Life Writing for Publication
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You're looking at all these people publishing their memoirs nowadays and you're thinking, "I could do that." So you write your life story, package it up, and send off this weighty manuscript to a prestigious New York publisher. There it reaches the desk of a sympathetic editor who finds the first few pages of your story so fascinating that she stays up all night to finish reading it. The next day, you get a call from the editor, offering to publish you and give you a great big advance.
Don't count on it. Rare even in nostalgic reflection, such a process of literary arrival has all but ceased to occur in the profit-driving publishing industry we know today. The business pressures that publishers face has resulted in the addition of another key player, the literary agent. Now more than ever, publication requires an agent's help. If you want to publish your life writing in the literary marketplace, you will do well to learn more about the place of literary agents in the publishing chain, and then do what it takes to find the right agent to represent you.
Why Do You Need a Literary Agent?New authors today enter a publishing industry of unprecedented competitive pressure. Editors receive hundreds of manuscripts each week, every week. They must plow through the less-good ones quickly, but not so fast that they miss the gems-books with strong sales potential and (often if not always) some literary merit. Agents today act almost like editorial assistants, the first reviewers of new manuscripts and proposals. Editors so appreciate the weeding-out work that agents perform that most of them will not even read "unagented" material that they receive directly from authors.Once a publisher has agreed to buy your work, a good literary agent will advocate for you in the complex process of contract negotiation. As technology revolutionizes our ideas of intellectual property, new publishing possibilities have arisen, and a good agent will not only protect your rights in these tricky areas but will get a better deal for you than you can get for yourself. And if you plan to continue writing, your agent can give you invaluable career-related advice and support.
Finding the Right AgentTo begin with, you should locate agents likely to have an interest in your work. Several reference sources can help. Published annually, Literary Market Place (Bowker) and the Guide to Literary Agents (Writer's Digest Books) offer the most comprehensive and timely agent listings. Jeff Herman's book Writer's Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents (Prima) includes a smaller number of agents, but the listings provide more detail about agents' personal taste and professional style. You can find all of these sources in most good reference libraries. Take advantage of these sources, if you have access to them. Because the agenting profession is so highly personal, it will be to your advantage to learn as much about prospective agents as you can. You can start with some objective criteria:
Once you've determined which agents might be best suited to represent your work, it's time to write a query letter. And that will be our topic in the next issue. |
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Last updated: 02/07/00