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February 8, 2010

Agents make me mad!!!

I'm not talking about doing things I feel ashamed about, or find pleasurable in guilty, behind closed-door ways. They make me mad because they force me to do something I despise, deplore, loathe, and out-and-out detest...they force me to try and sell, and both inevitably and unfortunately..to think like a salesman. It's called a "query letter," and I'd like to kill the next guy that offers me advice on how to write one.

In layman's terms, it sucks. I wrote a book recently. Probably not a great book. Hopefully, a marginally good yet entertaining work that someone, somewhere, someday might read on an airplane or spill beer on while sitting on the beach, or if you're like my dad, use for a coaster along with any other thing I may bring into the house, be it however important only to me...but I digress.

I want to write the next book, not put on my white shoes and play Death of a Salesman! I think it's safe to say, be it ever so bold, that agents now find themselves in the cottage industry of selling the "secrets to getting published," and have turned the publishing industry into a "make it big or not at all," bureaucratic freak show. Why not say "if you're not David Baldacci, then go away" on your agent information and be done with it?

I could be the next "somebody or other," and could have a series of books ready to go that can keep an agent making money for years, but without huckstering properly, no one will ever know. This book might make a great movie, but without spending the time learning how to sell it to someone whom obviously doesn't care and won't take the time to look past the first five pages, I'm just a guy with a year's worth of nights I could have spent doing something else!

I'm starting to wonder when the first person will use the term "how droll," or tell me I'm sophomoric, pedantic, or some other high-brow phrase rather than say "it's not for me" like the hundred+ agents have so far? Thanks for the form letter, automated response, don't call us-we'll call you crap sent by your starry-eyed little coed assistant. See the potential in someone based on an 88-word blurb. Yep, that makes sense. Next time you buy a car, don't even get in before you buy it. Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to give someone money and they're telling me to pack it up my ass. No, it's not "chick-lit." No, it isn't a book about how great it is to be gay, or some young-adult teen beat bullcrap. Funny how agents choose books based on the needs of their portfolio and the current market trend as opposed to entertainment value, if the author has anything else planned, and if someone who isn't trying to get on Americal Idol would read it. Agents can be as much the impedement as they are the access to the process. After all, what the hell is commercial fiction really?

I'm starting to get mad, my brain is clogging. You see, I've read some real shit published by big publishing houses, and some real stinkers by people with big names, but little old Brainclogger can't catch a break! Oh, if you're an agent, why not review my blog to see if I have the creativity necessary to send you a query letter. I know! Why not just come over my house and kick me in the face.

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