noveldoctor

Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re a really brilliant un-agented, unpublished writer and you’ve recently finished final edits on a truly brilliant novel. Yesterday you queried a bunch of agents and today you got five “The Call” calls. Don’t laugh. We’re playing “let’s pretend,” remember?

How do you decide which agent will share 15 percent of your inevitable Very Nice Deal?

By gleaning great wisdom from this handy-dandy agent guide, that’s how.*

A Good Agent…will have some difficulty managing her excitement about representing you, occasionally letting slip words like “amazing” or “lyrical” or “compelling” in the course of her comments about your novel. She will talk about your novel’s main character, Gabrielle, so eloquently you’ll forget for a moment that you made her up.

A Bad Agent…will talk mostly about all the money the two of you will make and will refer to your novel in generic terms until she’s skimmed enough of the manuscript on the card table in front of her to declare your post-apocalyptic novel of spiritual re-birth “better than Dickens and Nicholas Sparks combined!”

A Good Agent…will tell you the truth about how hard it is to make it as a new author, then describe in detail how she tackles that challenge with as-yet-unpublished authors she chooses to represent.

A Bad Agent…will either a) tell you your book is perfect as is and pooh-pooh the idea of spending any more time on it, or b) tell you you’re “almost there” except for a bit of editing that she’d be happy to help you with for $2000.

A Good Agent…will invite your questions and answer every one unless he doesn’t know the answer. In that case, he’ll say “I don’t know,” research the answer, and then call you back.

A Bad Agent…will answer every question that makes him uncomfortable with the nauseatingly hyperbolic details of his most recent spectacular author deal (which he doesn’t reveal actually happened back in the ’80s).

A Good Agent…will return all of your calls within a day or two, or will shoot you an email letting you know when she can get back to you if she’s currently focused on meeting a critical deadline. But she also won’t hesitate to tell you if you’re calling too often. She’ll say it nicely.

A Bad Agent…will use the following excuses to explain why she didn’t return your last six calls: my cell phone died; my grandmother died; I was busy negotiating a huge deal for you and it was taking forever and I didn’t want to jinx it…but it fell through anyway; my cell phone died again; my other grandmother died.

A Good Agent…will graciously accept gifts of chocolate or Starbucks gift cards from current clients only.

A Bad Agent…will require gifts of chocolate or Starbucks gift cards before deciding to offer representation.

A Good Agent…will custom-select publishers for each book proposal, matching the books and authors to the publishers’ needs and interests.

A Bad Agent…will load proposals into a shotgun and fire it in the general direction of a zillion publishers, regardless of “fit,” just so she can say “hey, I sent it off to 25 publishers” when you ask for a status update.

A Good Agent…will not give up on an author he believes in just because the first round of submissions doesn’t net any offers.

A Bad Agent…will tell you no one is interested in your book after getting just one rejection.

A Good Agent…will be a cheerleader, a coach, an advocate, a negotiator, and a shoulder to cry on, sometimes all in the same day.

A Bad Agent…will do as little as possible to earn his 15 percent.

A Good Agent…will share a bottle of fine wine with you when celebrating the signing of your contract.

A Bad Agent…will share a bottle of fine wine with you when celebrating the signing of your contract…then deduct the cost of that wine from your first royalty check.

A Good Agent…will know when to make the difficult decision of tabling a current project due to publisher disinterest. Then she’ll help you turn your attention to the next one.

A Bad Agent…will keep re-submitting the current un-sold project until editors around the globe start to refer to you as “that annoying author.”

And finally:

A Good Agent…will still make mistakes. You can count on it.

*I’m not an agent and I don’t play one on TV. But over the years I’ve gotten to know a few of the good ones in my little publishing niche and some of them seem to like me.

You’ve read everybody else’s predictions. You’ve heard from the experts. The insiders. The pundits. Well, goody for you. Those  prognosticators may have knowledge. They may have expertise. They may even have credibility. But what they don’t have…is a really good imagination.

So forget all those boring predictions and trust mine instead. They’re based on years of…okay, fine. They’re not based on anything at all.

I just made ‘em up this morning.

In ten years…

• Those infinite monkeys with their ubiquitous typewriters will have successfully written Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and subsequently declared it “notably inferior to The Tempest.” Then they will throw feces at each other.
• 73 percent of people who own computers will have written a novel. The other 27 percent will have written two or more novels. 99.9 percent of all those novels will be crap.
• A group of recently-out-of-work literary agents will form a rock band and call themselves The Query-Spammers. They will be terribly ironic. And terrible.
• Apple will finally release its tablet computer. Steve Jobs will declare “the end of e-ink-induced headaches.” He will then reveal the two available configurations of the iTablet: Extra Strength and Sinus Congestion. Only Apple COO Tim Cook will laugh at his joke. Jobs’ famous “one more thing” will turn out to be the long-rumored, much maligned iTurtleneck. Promising to revolutionize corporate casual wear, the iTurtleneck will feature one less hole than traditional turtlenecks. It will come in black, and black.
• Oprah will start a new network television show dedicated solely to talking about books. Unfortunately, she’ll only talk about East of Eden, Love in the Time of Cholera and The Road.
• Hemp will replace wood pulp as the source of paper for traditional books. Traditional books will suddenly become popular with a new demographic: young people who think hemp is the part of the plant you smoke.
• Ray Kurzweil will introduce an e-reader device that beams content directly into your brain. Within days of its release, hackers will find a security hole and vanity presses will begin flooding the Kurzweil CorTex(t) with crappy self-pubbed books. A month after its release, millions of readers who thought they downloaded the latest Stephen King novel, Everything In the World Is Evil and I Mean Everything, will be more disappointed than usual with his increasingly verbose prose, completely unaware that they’re actually reading a rambling collection of spam headlines cobbled together by a bored hacker in St. Paul, MN.
• The racy novel, Hermione and Me, by David Gordon Rowling Murray will be released by Simon, Schuster, Hachette & Scholastic, LLC and sell out of the 10-million copy first run within seconds of its release. In an unrelated story, J. K. Rowling will purchase ten million copies of an unnamed book and bury them in a Montana landfill.
• President DeGeneres will declare December 9th as Read-a-Real-Book Day. Most people will choose something by Dr. Seuss.
• “Fiction” novels will still account for 100 percent of all novels.
• Guy Kawasaki will finally accept that his enduring popularity is due almost entirely to the fact that people think he invented the motorcycle.
• TwitterPrint, the book publishing arm of the Twitter Collective, will hit the top spot in the last print edition of the New York Times Best-Seller list with its first published work, Someday I’ll Wish I Hadn’t Said That, by millions of uncredited authors.
• I still won’t have a flying car.