Trolling for an agent
I had an agent once. Or at least I thought I did. Katie referred me to her agent and so I submitted my unwieldy proposal there and it was accepted. Kind of. At least the agent said she was going to trot it around town after I emailed her asking for a response. I didn’t hear from her after that until I wrote her (again) for another update and she said that she had one interested publisher but wasn’t sure ‘cuz the market had tanked (this was right after 9/11). Then I got a form email saying she was leaving her job to start her own agency but that she would be taking her projects with her and that’s the last I’ve heard.
Obviously I’m not using her again. This is a totally different proposal. The last one was supposed to get me work but this one is one that I actually want to write. If it gets me work, I will be one happy camper but mostly I wanted something on my resume of which I could be proud.
I had a couple of other referrals from author-friends. The first is the one who rejected me already and the other is one I’ll hit up if the one I wrote to today doesn’t bite. The one for today is a cold-query; I have no in there but I like what I’ve read about her and her stable is impressive.
I think I know why that first agent rejected me: My query absolutely sucked. It was so boring. It sounded like this:
Approximately 4.6 billion people enjoy corn. I enjoy corn. I have written about the enjoyment of corn. This will interest people who enjoy corn as well as people who don’t enjoy corn but wonder about the people who do.
Only it wasn’t about corn.
My new query is much punchier. I even use the term “third-wave feminist.” I wasn’t sure if I was, in fact, a third-wave feminist or if I was simply the daughter of a second-wave feminist who was smart enough to take up the cause. I missed the grrl power movement by a couple of years: I don’t have tattoos or piercings and no longer listen to anything that sounds remotely like cool punk rock. But at 33, I suppose I am a third-wave feminist and I certainly identify more with their mothering creedo than the one (not) supported by my 70s era sisters. In any case, I thought it was a nice short-cut to explaining my viewpoint in the query so I ran with it. Labels can be useful when you’re trying to keep your query to a page.
LOL. I’m reading this, thinking: “What the f*ck? She wrote about corn?” And then I read the rest. But thank you for the laugh. : )
Maybe we can come up with a new name for third wave non-tattood non-pierced non-punk feminists. I’m pretty sure if I made a date with most of feminists I know online, they would sneak out of the coffee shop once they got a look at me.
I am one of the 4.6 billion people who enjoy corn. I would read your book any day, and recommend it to my brother, who doesn’t like corn but is curious about my affection for it.
Theoretically, I missed the whole grrrl power thing too (I’m almost 35), but it TOTALLY resonated with me. I loved the music, the girls, the fervor, everything — even when it sucked. Even when it was ageist. Which it was and still is.
There WAS nothing like that when I was a teenager where I was living, and my mom wasn’t really a feminist. We never talked about it, anyway, so even if she was I had no idea. I didn’t even know what feminism was until I was in college. I never got pierced or tattooed either; I never was “punk”. But I so identified with what a lot of these young women are/were about that a lot of times friendship transcended age and lifestyle… and it still does.
A lot of those young women that I knew when they were 14 and I was 22 are now having their first children, asking questions, struggling, triumphing. It all comes around. Motherhood: the Great Equalizer. (well, it should be)
Ivy, I’d be so into having a cup of coffee with you.
Dawn… I’m curious to know more about this book (sigh… a whole book of Dawn!) and how you go about finding an agent and stuff. It’s gonna be an interesting journey. May you find someone worthy of you.
There are a lot of agenting books on the market as I’m sure you well know; the one that is quite impressive in terms of getting to feel as though you know the agents before you query them is “Literary Agents” a Writer’s Introduction by John F. Baker, Macmillan, 1999. Portraits of about 45 leading agents are shared in vivid detail–a good place to start.
Best,
M & M