of new clients come from there.

This, though, is not the norm.  Even though we pride ourselves in reviewing everything that is sent to us, we pass on most unsolicited queries .  In fact, we would be helping nobody by signing an author who isn’t ready and submitting his or her work only to be turned down by publishers.  More than anything else, the author would suffer – his or her ego would be hurt by the mass rejection and he or she would have to wait a good long time before submitting again to the same editors who had just turned down the material.

When we do turn a writer down, whether they are solicited or unsolicited, we try to do so thoughtfully.  There is absolutely no point in being rude or discouraging.  That said, with the volume of queries we receive, there’s no avoiding the dreaded form rejection letter.  We know authors hate these and we’re not thrilled to use them, but we simply don’t have the manpower to write individual notes to everyone.

So my message to authors who are just starting is to have your material be as ready as possible before you query agents and if you get turned down, think about why, continue to work on your project and try again when it is in a more polished place.

Persistence is one of the things I live by; giving up is simply unacceptable.  But so is lashing out against people who work hard and are genuinely trying to help.

September 12, 2012   Miriam   authors, bestsellers, competition, creativity, fun, Miriam, writing  
4

Spousal envy

A lot of authors are married to or in relationships with other authors.  Who better than another author understands the need to jump out of bed in the middle of the night in order to write down the solution to a tricky scene in your novel, or the misery of staring at a blank sheet or screen and feeling like you’ll never have anything to fill it with, or the fugue state you enter when the characters are racing you through the plot at breakneck speed and it’s all you can do to keep up with them, never mind eating, showering, or answering the phone.   So, yeah, we see a lot of authors who live together and work together and share the ups and downs of the writing life.

And, I’ve always wondered how it must feel to be the less successful half of one of those relationships.   Because even if both authors are supremely talented (Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne…) you know there’s always one half of the couple who garners the greater acclaim critically or commercially (sometimes both).  And, given how fragile creative egos can be, it’s gotta smart a little no matter how much you love your significant other when her book is the talk of the town while yours is languishing in the remainder bins.

This piece by Niall  Leonard, EL James’ husband, is delightful precisely because it is snarky and meanspirited in just the right proportions.  On the one hand, Mr. Leonard is doubtlessly enjoying his wife’s success (and, we hope, if theirs is a good marriage, rejoicing for her).  On the other, he’s a wee bit cranky that her blockbuster is taking over their lives and that all anyone wants to talk about is Fifty Shades of Grey when he’s got his own book to peddle.  He doesn’t come across as unduly bitter and clearly has a sense of humor about the whole thing.   Or does he?

How hard would it be for you to watch your spouse hit the literary jackpot while you’re toiling away in obscurity?  Would you be noble and selfless in your support or would you secretly be drawing mustaches or devil horns on his/her author photo?

September 11, 2012   abby   Abby, authors, characterization, characters, gender, writing  
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Man haters?

I love Junot Diaz. I think he is an amazing and imaginative writer and I like to read everything of his that I can get my hands on, so it is no surprise that I read the interview he gave to NPR this week. And what really caught my attention was his characterization of men through the eyes of women. Diaz says

But look, bro, are you telling me that if I get all the women of the United States and gather them all together and then say, ‘Do you highly recommend American men?’ that you’re going to get, like, a sterling recommendation? That these women are going to be like, ‘Oh, yes, American men are fantastic! These dudes have done so well by us.’ I think that every culture, if you got all the women of that culture together and said, ‘Grade your men,’ I don’t think any country — even a place like Denmark, which has this famous sort of gender equality — would give their men anything higher than F as a collective. And that’s a reality.

If you’re familiar with any of Diaz’s work, you’ll be able to see a parallel between the above quote and the characters in his stories—basically, his male characters are always jerks because that’s what he believes women see. Author Craig Nova comes to a similar conclusion about the characterization of men in fiction, except he laments it. Nova complains that male characters are rarely the good guys anymore, and are more often characterized as dead-beats and dogs. But in his own life, Nova can think of plenty of great male role models.

And as I think about Nova’s words, I am hard pressed to find a completely stand up, great guy in any of my recent reading. But the world isn’t full of men who are just jerks, so why aren’t our fictional men more diverse? How did we get here? Why do you think these two men portray their gender so differently in their fiction? And which do you think is more truthful of men in real life?

August 15, 2012   Miriam   authors, classics, critiques, favorites, fiction, fun, Miriam, opinion  
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The sense of a beginning

As we’ve discussed many times on this blog, a truly great opening line to a novel is the holy grail for those who read and write for a living.  A beautiful, evocative, powerful first sentence can mean the difference between committing to a 600-page journey or picking up the remote.  The truth is, most novels, even the ones we decree to be masterpieces, don’t have particularly memorable opening lines.

For instance:  “The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.”

Or, “When the lights went off, the accompanist kissed her.”

Or, “The play—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.”

These are the first sentences of three of my favorite novels of the past decade or so.  Solid openers, certainly, but nothing of the caliber of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  I believe that these three books (The Corrections, Bel Canto, and Atonement in case you hadn’t guessed) will become classics (if they haven’t already) despite the fact that Franzen, Patchett, and McEwan didn’t knock it out of the park with their first swing.

I just started reading Gone Girl and because it has been hyped to the heavens by everyone I know who’s read it, I was looking for a brilliant start.  And…it’s fine.  It made me want to keep reading but it didn’t grab me in a vice grip and drag me into the book.  To be honest, it felt a bit forced and writerly.  So far, however, the novel’s terrific and living up to the reviews.

My point, and I do have one, is that the first line doesn’t have to be mind-blowing.  It just needs to be good, intriguing, well written.  It should pique your curiosity even if it doesn’t turn you into a quivering mass of anticipation.  Ah, but the next 90,000 words need to keep you interested.   And, then you can try again—with a stunning closer that stays with you long after you’ve finished the book.

Of course, if that’s all too much trouble, you can do what these folks did and write some truly gruesome first sentences.  They will definitely grab someone’s attention.

What are the first lines from novels you’ve loved that didn’t exactly knock your socks off?  And why did you keep reading anyway?

August 02, 2012   Miriam   authors, fun, interaction, marketing/publicity, mentors, Miriam, relationships, self-publishing  
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Support systems

We’ve lately had the good fortune to represent some lovely women, like Tracey Garvis Graves and Colleen Hoover, who started out self-publishing their fiction and for whom we’ve now been able to make some significant deals with “legacy” publishers (have I mentioned that I really dislike that term?).  These women are very smart and committed about their work, but they are also incredibly generous in their support of other writers who are embarking on the same kind of venture.  They belong to online support groups where they critique each other’s works, give each other tips on how to market their books, and serve as cheerleaders to each other on their public platforms.  As Jane mentioned in her blog post last week, authors mentoring and supporting other authors should not be a surprising phenomenon, but, in fact, it often is.  It’s also wonderful and important and we hope that other authors are taking note and emulating this kind of esprit de corps.

But, as I mull over this interesting development, it occurred to me that I don’t see this kind of “community” among male writers.  Sure, people like our own David Morrell are tireless in speaking at conferences, sharing  insights with up and coming writers, and offering priceless advice (in David’s case like the professor he once was).  And I know that  Joe Konrath, whom we’ve represented for many years, has a huge online following for his often controversial but always provocative views about the publishing process.  But, I have not seen the kind of small  influential online writing groups among male writers that seem to be flowering in the women’s fiction world.

Why is this, do you suppose?  Is it a XX/XY thing?  Is it because of category?  Is it because men are more naturally competitive and women more nurturing (to apply the most pervasive stereotypes)?  Or do these groups exist and thrive and I’m just not hip to them?

July 17, 2012   abby   Abby, authors, controversy, debate, digital publishing, e-books, Facebook, piracy  
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eBook Piracy

In a digital publishing world, how do we deal with piracy? Authors and readers alike have strong opinions about piracy, DRM (a special kind of coding that is added to some eBooks so you can’t do things like copy and paste or print out an entire eBook), and how to stop eBooks from being stolen. And some have more creative solutions than others. The Guardian recently shared this piece about author Terry Goodkind and his own special brand of revenge. After finding a pirated copy of his self-published title THE FIRST CONFESSOR: THE LEGEND OF MAGDA available online, Terry took to his Facebook to out his pirate to fans and publicly shame him for stealing the eBook (including posting a photo of the alleged pirate).

And it worked.

The pirate removed all of his links to Goodkind’s book and Goodkind considers this a victory.

The question is: should we be castigating people who make pirated eBooks available? Or, as Paul Coelho believes, does piracy stir readers’ interest and sales? Goodkind believes it removes any incentive to legitimately purchase an author’s work. What do you think? Should authors put a lot of effort into combating piracy?

June 20, 2012   Miriam   authors, controversy, culture, media, Miriam  
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Content pressure

A friend of mine alerted me to this story about Jonah Lehrer’s self-plagiarism (which turned into a story of him plagiarizing others) and it made me sad.  This kind of thing keeps coming up (whether it’s plagiarizing or making things up, a la Frey and Mortenson) and it’s disappointing, sure, but it’s also puzzling.

Rather than opting for knee-jerk demonizing, I find myself wondering if it’s possible that these talented people are just cracking under the pressure to produce content at a speed that is unsustainable in order to catch the miniscule attention span of readers used to having 17 websites open at once and getting their information in McNugget bites.   Or, as in the case of those who “embellish,” if it’s the trying to make their stories bigger, shinier, funnier, more tragic, more more in order to grab your and my interest.

Is any of this excusable?  Are we collectively putting too much pressure on our writers and thinkers and pushing them over the edge into the ethical abyss?  What do you all think?

 

 

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