For some reason, I was on the agent panel at the recent Pacific Northwest Writers Conference (great conference btw). We actually opened the conference on Friday morning. There were four agents and moi. And five hundred people in the audience.
Normally I’m not a fan of agent panels. But since I was on it, I was a fan of this one. Joking. Often you hear a lot of “Don’t do this” and “Don’t waste my time” etc. etc. I prefer a more positive approach. Also, and this is blasphemy, a writer’s job is not to make an agent’s job easier. It’s to write great books. I’m not saying wanna-be writers should do stupid things, but too often agents take the attitude of ‘this is so hard separating the chaff from the wheat.’ Well, it’s their job. The writer’s job is to write the damn book. And learn how to be the best possible author they can be, which is more than just about writing.
I just read an agent’s blog where he was talking about how many emails he had every day and how often he emailed and blah blah blah. That’s why they call it a job. He isn’t sitting there knocking out 2,000 words of brain exploding, blood on the page fiction that sucks the life out of you to write. Day after day. That’s a job too.
I love the scene in THE PLAYER, by the brilliant Robert Altman, where the studio exec Griffin Mill says: “I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we’ve got something here.”
On the panel, I said that authors needed to understand that an agent can’t plan their career for them. An author needs to come to an agent with a plan, then they work together to make the plan feasible. One of the agents on the panel, who’d been in the business a long time, was shocked. He said he had never ONCE had a wanna-be author approach him with a plan along with the manuscript. I’m not talking about marketing (of course, for non-fiction you must talk about it, but for fiction it’s a different story). I’m talking about presenting a first manuscript that’s great, then a unifying concept and theme for following books, with reasonable, but tight, timelines for launching your career with follow-on books.
The problem is the Catch-22. How can a wanna-be author know how to develop a plan about something they’ve never done before? That is the core of why I’ve developed my Warrior Writer program. To teach writer all the hard lessons I’ve learned over 20 years. We need to be smarter in publishing. We have to TRAIN and TEACH our authors how to be part of a successful publishing paradigm; not hope they figure it out on their own or that magic happens. There’s no time for that any more.
Let’s build publishing teams where we all work together.
