Be Your Own Editor

My friend Joan needs help. And fast.

It’s my big moment. It came faster than expected. I get to meet with an agent, face to face, next week. What the heck do I do?

I get an entire 15 minutes to talk with the agent, who specializes in my area.

This is probably the exact wrong thing to do, but I’ve designed a cover and typeset ten chapters of a proposed book idea.

What should I do? What should I say? What should I bring?

Relax, Joan. You’ve come to the right place. I’ve sat on the other side of that table.

First—and this may be obvious—cut to the chase. You may go in planning to do so but get nervous and end up spending five of your precious minutes making small talk about your family or the vacation you just took. Spend only thirty seconds making small talk to establish a friendly rapport, and then get to your story.

Also avoid providing a detailed history of the book you’re pitching: they won’t care about your writing process or how you first came up with the story idea. If they do, they’ll ask you. They care primarily about what’s on the page, so focus on that.

Which brings me to something I hate to say: I would advise against bringing your cover art. If you feel it conveys something about the book’s content or your marketing concept that you can’t explain in words, or if you just can’t bear to not bring it, then show it to the agent for ten seconds and then put it back in your purse. Or include it with the materials you supply, but don’t talk about it. Why? They want to sell your book to a publisher. Publishers have art departments; they don’t use jackets designed by authors (though you may have some approval or input). And they won’t want an author who’s going to say, “Why don’t you use the cover I designed?” You may not be that person, but the agent doesn’t know that.

The bottom line for an agent is the words on the page. They’re looking to represent you as a writer, not an artist. Bells and whistles like artwork can sometimes backfire by making you seem unprofessional: the agent might think, “Does she really think Random House is going to use her cover design?” Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I don’t want you to shoot yourself in the foot. Your art may be beautiful but, in the end, it’s irrelevant to the process.

You say you “typeset” ten chapters. Do you mean that you literally had those chapters typeset, or just that you printed them out? Again, something like that falls under the “bells and whistles that don’t help” category. It’s fine as long as the type is double-spaced, single-sided, and easily readable and photocopied—don’t give them something bound that they can’t photocopy for someone else in their office to read.

Also, make sure you’re not giving them too many pages. I don’t know the circumstances of this meeting—is it at a writer’s conference? At the agent’s office? Are there guidelines? If you haven’t already, try to find out beforehand how many pages you should provide as a sample. If they want 30 pages, don’t give them 100.

If they’ve already seen a query or proposal of some sort, then you’ll have more to talk about. If you’re meeting them cold, and they know nothing about you, tell them simply and straightforwardly about the story. And tell them anything important about you, as a marketable author, that they won’t get from your writing sample. For example, that you’re working on other ideas. Agents want writers who aren’t going to be one-hit wonders. If you have any marketing platform at all, such as a website, say so. If you have any contacts in publishing, mention them.

Just as you should when you write a query letter, do some homework on that agent and mention one or two of their authors. Stay away from swooning, obvious flattery. But if, as you say, they specialize in your genre, it should be natural to bring up any of their authors whose work you know and like, perhaps by way of comparison to your own work.

That’s about all the advice I can give, aside from “be relaxed and don’t seem too desperate.” No begging. If you want to clarify any of this, Joan, please do. Good luck; I hope you come out of it with representation!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 11:55 am and is filed under Literary Agents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.