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.
