Congratulations to Stacey Lee whose debut novel Under A Painted Sky is a finalist for the 2016 Pen Center USA literary Award.
A big thank you to the judges Daniel José Older, Isabel Quintero, and Margaret Stohl.
Congratulations to Stacey Lee whose debut novel Under A Painted Sky is a finalist for the 2016 Pen Center USA literary Award.
A big thank you to the judges Daniel José Older, Isabel Quintero, and Margaret Stohl.
All aspiring writers want their magic number to be one.
The first novel a writer ever wrote is perfect from conception.
The first novel lands a literary agent.
The first novel is so awesome, it immediately sells at auction.
The first novel is published to great fanfare and much commercial success.
The dream-come-true of overnight success. Well, I’d like to tell you something about that. Overnight success is a fabrication created by media outlets because it makes for a good story.
Ninety-nine-percent of the time, overnight-success stories are fiction. Most of these stories don’t divulge that the author ghostwrote ten novels for other people, or wrote three of their own novels that are tucked away because the author was working on craft.
In real life, what is the magic number—the number of novels written before a writer gets picked up by an agent, sold, and published?
I’ll tell you right now, it’s not one. If you poll a large number of authors and ask them how many novels they wrote before their first one sold, and then if you average the numbers they give you, my sense is that you will land right around four.
One of the truths I highlight at writers conferences is that for more than half of my clients, I passed on the first project they sent me. It wasn’t until they sent me a later, more mature work that our agent-author love match bloomed.
Why do I tell you all this? If you’ve just completed your first novel, awesome. Celebrate this huge achievement. But it doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t sell, or if you independently publish it and it doesn’t get much traction.
Keep on writing. Your magic number might be two or six or ten. My guess is that if you are passionately writing with ten novels under your belt, success is just around the corner.
Photo Credit: Andy Maguire
(Just a note, this post is from our archives. Some references and links may be from past years.)
Just recently, PW published an article in which agents shared their thoughts on children’s books and YA trends. Although I’m quite tickled that so many agents are seeing lots of submissions featuring diverse characters, it’s dangerous to consider diversity the latest YA trend.
I’m sure I’m not the only agent who can say they’ve been repping diverse authors/books since day one. It certainly didn’t take a trend for me to sign those books and authors (for example, Kelly Parra’s awesome MTV Book Graffiti Girl in 2007, Kim Reid’s memoir No Place Safe in 2007, and Simone Elkeles’s Perfect Chemistry in 2008). But I can say this: unequivocally, before #WeNeedDiverseBooks became a rallying cry in April 2014, selling in a diverse author/book was tons harder to do. I have my submission logs to prove it. It often took me about 12 to 16 months of grim determination to find a diverse book a home.
If diversity is now hot enough to make the selling-in part a lot of easier, trust me, I’m all for it. Yay! Finally! But I absolutely do not want diversity to be considered a trend in young-adult literature, and here is why: If something is a trend, then it can go out of fashion just as quickly as it came in. And quite frankly, that would be a travesty.
The blunt truth is that selling a diverse book is a perfectly normal thing to do in publishing. So my rallying cry? Agents, new and old, even when diverse books become harder to sell, as they inevitably will (in publishing, trends of every kind have always come and gone), keep on keeping on.
Diversity is not a trend. It’s simply here to stay. This is the new normal.
Photo Credit: Ahmed Alkaisi
If you’re a writer on Twitter, you probably know that #MSWL is a popular hashtag. It’s how lots of agents and editors broadcast their submission wish lists.
I love it! But I can say with complete certainty that I’ll never post a #MSWL list. Why? Simply because I honestly don’t know what I’m looking for until I start reading it.
Case in point: When I read Stacey Lee’s UNDER A PAINTED SKY in manuscript form, never in a million years would I have posted to #MSWL that I was looking for a young-adult novel set in the American West, with two female protagonists—one Chinese, one African American—on the run and cross-dressing as boys to disguise themselves.
Yeah. I don’t think that would have come up.
But the minute I started reading, I knew I had to have that book. And thank goodness Putnam Children’s agreed with me.
So here’s the plain, honest truth: I have no idea what I’m looking for until the voice of a story grabs hold of me and doesn’t let go.
Just recently, I sold two science-fiction novels—DARE MIGHTY THINGS and THE BLACK HOLE OF BROKEN THINGS. Both, oddly, feature a competition at the heart of the story.
Ha! If you’d asked me whether competition stories were on my wish list, I probably would have said no. Popularity of The Hunger Games and all.
But once Emmett got a hold of me in THE BLACK HOLE OF BROKEN THINGS, I was 100% in. And in DARE MIGHTY THINGS, once Cassie Dhatri convinced me that competing for the opportunity to be an astronaut was cooler than competing for a prince and a kingdom, my inner geek girl squealed with delight. I was in.
So keep that in mind when you ask an agent, “What are you looking for?” If they have a ready answer, take it with a grain of salt. Rarely do we find exactly what we are looking for.
As the Rolling Stones would say, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.”
Photo Credit: Hey Paul Studios
At the beginning of 2015, I implemented new submissions guidelines. Instead of reading queries and then requesting sample pages, I now request that authors include the first ten pages of their manuscript along with their query letters.
What a difference! Instead of reading only 45 full manuscripts (like I did in 2014), I read 87 full manuscripts in 2015, plus 129 sample pages, and although many of these projects weren’t right for me, they did end up being right for another agent.
Now, having tried this new submissions process for a year, I can definitely identify some pros and cons.
PRO: I’m guessing writers probably love it. It gives them a chance to wow me with some opening pages, whereas before, if they didn’t perfectly nail the query letter, they might have been out of luck.
CON: Sometimes it takes me weeks longer to respond to queries than I would like. If I know I have to read some pages with it, I can’t just breeze in and get it done in 30 minutes. I need at least an hour to read the sample pages attached.
PRO: I’ve learned that some writers can nail the query letter, but their actual pages are not quite ready for an agent to read. And I can decipher this pretty quickly. This allows me to ask for full manuscripts of novels that are ready.
CON: It’s more pressure for the writer to really nail those opening pages.
PRO: The number of novels I read all the way to the end went up in 2015. It’s pretty rare for an agent to read an entire manuscript if they know early on that the project isn’t for them. I actually read many more novels to the conclusion before making a decision about offering representation.
CON: Man, I was a bit slow in getting back to some writers. I had several manuscripts for an embarrassingly long period of time.
INTERESTING TIDBIT: When I do ask for a full, I almost always make my decision on whether it’s right for me within the first 60 pages.
It’s that magic time of year when I tally up the numbers and share Kristin’s Yearly Stats! Apologies for being so slow to get this posted.
37 : total number of New York Times bestsellers (up from 33 total in 2014)
51 : books released in 2015 (22 print releases, 9 reprints, and 21 digital releases)
3 : new clients, two of whom sold at auction for six figures. One deal is public, the other is not yet announced. The third client is going on submission next month!
29,000+ : estimated number of queries read and responded to
87 : full manuscripts requested and read (up from 45 last year)
129 : number of sample pages requested and read (down from 856 last year. See my January Newsletter column Think Like An Agent below to learn why we requested far fewer sample pages this year than we have in years past.)
2 : number of projects currently on submission
71 : foreign-rights deals done (down from 99 last year, mainly because I only took on one client in 2014), 14 in Asia, 3 in Brazil, 3 in Mexico/Latin America, and 51 in Europe
4 : TV and major motion picture deals
46 : number of print runs for my longest-selling title, which is Jamie Ford’s HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET—which originally published in 2009. Twelve for the hardcover version, 34 for the paperback—four of which occurred in 2015! Crazy for a title to still be getting reprints after six years.
8 : conferences attended (which includes Bologna Book Fair, London, BEA, and Frankfurt Book Fair)
3 million+ : copies in print/sold for my bestselling long-running series this year
2.5 million+ : copies in print/sold for my bestselling individual title
3.5 million+ : copies sold for my bestselling hybrid author
Millions and Millions : ebooks sold for four of my bestselling indie-publishing-only authors. I can’t even track anymore.
100 : physical holiday cards sent
539 : electronic holiday cards sent
Not telling it’s so embarrassing : number of eggnog chai lattes consumed during November and December
Lots : of late nights reading on my living-room chaise with Chutney
All : great days loving my job!
Happy New Year!
I think this can be the most debilitating mistake an aspiring writer can make. There be dragons if you start down this mental path.
I recently gave a talk to Regis University’s MFA in Creative Writing students. In the fifteen-minute Q&A, one participant asked why it was so hard to get a literary agent to even look at her project. I could hear the frustration in her voice. I didn’t have a ready reply because the truth is that there is no good answer.
Writing is personal business. And any response and/or rejection can definitely feel like a commentary on your talent and who you are as a person.
But here is the reason you need to start thinking like an agent and less like a writer when it comes to submitting your material. If someone passes on your work, that rejection is not a commentary on your qualities as a human being. In a lot of instances, it’s not even a commentary on your ability or talent as a writer!
Let me repeat that: A rejection is often not a commentary on your writing talent.
I can cite a bundle of different reasons why an agent or publisher may pass on your work, reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with your writing ability. Don’t believe me? Here are a few (and in no particular order):
I could go on. There are so many reasons that when I spoke at Regis, the best advice I could offer is this: Do not use writing as a means of validating who you are as a person.
No matter what an industry person’s response is to your written work, your writing is only one facet of who you are as a human being. Don’t make it everything, or you may lose your joy of writing and find the whole business very depressing indeed.
Photo Credit: BK
Last week, I just had to share on Facebook and Twitter an article I saw in Publishers Weekly called “Trying To Find A Literary Agent Is the Worst Thing Ever.”
I had a sneaking suspicion that it would ring true for a lot of aspiring writers. With over 7,000 people viewing the post on FB, I guess I was right!
But here is a little tidbit I bet most writers don’t know. Sometimes being a literary agent is the worst thing ever. Agents are in this biz because we love books, admire writers, and want to make dreams come true. Sending out a rejection is none of the above. I really don’t want to be in the business of crushing dreams.
Crushing dreams truly sounds like the worst job ever.
When I sell a debut author, a first-time writer finally realizing his or her dream, that is the biggest high. I’ll be giddy for weeks after because I just helped fulfill someone’s long-held dream. How awesome is that?
In 2015, I had the pleasure of selling two debut authors. Not only that, but each project sold at auction for an amount that could reasonably entice the debut author to quit his or her day job. Writing as your full time job—talk about ultimate wish fulfillment!
But trust me when I say that sometimes being a literary agent is the worst thing ever. The majority of us don’t sit in our office chuckling maniacally with glee at every rejection we send. The truth is that I hate sending rejection letters. And two of my former assistants ultimately moved on to different jobs because they, too, hated having to say no.
Some days it’s truly the worst thing ever. I see many a worthy project that I simply can’t take on. Every new client is a big-time investment because agenting—and agenting well—is a huge commitment.
I don’t expect a lot of sympathy from writers. But do know that I, for one, don’t take pleasure in hitting the send button for a rejection.
Photo Credit: Tilemahos Efthimiadis
Well I’m happy to tell you! I’ve gathered all the pictures I posted on Twitter and FB and organized them in one handy post with all the locations specified.
Thank you for playing along!
Pic 1 – Agent Kristin is in Singapore!
Pic 2 – Agent Kristin is on the island of Koh Samui in Thailand
Pic 3 – Agent Kristin is at the Wat Pho Temple in Bangkok, Thailand
Pics 4 & 5 – Agent Kristin is at the Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand
Pic 6 – Agent Kristin is at Wat Prasrisunphet Temple in Ayutthaya, Thailand
Pic 7 – Agent Kristin is at the World Heritage site Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia
Pic 8 – Agent Kristin is boating along Ha Long Bay in Vietnam
You pounded out 50,000 words or more in the month of November. You rocked NaNoWriMo. Huge Congrats! But wait, before you press send, here are three things to consider:
Strategy #1: Consider the holidays
Don’t send out your novel in the month of December. Put yourself in an agent’s shoes for two seconds. The holidays are fast approaching. Agents are motivated by closure and wrapping things up so they can take two weeks off. Submissions are going to get read quickly so agents can check them off a to-do list that is always longer than time can accommodate.
So not the mindset you want an agent to be in when they read your novel. We are only human after all.
Strategy #2: Polish, polish, polish before submitting
If I had a dollar for every time a writer re-queried me for a project significantly revised since my rejection, I could live large. Often writers ask if they can resubmit, and 99% of the time, I decline. There simply isn’t enough time in the day for me to read submissions twice. Agents expect you to be ready the first time around. Don’t blow what might be your one chance with a particular agent.
But if I requested the revision, that’s a different story. Trust me, you’ll know if I’ve requested a revision from you.
Strategy #3: Don’t get stuck in the post-holiday crush
Don’t submit during the first few weeks of January. Why? I’ll tell you right now that that on our first day back, we’ll get 600+ queries. Hard to stand out in that influx.
Best time to submit? The last week in January/first week in February.
Agents are back in the swing of things and excited to read. February is usually a slow month for us.
