My Literary Agent Saga

(It ain't pretty)

Huffington Post once reported that a British literary agent got sentenced to prison for cheating gullible, fame-seeking clients out of their money. His clients thought that movie deals were in the works with big Hollywood names — and who doesn’t want to be famous as well as rich?

I’ve never been cheated by an agent, but remember in Moonstruck how Vincent Gardenia warns Cher not to go through with a second marriage? He tells her, “Your mother and I were married fifty-two years and nobody died. You were married, what, two years, and somebody’s dead. Don’t get married again, Loretta. It don’t work out for you!”

Well, that’s been my story with literary agents. All of them. It just don't work out for me.

One agent was funny and charming and we had great chats, but my career only moved a bit forward over several years because an editor I admired approached me to switch publishers and offered a larger advance.

Another agent made me feel like I was caught up in a bad romance, never responding to my queries or telling me who was seeing my book. It turned out that she was busy sleeping with her most famous client. 

A third agent screwed up a book deal in major ways and was so slow, one editor actually phoned me and asked if he was dead.

Though I got some solid editing advice about my novel from a fourth agent, despite my doubts, she took it to New York in the middle of a gigantic stock market meltdown. Panicky editors weren’t buying anything. 

A fifth agent kept sending a mystery of mine to editors who didn’t like the genre, and then she left the business.

After we signed, another agent relocated to Japan and I wasn’t convinced a Skype relationship would be feasible despite her saying she would come to the U.S. once a year.

Then there was the agent who turned weird on me and another client who was a friend of mine, spreading rumors about the other writer for reasons that are mysterious at best. That agent was fired by her agency.

I started my career at a time when the conventional wisdom was that you couldn’t even have a career without an agent. And without an agent, you weren’t really a serious writer. But experience has proven something different and the publishing world has completely changed since then. Most of my 27 books have been un-agented and quite a few have done as well as or better than the ones that agents represented. One book has even sold over 300,000 copies and been translated into fifteen languages including most recently Mandarin and Romanian. It’s in a third edition and sales chug along month after month.

When I told a novelist friend in New York about my bizarre agent history she assured me that my story was sadly typical: “It’s just that most of us don’t want to talk about it because we’re too ashamed.”

Lev Raphael has taught creative writing at Michigan State University and currently edits, coaches, and mentors writers at writewithoutborders.com. He is the author of twenty-seven books in genres from memoir to mystery.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash