On Thursday, I broached the seldom-discussed subject of how to talk to an agent who wants to sign you, a situation I devoutly hope all of you will be facing very soon. Today, I want to go into the logic behind the two major submission strategies favored by agents, individual submissions and multiple submissions, and how the strategy pursued by your agent can affect you and your book. Individual submissions are far and away the more common choice for fiction, so I shall discuss it first.
Let’s assume that you have already signed with Agent X and revised your manuscript to within an inch of its life at X’s behest. Once Agent X is satisfied with the work to be submitted (and be prepared, everyone: getting it into submittable shape can take months or even years; “How much revision do you typically do with your authors before submitting?” might be a good question to ask in advance), then she will pitch your work to an editor — via phone, lunch, coffee, chance meeting at the local deli, the odd conversation at an alumni club meeting, etc. — and if the editor sounds interested, your manuscript or book proposal will wend its way to the editor’s desk.
I would like to report that once there, it is instantly pounced upon and eagerly read by the editor, but in all likelihood, it will sit there for a while, twiddling its papery thumbs in a pile with other bored manuscripts. Here is where your agent’s persistence will really pay off: a good agent who cares about a project will keep on nagging unmercifully until your manuscript gets read.
How long can it sit there? Well, it depends. Several months is common, but would you throw something at your monitor if I told you a year is not unheard-of for an individual submission? After all, the editor knows no one else is seeing it, so it’s automatically a lower priority than the submissions with a deadline, right?
This is not, in short, a situation where anyone concerned should be holding her breath, waiting for a response.
Please do be aware, though, that with individual submissions, long waits do not necessarily mean bad news. I know writers who have had good books held by editors for over a year — both books that the editor eventually acquired and books that the editor rejected. If the editor just dislikes the writing style, that will probably be determined quickly: often, an editor (or, more commonly, his assistant) will read the first few pages of a submitted manuscript fairly shortly after receiving it to see if there’s any chance at all at he might want to acquire it. If the answer is no, trust me, it will be off his desk in a hurry.
What will NOT happen, however, is that a book will be rejected and STILL remain sequestered in editorial files. Nor will it be read and set aside to think about. Almost universally, long waits are attributable to your book’s not having been read yet, at least by the person empowered to make an actual decision, not to his trying to make up his mind between a couple of projects. (Although, to be fair, at most houses, several people will have to read the book before it lands on the desk of the decision-maker, and that, too, takes time.)
From the writer’s point of view of course, these delays are maddening – all the more so, because the writer is almost never told what is going on with the book during these delays. The only sane response is to leave the whole matter in your agent’s hands and start working on your next book, but few among us have that kind of sang froid, alas.
In my case, while my novel is making the rounds of publishers, I have a memoir that might conceivably be coming out within the foreseeable future, my next novel to complete, my editing business to run, and this blog to write: I certainly have plenty to do. Yet even I find myself wondering if the manuscript of my novel will sit so long in one place that the paper will spontaneously produce leaves, acorns, perhaps even an entire tree. Someday, will archeologists be trying to estimate the age of my manuscript by its rings? Or in geological time, if it petrifies?
This is, of course, the primary drawback to individual submissions of a manuscript. “Aha! “ I hear you cry, “then I should press my agent-to-be for multiple submissions!”
Well, not necessarily. Multiple submission (also known as simultaneous or mass submission) is, as the name implies, when your book or book proposal is sent to many editors at once. Nonfiction is very often sold this way, as is any book expected to generate sufficient interest for an auction. Your agent will pitch your book (over the phone or the aforementioned comestibles), the editor will express interest, your book or book proposal will be sent, and this process is repeated with your agent’s entire A-list of editors.
The advantage of this is that interest from several editors can engender a bidding war. The threat of another editor’s scooping up the next hot thing can also speed up the reading process considerably. The disadvantage, however, is that it makes your book very subject to the winds of gossip. If half the editors say no, the other half will probably hear about it.
Yes, New York is a big city, but in many ways, its publishing world is a small town. Your agent’s assistant probably went to college with assistants of a couple of the editors who will see your book. People talk. If one editor makes an offer, you can bet your boots that she will mention it to people she knows. Similarly, if she turned down a book an agent was pitching as the best read since the Declaration of Independence, she’s likely to mention it to her chums. As a result, books can go from very hot to very not in a matter of days.
For those of us who reside in more laid-back portions of the country, the speed of Manhattanite collective changes of mind can be dizzying, if not downright odd. Why, we Pacific Northwesterners wonder, does everyone want the same thing at the same time? Surely, the book market is more complex than that?
I wish I could explain this phenomenon, my friends, but I can no more explain fads in the book market than I can fads in fashion. Why is it that when you walk into an NYC publishing house, for instance, all of the editorial assistants will be dressed more or less the same? Beyond me. But remember those beach-combing New Yorkers I told you about? Same mentality.
Don’t try to reason it out more than that: it is one of the great mysteries of life, like the origin of evil and why the line you chose at the supermarket always moves more slowly than the others. Just look out your window at the Pacific Northwest verdure, reflect that you can probably see more trees from your office window than are in the entirety of Central Park, and reconcile yourself to regional differences in character. Remember that you perplex them, too.
So, too, should you regard the mystery of the alternation of glacially-slow reading times and we-need-you-to-overnight-your-changes urgency. Panic and apathy often seem to be the only two possible states of being. It might occur to you, living in an environment where the air is breathable, that it would in fact be theoretically possible for agents and editors to come up with a temporal plan, where one event follows another in a logical manner, and deadlines may be met with the calm tranquility that only comes from advance preparation.
Take my advice: don’t try to present this quaint view to people in the New York-based publishing industry, lest you be labeled a West Coast Flake. Instead, just take quiet steps to insure your own inner peace and personal tranquility, and let them get on with their heart-stopping perpetual panic.
And no, I am not talking about meditation: I’m talking about adding two weeks to any negotiated deadline, so you may finish making your changes without losing too much sleep. I’m talking about pretending that FedEx does not serve your remote part of the country; the USPS’ Priority mail is more than fast enough for a manuscript that will sit on an editor’s desk until the next Ice Age.
My point here (and I’m relatively sure that I still have one) is that the more you know about your prospective agent’s preferred solicitation style up front, the more stress you will be able to save yourself down the line. Will you be dealing in the geological timeframes of individual submissions, or the live-or-die gamble of multiple submissions? Either way, get a solid explanation now, before the panic begins, because honey, trying to get an explanation from a Manhattanite agent in the middle of a panic is like Dorothy trying to talk strategy with the cyclone that landed her in Oz.
Learn what you can first, then hold on for the ride. And wherever you are in the process, keep up the good work!