SMFS Member Guest Post: A Tale of Three Agents by Paul A. Barra

 

Please welcome SMFS list member Paul A. Barra to the blog today with his perspective on an interesting topic…

 

 

A Tale of Three Agents

Paul A. Barra

 

After Mikhail Baryshnikov had been living in this country for a few years in the late eighties, he was asked what he thought was the main difference between the USA and the Soviet Union. The famed dancer replied: "A hard job in Russia is to buy something; a hard job in America is to sell something."

 

I agree with the second half of his contrast, and I don't want anything to do with sales. Leave that up to the experts has always been my motto, so I've been hunting for a literary agent to represent my work ever since I began writing fiction seriously. I need someone else to do the selling.

 

When I sold a novel manuscript to Black Opal Books seven years ago, I asked the editor/publisher to recommend me to a literary agent. Lauri Wellington did that and I signed with a Dallas-based agency, recognizing my inadequacies in the business world of publishing and hoping that having an agent in my corner would assist me in getting my next project in front of acquisition editors of more prestigious houses as I continued to write.

 

After all, agents are known now as the primary screening apparatus for publishers, with many functioning as valued editors in their own right. An agent may represent the adversary in contract negotiations with a publisher, but she is also a tool in the difficult task of acquiring projects for publishers. Not so my first agent.

 

I was assigned to a new agent at the agency, something I expected and accepted. I was a new author. The young agent was, and is, an excellent communicator, muti-talented as a cover artist and marketer, and now a publisher of her own marque. At the time, however, she was new and disliked the sales aspect of agenting almost as much as I did. She was also badly treated and mentored by the senior agent at her firm. Not only did she not sell my next script, she never read it. Her boss told me to wait in the queue like everyone else seeking representation, even though she had already signed me and was receiving her cut of my royalties from the first book (meager as they were). My relationship with the agency ended badly—luckily for me, as it turned out, since that agency is now charging reading fees—and my young agent left the fold. 

I published another book with BOB and then lucked out with "Westfarrow Island," signing with my independent publisher of choice, The Permanent Press. The product was beautifully done and got a dynamite review in Publishers Weekly when it dropped in 2019. A year later I sent them my next work, a mystery at a horse racing venue. The protagonist was a fallen priest. Co-publisher Marty Shepard called me to say he didn't like priests, in fact he "couldn't stomach the idea of a man dressed in black;" would I turn the man into a former priest? Since a main theme of the novel was redemption, I told Marty that wouldn't work if the man had already abandoned his vocation. We agreed to disagree, and I was out one publisher.

 

So I went hunting another literary agent. I found one in New York who liked the Westfarrow sequel I had written. I recognized the name of her agency even if I didn't know her by reputation, but she was smart and easy to get along with. It was the time of Covid, so she had emigrated back to her home in the Bay Area, but our work together was not affected. We talked about changing the characters, possibly even using a pen name, but the agent eventually decided to put the revised script out on submission as a sequel called "Sheepshead Bay Commission." Predictably (I can say that now but wasn't nearly so certain then), no one would touch it. One editor from a major house told my agent that he would get fired if he ever took on a sequel of a novel owned by another publisher. Bad blunder, but we could recover.

 

The trouble was, my agent had lost heart. She gradually got slower and slower answering my emails, didn't have anything definitive to say about my second major rewrite of Sheepshead Bay, wasn't enthusiastic about the other works I had written. By now it was 2021 and I had not published anything but few short stories in two years. She became my literary agent in name only.

 

Another New York agent, this one an academic with a terminal degree in Black Studies from a prestigious university, liked a children's historical adventure I wrote called "Samson and the Charleston Spy." My second agent was gracious in releasing me from our contract, and I was off with Agent #3. This was in early 2022.

 

I learned a lot about middle grade readers. How, for instance, one could not write in first person if another, third person, POV was going to have a say later in the book. We can do that sort of thing in adult novels, but ten-year-olds can get confused with the change. Since the novel takes place in and around the bombardment of Ft. Sumter and is told from a Southern perspective, and contains the themes of slavery, nativism and zealotry for the Cause, my new agent and I worked hard getting the script in shape. She even sent it to a "sensitivity reader" for input. When it was finally ready, she submitted it to eight editors at NYC publishers. Result: eight rejections.

 

Three wanted only contemporary novels, no historicals; three offered no comments as to why they passed on the novel. Agent #2 had an excuse for every rejection but one: One editor had the effrontery to suggest to my agent, on the phone, that the script would be more palatable to NYC editors if the protagonist himself turned out to be the spy. A native South Carolinian son of the Confederacy becomes a Yankee spy! If I had agreed to that, I would have had to move out of the South. Under cover of darkness. The children's book world is a fearsome jungle indeed.

 

Agent #3 wanted to wait before she tried submitting Samson again, and she wasn't interested in the adult manuscripts that were beginning to pile up on my desktop. The same thing happened as happened with Agent #2: she gave up after one round of submissions. Late last year, she called to tell me she was leaving her agency for another and would not be taking me with her. She was as kind and gracious as always. I think of her—and Agent #2— as a friend, although I cannot imagine a situation in which I would ask for her advice again.

 

Meanwhile, a story of mine had been selected for a Mystery Writers of America anthology ("When a Stranger Comes To Town"). The MWA was represented by Alec Shane of Writers House. Although my only contact with him was when he sent me my share of the book's advance ($549) and author copies of the hard and soft-covered products, I wrote to him suggesting that since he already represented some of my work, he might as well represent all of it. He did not agree, so I am again unrepresented.

 

My writing buddy is suggesting that I go self-publishing this time. Writers are making money by doing the publishing houses' work themselves—and there are many artists and editors and producers who can assist, for a fee. I'm not taking him seriously because the very thought of the time and effort necessary to be successful, truly successful, as a self-published author drains away all my energy. I don't think I'm strong enough to put in the work that writing requires, plus the work into marketing and promoting my book that would be necessary to make money. That's sales, and sales is not the work of a writer.

 

A writer ought to be able to support his family by writing alone. I did it for many years as a freelancer, writing feature stories in a niche press market and in magazines. Fiction shouldn't be impossible. So, I'm starting over again. I'm going to query small presses and work my way up, gradually. And, if I ever do attract an agent again, I'm going to talk to her about her thoughts on trying out more than one submission blitz before giving up on a project. I understand sales is difficult, I will tell her, but that's why I want you to represent me. I do the writing; you do the selling. Can that still work in 2023?

 

Paul Barra ©2023 

Paul A. Barra's latest novel, Full of Eyes: A Rebel Bishop Mystery, is a historical mystery.