Big Fan of Change

Everyone in my family called my great grandmother Ella a gypsy. In this case, not in the literal sense--it's just that she moved around a lot. A LOT. In fact, there is one story that everyone likes to tell about how my great grandfather left for work one morning from his house, only to return that evening to find a note on the door that said:

"Moved today. You can find us at _ _ _ Carl Street. Love, Ella"

Seriously. This is a true story.

And though there are 2 generations between us, I caught the gypsy bug. I've moved. A *LOT* in my short adult-life so far. I'm very comfortable and happy with change (this is the opposite of both my mother and my husband--imagine the grief every time I donate boxes worth of things just to start fresh!). For me, there is something very therapeutic about packing up, starting anew, and settling down again. It's like my old life revised.

I just feel bad for everyone who has helped me move over the years :-\

Besides my husband and my parents, I've never asked the same person twice. I want to actually KEEP my friends, after all.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic.

In my youth, another thing I did was change my "identity" over and over and over again. Though this is pretty typical of all teens. I was goth, I was thug, I was an athlete, I was a philanthropist, I played the violin, I was a thespian, I was a geek, I was a punk-rocker, I was a party-girl...the list goes on. I couldn't figure out WHO I was or wanted to be. I went through a phase where I dyed my hair pink, then green, then orange (mom just about keeled over when I came home freshman year with a pink head), I've tried all sorts of clothing styles, and you don't even want to see some of the make up I've worn over the years (brown lip-liner and cream-colored lipstick anyone?? 1995 was a strange year, indeed).

But now I'm all grown up. I have a husband and a dog who don't like to be uprooted all of the time. And I have a professional job--I can't just dye my hair blue and expect Nancy to be happy, now can I? So I'm taking my need-for-change out on the NCLit Blog. This is the third template we've now gone through, and in honor of winter and the holiday spirit--there's snow! I love it. Let's see how long it lasts.

Overall though, as the year comes to a close, I realize that I have a lot to be grateful for that I won't even begin to list here. The one thing I will mention though is my job. Over and over this proves to be the perfect job for me, and now I realize--it's the perfect job for my gypsy-like nature, too. One minute I'm marching through the darkness of the Unsea with a military unit around me and monstrous creatures flapping above...the next I'm hatching diabolical schemes with the world's greatest supervillain, Zachary Ruthless. I'm falling in love with the slimiest player at Hamilton High School, or I'm trapping a baby elephant who will soon turn into my only friend in the jungle. I'm on the road in an old RV with my dad, or I'm being fissured into the middle of a fae war.

I could go on (see my tweet from last night about the 4 hot dog nappers!), but I think you get the picture. Thank you to all my clients who keep me on my toes and teach me to never underestimate what's around the corner....

....still eying a bottle of electric red hair dye though....

Clarification on the agency's NEW submission guidelines

As you may well know, we’re changing our submission guidelines here at Nancy Coffey Lit starting November 1, 2010. For those of you who haven’t heard yet, please read the post on it here.

We invited readers to respond/pose questions at this time so we could better understand what about the new guidelines works for querying writers, and what doesn’t.

This was one of the comments made:

Anonymous said...

For a mutually dependent relationship (the agent needs her author's ms to sell, the author needs the agent to sell her ms), the power structure between a querying author and an agent is completely one-sided. The author pursues the relationship with the agent. I do not find it unreasonable for the agent to in kind show professional courtesy and say that the query was not only received but reviewed and rejected (automated response or not, there's nothing else that can confirm for an author that the query wasn't lost after the fact--which does happen).

There is free software on the internet that allows a user to enhance her copying and pasting abilities. You can write a standard rejection letter (or multiple variations to cover the most frequent responses you may encounter [this isn't right for me, keep trying, look at our submission guidelines, etc]). CTL+ALT+# and you've pasted and sent your form rejection in a matter of seconds.

Even if our work is not to your liking, we are worth a couple of seconds.

Anonymous brings up some good points that I’d like to address.

I think where the confusion lies is in the very beginning of Anonymous’ comment. What he/she says is absolutely correct. An author-agent relationship is mutually beneficial and dependent. And yes, the power structure between a querying author and an agent is one-sided. But these are two different things. The first line refers to clients, and the second refers to querying writers.

I can completely see how from a writer's perspective, queries are the most important part of an agent's job. And because there are so many blogs about queries, and posts about queries, and websites devoted solely to crafting a query, it may seem like agents spend most of their day looking at and evaluating queries.

But that’s not what agents do.

An agent’s job is not to read queries or submissions. An agent’s job is not to attend conferences, or judge contests, or do interviews, or offer critiques for auction. In fact, an agent has very, very little time to spare to do any of those things at all. 98% of an agent’s time is spent on his/her clients: submitting, negotiating contracts, reading, writing up editorial notes, advising, acting as liaison, brainstorming, meeting with editors, planning with publicists, etc. And in truth, if we (at NCLMR) wanted to close to queries completely, we could and it wouldn’t affect our job at all (which is why so many agents have employed this guideline).

But that’s not what we want.

We love to find new talent. We love to discover a treasure among the pile, a writer who has all of the right tools and just needs a little help to finish creating. I know that is one of my most favorite things to do when I read my queries late into the night (because I often don’t have time while in the office). I love, love, love when a new voice has me captivated.

But this doesn’t mean that every query/submission in between isn’t worth anything.

It’s actually not a question of worth at all--as in, this writer/query is not worth a couple seconds of our time. The issue is not copy-pasting a form rejection. It's that sending any kind of response to a query can, and does, lead to a snowball effect. A form rejection, I'd say at least a third of the time, leads to a follow-up email from the writer in question. Either thanking us for taking the time to look at the query (which is well-meaning, but does take time to read), or asking for help revising the query, or asking for a more detailed explanation about why the query was rejected, or asking us to refer them elsewhere, etc. It occasionally leads to follow-up phone calls. Any response to these responses always--always--generates further communication. And the writer can say, at any point, "Aren't I worth the two seconds it takes to reject? The two minutes it takes to tell me why? The four minutes it takes to talk to me on the phone?" And it is never about worth. It's, do we have the time to talk to each of the hundreds of writers that we have to reject every week to explain why we can't take them on as a client?

The answer to that is No. We simply don’t have the time to do all of that and do our jobs. And just to clarify, our job is to represent our clients.

But I can say for us at NCLMR, whenever we DO have free time, we devote a fair amount of it to unagented writers whether it be critiquing, attending conferences, participating in contests, or even writing for this blog. And I’ve personally been on the querying end of this business before…I would have much rather the chance to win a critique then try to decipher what a form rejection means.

My Clients Make Me :-)

When I find a submission that I fall in LOVE with, I don't just shoot off an email and offer representation right there. Because that is only one part of the whole package (a majorly important part, but still not the whole thing). What I do first is set up a phone call to talk (or start some sort of correspondence, stat). Why do I do this?

Well...to see if we'd work well together!

There are a ton of great projects out there to go around, and I turn down publishable stuff every day (whether just at query stage or beyond). But I think what makes a client-agent partnership work long and successfully is the relationship.

This doesn't mean you have to be BFFs or talk everyday...it just means that you have to fulfill the following criteria:

1. You both love the work (well, duh...I hope they love their own stuff!).

2. You have a revision style that meshes well (agents can typically mold their revision style just a bit to suit each client's needs, but they still have a typical style and it needs to work for both of you).

3. You feel comfortable talking to one another. Does this mean that you have to talk every day? Every week? Every month? No. But when you DO talk, it should be fairly easy to be open and honest with your questions and opinions.

4. You need to have the same goals.

This last one is important.

You may be scratching your head, thinking something like "Um, Joanna--isn't everyone's goal to get published?"

Of course it is!

But what I mean here is that your long term goals need to be the same. And what you want out from your career in publishing should be the same. At NCLit, when we sign clients, we want it to be long term. So when we go on submission or advise them in decisions, we're thinking not

only how those decisions will affect right NOW, but also how they'll affect your writing career years down the line.

But I digress. Because today I'm talking about why my clients make me HAPPY!! *twirls*

It's because they rock. It's only Tuesday and so far this week I've gotten to hang out with Amy Lukavics, Kody Keplinger and Shelby Bach (featured in my pic above, in that order, from L to R). And if you want to know what we did, just read Shelby's blog post about Monday night. Or check out a very happy-to-be-published Kody K below. Seriously...my clients make me happy, man. Who else gets to do this stuff and call it "work"?? I am more than happy to continue working like this for the rest of my life.

Don't forget to enter in the contest to win loads of DUFFiness stuff!

Happy DUFF Day, Everyone!