David Thayer

Literary agents who blog are now a fixture. Miss Snark has found an audience for her upstream view of the the industry, but other agents, like Jennifer Jackson and Kristin Nelson are blogging. Ms. Jackson has links to her clients who blog, an innovation that makes sense. I’m not certain what the status of Agent 007 is these days, but agents are on my mind. If you’re not sure what a literary agent is you may want to cling to that innocence, but if you’ve just finished the novel a decade in the making, the fun has not even started. If you want to have that novel published by a major house you’re going to have to find an agent.

I met my agent in a hallway during a conference. We didn’t talk about what I was working on. He was taking a break from the pitch sessions underway at a hotel ballroom. Steven J. Cannell approached to ask where the urns had gone, which I took to be a philosophical question, where have the urns gone? Bert told Stephen we were out of coffee until the three o’clock break. Cannell nodded, looked at me and said, “where have we met before?” Hollywood? Bali? The rooftop garden at 90 Pine Street? The correct answer on the tip of my tongue was: Nowhere have we met before.

Bert’s theory is that people who work in Hollywood assume they know everyone and when they go to other places like Portland, Oregon, they bring this assumption with them. If I’m talking to you it’s because I know you, otherwise why would I talk to you in the first place? I was thrilled. So, Bert and I talked with Cannell until a wrangler appeared to whisk him off to a radio interview. That left my future agent standing with me in the wake of implied celebrity. Cannell said it took him eight years to find an agent for his series of novels.

Eight years. He wrote The Rockford Files. I was musing about this tidbit when Bert’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a writer, aren’t you?” My first impulse was to deny this accusation, get busy shifting coffee urns, make myself useful. But I nodded and admitted that I didn’t know Stephen J. Cannell, that we hadn’t met on Bali or the roftop garden at 90 Pine Street. Bert handed me his card. A few months later we signed a contract. This is one way to meet an agent.

Now I need an agent for my mystery series. Bert doesn’t like crime fiction. I’m querying and submitting. I hadn’t thought about the necessity of having two agents, it was difficult enough landing one. But this is the age of specialization and I don’t want an agent trying to sell stuff they don’t enjoy themselves. An agent requested The Working Dead. I ‘ll send the manuscript today and start working on something else. Anon.

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