How to Get an Agent to Return Your Calls

By Jim Hornfischer

[Speech, Pima Writers Conference, May 25, 1996, Tucson, Ariz.]

I enjoy speaking at conferences such as this because I feel it is part of my responsibility as a publishing professional to dispel as many misconceptions about the business as I can. While my direct style can be helpful sometimes to writers, I also need to confess that there may have been one or two occasions in the past, when my presentations have served mainly—to cause wholesale depression on the part of my audience. So, if you are prone to depression, please know that I’ve requested that a pharmacist be on 24-hour call here at Pima to dispense Prozac on an as-needed basis.

Seriously, if you’re the kind of person who sees half-empty glasses and silver linings blighted by clouds, this is the very last business you should be in. Rejection is part of the trade. And I’m very much speaking from personal experience here, because the agent’s job above and beyond negotiating the big deals, is to handle rejection on behalf of his clients. If an agent is a DEAL BROKER, he is also a REJECTION BROKER. When rejection comes calling as it always does, it is my job to put the best possible spin on it for my clients. I’ll boost their spirits any way I can. I’ll call into question the collective intelligence of the Simon & Schuster editorial board. I’ll speculate about dark conspiracies unfolding in the Random House marketing department. I’ll suggest that these initial submissions are just test forays into the market and that our real submissions will begin once we’ve perfected our submissions strategy on these.

While it’s true that my firm has had some tremendous successes over the years, it’s also true that rejection is part of our lives, day in and day out. And I want to start out by stressing that agents and writers have this in common. It’s an elemental part of the book trade, and so please know that it is NOTHING PERSONAL when rejection comes knocking at YOUR door.

Fear of rejection has doubtlessly inspired the title of my talk today: "How to Get an Agent to Return Your Phone Calls." And since I hate to keep people in suspense, I’m going to answer this question directly and simply: An agent will return your phone calls when and only when he can call you his client. Until then, when you’re making your submissions, when you are still an unagented author, the phone is your worst enemy.

You do not want to antagonize a potential agent by pestering him or his staff via telephone. Even if your intent is not to pester, but merely to pitch your manuscript in the friendliest possible manner, to build some ancipation, the phone is still your least effective tool for presenting your work. Unless you can convey your marketworthiness by truthfully stating that your name is Stephen King or Danielle Steel, telephone pitches are almost always a waste of time. Why? Because it is almost impossible to convey orally the true power of a novel.

No one knows this better than book editors. They spend years trying to perfect the oral presentation of a book, because part of their job—and it’s the part they hate the most—is to attend sales meetings where they are forced to stand up before a crowd of bored, preoccupied colleagues in the marketing and sales departments and verbally pitch the merits of their books. Editors DREAD this. They know that the odds almost guarantee that their books, especially their novels, will come across as implausible, maudlin, hokey, contrived, far-flung, boring, or just plain bad. As an exercise, just TRY describing a good novel you’re read recently, even a classic of world literature, verbally to a friend. If you’re like most people, you’ll fumble for superlatives, mangle the carefully conceived plot, and finally settle on saying something like, "Oh, you’re just gonna have to read it."

To that I say, Amen.

The book publishing business runs on the energy that is created when black ink meets white paper. Among those poor editors I was telling you about, few of whom ever go to Toastmasters meetings regularly, almost invariably their preferred method for building in-house enthusiasm about a new manuscript is to circulate copies to KEY colleagues and hope that they spend quality time READING it. Just coincidentally, this is how readers in bookstores encounter new books—by reading them.

So I implore you to take a lesson from this brief inside look at how books get pitched inside publishing houses. Work hard on presenting yourself in print. You are not car salesmen. Nor are you movie industry pitchmeisters. You are book writers. Decisions in our world are made by people sitting in easy chairs or over old desks, reading silently and searching for magic within the words.

Avoid the telephone. Once you cross the line of clienthood, you will be using it frequently enough. It’s expensive. Its ringing hurts the ears. For writers it is most effectively used for ordering home pizza delivery or treating writers block with long conversations with mom. For the time being, stay off the phone and use the silence to write.

So contrary to what the title of my talk suggests, I recommend that you concentrate your efforts not on telephone solicitation (you can leave that to the telephone company salesmen) but upon getting a prospective agent’s attention in the form of a WRITTEN QUERY. There must be hundreds of good books and magazines telling you very specifically how to do this, and I recommend you read as many of them as you can. The problem with too many of these step by step, prescriptive articles and books, however, is that they are often too specific or rigid, and that they can tempt you to try to fit the square peg of your novel into the round hole of the book’s or magazine’s formula query. What I hope to offer you today is a slightly different perspective, one that is more conceptual than particular. What I hope to do, is illustrate some 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.

These processes of selection are really very similar. The first thing to observe is painfully obvious: you can’t buy every book that the Barnes & Noble carries. Something like 50,000 new books are published every year, adding to an existing stock of millions of different titles. If you buy one book out of those hundreds of thousands or millions of titles, you are giving 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.

I’m making this rather obvious point about overabundance to make clear the following: Just as you as a book consumer cannot possibly give every offering 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. 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 much. Look at me. (Pauses five seconds.) Five seconds is way too generous. More likely, your eyes sweep across entire shelves until something 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 sense of limitless knowledge readily available there on the shelf. But it’s obviously 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 by the general public is a good bit lower than that found on the bookstore shelf—and this remains true no matter what they say about the literary abilities of Clive Cussler—agents approach their submissions pile with every expectation of rejecting what they read. To save time and to return more quickly to the work that pays our bills, i.e. attending to the many needs of our clients under contract, we are literally looking for reasons to reject an unknown manuscript when we pick 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 is going back into that padded bag and back into the sure hands of the U.S. Mail.

Sometimes manuscripts are rejected out of hand, 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 the bookstore browser who simply doesn’t shop in the science fiction section.

From the twin realities of an overabundance of material and the quick decision-making process that ensues, I will draw 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. I want to work with people who are professional about their writing. And long-winded, rambling introductions suggest the very opposite.

Of course, if you pay attention to how publishers present books to the public, you know this very well already.

The second lesson is to learn how to communicate the general essence of your work, as opposed to its details. If you choose carefully the agents you show your work to on the basis of their stated interests, you will almost always get a better reading if you position your work in broad terms along lines that interest them. Try to learn a little something about the interests of the agent who’s reading your work. Check him out in any of the various agent’s directories that are out there. 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.

Let’s talk about the concept of positioning. Because it’s a term drawn from the world of marketing, it can be relied upon to raise the hackles of anyone who believes in the singularity of their art. Yet it is indisputable, isn’t it, that for someone to find a book in a store it must be carried on a shelf that permits customers to find it?

If you’re familiar with the layout of your local bookstore you already grasp the rudiments of positioning. If you’ve ever wondered why Mary Higgins Clark isn’t shelved with the mysteries anymore, or if you’re confused as to why there’s suddenly this whole big section called "Gift Books," despite the fact that in your experience any book could be a gift, you are on to something important and you should think about how and why books are organized the way they are. Ask a manager for some explanation. Many of them are happy to talk about the rhyme and reason of bookselling with curious customers. If you’re selling a novel, you need first to know where it falls along the literary/commercial spectrum. Understand this: As far as publishers are concerned, there are only two kinds of novels: LITERARY and COMMERCIAL. Literary novels are read for the aesthetic 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; cozy mysteries; high-society romance. 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. An example of this would be John Irving and The World According to Garp. His reputation never really recovered from that success. Or every now and then a commercial novelist will be said to be LITERARY because critics suddenly recognize his talent as an artist. Stephen King straddles that line because certain critics have recently noticed 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 me a novel that combines romance, mystery, science fiction, and historical western all into one irresisitible 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. Reads books in your category and try to understand WHY they work. The best writing lesson you can give yourself will come not from going to a workshop, or from reading Strunk & White, or least of all from a professor of English literature somewhere. The best way is to read in your category, and read more and carefully study 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 heed this warning to position your work effectively, to communicate its general essence in broad terms that an agent will instantly understand, you will likely be rejected. The numbers aren’t pretty. (Here is where you may want to hit the Prozac.) 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—98% of the submissions we received FROM AGENTS encountered similar odds. Do a little algebra and you’ll know that we take on somewhere between 1 in 20 to 1 in 50 projects that are sent to us. Now 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 lazy. They’re content to submit their unpolished drafts, thereby representing them as the best they can do. After the first 10 rejects come in, they 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 some more, 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, the kind who revises and learns and revises some more, 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.

These tend to be the kinds of writers who get their telephone calls returned by agents.

But only after they win them over in writing.