Literary agents and unicorns

Please allow me a bit of self-promotion to kick off this week’s post. It would make me giddy with delight if you would follow me at my newly launched author’s page: https://www.facebook.com/melinda.wichmann.author. This will be the central clearing house for all things “Ghost,” including release date, cover art, pre-order info, etc. when it becomes available. 

“How to Live with a Ghost” is my Novice A book. All my dog training friends are nodding in total comprehension. For the three readers of this blog who are not part of the competitive dog obedience scene, Novice A is the entry level class every American Kennel Club dog obedience trainer enters when they start their trialing career.  Once you’ve titled in that class, you can never enter it again with any of your successive dogs. You only get one Novice A dog and you never forget them. My Novice A dog was a beagle.

 

Setting out to get my Novice A book published was only marginally more difficult than convincing a beagle not to sniff. One does not simply send a completed manuscript to one of the Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon and Schuster) and say, “Here’s my fabulous manuscript that is destined to be a best-seller. Call me and we’ll talk.”

 

Well. You can. It’s a free country. But doing so will get you exactly nowhere because your fabulous manuscript will get tossed into a heap of other unsolicited manuscripts called the slush pile. Someone might look at it before dumping it in the digital trash. But they probably won't.

 

 

To get the Big Five to even spare you a passing glance, you need to hire a literary agent. Such a person is well-versed in the machinations of the book publishing industry. Their job is to pitch your book to the people who might want to publish and sell it.

 

How does one obtain a literary agent? I am the last person you should ask because I am an epic fail in this department. I do not have an agent. Or perhaps I am my agent. Does that make me a free agent? I should refrain from sports analogies since I have never played any variety of sports-ball.

 

You can do an online search for literary agents and find literary services staffed by agents representing all kinds of genres. But be aware, book publishing is a fickle field.

When I was in search of an agent to represent “Ghost,” BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People Of Color) books were all the rage. Agents were screaming for stories with BIPOC characters overcoming adversity. It was also the year of the Me Too movement, and LGBTQ issues were in the spotlight, so if you could combine all three elements, you were an agent’s dream. It honestly felt like those were the only topics they were interested in.

 

I sat at my laptop and looked at my Novice A novel, set in rural eastern Iowa, which is not exactly a seething mass of racial upheaval. I looked at my characters, who are, for the most part, white, straight and untraumatized by sexual assault. Even the agents specializing in the paranormal genre, which was more forgiving than represent-the-world-today general fiction, were looking for sexy vampires and dark shapeshifters. A plain old ghost in a traditional haunting scenario didn’t have them blowing up my phone. But I’d had a lot of fun writing “Ghost.” I wasn’t trying to expose social injustice or create some bizarre new paranormal world. I just wanted to share a story that would let people escape from their day-to-day crazy. 

 

 Literary agents are the gatekeepers of the book publishing industry. So how does one get the attention of a gatekeeper?

 

One writes a query letter. This soul-ripping document boils down the essence of your manuscript into a single page that presents the “elevator pitch” of the story in a style that escalates the drama of the storyline without revealing the ending. It should leave the agent absolutely dying to read the whole thing and share it with the world. What usually happens is, you send it off and if you’re lucky, you get a polite response six weeks later saying “Thanks but no thanks.”

 

As frustrating as that sounds, it’s actually worse.

 

Some agents represent cozy mysteries, cookbooks and young adult novels. Others specialize in historical fiction, Christian fiction and poetry. They have specific areas of expertise and specific themes in the material they are seeking because they know what sells in the current market and what doesn’t.

 

Agents post what they are looking for on their websites. For example: Agent Sue Brown with XYZ Literary Agency is, “Especially seeking stories with female protagonists who run pet rescues by day and ride black unicorns across the countryside by night, turning puppy mill owners into toads with spells brewed by the fairies in her garden.”

 

Oh, yay! You fire off a query letter, extolling the virtues of your female pet-rescuing, black-unicorn-riding protagonist, her spell-brewing fairies and the warty creatures she leaves in her wake. You include the requested first chapter and a synopsis. And then you wait. For. A. Very. Long. Time. Eventually, you receive a painfully polite reply with the inevitable “So sorry. Just not quite what we’re looking for.” 

 

It is my theory the reason you often see authors wearing hats in their publicity photos is because they have gone bald from tearing their hair out while querying. We present agents with exactly what they are looking for, only to be told that’s not what they’re looking for.

 

 I queried. I queried a lot. I got rejected a lot. I also got a few nibbles, with agents asking for a “full,” which meant they want to read the entire manuscript before stomping on my heart with hobnailed boots and the inevitable, “So sorry. Just not a good fit for us at the moment or ever.”

 

Now let’s be honest. Just because you’ve got all the elements the agent is looking for doesn’t mean you have them assembled properly. And that’s a legit point. In the business world time is money, and no one wants to take on a time-consuming project that has to be restructured from the ground up, no matter how wonderful the material is, when another author presents a manuscript that contains the requisite unicorns in the requisite order and actually looks like it’s been through a few serious edits. Looking back, I know my manuscript wasn’t gleaming in full-polish mode.

 

 My querying phase began and ended in 2020. I can honestly say 99 percent of the rejections I received were perfectly polite and ended with the generic but optimistic sentiment, “Good luck with your project.” The final one, however, stood out because it was so truly nasty, I put “Ghost” on the shelf and got on with my life until last fall, when the universe conspired to hit me over the head with the manuscript and whisper, “Do something with this.”

 

I did, and stumbled into a publishing contract in the most wonderful of ways, even though they involved talking to strangers, which terrifies me to this day.

Thanks for reading! Please follow me on Facebook! My publisher assures me Things Are Going To Happen Soon. Please also understand book publishing exists in its own space-time continuum, where hours and days spin endlessly without any visible result, then everything happens at once and needs to get done at the speed of yesterday. Which is exactly like showing dogs.

 

My boy Raider at USASA Nationals in 2024. Go fast!
(Photo by Aaron Gold Photography)