Ask the Agent: Night Thoughts on Writing and Book Publishing

By Andy Ross

Drawing on his thirty-five years as a bookseller and his many years as a literary agent, Andy Ross brilliantly explores the vast and often confusing landscape of contemporary publishing, noting its quirks, foibles, and rewards. Ask the Agent is a witty, humorous guide to what it takes to get an agent and get a book published combined with a paean of praise to joys of reading. Ross even manages to make the subject of rejection letters entertaining as opposed to depressing. His brilliant satire "Publisher Rejection Letters from Plato to Hitler" not only contains great advice, it’s as much fun to read as the best of Woody
Allen.”
-- Mary Mackey bestselling author of The Year The Horses Came

Literary agent, Andy Ross, has been posting to his wildly popular blog, Ask the Agent, since 2009. The blog includes no-nonsense advice on getting published and finding an agent, his incisive thoughts about the process of writing and the business of book publishing, and his recollections as a bookseller and owner of the legendary Cody’s Books in Berkeley for 30 years. Ask the Agent: Night Thoughts on Writing and Book Publishing collects the best of these writings as well as new material. The writing is rich, the insights always original, and it’s side-splittingly funny. The collection includes such classics as: “How to Pitch to an Agent,” “The Slush Pile,” “Think Like an Editor,” “The First Book Ever Written,” “Ann Lamott (And Albert Camus) on Writing,” and “Eunuchs at an Orgy: Authors on Literary Critics.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Ross
• Release date: Apr 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301933068

Andy Ross

Andy Ross is a literary agent in Oakland, California. The Andy Ross Agency represents books in a wide range of genres including: narrative non-fiction, journalism, history, current events, animals, religion, literary and commercial fiction, and young adult fiction.

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What Others are Saying about Ask the Agent

Drawing on his thirty-five years as a bookseller and his many years as a literary agent, Andy Ross brilliantly explores the vast and often confusing landscape of contemporary publishing, noting its quirks, foibles, and rewards. Ask the Agent is a witty, humorous guide to what it takes to get an agent and get a book published these days combined with a paean of praise to joys of reading. It is an invaluable resource for established authors as well as those writing their first book. Ross even manages to make the subject of rejection letters entertaining as opposed to depressing. His brilliant satire Publisher Rejection Letters From Plato to Hitler not only contains great advice, it’s as much fun to read as the best of Woody Allen.

-- Mary Mackey bestselling author of The Year The Horses Came

For more than thirty years, Andy Ross was the great owner (and house wit) of legendary Cody's Books in Berkeley, during which which he also championed the legal fight for the rights of individual bookstores against corporate chains. For some years now, Andy's brought that passion and and extraordinary book knowledge to his work as a literary agent. What he presents here about preparing and marketing your book is absolutely no-nonsense, and absolutely priceless.

-- Thomas Farber, author of Brief Nudity, and Publisher/Editor in Chief of El Leon Literary Arts

Ask the Agent:

Night Thoughts on Writing and Book Publishing

By Andy Ross

Published by The Andy Ross Agency at Smashwords. All rights reserved.

Copyright 2013 Andy Ross

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reciptient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Beginner’s Mind

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.

-Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind - Beginner’s Mind

I became a literary agent the same way I became a bookseller. I fell into it without much thought. I wish I’d started a long time ago. For one thing, it was easier making a living as an agent then. Publishers were taking more chances and actually paying writers. They’re much more cautious now. Publishers talk about sharing the risk. That means giving low advances, or none at all.

When I first started thinking about becoming an agent, I knew very little about it. Well, that’s not entirely true. About 20 years ago, I was married to one. My first wife, Joyce Cole, was a literary agent. She came out of sales. I met her in 1972 when she was a field rep for Avon Books and I was starting my first bookstore in Sonoma County. When we got together many years later, she gave me the job of reading her slush pile. I never found anything good in it. And I believed, incorrectly it turns out, that it was a thankless waste of time. I’ve found a lot of great books in the slush pile and have gotten quite a few of them published. There’s gold in them thar slush pile hills.

I never bothered to learn from Joyce the things that are most important in my work today. We never spoke about book proposals. At that time, I’m not sure book proposals were as important as they are now. I don’t remember ever learning from Joyce about the book contract, one of the first things I had to master when I became an agent. I never asked Joyce how she edited books, or whether she did at all. I didn’t even know the elements of the book deal. (Advances, royalties, territorial rights, etc.)

In 2006, Cody’s was having lots of financial difficulties. Most of it had to do with the big changes that were happening in America’s buying habits. Barnes and Noble and Borders were opening everywhere with 40,000 square foot stores that dwarfed Cody’s. Since 2000 readers were buying more books on-line. You could get every book in print from Amazon.com, which was selling books much cheaper than Cody’s could. Though our two Berkeley stores were losing money, I took a gamble and opened a new one in San Francisco. It was a big mistake. It never really caught on.

After San Francisco, I could no longer afford to subsidize the company’s losses. Lucky for me, I found a buyer, Hiroshi Kagawa, who owned Yohan, Inc., the largest distributor of English language books in Japan. Hiroshi had bought Stonebridge Press in Berkeley the previous year and was looking to expand his business in the US. I continued to manage Cody’s for the next year. It was an interesting experience working for a Japanese company. They’re different, you know. I liked Hiroshi enormously, but I found that I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out what he wanted from Cody’s and from me.

When Yohan in Tokyo started having financial problems, Hiroshi could no longer keep putting new capital into Cody’s, and I was back in the unhappy position of spending most of my time choosing which publishers I would not be able to send checks to. That’s when I realized it was time to end my 35 years as a bookseller.

I left the store in December 2007. I had no plan to become a literary agent. I didn’t even know what a book proposal was. ( Shhhh. This is a dirty little secret.) I wanted to stay in the book business, because I’d been in it my whole life. I didn’t know how to do anything else. My friend, Ani Chamichian, a book marketing executive, told me I should be an agent. I’d never thought about it. I woke up the next morning and decided to do it.

When I look back at the first few months of the agency, I’m amazed at all the things I didn’t know. I didn’t even know enough to be intimidated by all the things I didn’t know. There are a lot of very young agents around who are right out of college or coming from other fields of work. They tend to go into the big agencies where they can be trained by other experienced agents. I didn’t have that luxury. I had to be an autodidact.

But there were some things I knew that other agents didn’t, even the agents with years of experience. Very few of them ever worked in a bookstore. I had been speaking to book loving customers every day. I worked with sales reps and read catalogues from hundreds of publishers of all sizes. I saw the books that sold and the ones that didn’t. When I made a buying mistake, sometimes I boxed the stacks of unsold books up myself and sent them back to the publisher’s warehouse. I reviewed invoices every day and knew the discount terms for every publisher. I came to realize it wasn’t true that I was never trained to be an agent. In fact, I had been training for 35 years.

I still had to master the fundamentals. I learned about contracts by reading Kirsch’s Guide to the Book Contract. It was the definitive book on the subject. The author, Jonathan Kirsch, is probably the preeminent legal expert on the subject as well as an author of trade books on Jewish history and theology. I go to him now when I need intellectual property advice.

Then I went on and read How to Write a Non-fiction Book Proposal by Michael Larsen. It’s published by Writer’s Digest Books and is the best selling book on the subject. I’ve known Michael and his wife and partner, Elizabeth Pomada, for years. They’ve really encouraged me in my new career.

When I first got started, I had an image of literary agents as sort of cold and snooty. I was wrong about that. The agents in the Bay Area were unbelievably supportive and encouraging. And they all were generous with advice about nuts and bolts when I needed it. Some of them have become my very good friends. In particular, I’d like to thank Kitty Cowles of the Cowles - Ryan Agency and Carol Bidnick. I have learned so much from both of them.

When I began, I thought I would be specializing in the kinds of books I sold at Cody’s. And if you look at my list of titles, there are a lot of those. But I also found I was working in all sorts of areas that I never imagined. I like to think of myself as kind of a literary gigolo. The books I represent include such genres as: narrative non-fiction, memoir, current events, travel journalism, religion, animals, true crime, cookbooks, illustrated kid’s books, and teen fiction. I even have a book on the world’s ugliest dogs. I still work with scholars, and I’m proud of those important titles (although sometimes the shortest word they use in their text is epiphany.)

I wasn’t planning to work in fiction. But, again, I sort of fell into it, and found that I love the work. It’s tough. Fiction is extremely difficult to sell. And it takes lots of work. I usually have to read a book three times before it’s ready for submission, and I have to do detailed line editing as well. That’s the other big surprise in this job. I thought it was going to be like a real estate agent, linking up buyers and sellers and negotiating deals. It’s really much more creative than that. In non-fiction I find that a writer often has a great book in his head, but can’t identify exactly what it is. So I have to act as a literary midwife. In fiction, I’m amazed at how little perspective novelists have about their own stories. I work with several novelists who teach other people how to write novels. Sometimes they have trouble seeing that the story they have been living with for years might not be resonating with a reader as much as they imagined.

I was surprised to learn that I had a talent for editing fiction, at least that’s what my clients told me. Which brings us back to Suzuki-Roshi’s quote above. I try to approach a manuscript of a novel with a clearness of mind and without preconceptions. To look at it with a beginner’s mind. I like to put myself in the place of the reader. I usually read the text out loud and listen to myself. When I’m bored, I make a note on the margin that I’m bored. When I see awkward sentences and bad style elements (like word repetition and clichés), I can usually hear them. When a character doesn’t ring true, I let the author know. When dialogue doesn’t sound natural, I can tell by listening to my voice as I read it. And surprisingly this happens a lot, even in the work of experienced and accomplished writers. And it feels pretty good when I finally submit the novels and know they are a lot better than when I first received them. And I’ll take some credit for that, thank you very much.

I started my blog, Ask the Agent in 2009. I’m not sure I can tell you why I did it. My brother, who is a kind of social media maven, told me I should do it to market myself. Honestly, I didn’t know what he was talking about. But I started doing it anyway. I’m not sure if what I write about is always effective marketing. My good friend, Alan Rinzler, who is a freelance editor and blogger, tried to give me some avuncular advice. He took me out to a bar and asked me: What are you trying to do with that blog, sound off or make money? His question was rhetorical. But I had some trouble responding. Looking back on my blog posts, it really seems that I have been doing a lot of sounding off. I hope that readers find it refreshing. Most agent blogs are pretty heavy on tips for getting published. That’s ok. Those tips are always useful, and I’ve incorporated some of them into this book, as well. But I try to do it with some pretty edgy attitude.

I still try to approach new projects with a beginner’s mind. It’s getting harder. I’m not a beginner any more. After several thousand publisher rejection letters, you start to get a little cynical and inured to fresh new ideas. I struggle with that every day. I would like to think that a the ideas in this book, many of which came from my blog, have that kind of freshness though. I truly believe that the creative imagination of a writer is something miraculous. That’s why I love being an agent. I hope that feeling stays with me.

Part 1

An Agent’s Advice on Getting Published

Before You Start Writing Your Book, Ask Yourself These Questions

As an agent, I see a lot of non-fiction book proposals based on wishful thinking about whether a project is publishable. If writers asked themselves some basic questions before beginning the process, they would save some time and grief. They would either refine their concept into one that is attractive as a commercial publishing venture, or they would realize the idea is ill-conceived or possibly destined for self-publishing. Here are some questions you should be asking yourself.

1. How many books am I trying to write? You have no idea how often I speak to prospective authors who can’t decide which of their many fabulous ideas they want to write about. So they try to shoehorn all of them into a single book. I see book proposals beginning with sentences like this: My book is a self-help book about curing back pain with elements of a memoir included. My advice. Save the memoir for the next book. I always sense a problem when the proposal announces the project crosses genres. Yes, there are some successful cross-genre books, but more often the author is just being lazy and unwilling to choose what genre she really wants to write in. Publishers say they are looking for fresh new voices, but if the voice is too fresh and too new, if the publisher is confused about the book’s genre, if the bookseller can’t visualize what section the book should be shelved in, then it’s going to be tough for this book to find a home. I know. I bought books at Cody’s for 30 years. When I couldn’t figure out where I’d shelve a book, I tended not to order it.

2. Is this a blog, not a book? Is this a long form article, not a book? Editors are always sending me rejection letters based on these concerns. Everybody seems to be blogging now, and we’d like to take our precious material and put it all together into something that will make us some money. (I’m doing that right now.) There’s also the added benefit that the hard work has already been done, and it just needs a little slicing and dicing. Publishers don’t want books derived from blogs. Why would readers pay for stuff already available for free online? The question about whether the subject works better as a shorter journalistic piece is a little more complicated. But if your manuscript is less than 50,000 words, it’s too short for a book. With e-books, publishers are exploring new formats and are doing projects with shorter word counts. We have to wait and see how that’s going to sort out.

3. Who’s are my readers and what do they care about? This is the single most important question that needs to be addressed in an effective book proposal. In the world of commercial publishing, the reader is sovereign. I once tried to sell a self-help book about how to deal with a variety of office injuries, written by an author with good bona fides. It got rejected. Editors pointed out that readers who have back pain don’t really care about how to treat repetitive stress syndrome. They want a book on back pain. The reader is selfish and self-absorbed. She wants you to speak to her concerns.

I also find a problem with book proposals that define their potential audience too broadly. I once got a proposal about women’s health that described the potential audience as all women who care about their health. I pointed out this was not an audience. This was a demographic that included several billion people. This won’t be helpful to a publisher attempting to decide whether there is going to be a wide general interest in the book. And it’s likely to create delusions of grandeur on the part of the author.

4. If there are no other books on this subject, is there possibly a reason? Most authors think a great pitch is: There are no other books out there like mine. For publishers, this begs the question of why aren’t there any? And the answer for them is usually that there is no audience big enough to justify publishing on this subject. What publishers really want is a book idea on a subject that’s been written about in other successful books. But you need to prove you have something special that will make this robust audience spend money to read what you have new to say. Every book proposal should have a competitive analysis section listing five or six comparable titles. The first thing an acquisition editor will do when reading the proposal is to look up the sales on these titles. Publishers all have subscriptions to Bookscan, the database that retrieves point of sale information on all titles in print. If the sales on your comp books are modest, it’s a good indicator the audience isn’t big enough to justify publishing