Do you need a literary agent?

Hang around with a bunch of writers, and sooner or later the talk will turn to literary agents: who has one, who’s looking for one, who’s thinking of switching, who’s unhappy with theirs.

Of the twelve books I’ve published through traditional channels, none has been placed with the help of an agent. That doesn’t mean I’m opposed to working with agents, nor that I’d not want to work with one at some point in the future. In fact, for nine years I worked as an agent myself—a real estate agent, that is, because the average writer’s royalties don’t do much toward helping her children through college.

A book is not a house, but by working as an agent, I did learn quite a lot about the value of a third party in important transactions. In most cases, I still advise buyers and sellers that they’ll come out ahead if they work with an agent who knows the business.

In the end, it’s an individual decision—whether to seek representation or go it alone, which in the book business could mean either placing your manuscript directly with an editor or bringing it directly to readers.  Here are seven things to consider when you’re contemplating a literary agent:

·        Your project: Can you convince an agent that your book has real breakout potential? It used to be that agents would sign authors with the idea of developing them over the long haul. But in today’s market, the place of the midlist author is becoming more and more precarious. That’s why you hear so much about platforms—agents prefer authors who bring their own readers. If your project’s worthy but not destined to be a chart-busting success, you might be better off publishing independently, or with a small press where you can submit directly to the acquiring editor. The genre matters, too. In children’s books, for instance, many editors (even at big houses) will consider unagented manuscripts, while in other genres, that’s almost unheard of.

·        Your ambitions: Will you still feel like a writer if you don’t have a literary agent? When others are talking about their agents (complaining about them even), will you feel left out? While this may seem trivial, the gravitas that comes with having an agent may signify to you that you’re part of the game. And if only a big New York house will do for your book, you’ll likely need an agent to place it there.

·        Your connections: Agents are middlemen. They network. Ironically, it’s the writer who’s been in publishing awhile, someone who has established a few industry relationships on her own, who may be most able to navigate without a literary agent.

·        Your skills: Agents know contracts. They’re negotiators. They see the big picture. Many are fine editors, and can help authors fine-tune their manuscripts. Yes, you can hire out some of those services, but in the end, it may be a lot more efficient to work with one person who can do it all, someone who has a vested interest in your success, since commissions are dependent on sales.

·        Your expectations: As in any profession, there are good agents and bad agents. There are no licensing requirements for literary agents, so if you pursue one, make sure that person is well-affiliated and well-recommended. Keep in mind, too, that whether you acknowledge it openly or not, one of the reasons you’re drawn to an agency relationship is that you simply want someone to believe in you and your work. The reality, though, is that agents are very busy, and you may get little personal attention. And despite her best efforts, there’s no guarantee that an agent will place your manuscript. On the other hand, if you’re eager to see your book on the shelves in France or on the big screen, you’ll need an agent, as foreign and film rights are notoriously difficult to sell.

·        Your options: By signing with a particular agent, are you narrowing your options strictly to the traditional publishing path—a path that’s becoming increasingly narrow and difficult to navigate? Or is yours one of the forward-thinking agents whose services include helping independent authors get noticed? Once you enter into an agency relationship, you’ll have certain legal and ethical commitments to that agent. Yes, agents and clients “break up” all the time, but the understanding is that as the agent invests in your career, you’ll be loyal to your agent.

·        Your patience: Good agents have lots of clients. Out of hundreds (if not thousands) of queries a year, they can often take on only a handful of new authors. Much as they may like you and your project, the numbers aren’t in your favor. Do you have the time and patience to keep shopping for an agent in an increasingly tight market?  

Writing a book you love

Having published a dozen books, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I don’t love them all equally.

Don’t get me wrong. I worked hard on each of my books, and I’m not ashamed of any of them. But some are real labors of love, including a book I’m touring this week—a book I’m not yet finished writing.

I know it’s odd to tour a book that’s not finished. After all, the point of a book tour is to sell books, and you can’t sell a half-finished book. (Or can you? Dickens did.) But when the National Park Service asked me to do a program on Kate Carmack, the subject of my forthcoming book Wealth Woman, I scheduled the program into a final research trip, lining up presentations at several museums along the way.

I’ll get a few comped travel expenses. I’ll sell a few copies of titles that are already in print. But mostly, the reward for this particular journey—and for this book—is setting Kate’s story straight. It’s been a long time coming.

Kate Carmack, first called Shaaw Tláa, was once known as the richest Indian woman in America. She claimed to have made the discovery of a lifetime, Klondike gold. But when she’s mentioned at all in writing about the Klondike, it’s as a difficult woman, a drunkard who gave her husband nothing but trouble. “After reading about her, who could blame a man for shedding her!” wrote an editor to George Carmack’s biographer.

As it turns out, nothing could be further than the truth. Though cheated out of her wealth, Kate defied convention and proved that defeat need not follow loss. The more I learned of her, the more passionate I became about her story, and the more I knew it had to be told.

The more I learned, the more I also realized the overwhelming extent to which the prevailing Klondike narratives glorify individualism and colonialism. As it turns out, Wealth Woman: Kate Carmack and the Last Great Race for Gold will be the first authentic rendering of the gold rush from the perspective of those who were there first, the Natives of Alaska and the First Nations of Canada. 

My passion for Kate’s story comes from thirty-four years of living and traveling in Alaska and the Yukon, including villages where I was the outsider. I want silenced voices to be heard. I want fresh perspectives on familiar history. Though not yet fully birthed as a book, Kate’s is already a story I love.

You can read a chapter from Wealth Woman in draft here.

Dead fish, free books

Forget those back-to-school sales. Summer’s not over yet. In Alaska, the silvers are running, and so is the Ode to a Dead Salmon bad writing contest, sponsored by Running Fox Books.

Judges Ned Rozell and Howard Weaver have narrowed the stinky field to three finalists, displayed here. Now it’s up to the public to choose the best of the worst. So don’t delay—click over to the Ode to a Dead Salmon site and hold your nose as you choose. Voting ends Monday, Aug. 19, with the winner to be announced on Thursday, Aug. 22.

As a special thanks for your vote—and to anyone else who sees this post—Running Fox author Deb Vanasse is offering the Kindle edition of her novel Out of the Wilderness free on Friday, Aug. 16 and Saturday, Aug. 17. Mark your calendars, tell your friends, and reward yourself with a free book!

Publishers: Is it wrong to jump ship?

When I write about independent publishing and hybrid authors (those who publish both traditionally and independently), I’m routinely asked about whether it’s fundamentally wrong for an author to strike out on her own after being published by someone else.

In one sense, these questions are heartening. Relationships matter. We should respect those we work with. But they also point to a huge disconnect between what writers think goes on in traditional publishing and what actually happens.

Let me say first off that no author’s experience in publishing is exactly like anyone else’s. With that in mind, here’s my perspective on the ethics of jumping ship:

• After a publisher commits resources to publishing your book, isn’t it wrong to publish your next book somewhere else, or to publish it yourself? With the exception of a few big-name authors, publishers aren’t courting writers, and they’re not looking to marry. They’re selling books, title by title. Their investment is in a particular title at a particular time for a particular market. It’s a calculated risk. If your publisher wants first option on your next book, they’ll include an option clause in your book contract.
• But it’s hard to get a contract with a publisher. Once you’ve got one, shouldn’t you do everything you can to get another one with the same publisher? Not necessarily. Each book deserves the best home you can find for it, and these days there are more options than ever. Sometimes that will be with the publisher who published your last book. Sometimes it will be with a different publisher. Sometimes a book is best served by you bringing it directly to readers.
• I thought publishing was about relationships. Once you’re working with people who believe in you, shouldn’t you stick with them? Decades ago, it was common for agents and editors to identify and mentor writers with promise, nurturing them from one book to the next. Those relationships tended to be exclusive. These days, it’s a rare and beautiful thing to find someone in the industry who has the time, energy, and freedom to develop a long-term relationship with an author. Unless you’re able to bat book after book out of the park in terms of sales, market forces require most industry professionals to turn their attention to the next author and book with hit potential.
• When you publish independently, aren’t you competing with the traditional publishers you worked with in the past? Not if the book’s not right for that publisher. In fact, the reverse is true: Your previous publishers will benefit from the marketing and branding you do when you promote books you’ve published on your own—and frankly, you will do more of it for those books because your return in sales is so much higher than for traditionally published books. As more and more readers discover your writing, sales of all your titles increase—and those previous publishers had to risk nothing to achieve it. That’s a win-win for everyone.

Oh, baby! How we’re wired for stories

It's books for Max, not TV

I spent the weekend with a brilliant and beautiful baby. His parents (once brilliant and beautiful babies themselves) don’t let him watch television, since screen-watching delays cognitive development in children under the age of two.

But I’m significantly older, and while Max wasn’t looking, I learned a few things over the weekend about babies (and the rest of us) from a Sixty Minutes segment featuring research on babies, ages three to six months, that proved how deeply, and in what ways, we’re wired for stories.

In the studies, babies watched puppet shows—and boy, were they captivated. There were bad guys and good guys, puppy puppets, some dressed in red, some in blue. There were acts of kindness and mean behavior. There was vengeance.

Here, what I learned from the diaper brigade:

• Everybody loves a hero. At the ripe old age of three months, babies favored good guy (who helped a puppet open a box) over the bad guy (who bounced the puppet off the box). The writer’s takeaway: Remember Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat? We like characters with redemptive qualities.
• We like moral justice. Babies liked to see bad guys get the what-for, favoring the puppets that punished the meanies. The writer’s takeaway: When justice is at stake, readers respond.
• We like people who are like us. Babies who favored Cheerios over other snacks repeatedly chose puppets who demonstrated the same preference. The writer’s takeaway: Those relatable characters you’re always hearing about? Those roots run deep.
• Social learning overrides our natural selfishness. Presented with tokens they could either keep or share, young children kept all they could. But at about age ten, they began keeping fewer tokens for themselves and leaving more for others, even for people they’d never met. The writer’s takeaway: In every culture, stories are part of our social learning, nudging us to transcend what comes naturally.

Annual "Ode to a Dead Salmon" bad writing contest accepting entries July 23 - Aug. 5

Summer's in full swing, the fish are running, and you know what that means: the hugely popular "Ode to a Dead Salmon" bad writing contest is back for its fourth season. Take a look at last year's finalists, sharpen your pencils and follow that smell. We want your best worst writing, submitted to runningfoxbooks@gmail.com between July 23 and August 5, 2013.

The idea for the contest, which began in 2010, came from a 49 Writers interview with Alaska's former Writer Laureate Nancy Lord, who said that in her early years of writing she realized that she needed to get beyond mining the same myths - 'odes to dead salmon,' poet John Haines once called them. This year, the good folks at 49 Writers have bequeathed the Ode to a Dead Salmon bad writing contest to us at Running Fox Books. We think it's a perfect fit. Our office is in Alaska, and we like to think we have a nose for bad writing, since it's what we've set out to conquer with a venture that aggregates quality books.

In past years, the Ode to a Dead Salmon contest has attracted bad writing from all over the world. No matter how stinky, every submission gets its day in the sun, posted here for the world to enjoy. And our rotten winners have gotten some great press, including a write-up in Alaska Magazine.
 
So it's time to do it all over again. We want your best tongue-in-cheek "Ode to a Dead Salmon" bad writing, poetry or prose, fiction or non. We'll publish all entries at our Ode to a Dead Salmon webpage so the world can read them, and we'll post the finalists here, with links from the Running Fox website and all the usual social media places. And yes, there's a prize: the winner receives a Ray Troll t-shirt of their choice. But the main goal, of course, is to have fun.

The rules:


1. We reserve the right to exclude entries deemed unfit for posting. (But if you don't receive an email confirmation of your submission, do let us know at runningfoxbooks@gmail.com.)
2. We need your real name and real email address. If you want your entry to be posted under a pseudonym or left anonymous, make that clear in your email.
3. No more than three entries per person.
4. No more than 800 words per entry (shorter is just fine with us: limerick, haiku, opening lines). 
5. Entries must be your own original work.
6. You keep the copyright, of course, but by entering you're giving us permission to post.
7. This is our contest. We make the rules (that's the beauty of blogging, folks), and the rules may change as we see fit. We'll let you know if they do.
8. We accept only Word documents or submissions embedded in the email text. Submissions MUST be single spaced, Times New Roman, with NO paragraph indentations; instead of indenting, please space between paragraphs. If the formatting is not correct, your submission will not be considered.
9. All entries must be emailed to runningfoxbooks@gmail.com by midnight on August 5, 2013. Finalists will be posted on August 12, and voting ends August 19, with official recognition of the winner on August 22..

Publishing: One size doesn’t fit all

The big boys just keep getting bigger.

Earlier this month, the Random House-Penguin merger was completed. (No, the new house is not called Random Penguin, though we wish it were.) According to the New York Times, “The combined companies will control more than 25 percent of the book business, with more than 10,000 employees, 250 independent publishing imprints and about $3.9 billion in annual revenues.”

That’s big. And isn’t it every writer’s dream to be published by one of the Bigs?

I’ve been fortunate to have published with houses of all sizes, including Penguin (before it was Random), so I’m speaking from experience when I say that bigger is not always better. More of my books—substantially more—have reached readers through smaller publishers. With a dozen books under my belt, I now pay a lot more attention to which houses are the best fit for which books.

At the other end of the scale from the Bigs is the Lone Wolf, the author who’s releasing books on her own. The Lone Wolf enjoys the control of every aspect of publication—creation, production, promotion, distribution—but she faces some daunting numbers. Some three million books came out in 2012. That pencils out at about 9000 books coming out every day. Of the annual total, 318,000 were released by traditional publishers. The rest—upwards of 2.5 million—came from independent authors, publishing their own work. That means small is really small, as in very tough to get noticed.

But what if some of those independent or hybrid authors banded together to create a curated showcase for their work? Before I launched my first indie book, a re-release of a novel that had been traditionally published, I talked with a few author friends about the idea of an authors’ cooperative in which affiliates, each publishing at least some titles independently, could aggregate their books.

The result was Running Fox Books, where I publish some of my own work (some I still publish with other houses), but also showcase the good work of authors I know and trust. Running Fox and its affiliates are dedicated to high-quality books with strong commercial literary appeal, written by spirited, independent authors who care about language and the shared pleasure of a good book. I’m proud to have authors David Marusek, Ned Rozell, and Howard Weaver on board for the launch.

Setting up Running Fox took some time. That investment will continue each time I update the website or send out a press release or a newsletter. Some would say those hours be spent on my own books. But I’m pretty good at making sure I spend a good chunk of each day on creative projects. I’m also a big believer in giving back where you can, and thinking beyond yourself.

It’s not all about big. Cooperative ventures like Running Fox offer viable alternatives for authors. "I believe this is one of the savviest business models in publishing today," says publicist Julie Schoerke of JKS Communications. “This is a smart business move for top-notch authors on a number of levels."