Lindsay Mendez Quotes

I tried for years to get an agent because I was told you needed an agent. The agent-hunting process was grim indeed.

I had the easiest publishing experience in the entire world. I sent out fifteen courier letters to agents, got five no replies, nine rejections and one I want to see it. A month later I had an agent. Another month later I had a three book deal with Little Brown.

I wrote a query letter to an editor - a friend of a friend. The editor called me an idiot, told me never to contact an editor directly, and then recommended three literary agents he had worked with before. Laurie Fox was one of them, and I've never looked back.

My advice for finding a literary agent would be first, put your work out there as much as possible and hopefully someone will find you, because I still have literary agents writing to me after they find my site. You want someone who understands your work and is going to be your cheerleader from day one.

If you want to be traditionally published, then you most likely want to get a literary agent. To sign with an agent, you need to send them a query letter, but agents can get up to 20,000 query letters a year. With numbers like that, it helps to get in front of agents with every opportunity you have.

After two years of sending out query letters and failing to get an agent, I made friends with an author, who was nice enough to introduce me to his agent. That got my foot in the door.

Probably because I really love this bookmaking and storytelling world, I'd been thinking for years about the possibility of becoming a literary agent.

Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.

A typical agent in New York gets 400 query letters a month. Of those, they might ask to read 3-4 manuscripts, and of those, they might ask to represent 1.

I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to 'shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they're the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.' That sounded like bad advice to me.

The advice would be the same for any kind of fiction. Keep writing, and keep sending things out, not to friends and relatives, but to people who have the power to buy. A lot of additional, useful tips could be added, but this is fundamental.

Agents are deal makers, and they're really, really good at making deals. But they're also exceptionally helpful after the deal is made - agents act as a good intermediary between authors and publishers whenever disagreements come up.

Having a literary agent makes a huge difference in submitting work. My agent has access and tremendous passion.

The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are.

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.

I think that a really good agent should be able to get the right publisher, which the agent has already figured out, get as much money as she can from that publisher, and make a deal, rather than have the amount of money determine the sale. That's what the best agents do.

Agents are essential, because publishers will not read unsolicited manuscripts.

The best advice I got as a writer was also the first advice, which came from the late fantasy author and editor Karl Edward Wagner: Any agent who charges to look at your work is a crook.

Of course I had a piece of luck I couldn't have imagine for myself in a million years: I got an agent. That sped up the process. I'd say it's a good idea, getting an agent.

When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of talent, resisting attempts to let you inside. It isn't like that at all. It may be more difficult now, and take longer than when I started to write, but there's a great, empty warehouse out there looking for simple talent.

Unbeknownst to me, two readers of the posts, both published authors, contacted their agent, Bill Jensen, within 24 hours of each other, encouraging him to drop me a line. Which he did. He shared his extensive publishing background with me, and prayerfully offered to work out a proposal and to see if God opened any publishing doors? I never get over the unexpected ways of God.

I have an agent, John Brockman, who is an agent to many academic authors like Dan Gilbert and Steven Pinker, and he's very good at conning academics into writing books. He pulled this trick on me.

It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.

When I started writing, I just hoped for a nice little paperback series.

Authors don't tend to stay with the same agents and editors over their entire lifetimes, but Grafton worked with Marian Wood, her editor at Putnam, from Kinsey's first outing, and signed with Molly Friedrich, still her literary agent, with the publication of 'B Is for Burglar.'