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Finding an agent . . .

9/21/2014

 

Guest Post by Norma Watkins
MCWC Board Member and 2011 Presenter

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Norma Watkins is the author of the award-winning memoir The Last Resort. She has a Ph.D. in English and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, which she teaches at Mendocino College’s Coast Campus.
The first time I tried to find an agent, I had turned my Ph.D. dissertation into a novel. I asked a friend in Miami to give me the name of his agent and sent off my manuscript. One day at the office, the phone call you dream about—the agent saying she loved the book. I wanted to throw up my hands and run screaming out the door. “Good-by forever, desk jockeys. I’m off to be a writer.”

Fortunately, I did not flee my day job. My agent sent the book off to one publisher, who didn’t like it, and said she said she didn’t want to over-expose me by sending it to others. Then she decided to quit the agent business and become a writer herself.

Agent number two, also recommended by a friend, said yes, she liked my work and would take me on, but it wasn’t my turn. I needed to wait my turn. I waited eleven months and she sent the book out to four publishers. When they turned me down, she billed me $200 for copies and said it wasn’t my turn anymore. I would need to get back in line, and did I want to write a cookbook instead. Good-by agent #2.

I tried the agent-finding method recommended in Poets & Writers: join Publishers Marketplace; identify agents who have sold books similar to yours; send out multiple query letters. I did that. I did it over and over, sending out forty, eighty, a hundred queries. No luck.

The emotions I ran through over those years.

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My present agent was already a friend. He represented writers who wrote about politics and war and didn’t take what he called “women’s books.” But he agreed to make an exception. The memoir (enough people had died to change my “fiction” to truth) was finally published in 2011.


Don’t give up, but the operative word in my tale is “friend." Go to a Writers Conference and make a friend of the agent—which means listening, accepting, revising, and most of all, staying in touch.

I would love to hear how any you out there found an agent, lost an agent, loves an agent or wants to murder one. Names may be withheld.

Norma’s Writing Regimen: I've taken Ann Patchett's advice—to  set a time to write and stick to it. Aristotle said we are what we do. I get up every morning at 5 a.m. and write for two hours. It takes (according to the infamous web) 66 days to form a habit—something you do without thinking. This early morning writing has become my habit and I've finished the draft of a new novel (to join the other three in my drawer?). Working title: When We Were One, about two girls, raised as orphans on a farm in Missouri, and sent away after high school. How they find their way in the world and return to discover the secret of their birth. Like all my books, it’s about women finding their power. 





Confessions of a Conference Pusher

7/7/2014

 

Guest Post By Shirin Yim Bridges
MCWC Faculty 2011 and 2013, MCWC Advisory Board Member

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Author of Ruby's Wish, one of Publishers Weekly's Best Children's Books of 2002 and winner of the 2003 Ezra Jack Keats award; The Umbrella Queen, named one of the Best Children's Books of 2008 by TIME magazine; the forthcoming Mary Wrightly So Politely; and The Thinking Girl's Treasury of Real Princesses. All her books are about girls who manage to exert themselves and do the unexpected.
My sister, Natasha Yim, is a self-proclaimed conference junkie. By which she means if there’s a writers’ conference, she’ll try to find the funds to attend. She usually gets to at least one a year (she’s a MCWC alum), and sometimes as many as three. It was at a writers’ conference that she found a publisher for her most recent book, Goldy Luck and the Three Pandas. Similarly, she met her agent beside a swimming pool at a social event. 

I am a conference pusher. Whenever I teach or speak about writing and publishing, I tell anyone who will listen that conferences are the only short cut left to getting published by someone other than yourself. But is this true? I subject my oft-repeated assertion to closer scrutiny in my blog at goosetracks.me.

Conferences are how the book industry does business. In addition to the writers’ conferences, there are the booksellers’ conferences (BEA being the largest one in the U.S., usually held in New York), and the library conferences (the behemoth being ALA). As an author, publisher, and speaker, I attend on average eight to twelve conferences a year. 

That many conferences does not a happy camper make. I’ve just returned from this year’s ALA National Conference in Las Vegas. It was a very successful conference for Goosebottom Books, at which we introduced our new series, A Treasury of Glorious Goddesses. 

But my back and legs still ache from four days of standing. My brain is exhausted from constantly being ON. I’d like to say the 108˚ weather and infrequent meals (try walking away from a booth to get fed when there are 13,000 attendees!) have made me newly svelte, but no such luck.
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There’s one conference that I look forward to every year though: the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. It has everything that I tell my students conferences offer: the opportunity to improve your craft; the opportunity to meet other authors like yourself; the golden chance to put your manuscript in front of agents, editors, and publishers. 

And it has something that I value even more—community. 

You’ll see what I mean when you get there. As you watch shy newcomers being greeted by the million-watt smiles of board members; as you see conference regulars embrace each other as at a reunion; as faculty shake hands and slap each other on the back, and turning, include you too; listen out for Louis Armstrong: 
I see friends shaking hands
saying how do you do.
They’re really saying...

Yes, it’s a wonderful world.

Shirin Yim Bridges

Only an invitation to speak at the SCBWI East Australia and New Zealand Conference in Sydney, Australia, prevents her from joining the MCWC community this year.

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