Agents & Publishers, Ideas & Execution, and 4 Leaf Clovers

I received my first rejection from a publisher during my sophomore year of college. I had what I thought was a good idea for a book and, for a short time, the publisher agreed. But they eventually rejected my idea with memorable style.
 
Back then I was an avid reader of Rolling Stone magazine. I devoured every issue, always starting with “Correspondence, Love Letters & Advice,” their letters section. The short, snappy commentary from the readers of Rolling Stone was the print equivalent of 1970’s Classic Rock Twitter. I sent a letter to Jann Wenner, the founder and publisher of Rolling Stone in which I suggested that (1) a compilation of these letters would make a great book, and (2) I would be the perfect person to curate those letters into that book.
 
To my astonishment, a letter arrived a couple of weeks later from Mr. Wenner’s assistant, typed on the subversively cool letterhead of Straight Arrow Publishers, the name of Mr. Wenner’s company at the time.  The assistant wrote that Mr. Wenner saw some promise in my idea, and asked me to submit a polished draft of what I had in mind. 

You know that story about the dog who chased the car, caught it, and wondered “Now what do I do?” That was me. I cobbled together a couple of dozen pages of letters from however many copies of Rolling Stone I was able to scrounge in our dorm, typed a crude draft, and mailed it back to my new friend at Straight Arrow.
 
When her next letter arrived about three weeks later, I trembled when I opened it. It turned out to be a short, polite rejection. They were still interested, but they felt, as my contact so memorably wrote: “the idea is still valid, but the execution is lacking.”
 
I never followed up with Straight Arrow Publishers, but for the rest of my time at college, after many exams, most hockey games, and every date, if anyone asked me or any of my roommates “How did it go?” they were likely to hear: “The idea is still valid, but the execution was lacking.”

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One thing I’ve learned in my new life is that writers do not contact publishers directly. Instead, part of my job now is to find an agent who will contact publishers on my behalf. Every agent has one or more specific interests. Some agents specialize in fiction, many are focused on the young adult or children’s markets, quite a few (fortunately) are focused on nonfiction, memoir and history. That being said, agents are also very selective. They have to be. They are bombarded each week with dozens - sometimes hundreds - of proposals from writers like me.

I wanted to quantify the chances of finding an agent. When I typed the first several words of the question “what are the odds of finding an agent,” Google auto-filled my query with “what are the odds of finding a four leaf clover.” As luck would have it, the chances of finding an agent (roughly estimated at somewhere between 100 to 1 and 1,000 to one) are better than the chances of finding a four leaf clover (10,000 to 1). Just this past weekend, an agent tweeted her stats for the month of October. She received 607 queries, and only requested follow-up proposals from three of the prospective authors. She is also closed to queries for the balance of the year, which is another thing that happens.

Much of my time these days is spent tailoring query letters and book proposals for prospective agents. I recently received my first rejection, so in that respect I’m starting to feel like a professional author.

I’ve read that due to the volume of queries they receive, many agents only reply if they have an interest in your work. So even though he did not provide the response I hoped to receive, I sincerely appreciated this agent’s courtesy in replying. Even better, as luck would have it, I was once again rejected with memorable style.

His email read in part: “I don't believe that we are the appropriate agents to represent this material. In this very competitive market, we are simply not enthusiastic enough about our ability to sell this work to offer you representation.”

At first, even though I knew that wasn’t true, I appreciated that he faulted his agenting ability, and not my writing. It only took one more reading to understand that, of course, this was not what he was saying at all.

I was a salesman for thirty years, and I thought I had been rejected in every way imaginable. But I’ve never been let down with such thoughtfully phrased language. The people who know me the best know that I absolutely love this stuff.

There are surely additional rejections and battle scars in my future. However, I have absolutely no doubt that the idea for my book is valid. Now, in addition to fine-tuning the execution of my story, I also have to better execute how I pitch it to agents.

Thanks for following along,
Bill