Considering that I have recently been
querying my dark humor novel And They Call Me Crazy, the following emeralds of wisdom from Lorca Damon are not
only funny, but very timely. Thank you
for this one, Lorca!
 |
| Lorca Damon |
I am an unloved writer.
I’m one of the hordes of would-be novelists who is still trying to break
through the Great Wall of Publishing, one brick at a time. The first brick:
finding an agent.
I have to admit that I
queried about one hundred agents with my first novel. I got only a handful of
requests for the full, and then nothing. I put that book in a drawer, so to
speak, when my life got busy with some super cool projects and changes. I
actually pulled it out of said proverbial drawer last week and oh my god the
writing is a bunch of shit. I sounded like I was trying to use every 25-point
word I knew. And this was supposedly young adult. I wanted to beat me up for
being such a nerd, and I wasn’t even a teenager.
Luckily, my writing got
way better (See? I can talk like a teenager) and I wrote a book that an agent
actually adored. Here’s how the timeline went:
Late April 2011: queried
agent
Late August 2011: she
requested the full
Late September 2011: the
book won a contest that I forgot I had entered and the prize was a greenlight
to submit to a major publisher; emailed the agent to let her know, we Skyped about
it on video chat for an hour, we emailed a million more times; then nothing
happened.
Late January 2012: heard
from the publisher, they loved it but couldn’t publish it after their lawyers
said the estate of J D Salinger will eat us all for breakfast; emailed the news
to the agent, who said she finally decided the she loved it and wanted to
represent it IF I made some revisions and we began another 50 back-and-forth
email conversations.
Late February 2012:
gently nudged the agent in an email to see if she liked those revisions; she
said she did, but she still had some thinking to do.
Early May 2012 (more than
a year after I queried her): gently nudged the agent in another gently nudging
email; she responded with her concerns and said she would make a final decision
by the end of the month.
Late June 2012: I still
haven’t heard a peep
.
Now, this is where
authors (especially successfully self-published authors) start to roll their
eyes and talk about everything that is wrong with the industry. Yes, it moves
at a snail’s pace. No, it may not be any more lucrative to traditionally
publish than to self-publish. But I have to point the finger of blame once and
for all:
This fell through because
of me.
What? How is this
possibly your fault, Lorca? You did everything you could! You entered contests!
You kept in contact while still giving the agent her space? You made the
revisions she asked for even though it was YOUR book! How could this possibly
be your fault??? (I know what you’re thinking because I thought those same
things for a while)
This is how it’s my
fault: all my contact with the agent had been because of a referral, then through
email and Skype. When I finally wandered over to her agency website one day to
see if there was any news of her actually dying, I was horrified.
There were kittens all
over it. Yes, pictures of kittens as the motif. She was a children’s book agent.
She reps books (presumably) about kittens. I don’t write about kittens unless
someone is having to eat feral cats to survive.
Despite learning that she
wanted to branch out into YA fiction, I chose the wrong agent for the job. She
had told me she was “having trouble getting behind my other projects,” which is
industry lingo for “I may not be the right agent for your work.”
So? Suck it up and rep my
book, right? Wrong.
I read an interview with
an agent who had rejected the Harry Potter series when J K Rowling was just a
lowly querying-stage author like the rest of us. The interviewer asked this
agent if he was kicking himself now for not taking on the boy-wizard and the
agent immediately and firmly said, “No.” His reason? He said those books never
would have BECOME the Harry Potter series if he had taken the project, because
that’s not what he represents. And that takes guts to admit.
People die in my books.
Whole towns full of people. Dogs even die in my books, and not from old age or
a rabies bite that he got while protecting the little kid. A teenager pulls out
a gun and shoots the dog in my book. It was important to the story (I don’t
just have a thing against dogs) but it was too disturbing for her. She wasn’t
the right agent for my kind of books, and God bless her for even trying. She
likes my writing, just not my subject matter. And that doesn’t make her
unprofessional or a lousy agent. It makes her one of the best, in my opinion,
because she’s willing to say, “I can’t take this book as far as it should go
because it’s not what I do.”
Lorca Damon is a teacher in a juvenile correctional facility
and staff writer for GoodEReader.com. Her first non-fiction title, Autism By Hand, is an Amazon bestseller
and her first fiction title, The Earth is for Dancing, was recently published as well. She is also one of the funniest people I know. You should stalk her at
Her website: lorcadamon.com
Twitter: @LorcaDamon
Good E-Reader goodereader.com
