Put on Your Game Face

We have a joke among my friends that there’s Work Jessica and just plain old Jessica. Hopefully all of you really only ever see Work Jessica.

Work Jessica is my game face. It’s the image I want to present to the public. It means that I dress a certain way and act a certain way. And while, hopefully, Work Jessica isn’t too far off from regular Jessica, there are subtle differences. And no, I’m not going to tell you what they are and ruin the illusion.

Recently, at a conference, I was walking around, sort of confused actually. I had come out of one room in the giant hotel and was trying to get my bearings. I’ll admit, I was probably weaving and a little scattered. You know the person, you’re trying to walk around her, and just as you are about to go left she weaves left and when you try right she turns right. Well, I was that weaver and yes, it’s irritating, but, since we’re at a conference, we all have our game faces on so we grin (albeit tightly) and finally make our way around. Well, that’s what we should do.

Apparently the woman behind me didn’t feel the same way. Her solution to the situation was to storm by me, sighing deeply and huffing just a little. She was obviously irritated. The problem with this is that she didn’t know who I was. If she was an unagented author she had just acted incredibly rudely to a potential agent. If she was a bestselling author she had just acted very rudely to a potential reader, and if she was an agented but unpublished author she could have acted very rudely to a potential editor. See, here’s the thing: When at a business event like that we don’t know who’s listening in, watching, and just generally paying attention to our every move. And that’s why it’s important to keep our game faces on. When you get up to your room, the door is shut and it’s just you and your roommate and you’re allowed to huff and puff all you want, but when out in public I implore you to try as hard as you can to keep that public persona as charming as possible.


Jessica

Are you Superstitious

I don’t like to think of myself as a superstitious person, primarily because it seems kind of silly. That being said, I’m superstitious, whether I want to admit it or not.

For example, years ago I made a decision not to tell anyone in the office about a book I was excited about until I had finished most of the manuscript. Why? Because it seemed that every time I got excited enough to tell everyone about those first few chapters the rest of the book would fall apart. I was convinced that if I kept it a secret the book would hold together.

When an editor calls to tell me she’s excited about a book or getting second reads from others in-house I purposely keep my game face on for the editor, the author, and for myself. In other words, I squash any premature excitement. I don’t want to jinx it.

BookEnds has a weekly meeting and each week I need to type up my agenda notes on sales, negotiations, submissions, etc., for discussion during the meeting. I will not add any book to the sales column until negotiations are fully final. Even if we’re 99% there and I know it’s a done deal, I will not add it. Again, I don’t want to jinx anything.

What about you? When it comes to your writing career, is there anything you’re superstitious about?

Jessica

Brainstorming

Once, long ago, a reader made a comment on my blog that agents should just stick to selling books, that she didn’t want an agent who would “tell her what to write” because that’s not an agent’s job. Obviously this comment has stuck with me, not because I was hurt by it in any way, but because it made me think about the different expectations writers have of their agents.

I never “tell” an author what to write, but I do spend a lot of time brainstorming with my clients, some more than others. With some of my clients we will spend hours, days, and weeks trying to come up with the perfect idea or even the best way to shape a book. Others, of course, do that all on their own and I don’t have much, if any, input at all. Either way works for me.

In my opinion, an agent’s job is to partner with an author to help build a writing career. However what works for the author is going to be up to the individual author. That being said, I absolutely love brainstorming. I remember the first time I learned the word “brainstorm.” I was in third grade and part of an academic decathlon type of group. Our instructor coached us in the freedom of brainstorming and I was hooked. I loved using my imagination to create ideas, no matter how crazy they might have seemed, and I love it to this day.

I often joke with my clients during these brainstorming sessions that I get the easy part. I throw ludicrous ideas their way and then leave it up to them to see if they can make it work. Sometimes they have come up with absolutely brilliant books and sometimes they’ve laughed in my face. Sometimes they’ve simply said no way and sometimes they too get excited after one of our sessions. I don’t brainstorm because I’m a frustrated writer, I don’t brainstorm because I think everyone needs to do things my way. I brainstorm because I have ideas, because we’re all working in a creative environment, and because I think success in all business means being open to new things.

I have to say, brainstorming is one of the best things about my job. I love working together, creatively, with others, and I can’t thank my authors enough for allowing their crazy agent to throw her wacky ideas their way. Hopefully it’s of some help.

Jessica

An Author's Seduction

I’m a big fan of marketing guru Seth Godin. You may have heard me talk about him before, and if you follow me on Twitter you’ve definitely seen me retweet his posts. Seth tends to write very short blog posts, but in a few words he is really able to get me thinking. His recent post on the Art of Seduction made me think of what both published and unpublished authors need to do when it comes to marketing.

We live in a world where everyone wants everything to come easily and be easy. Unpublished authors berate agents for not having uniform guidelines that would simply allow them to shoot out one query letter to everyone, and published authors are seeking the magic promotional item that will hit all potential readers in the same way and make them buy books.

It’s never going to happen. Uniform submission guidelines mean that you’re assuming all agents are exactly the same, and thankfully that’s not true. We all have different tastes and different ideas. We love different types of books and different authors, and thankfully so.

The same holds true for published authors. I talk to authors all the time who seem to want to know the magic of marketing. They want to know how another author had such success and what she did to attain it. The truth though is that it doesn't work that way. One uniform promotional idea that will resonate with everyone means that all readers are the same and even if you are writing in the same genre as another author, your readers are not the same.

If you really want to succeed when it comes to finding an agent or getting new readers, then you constantly need to be re-creating and rethinking your strategy to appeal to many different types of people. What works for one might not work for you, what works for one of your books might not work for the next. What works when charming and wooing one girl is not likely to work with another and what works on that girl one night, might not work the next.

Jessica

Work of Cover Art

Queries aren’t the only thing I’m behind on. I’ve also fallen behind on my Bravo TV watching, and since Bravo seems to take up the majority of my DVR space, that’s saying a lot.

Finally though I’m catching up and watching Work of Art, the Bravo reality show for competitive artists. Believe it or not, this show is much more interesting than I would have thought. Of course, anything that uses the format behind Project Runway and Top Chef can’t fail in my mind. One of the reasons that I love watching these shows is that I feel in some way it gives me insight into my own world. Fashion design, cooking, and creating art are not that much different from writing a book. All of these people bringing their art into the business world.

Work of Art is particularly interesting, though, because of one episode. In episode three the artists were asked to create a book cover for a Penguin Classics book. This was probably the first time I actually felt I knew what the judges were talking about. In some cases, the art was interesting, but there was no way it was marketable as a book cover, and in other cases the art might have made an interesting book cover, but it wasn’t necessarily great art. The trick for these artists was finding the balance between the two. And this got me thinking: Have you ever seen a book cover (other than your own) that’s really stuck with you simply because it was a great piece of art, a piece you would like to have to hang on your wall? Have you ever bought a book because the cover was so gorgeous you couldn’t resist?


Jessica

The Reason for "Rules"

Believe it or not there is a reason behind every “rule” agents have when it comes to querying. The reason isn’t to make your life crazy, but to help give you a better shot on the road to publication.

On the BookEnds website we advise all authors to put the word “query” or “submission” in the subject line of their query. The reason for this is that we’ve set up our spam filters to push those words through. If “query” or “submission” come up in the subject line my server knows not to mark it as spam and push it through, and my email manager knows not to mark it as spam and to file it automatically in my query folder so I can read it later.

Believe it or not there is a reason for our madness.

Jessica

Query Friday

I haven't done a status on my queries lately, I guess because I've been closed. But for those who don't follow me on Twitter, I thought I should update you. As of a week or so ago (I've totally lost track of time) I'm fully caught up on queries, although still closed. That means I don't have any queries left to answer. If you've sent me a query anytime in the past year you should have an answer. If you haven't received an answer the letter was lost in some way or another and you should re-query after September 6.

The weird thing about closing to queries is that for some reason it gives me the freedom to request more proposals. I find that as I’m reading queries and the numbers in my inbox actually go down (instead of stay stagnant) I am requesting more partials than I have all year. I've been finding time to get to those too and at this point have roughly 20 left together. Some date back to June, the rest are from July and August.

--jessica

Do We Impress You

Have any of your bloggers impressed you so much by their comments, or how they wrote them, it created a head slapping "I should represent this writer" moment, or conversely, "I should steer clear of this nut-case"?

I have learned on your website that content of the story is as important as the caliber of how it’s told. But, for those of us who realize the difficulties of the process, do our brilliant blogger comments impress you, in any way?

I think some of us try to behave and do everything right so we get to be on your good side, which means, we get to pass out and collect the homework and watch the rest of the class when you are out of the room. By the way, Tommy has a water balloon in his desk.

If you have covered this on your website I apologize for not digging deep enough or forgetting what it was you actually said. Okay, I’ll sit down now and shut up.

I liked this question because it touches on a conversation I frequently have with other agents, clients, and writers who read my blog. It first came up a few years ago when a client mentioned all the sucking up that goes on on my blog. Honestly, I had never seen it. I guess I took everything at face value. If a reader agreed with me or complimented what I said, I simply assumed they agreed or were complimentary. I suppose it’s sort of like learning that the cute boy in school likes you. Everyone else sees it, it seems obvious, all except to the girl he’s set his sights on. I’m afraid I’m still that girl who doesn’t really see it. I suppose there are those who think that agreeing with everything I say will warm my heart and make me want to represent you. It really won’t, just like disagreeing with what I say won’t make me not want to represent you.

In some ways, I see the blog as a separate aspect of my business from the actual acquiring, submitting, and selling of books, and in many ways it is. I suppose if BookEnds was a giant corporation I would work for two different departments. Blog Jessica would work for marketing, promotion, and, maybe, customer service. Agent Jessica would work in the agency department or maybe sales. Her job would be to represent authors and sell their books.

No comment has been so brilliant that I thought I’d love to represent that author. Meet the author maybe, but not represent. And the only comments that really turn me off so much that I know it’s an author I would never want to represent are usually posted anonymously by trolls. They are rarely intelligent or rational discussions. Usually they are attacks and nothing more. I tend to ignore them.

Behaving does not mean always doing everything right or agreeing with everything someone else says. Would any of you want an agent who only wanted to work with clients who nodded, smiled, and gritted their teeth? I don’t think so. Behaving means acting professionally and giving an honest opinion respectfully, even when it’s to disagree with the original post.

Jessica

Referrals from Clients

In my post A Different Way of Doing Business, a lot of discussion occurred in the comments section about the referring author’s responsibility and how I dealt with my client if a “bad” referral came in (for lack of a better word).

The minute you get a book deal, heck, the minute you get an agent, people are going to come from everywhere asking you to get them in the door with your agent. It’s natural, it’s normal, and good for them. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the business world it’s that the phrase “it’s not what you know, but who you know” really is true. Almost inevitably this means a client will come to me to say that Author J wants an introduction, she’s never read her work, but passed along my name. What I always say is that’s fine. No author, no family member, and no friend should be responsible for weeding out my submissions and I don’t judge my authors on the referrals they send or the number of authors who come to me using their names because they are in critique groups together or met at a conference.

I’ve gained a number of great clients through referrals, just signed one up as I’m writing this, in fact. I’ve also passed on a lot of material. You never know what will hit and I appreciate that my clients respect me enough and have enjoyed working with me enough to think my name is worthy of passing on. In my experience, clients will sometimes ask what happened with that other author, but rarely are they invested enough to get upset if I pass and never do I volunteer the information to the client.

What it comes down to is no one is responsible for your work, your career, and the way you present yourself but you. Once the introduction is made it’s up to the author who received the referral to close the deal, so to speak. No one else can do that for her.

Jessica

An Agent's Creative Side

Do you ever have those days when too many distractions make writing nearly impossible? Maybe it’s a day better spent researching or working on marketing and publicity or maybe it’s a day you just need to take a break from writing to get those other things done that are clogging your brain?

I don’t know if that’s the way it works for you, but that’s definitely the way it works for me. There are days when, no matter how many proposals are piled on my desk, I just can’t get to them. Editing, reviewing, reading, or writing revision letters for clients is a creative process. When I read those books or proposals I need to be at the top of my game. I need to be able to really think while I’m reading, analyze what’s working and what’s not working, and make copious notes to the author. If I have too many other things going on, things that can make it difficult for me to focus, it’s not going to be good for my client. It means that I’m distracted and that I might miss the fact that the heroine is a complete imbecile or the hero is just plain awful. If I’m distracted it means I can’t do my best work for a client and this is why it sometimes takes agents longer than it should.

If I’m distracted I think it’s better not to read for revisions the minute the work arrives on my desk, but to instead give myself time to get rid of the distractions and give myself a clean plate. Once my brain is clear, I settle in, turn off the phone and computer, and sit down to focus on what needs to get done. Granted, this usually doesn’t take weeks, but can sometimes mean that it takes a few days longer than I want it to. I try to keep my clients honestly informed of where I’m at with things and hopefully I never keep them waiting too long, but an agent’s job has a bit of a creative side too and just like writers, it’s important for us to embrace our own creative process so that we can do the best work possible on your behalf.

Jessica