Nathan Bransford

The Ditchwalk Agent Query Challenge

December 2, 2009 By Mark 18 Comments

The Issue
On October, 22nd, 2009, literary agent Nathan Bransford of Curtis Brown, Ltd, posted the following on Twitter:

Jessica Faust’s great post re: editing/queries/synopses aren’t fun, but they’re your job: http://bit.ly/1aI0XF

Following the link I found another literary agent, Jessica Faust, of BookEnds, LLC, ranting about lazy writers:

Life and getting published is not about easy. It takes work and I’m willing to do the work to help you build a successful career. Since it’s your career I would think you’re willing to do the work too.

Now, I don’t know what you think about a literary agent dressing writers down in public, but I’m not sure Ms. Faust is exhibiting the kind of professionalism that lends credibility to her advice about professionalism. I say this because one of the things agents have to deal with is the fact that writers come in all shapes, sizes, neuroses, flavors, vintages and intellectual capacities. It’s baked into the business.

If they don’t know it in advance, all agents learn this during their first full business day. So when I see an agent go off the deep end about how writers make that agent’s life difficult, or about writers being inept, or about writers being vain, or whatever else an agent might appropriately bitch about over drinks with other agents, that rant sounds like someone telling the world to be different from the way the world is.

Even your average agent knows that a good part of their job is trying to take feral square-peg writers and hammer them into trained round-peg authors that fit the publishing pigeon holes of the day. That’s the whole game from an agent’s point of view: connect products with markets, and massage both until they fit. Unfortunately, writers themselves are notoriously uncertain about how all this works, so they either do the wrong things or write the wrong things or ask stupid repetitive questions until the agent goes mental. [ Read more ]

Theme, Literature and Money

October 27, 2009 By Mark 2 Comments

Nathan Bransford put up a post today titled Themes Schmemes. Here’s the gist of it:

I think the drive to write Literature/art sometimes leads some very talented writers, especially young ones, to write books that as an agent I can’t sell because there’s too much attention paid to the themes and the subtext and the meaning and other English-class-type concerns, rather than the narrative and the plot and the craft and other sausage-making-type concerns.

In talking about theme over the course of this past week, I tried to stay focused on the difference between theme as a useful literary technique and theme as a toxic analytical tool. I tried to stay away from the relative merit of theme as a technique or personal literary objective because I consider that an artistic choice. Saying that theme is bad when used by a particular author to create a given story would be like saying that reference photographs are bad for any artist’s painting. It’s not for me to decide.

Bransford’s post, however, changes the axis of analysis. Instead of the utility or merit of theme, he is focused — rightly, for an agent — on sales. And from that point of view I have no doubt that he’s right: theme and other literary tools are often completely unnecessary when crafting marketable fiction. The problem, of course, is that this is a slippery slope, and once you shove off you can’t stop the slide without exposing yourself to your own market-driven arguments.

I’m confident Bransford believes there’s a minimal level of storytelling skill necessary to write a bestseller. Still, if you found a trendy, charismatic writer who could riff on pornographic sex, gruesome, sadistic violence and pop-culture references, and you hyped the resulting title with a cutting-edge social-media marketing tour, you might end up with a bestseller on your hands. At which point that writer’s agent would point out that Bransford’s concerns about plotting and character and story are totally overrated, and the only thing that matters is whether you really can increase sales by taking a bus load of orphans hostage and refusing to free them until every American buys five copies of Risotto: A Love Story.

Which is why I tend not to make market-driven arguments about craft-driven processes. If what sells is what matters, then nothing else matters.

— Mark Barrett

May You Live in Interesting Times

October 26, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Two months ago — two months! — I started digging into the issues facing publishers and authors. Now, eight weeks hence — eight weeks! — I feel like I’m living in another millennium. Or having a dissociative episode.

Back at the dawn of time the Kindle was all that, with Sony trying to chip away at market share. Now, today, the Barnes & Noble reader (called the Nook) seems to have materialized out of thin air and projected itself into the role of New Sensation!

Kindle development time = 197 years. Nook = 2 minutes on High.

Back at the dawn of time Google was getting ready to lock up all written and yet-to-be written knowledge by conspiring with a little-known, self-absorbed bureaucracy that could not pass up the chance to do something important, even if that something was completely and utterly wrong. Now, today, the Internet Archive is doing something just as interesting, without all the lawsuits — and without aspiring to own things they don’t own.

By the way, I found this really interesting:

Brewster took a break from the demonstrations to elaborate a couple of facts, the most significant of which was the fact the books in the worlds libraries fall into 3 categories. The first category is public domain, which accounts for 20% of the total titles out there – these are the titles being scanned by IA. The second category is books that are in print and still commercially viable, these account for 10% of the volumes in the world’s libraries. The last category are books that are “out of print” but still in copyright. These account for 70% of the titles, and Brewster called this massive amount of information the “dead zone” of publishing.

Polarized positions are becoming even more polarized. Analog publishers hate digital anything. Bookstore owners hate volume discounts. Agents hate writers. And everybody hates independent authors ecause they’re not waiting in line to be hand-picked and validated by somebody else: “You’re cutting in line! You suck! You have no talent! You’re only able to find readers because of the internet, not because you survived our rigged system!”

Trying to project the lay of the land on New Years Day only evokes images of supernovae. Oh, and that Yellowstone caldera blowing up.

More here from Kassia Kroszer/Booksquare. And here and here from Nathan Bransford.

— Mark Barrett