Agents, Agents

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard. And you can’t get your book considered by the top publishers without an agent. Facts of life.

So those of us who have ambitions beyond self-publishing with Amazon spend our days, when not writing, trying to interest an agent in our work.

Not easy. Especially these days when the Agent world seems fixated on “underrepresented voices.”

(And, I ask, just how did these voices get underrepresented? Could it be that you, dear agents, would not look at them before because you thought them uncommercial and were slightly afraid of them? But now that it’s fashionable, you can’t get enough? And somewhere the ghost of James Baldwin is shaking his head and sneering.)

It’s not easy for a man of my persuasion to get looked at by the Agents of this world. My persuasion is straight white male. I am not whining. I am a straight white male and I refuse to pretend to be something else just so that some agent will look at my book.

A friend of mine once said that the best way to avoid getting trapped in the pettiness of this world is to be so good that they can’t deny you. Oh wait. That was Steve Martin, whom I have never met. But what the hell, it’s still a good saying.

I am working on being so good I can’t be denied. I figure I can whine about how shallow agents are these days or I can continue to work on my writing so that it is so good it makes even the most shallow agent jump for joy.

After all, I want to read those books by “underrepresented writers.” I know a lot of them have probably been waiting a long time to emerge from the indifference of the industry.

As for myself, I keep hoping to run into an agent who will actually read my damned book and tell me if it’s any good.

The last agent I thought I had (a previous blog talked about this) suddenly became very ill. You know, it makes a man wonder if the Fates are fucking with him when a high-powered agent likes my stuff and suddenly is taken very ill.

I went to another conference last weekend shopping my two mystery characters, Minerva and Sock and Pixie. (Okay, that’s three, but Sock and Pixie are a team.) Face to face I evidently do better than email, as two different agents were interested, one in each book.

The dilemma of what I will do if both like their respective books is not something that will likely happen. But I’m hoping there’s strength in numbers. At least one, I hope will read the book and like it and offer to help me get to the next level.

Then I can rest.

(!)