Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [83]
If you know anybody who knows an agent, so much the better. The agents I’ve known have always gotten a large number of new clients through referrals from other clients. Any third party whose name you can conveniently use can make it easier for you to get a positive reply to your query—and that’s all connections can ever do for you. After that, the book has to sell itself.
What about reading fees?
Forget about reading fees.
Some agents charge prospective clients a fee to cover the cost of reading and evaluating their work. The rationale here is that the agent has to be compensated for his time, but more often than not the tail winds up wagging the dog. The great majority of agents who solicit reading fees barely have a professional client list worthy of the name; without reading fees, they’d have trouble swinging the monthly light bill.
As a result, you wind up paying a fee in the hope that you’ll be represented by a man who, if anything, has negative clout with the publishing industry. Furthermore, the criticism he gives you can’t be trusted, because he has a vested interest in encouraging you to keep on writing—and to keep on sending in manuscripts with checks attached.
In some instances, the fee agent is in the editing business as well. The fee’s not all he wants from you. He’ll also offer to rewrite the manuscript, for a price.
Not all agents who charge fees are quite so venal about it, and I suppose there are a few who are really just trying to cover the overhead while assembling a list of professional clients. Even so, why pay an agent when you can find another agent to perform the same task for free?
The fee agent, of course, is a sure bet. You won’t have to write him a query letter and wait with bated breath for his reply. And, after he’s read your book, you can be fairly sure of a courteous letter praising various aspects of your writing. An agent who reads your work at no charge may send it back with a brief not-for-us note.
Think about it. Do you want to pay fifty or a hundred bucks so someone’ll write you a nice letter? We’re supposed to get paid for what we write, not to pay for what other people write to us. Remember?
I suppose you feel the same way about subsidy publishers?
You bet.
There is some justification for paying to have your work published if you are a poet or a writer of nonfiction. For most poets, that’s the only available avenue for publication. And, since poetry doesn’t make money anyway, there’s no particular stigma attached to paying for publication.
Some nonfiction deserves publication and can be commercially viable, but it may be too highly specialized to interest a commercial publisher. This is particularly likely with regional material.
In such cases, there’s no reason why an author would be ill advised to underwrite the cost of publishing his book. I personally believe that self-publishing is a much better plan than paying a subsidy publisher to do the job for you, but that’s by the way. We’re talking about novels, and it just doesn’t make sense for a novelist to pay for publication of his book. The only possible reason for it is vanity.
The novel you publish with a subsidy publisher will not do much of anything but cost you money. It will not get reviewed in any significant media. It will not be handled by stores. It will not sell enough copies to amount to anything. It will not even do much for your vanity, really, because knowledgeable people will look at the book, note the subsidy house’s imprint, recognize it for what it is, and know that your novel is one you had to pay to have published.
You can avoid the last pitfall by publishing the book yourself, using some ad hoc imprint. And, if you want to have a small edition of books made up in this fashion so that you can pass out copies to friends, there’s really nothing wrong with that. Writing’s a fine hobby, and if the novel you produce turns out not to be commercial, there’s no reason why you can’t indulge yourself a little and see your work in print. You’ll still spend considerably less annually than an amateur