How Agents Make Decisions

By Jim Hornfischer

Literary agents are the matchmakers of the information age. They read the work of writers, they take on for representation that which they like, and more importantly that which they feel they can sell, and then they use every technique of persuasion in the book to convince the decision makers of the publishing world—editors—to shell out tons of money and make everyone wealthy beyond belief.

Many publishing houses no longer consider manuscripts not submitted by agents. And so agents have taken on a de facto role as the first line of defense for the bookshelves of America.

They are also the first line of defense to your savings account, subtracting as they do a commission of 15% calculated on any and all income from your book. There are some who say this is money well spent.

An agent serves three essential and equally important roles. As first reader, he serves an EDITORIAL role in shaping your work to make the best first impression. He serves a MARKETING role, deciding how to present your book and to which publishers. And he serves a MANAGEMENT role, negotiating the best possible contract, getting the highest price for your book, and going to bat on your behalf throughout the publishing process to make sure things happen they way they need to.

The most common path to publication involves the hiring of a literary agent. But be forewarned: You don’t so much hire an agent as you do beguile him, seduce him, and win him over. This is not easy, because agents reject the majority of the work they see. Anyone who has tried to get an agent, no matter the ultimate result of the effort, has been frustrated by the seeming arbitrariness and coldness of the selection process.

What I hope to do in these few minutes is offer a fresh way of looking at the book selection process. It’s not as mysterious as you think.

I call this part of my presentation, with apologies to Robert Fulghum, “All I Really Need to Know about Publishing I Learned in My Local Bookstore.”

Because there are, in fact, many parallels between the way publishing professionals (i.e. agents and editors) select book projects, and the way you, as a book consumer, select books in the book store.

The first thing to observe is painfully obvious: you can’t buy every book that the store carries. Something like 50,000 new books are published every year, adding to an existing stock of millions of different titles. If you buy just one of those books, you are paying someone the ultimate complement: your money, time, and attention. Those are three rare commodities — money, time and attention —and they are parceled out carefully in publishing on both sides of the fence. By “both sides of the fence” I mean by publishers on on side, and by consumers on the other.

This rather obvious point about overabundance means this: Just as you as a consumer can’t possibly give every book in the store your full attention, you as a writer cannot rightfully expect that every word of your submission will be read by the agent or editor to whom you send it. Now, I love the little tricks some writers play, gluing pages together, for instance, to see if the reader read to that point. This kind of thing doesn’t bother me, because I freely admit the fact that selection happens FAST. Think realistically about the exact amount of time you permit any given book to catch your attention in the store. What would you guess? Five seconds? No way. That’s way too long. More likely, your eyes sweep across entire shelves until something, somehow, catches your eye. You may whip past sixty books before you pick one up for a closer look. And naturally, this is the pleasure of browsing in a book store: the endless variety, the limitless realm of knowledge available right there on the shelf. Clearly it’s not realistic to expect every title to command the same amount of your attention.

Agents work the same way. Snap judgments are made. In fact, since the average quality of work submitted to an agency is on the whole a good bit lower than what’s found on the bookstore shelf, agents approach their submissions pile with every expectation of rejecting what they read. Now if that sounds cold, it is: It is business. In order to focus on the work that pays our bills, i.e. attending to the many needs of our clients under contract, an agent will literally look for reasons to reject an unknown manuscript when he picks it up. It may be imprecise writing, lazy sentences, or outright grammatical error. A dangling modifier here, an errant semi-colon there, and sure enough that submission will finds its way back into the sure hands of the U.S. Mail.

Sometimes manuscripts are rejected without a single word even being read. If I see something calling itself a romance or a work of poetry or something else I don’t handle, back it goes. This exactly parallels what you do in the bookstore when, for perfectly defensible reasons of preference, you don’t shop the Eastern Philosophy section.

From the twin realities of an overabundance of material and the quick decision-making process that ensues, can be drawn two lessons. 1) Get to the point quickly in your query presentation. I am amazed by the number of writers who encumber their query letters with irrelevant personal information. Next time you’re in a bookstore, check and see how many times, in jacket copy, a publisher refers to the number of times a book was rejected before they published it, or muses about the difficulty of a book ever making it to print. While I understand the human motivations that lead to such confessions by writers in query letters, the effect is nonetheless to project an image of amateurism. Agents want to work with people who are professional about their writing. And long-winded, rambling introductions suggest the very opposite.

The second lesson is to choose carefully the agents you show your work to on the basis of their stated interests. If you do, you will almost always get a better reading if you position your work in broad terms along lines that interest them. Learn something about the interests of the agent who’s reading your work. Check him out in the various agent’s directories. Quite obviously you’ll be wasting your time if you send a mystery to someone who doesn’t handle mysteries, just as a science fiction book will be wasting its time if it shelves itself in the romance section.

Know what you’re trying to sell. If it’s a novel, know where it falls along the literary/commercial spectrum. Because as far as publishers are concerned, there are only two kinds of novels: LITERARY and COMMERCIAL. Literary novels are read for the pleasure that derives from how the author assembles language. Commercial novels are read because they adhere to certain category expectations of the reader: international thrillers; woman-in-danger suspense novels; cozy mysteries; high-society romances. Every now and then a literary novelist will be said to turn commercial whenever his books commit the indiscretion of selling a few hundred thousand copies. (John Irving’s reputation scarcely survived the success of The World According to Garp.) And, every now and then, a commercial novelist may suddenly be called LITERARY because reviewers suddenly recognize his talent as an artist. Stephen King straddles that line because critics have observed the writerly assurance and skill he brings to the dismemberment of bodies.

But for the most part writers take on hard and fast identities as commercial or literary novelists. You need to know what you’re selling and present it accordingly. When I’m reading my submissions, nothing confuses me more than for a writer to promise a novel that combines romance, mystery, science fiction, and historical western all into one irresistible package. If you try to be all things to all people, you will endure the pitfall that in publishing parlance is called “falling between the cracks.” Book that fall between the cracks have fingers in too many pots. In trying to be all things to all people they wind up being very little to few people. There simply aren’t significant readerships for books that combine all of these elements.

If you know with relative certainty where in a bookstore your novel will be sold, you are in good shape. But this is only part of the battle. Read books in your category and try to understand WHY they work. The most practical writing lesson you can give yourself will come not from going to a writers workshop, or from reading Strunk & White, or from haunting an English department. It will come from reading widely in the area of literature you wish to practice, and from carefully studying how the strongest writers achieve the effects that win them their readerships. This is an education you will find ONLY in a bookstore.

If you don’t effectively position your work, you will likely be rejected. The numbers aren’t pretty. Fully 95 to 98 percent of the submissions I get go back to their sender with a nice note. And when I was an editor at HarperCollins in New York, fully 95 to 98 percent of the submissions we received FROM AGENTS met the same fate. If that sounds bad just think: if you as a bookstore customer bought books that you looked at in that same proportion, you’d have one heck of a library on your hands. I hope that makes it clearer why so many of your queries come back to you without specific detail about why, or advice about where you should go next.

If you think about it, for a writer to expect that kind of feedback from agents or editors would be sort of similar to somebody expecting you, the bookstore consumer, to write letters to authors whose books you didn’t buy. “Dear Mary Higgins Clark: I regret to inform you that your new novel just isn’t right for me at this time....”

Now for a word about competition. It’s important to stress that publishing is not a zero-sum game. While it may be tempting to look at the writer across the room who got some obscenely lucrative contract and feel that somehow a door has been slammed in your face, the plain fact of it is that agents and publishers will always make room for superior talent. The huge abundance down at your Barnes & Noble superstore should make clear that there is always room for one more. Now I’m not saying that the New York Times bestseller list will make the same allowance. But it does mean that if you work at it and make yourself into a serious writer, you will very likely be published some day.

If there is any competition going on in this business, it is not between new writers, but between new writers and that 95 to 98 percent rejection rate I quoted earlier. Part of the reason for such a high number is that many writers are content to submit their unpolished drafts and thereby present it as the best they can do. After the first 10 rejects come in, lots of writers quit revising that unpolished draft, give up and choose instead to start a writing a new manuscript, which will have the same short lifecycle as a result of the writer’s impatience.

However, if you work hard and pay attention to the details of your craft and if study the reasons WHY other books work and apply these lessons to your writing, if you resist the impulse to send out your first drafts and instead take the time to revise, and revise again, if you do all of these things and stick out the first two dozen rejections, there will be an agent or publisher out there whose day will be positively made by the fact that you sent your work to him or her.

If you are that kind of writer, you should be glad to hear that so many other writers are content to show their unrevised drafts. If you’re still worried about competition, there isn’t any at all. The fact is that, on average, an unrevised draft by an excellent writer is blown out of the water by a fourth draft of a writer who is merely competent but works hard.

So there is an awful lot of space on the shelf for writers like that, who use what they know about bookselling from their experiences in bookstores, who study other successful writers and incorporate their techniques selectively into their own work, and who revise and revise until their printer toner cartridge is dry because they know that a toner cartridge in a printer is very much like a naked rock before it is tackled by the sculptor.