Getting an Agent: When Luck Meets Opportunity - a guest blog by Regan Rose

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I met Regan Rose at the New England Crime Bake this past fall, and I must have been the only attendee who hadn't heard the excited buzz about her debut novel. We clicked over our points of contact - Mainers, ex-lawyers, already knew a lot of the same people, both attorneys and writers. 

It was later I got the 411 on Regan's debut - sold on a preempt in what Publisher's Weekly calls "a major deal," her foreign rights agent mobbed in Frankfort by eager publishing houses from around the world.

But here's the thing: whether you get 500 or 500 thousand for your first book, the process - doubts , fears, rejection, elation - is the same for almost every author. And the equation Regan posits here holds true for most endeavors, not just writing: Success = Luck + Preparation + Opportunity.

There is something so swanky about “having an agent” that it’s one of the most common questions I get from people who know I’m an upcoming debut author. Even friends and family totally disinterested in writing or publishing are dying to know: “How did you get your agent?” 

I was usually too shy to ask this question of other authors, but I spent countless nights and weekends scouring the internet for answers to the question. The bedrock truth is what my dad liked to repeat to his students (who hung on his every word) and his daughters (who tried to see the TV around him): luck happens when preparation meets opportunity. 

Let me take this up to 30,000 feet for a second. Hi! I’m Regan. My first novel, a standalone drama about family, crime, and questions, will be published in summer 2021. I hit the book-deal motherlode thanks to my agent, the coolest of the cool, Helen Heller of Toronto. Here is the “you’re so lucky!” version of how she became my agent:

In December 2017, I read Shari Lapena’s The Couple Next Door in two short days. I was a couple months into writing my own suspense novel, and I saw Shari had dedicated the book to her agent, Helen Heller. In the acknowledgements, she also talked about how great Helen was. A few months later, I started a list of agents I might want to query one day. The first name I wrote down was Helen’s. 

 

 In October 2019, I submitted an unsolicited query to Helen. Twenty-nine minutes later, she requested my full manuscript. I sent it to her that night, and the next afternoon, she called me and asked to represent me. I said yes. I could skip everything in between and make it sound like I must be a literary leprechaun.

But that doesn’t help you if you’re interested in getting an agent of your own. And even if you aren’t, it doesn’t tell you the whole story. So here’s what happened in between those dates.

During the two-plus years before I queried Helen, I worked on my book like I’ve never worked on anything in my life. I got up every morning at 5 sharp, stumbled into the study, and sat down to write for two hours before work. I read every night for at least an hour. I took vacation days to write and said no to weekend invitations. I shared early drafts and took people’s advice. I edited the story over and over.

In summer 2018, about a year into writing the book, I participated in Pitch Wars, hoping to get selected for a serious manuscript overhaul. I wasn’t chosen, but I did learn loads about the querying process and how to write submission materials. I drafted my first query letter and synopsis for that contest. When I wasn’t selected, I kept editing my manuscript, collecting agents’ names, and reading about how to write a good query letter.

In March of 2019, I didn’t know how to make my book any better, so I decided to send out my first round of queries. From my giant list of agent names, I picked eleven to start with. With some exceptions, I chose people who seemed to be relatively new at their agency. I got a few polite rejections, a lot of radio silence, and a single revise and resubmit.

I stopped querying and focused on the R&R. I liked the agent’s advice and didn’t want to send out the sub-par manuscript anymore. Meanwhile, I went to Maine Crime Wave in June and met another agent there. We had great chemistry, and when I pitched her my novel, she requested the full manuscript. She said I could send it when I was done with the edit. (And she was not shy about how jealous she was to know another agent had already caught my eye…a good thing to keep in mind when you’re querying!)

I finished the R&R edit in early September 2019 and sent the manuscript to the two agents awaiting it. Smart or not, I didn’t send it to anyone else. At the end of the month, I got an email from the conference agent passing on the project. I had already looked her up on Query Tracker, and I immediately knew it was a form rejection. I wallowed for a few hours then talked to an author friend, who reminded me rejection is the name of the game. She recommended I send out a new batch of queries, and she asked how much work I was doing to vet the agents in advance. She told me to fork over the $25 a month it costs to subscribe to Publishers Marketplace.

Obviously I am a masochist, as every writer is, so I started by looking up the agent who had just rejected me. She had big sales, and lots of them. Obviously I am very critical of myself, as every writer is, so I burned with shame. I couldn’t believe I’d thought a hotshot like her (and I mean this in the best way) would ever represent me. But then I remembered agents do not waste their own time, and she had asked me to send my manuscript to her. I went back to my list and saw Helen’s name. Another hotshot, I thought. The next morning, I got up early and queried Helen and a few other agents I’d been too intimidated to try in March.

Helen called me with excitement, a strong vision for the book, and a plan to get it sold. I’d already seen her numbers online. I took a ten-minute breather then called her back and said yes. I could have done things differently, but I had a good feeling and I went with it. Another day I might return with the next leg of the story, but the short version is, she sold my book within a week.

 

 Per usual, I think my dad was right. When you look at my story, I got lucky, absolutely, in so many ways. But a big part of the luck in landing Helen was my preparation, especially in the work I did on my manuscript. (Is this braggy? Yes. [Editor's note: No.] But it’s also true, and I feel the need to say it when I’m not feeling too self-conscious about it.) If you want to get an agent, my advice is always going to be to spend the bulk of your time and energy on your manuscript. Then researching the process and the agents you’re interested in. Don’t rush. You want your materials to land you an agent, but you also want to land the right agent for you. Doing your homework can help you reach out for opportunities you want to say yes to. Your story won’t go exactly like mine did, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get lucky.

What do you think? Do you buy my dad’s equation for luck, or has life taught you different math?

Regan’s debut novel is slated for publication in the summer of 2021. It’s currently called A KINDNESS, but there’s a new title in talks. Set in a fictional town in southern Maine, A KINDNESS is equal parts family drama, crime story, and moral thriller. The story alternates between the past, when Julia Hall’s family was rocked by her brother-in-law’s sexual assault, and the present, when Julia is called to the home of the detective who investigated the crime. You can keep up with Regan and learn more about her book at regan-rose.com, where all of her contact information is available.

Literary Agents — "Everything to Everbody"

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Victoria Skurnick of LGR Literary  (and my own beloved agent) was on Jungle Reds a few months ago, talking about no-nos when approaching literary agents with your book proposal.

But what do literary agents themselves actually do all day? Drape themselves artfully on silk settées and read manuscripts 
while eating bon-bons? (OK, I can hear Victoria laughing now....)

The truth is that literary agents don't have a set job description and every day brings a different challenge. The great literary agents are adaptable, proactive, relentless, positive. They love books and champion their authors.

Read on and learn one agent's perspective of the other side of the desk…..

VICTORIA SKURNICK: You can’t be everything to everybody. That’s what my mother would tell me when she felt I was spreading myself too thin.  Well, turns out, what I get paid for is exactly that: being everything to everybody.

It’s about the only description of what an agent actually does that is at all true.  We get to be greedy nags (at least, that’s how an editor might describe us), editors (God forbid a manuscript not be perfect before we submit it to publishers), mommies cum psychoanalysts to anxious writers [ahem—trying not to take this personally—ed.], accountants to harder-headed clients, literary critics, beggars, wheedlers, gypsys and thieves. 

Okay, forget the gypsy part.  Even when we manage to leave our offices, we’re lugging mountains of papers with us, which makes it hard to move around very far (I wasn’t that fond of the Kindle even before the Big A started acting up).

What we also get to be is busy and fascinated.  A day in the life of an agent might consist of many hours of reading, or it might be running around town trying to work of enthusiasm for a project, or preventing a publisher from going out with thousands of copies of books containing huge mistakes, or arguing with clients about plot points, or reworking proposals.  

On any given day, we might go from feeling like geniuses to considering ourselves horrible, stupid failures.  I know of no agent – not one – who does not spend some hours every month thinking, what if I never sell another book!?!   And that goes, I assure you, for the biggest names in the business.

I became an agent seven years ago, after several different paths, most of them in publishing.  But my last job was as editor-in-chief of what was then a powerful book club.  When you’re the editor-in-chief of a powerful book club, not only do people return your calls, but they actually call you – voluntarily.  

When you’re an agent, you’re the one making the calls, and the one whose emails do not necessarily get answered.  When, after three or four (or eight or ten) months, you’re sending the third or eighth polite email or making the fifth or twentieth call, asking an editor a question like, “Gee, I wondered if you’d had time to read  Book X yet,” and getting no response for the third, fourth, eighth or tenth time, you get to know what it’s like on the other side.  You get to internalize words like abject and powerless. 

But, when you’re at your desk and you pick up a novel that reads beautifully, then it’s all worth it.  The sense of excitement, of discovery, is remarkable. The wonderful knowledge that you are in a position to do everything possible to bring this to the attention of hundreds or thousands or millions of people.  This is the payoff; this is what we live for.

That, and the learning.  I just sold a book on the presidency of Chester Arthur, and the subject turns out to be incredibly interesting.  Who knew?  I’ve learned more about England in World War Two from Susan’s Maggie Hope novels than I ever thought possible.  A friend of mine who’s now a publisher, but who was an editor for decades, describes herself as “a talking book.”  And that pretty much sums it up.  Writers are smart people. 

Publishers are smart people – except when they turn down my clients’ books, that is.  

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Thank you, Victoria! 

Reds and lovely readers, do you think you would make a good literary agent? Why or why not? (I'd be TERRIBLE — too many people…..) 

Does Victoria's perspective give you and sympathy for those on the other side of the desk? 

Please share in the comments!

Literary Agent Victoria Skurnick of LGR Gives Top Ten Submission No-Nos

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: What do literary agents want? What are they looking for? (I'm not an agent and I get asked this all the time.) And what drives them absolutely bonkers?

Without further ado, I'd like to introduce my beloved agent, Victoria Skurnick of the Levine-Greenberg-Rosten Literary Agency (formerly Editor in Chief of Book of the Month Club and also a novelist, under the pen name Cynthia Victor, herself), to give you the inside scoop on what agents don't want.

Take it away, Victoria!

VICTORIA SKURNICK: I was all set to write a lovely piece about the daily activities of an agent, how wonderful it is to find an unknown author and contribute to his/her work becoming known, how much I adore the agency I’m lucky enough to work at, the intelligence and warmth of my colleagues. I was going to exclaim over the greatness of my clients.

And it’s all true – every word I say above is real. Yet, as I sit down to write this piece for Jungle Reds (and especially for my beloved Susan Elia MacNeal), I can’t bring myself to do it.  You guys are experienced writers, so the last thing you need is a laundry list of agents’ complaints. And yet, I find myself longing to write a top ten (or maybe three or fifteen or twenty) list of the things that drive me crazy.  I guess I’ve been longing to do it, and you guys are the unlucky recipients of my carping.  But you might share a bunch of these, so - who knows? - maybe it will be downright pleasant.  Here goes….

    
1. Referring to a novel as “a fiction novel.”  I hear this about twenty times a day – I have written a fiction novel, 180,000 words, etc.  Who, I ask you, is going to read 180,000 words when the assumption is you’re not James Michener?  But mostly, what other  kind of novel is there?  Novels are fiction.  Nonfiction is not made up of novels.

2.     Stephen King in On Writing did a perfect hatchet job on adverbs, but they have not disappeared. They are alive and well – except where they belong.  E.g., “I’m so fearful of what might happen if we take the car,” she said worriedly.  “Go fuck yourself!” he said angrily.  And then there are the thousands of “softlys” and “slowlys” and “reallys” and  “justs.”

3.     And now for all the places adverbs belong, but are rarely used.  “The ballerina moved really good.”  “I love to eat healthy; it makes me feel light.”  What happened to moving well and eating healthfully?  (Yes, I’m a crone, an anachronism, a woman of a certain age who had a great English teacher in the seventh grade.)

4.     The disappearance of good grammar in general.  And, by the way, this applies to the most successful and famous editors I know.  One doesn’t lay down (unless one was especially tired last Wednesday); one lies down. You don’t feel badly; you feel bad – intransitive verbs do not take adverbs.  He didn’t eliminate you and I; he eliminated you and me.  And on and on.  I sound older and older, huh?

5.     “I’m definitely going to be on Oprah.”  It wasn’t true in her heyday, and it certainly isn’t true now that Oprah’s barely on Oprah.

6.     Editors who won’t call back, write back, or answer questions in any form.  When I left my job as editor-in-chief of Book-of-the-Month Club seven years ago, my best friend, a publisher, warned me that going from buyer to seller meant my phone calls wouldn’t be returned with the alacrity I had grown used to.  Well, if by “alacrity” she meant NEVER, she proved prescient. I am lucky; I hear back from editors at least most of the time. My younger colleagues claim that trying to find out what’s happening from an editor is like whistling into a canyon – all the noise is of your own making.  Some call this behavior inefficient. I call it rude. And ultimately stupid, since I have long stopped submitting manuscripts to those editors who have too little time to write the word “no,” or, “maybe,” or “still reading.”

7.     The phrases “buttery soft” and “abject fear.”  I guess my antipathy comes from their being clichés, but it feels bigger than that. I swear. I don’t use the word “buttery” even when I’m talking about butter.  Merely seeing the word turns my face a buttery shade of green.

8.     “Oh, sure,” he said dryly.  If I could elect the single phrase I hate the most, it would be anything that uses the adverb “dryly.”  It’s a cliché, it should be unnecessary, it’s overused.  It deserves a dual grave in hell right alongside “buttery.”

9.     Authors (and agents and editors and everyone else on earth) who lack humility.  “At one point did you know this novel was going to be a phenomenon?” I asked the author of an execrable but very popular novel during his Main Selection lunch at BOMC.  “Ten minutes into writing it!” he answered in a tone of voice so smug it elicited looks of horror from even my most polite colleagues.  When did you realize what a piece of junk it is, I felt like offering as a follow-up question, but did not out of a strong preference for keeping my job.

10.  I’ve saved the worst for last: I hate hearing about agents who never get back to their clients.  These are often the same people who demand “exclusives” for submissions.  It’s rude, it’s unprofessional, and, most of all, it’s cruel.  I’ve been an author; I know what it’s like to wait.  But waiting for something that never comes, especially something that is the agent’s job, is unforgivable. I’ve heard many an agent rail against clients who are “too demanding.”  Well, how about us?  Are agents not subject to the rules of society? Do we not bleed?

Uh oh, the last phrase is the surest signal that I should stop right now.  Thank you, Jungle Reds, for giving me the opportunity to rant — and my piece about the joys of being an agent is available upon request.

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Victoria, thank you so much! (And now I'm going to do a search and delete for all words ending in -ly in my manuscript...)

Reds and readers, what do you think? Do adverbs make you crazy?  Have you been through the submission process? Are you thinking about it? Are Victoria's top ten no-nos helpful?