Wendy D. Gillespie

I want to read whatever is your first few pages. So if your book were to be published and a reader picking it up gets the prologue as the first few pages, I want to read that.

Authors are usually busy studying up for “the call” (an agent reaching out via phone to offer representation) when they know it’s on the horizon. It’s an exciting time for authors and agents! Resources are everywhere and there are many great guides to “the call” including these:

Questions to Ask Your Prospective Literary Agent

What To Ask An Agent

When Agents Offer Representation

The Next Set of Questions To Ask Prospective Agents

10 Questions to Ask When Offered Representation

The Call

25 Questions to Ask Your Potential Agent

Questions to Ask Before Signing with an Agent

However, what about the flip side? What do agents like to know about writers when we offer?

What agents like to know about potential fiction authors:

What are you working on next?

How long does it take you to write a draft?

Who are some of your favorite authors?

What kind of support are you looking for?

What has been your path to publishing? Agented before? Published before?

How do you workshop your work? Critique group?

Where do your ideas come from?

What is your day job? And what does your writing schedule look like?

What are some of your career goals and expectations?

How many other agents are looking at the manuscript?

Do my editorial notes match your vision for the book?

How do you feel about social media?

Why I want to know these things:

This is a sample of some of the questions I like to know answers to when I’m getting to know a potential author. Some of the most important things are that we share the same vision for this book and your career, and that we have similar taste in books we read for fun. I like to know that writers have a strong work ethic and a writing group they work with so I’m not the sole provider of feedback. I want to know about your publishing history even if it’s not clean and tidy–often it isn’t. I like to know your patterns like how fast you write and when you write, plus the best time to get in contact with you.

Is it about the answers?

You don’t need “perfect” answers to these questions. It’s nothing you can study for. At the end of the day we want to work with writers who we get along with, whose work we love and feel passionate about, who have a career path that we feel we can assist in, and who trust us.

I want to start this by saying I have NOTHING against self-publishing. Some authors SHOULD self-publish and they do it well because they’ve done the research, they’ve gotten their work copy-edited, they know how to market the book, they brand themselves. But, I’ve been seeing a lot of young writers (teens and twenty-somethings) who came from fanfiction writing and want to try their hand at writing original work. They write their first original novel… and then they put it up on amazon for the hell of it. They think it doesn’t matter if they sell a few copies, that’s a few dollars, right? DON’T DO THIS.

The problem with this is that later down the road, if those same authors want to explore traditional publishing… it will be harder because they now have sales baggage. Agents will ask about what work they’ve previously published and that self-pubbed book they posted up late one night on a whim and got maybe a handful of sales? That counts. And that means they’ve debuted as a self-pubbed author, which makes launching them through a traditional publisher will be much more different than if they had a completely clean slate. It makes agents and publishers more wary about picking them up.

A while ago there had been a self-publishing bubble where traditional publishes snapped up a lot of original self-pubbed books, but that has since more or less burst. Why? Well because in most cases the publisher discovered that quite a few of those self-pubbed books already maxed out their audience or reached their peak. Making it not so lucrative for them to relaunch the books. Not everyone is going to buy the new version if they already bought an older version unless the story has drastically changed.

Another thing to consider is that most often, self-pubbed pricing is considerably less than the list pricing of traditionally published books. Selling a thousand copies at $0.99 is very different from selling a thousand copies at $9.99 or higher. Less people are going to buy that same book if the pricing is higher. And very few traditional publishers are going to sell books consistently at $0.99. Maybe the occasional promo to mark the e-book down, but they won’t sell a paperback or hardcover at that price point. They need to cover their expenses to create those. Most successful self-pubbed authors sell a LOT of copies, thousands, hundreds of thousands, more even. They’ve reached non-Amazon bestseller lists (i.e. USA Today). They have legions of loyal fans who will buy anything they write because they know how to brand themselves and market their books. If your self-pubbed book isn’t hitting those numbers and that kind of audience, then it’s going to be very hard to convince a publisher to invest money in you.

So, as an agent, if someone approaches me with a book they already self-published, the first thing I ask is what were the sales and at what price point. And those numbers… that weighs in on my decision to take them on or not, because I know those same numbers are going to be something a publisher will have to overcome. It also makes me assume certain things about the author, like are they going to be impatient with me because they’re used to doing everything themselves? Traditional publishing works slowly and if they are used to just clicking a few buttons and having their work up, then they might get frustrated with the entire process. Or I might be wondering why they would want to move their book from self-pubbed to traditional publishing, could it be because the self-pubbing didn’t work out for them? That may mean they don’t know how to market themselves or there is no audience there. A million different questions arises and I start thinking they might simply be not worth the trouble. Especially if my inbox is already filled with fresh writers whose first book has NOT been previously published and the writing is just as strong.

It Came From Beneath the Sea