Pity the Poor Literary Agent

I now have two science-fiction novels completed, one a thousand years in the future, and the other set several decades away.

I’ve begun the routine of sending out queries to literary agents. 

Writing the novels has been such an effort, although rewarding, that it is difficult for me to imagine many people taking up that pursuit.  I don’t know of any people personally that have opted for this strenuous creative endeavour, even if expanded to the network of all my friends and acquaintances.

I think back to my well-educated work place, where many struggled to put together a coherent sentence, and hope I can be forgiven for thinking that novel writing is rare.

Yet when I read about the publishing industry, look at all the literary agents (there are so many), go to craft-of-writing websites and pay attention to the online critique association I’m in, it is clear a blizzard of would-be authors and novels sifts down non-stop.

This is revealed in the form-like rejections (I’ve gotten a lot) from literary agents. I get the feeling that the reason very, very few of them offer any explanation for a rejection is because they are quite overwhelmed by the volume of queries.

And this even given the popularity of the self-publishing route, which must draw off plenty of frustrated would-be authors to compete in the trials of e-book promotion and putting their work on Amazon.

I haven’t chosen to go that route, since I want to put my limited energy into writing, rather than worrying about search engine optimization.  I might end up going the self-publishing route eventually, but first I want to try the old-fashioned way of getting a literary agent to represent me to publishers.

Big Changes in Publishing

The publishing industry has changed dramatically, though, in the last decade or two.  The digital revolution has had a huge impact.  Especially with the rise of self-publishing and e-books, it was thought at one time that hard-copy books would go the way of vinyl LPs in music.  (With the revival of vinyl we can see how complicated these cultural forces can be.)

It hasn’t worked out that way.  Traditional publishers still have considerable marketing clout, and for many they remain the preferred route for getting one’s book to a wider public.  But the publishers aren’t very interested in dealing constructively with authors.  In the good old days, if a publisher thought a writer was promising and worth the effort, an editor might be assigned to help shepherd the novice to a more acceptable product.  From what I’ve read, such editors are no more.  Publishers expect a more finished product from the get-go. 

This means that a literary agent has to appeal to publishers with novels that they think will get an immediate positive reaction, including how trendy it is in subject matter or author.  Their livelihood is dependent on getting such positive reactions.

But it must be difficult to evaluate, decide to take on and then promote to publishers from the flurry of queries, and then manuscripts literary agents receive.  And coordinate all the work that goes with that.

This struck me hard recently as a result of exchanging novel critiques with others in the online group (Critters) I’ve joined.  These are drafts we trade with each other, in order to benefit from another set of critical eyes that (tragically!) may be of the very few to ever read these novels.

Of the three that I have gone over (or “beta read” as the jargon goes), all have been well written at the level of sentences, and spelling, and grammar.  Of course there are a few missteps here and there, but nothing terribly serious.

But as I read the works of these other would-be authors, it slowly becomes evident that there are structural issues, or characters really hard to understand, or emotional cul-de-sacs peculiar to the writer.  These problems don’t jump out immediately, but take considerable time and a close reading to become apparent.

In one case, the author has composed a story with wonderful characters, but it lacks an identifiable protagonist.  In another, it took reading most of the novel to understand that the writer wanted to recreate some kind of family emotional situation that kept the science fiction from making sense, at least to me.

I’m probably prone to the same faults. They reveal the difficulty of making a novel come to life in the reader’s mind.  And the difficulty for literary agents is to find by dint of their hard work, or by guess or by gosh, a work to stand behind. Pity the poor literary agent!

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The Pain of the Long-Cutting Novelist

I finally did it, fretting and stewing and twisting my long socially distanced hair — I cut my verbose science-fiction novel down to a more acceptable length.

Originally I claimed it was a mere 168,000 words long, although in reality it was more than 10,000 words longer than that.

As a rough rule of thumb, a typical novel might be around 90,000-100,000 words (and shorter in some genres).  In the science-fiction genre, it is acceptable for it to be longer due to world-building requirements.  Around 115,000-120,000 might be an upper limit, I’ve read.

So I’ve spent the last couple of months “murdering my darlings” as such severe editing has been described, shrinking the manuscript down to a more publisher-friendly 116,000 words.

As result, I think it is better paced and focused, while keeping the main threads of the story that I wanted to explore.  But it was a definite challenge.

Prior to that, I had been sending query letters to literary agents in North America without any response other than occasional form letters of disinterest.  (This is understandable as their time is valuable and apparently out there resides an earnest horde of would-be novelists.)

I wanted to improve so I sharpened up my short and long synopses, and developed a much better pitch in the body of the query. (A beta-reader and friend helped me with these efforts.)

My pitch now is:

A thousand years in the future, the Earth is failing, and civilization barely hangs on. A young archaeologist, Nick Himinez, desperately eludes a ruthless politician’s clutches by escaping to space after the man murdered Nick’s parents. Nick vows to bring him down while the politician rapidly gains global power and pursues Nick relentlessly. As they confront each other on a moon of Saturn, Nick is forced to choose between fulfilling his revenge and embracing a last-ditch opportunity for humanity offered by a powerful, but dying, alien race.

A literary agent very shortly after I made these changes to my queries responded to me as a living human being!  She strongly suggested that I really needed to shorten the novel.  She made no commitment but said I could re-query if I could get the novel to lose its wordy weight.  That was so heartening, even if it goes nowhere.

So back to the query-letter fray, and see what happens.

And also back to working on a second novel — got to keep writing! — set in the same universe as the first but in a much earlier era.  I have missed elaborating the characters and story of that while forced to pursue the loneliness of the long-distance writer (to go off on one of my elliptical references).  And with a little more prep, that first draft will begin!

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