Poets & Writers Magazine welcomes feedback from its readers. Please post a comment on select articles at www.pw.org/magazine, e-mail editor@pw.org, or write to Editor, Poets & Writers Magazine, 90 Broad Street, Suite 2100, New York, NY 10004. Letters accepted for publication may be edited for clarity and length.
Go Your Own Way
The articles “How Agents Operate: From Hoodoo Voodoo
to Herding Cats” by Betsy Lerner and “Decisions, Decisions: Three Different
Paths to Publication” by Alethea Black, Céline Keating, and Michelle Toth (July/August
2011) both unsparingly pushed my nose against the glass of today’s publishing
realities. These two pieces validated my recent decision to give up seeking
representation for my manuscript among the sea of skittish agents and opt to
self-publish with a small cooperative publishing company. The company produces
a very polished product, and by utilizing expertise culled from my marketing
and advertising background, it shouldn’t take long to recoup my investment. For
a writer, every rejection is a small cut—until he bleeds to death. The
new wave of publishing options is creating welcome avenues of opportunity.
Howard Giordano
Naples, Florida
Sporting Agents
The opening message
of Poets & Writers Magazine’s special section on literary agents (July/August
2011) seems to be: If a writer, particularly of fiction, wants any taxable
earnings from writing, she should choose to find representation. The introduction tosses off
the advice, “consider getting an agent,” as if most of us have any say in the
matter. “The Game Changers: Four Agents Who Turned Their Debut Writers Into
Last Summer’s Hot New Authors” offers a series of fairy tale–like
agent-author success stories. Pardon me for being bleary eyed, but exactly what
game did these four agents change? All agents want a shot to represent the
proven (or on-the-verge-of-proven) winners, and exceedingly few will take a
chance on undiscovered talent. The lesson seems to be: If you don’t have
influential friends in high places, if you aren’t affiliated with the top
writing programs in the country, or if your book hasn’t already won a prize before
you contact an agent, go back to the doghouse.
Lance Mason
Santa Barbara, California
When I found the
July/August 2011 issue of Poets & Writers
Magazine on the newsstand,
featuring on its cover a quartet of literary agents, I flipped open the
magazine just to confirm that one of those agents was in fact Kirby Kim. Kim
was one of the few agents nice enough to actually send a personal rejection of
my novel manuscript. Part of his reply is something I’ve repeated more than a
few times in my writing group: “Women will never read this.” His comment amused
but never bothered me. (Of course it helped me quite a bit that all the rather
stringent distaff writers in my group didn’t share his opinion.) The only sad
aspect is that he would have almost surely been correct if he’d simply said, “Very
few women or men will ever read this.… Hell, it would take a miracle to even get it
published.” Given the current publishing climate, I think this is a comment
agents might like to add to their form rejection letters. Sad but true.
Robert Young
Isle of Palms, South Carolina
Buzz and Beyond
Thank you for “Social
Media for Authors: Forever in Search of Buzz” by Lauren Cerand (May/June 2011).
I have recently deactivated my Facebook page because I found it too
restrictive: Facebook still resembles a club. Instead I started a more open
environment using Tumblr because, as a writer, you don’t necessarily just want
to reach out to “friends.” In this respect, I think the new Google+, with its “circles”
social-networking concept and its link to the omnipresent search engine, will
soon outflank Facebook.
Excerpted from a comment posted on
pw.org/magazine by marcus_speh
Thanks for the concise article on social media. As a
senior and a writer, all the tech stuff seems overwhelming. I was able to
gather some names that I plan to check out. Again thanks for keeping it simple.
Excerpted from a comment posted on
pw.org/magazine by Lee Kearney