I’m Not Proud: All the Wrong Ways to Deal with an Agent

10. December 2011 by Gore Wehner.

First off, a pitiful excuse. When I started off looking for agents, I had no clue what I was doing. I thought I did. I thought, in fact, I knew everything. I’d read books, you know. But books don’t tell you everything. After all, those authors did things the correct way, thus the reason you are reading their book. So, in my defense, it wasn’t complete ignorance. It was simply learning the ropes. I figured I’d give you, my faithful reader, the tips I wished I’d been given.

When I began my search for an agent to represent my work, it was the days of snail-mail. Email queries were uncommon. I sent off five queries at a time. The rejections trickled in. Here’s what I did right: I looked up the agents in Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents. How I studied that book! I marked agents who might be a good fit with slices of Post-It notes. (Since those days, Post-It Brand notes invented it’s own Page Markers. I buy them buy the bunch.) Then I carefully selected whom to query. My queries themselves were all right. Nothing to rave about, mind you. But all right. So at least I’m not embarrassed about that.

When email queries became popular, I decided to try it. After all, what is better than saving myself a few bucks and getting my queries into agents’ hands? Only ice cream with marshmallow topping is better, I tell you. (Feel free to disagree. But I digress.) Unfortunately, what I didn’t realize is that response time is much quicker via email. I assumed I had a good month before I’d get a response. So I pitched a new novel, one I hadn’t edited yet. It was still in its infant stage, a whiny little draft.

I received rejections within the hour. Amazed, I wondered if perhaps I should get going on that editing. Sure enough, I received a response that day requesting the synopsis and first three chapters. A day after I sent that out, the agent requested the full manuscript.

Damnation.

A 12-hour marathon ensued. I enlisted the help of my mother, an English major. We exhausted ourselves getting that draft presentable. This brings me to Tip#1: Make sure your novel is complete, edits and all, before querying an agent.

Here is the other thing I did wrong. This is the same agent, by the way, so I’m not leaping into new territory here. I didn’t read the submission guidelines on-line that said they weren’t taking on unpublished authors. I got lucky this time. He requested my work anyway. Maybe he was feeling generous. Maybe he wasn’t overly busy at the time. But if you are going to query an agent, and I’ll make this Tip #2: Check out their Agency’s website and see if they are taking new, unpublished authors.

Here is the worst of this, and I’m loath to even mention it. Okay. Here it goes. When I queried this same agent, I made an assumption I should not have made. I used the title Ms. And it turned out this agent was male. It was a unisex name, but an uncommon one for males. So, yes, I wrote Dear Ms. Agent. And if that wasn’t bad enough, in the heading I wrote: Query for Ms. Agent.

This agent must have been used to that, though, because he kindly sent me two websites that showed photographs of him. It was a very subtle way of letting me know. I think my face turned seven shades of pink that day. Tip #3: Do a lot of research on the agent. Find pictures if you can. Make sure you have the gender correct. Don’t assume!

Okay, here is the other mistake I made…with the same agent. (Poor, poor guy.) He asked for a 30-day exclusive, and I happily gave it to him. Fool that I was, I couldn’t query anyone else. After all, this was an exclusive. Thirty days passed, and I heard nothing. Tip #4: No exclusives! At least not ones that last a month.

But even after the 30 days expired, I decided to be kind and wait still…without querying anyone else. When I finally emailed him to see what was going on, he wrote back he still hadn’t had time to read my manuscript. So (and this is so stupid I want to bury my head in my desk chair) I waited without querying anyone else! Dumb, dumb, dumb. Tip #5: Even if you are waiting for a response from your favorite agent in the whole wide world, keep querying!

It gets worse. So much worse.

This poor, sweet man, who didn’t take on unpublished authors and whom I’d mistaken for a female received a phone call from me. And I hung up. Yes. You heard me.

Okay, let me backtrack.

I’d been upset that I hadn’t heard back from this agent regarding my work and it had been months. When I attended a writing conference, paying extra moolah to have my next novel critiqued by a well-known author, I broke down and told her my tale (minus the embarrassing bits), and she recommended calling him. “Only because he requested the manuscript,” she said.

So I gathered up my nerve, found the phone number of his agency, and made the call. Except it didn’t sound like an agency office. It sounded like someone’s home answering machine, so I thought perhaps either I’d called his home instead, or called the wrong number. So I hung up and tried to decide what to do next.

I’d forgotten people had Caller ID.

So my phone rang, and when I picked it up, it was him. I felt a little faint, and everything I wanted to say evaporated out of my head, and I might have squeaked, I don’t know, but suddenly we were having a conversation and I felt weak and anxious yet thrilled at the same time…

Tip #6: Get Caller ID. And leave phone messages, even if you aren’t positive you’ve reached the right number. Although, honestly, you shouldn’t be calling an agent anyway unless they’ve asked you to do so. Really.

So this poor, lovely, dear man was very gracious. He said his readers had read my first three chapters and liked it. But my synopsis sucked. (“That’s me!” I quipped happily. “My synopses suck!” As if I was gleeful about this. Dumb, dumb, dumb.) Still, he was too busy to read it himself, but he would try. Yes, he would try.

Tip #7: Don’t act happy to hear that anything you write sucks.

Well, long story short, it never happened. I moved on. And wrote more novels. When I finally found the right agent for me, I had learned some valuable lessons.

So, faithful reader, please don’t make the mistakes I made. I’m not proud, and it rivals the embarrassment of the time I called the fire department thinking I had a gas leak, only to discover the odor emanated from my son’s diaper. I’m still trying to get the several shades of pink out of my cheeks from that mistake.

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