What a literary agent can do you for.

Most people who post on LinkedIn brag about their successes. I’m going to “brag” about a failure.

A few months ago I completed a manuscript on graphical symbol systems. Among other things the book presents a taxonomy of non-linguistic symbol systems, and a novel theory (instantiated in a computational simulation) of what must have happened in the?brains of the scribes who invented the earliest true writing. It’s a topic I have been thinking about for years.

I was about to start shopping it around to academic presses, but a friend convinced me that I should look for a literary agent. He stressed the benefits of having one, assuming you can get a good one. (You can already see where this is headed.)

So I started looking for agents who handle scientific publications and, amazingly, rather quickly I found one, who we can call "WK", who was interested in my work. OK, so this agent handles non-fiction more generally, and a lot of her projects seem to be business related. Very few are really science. Probably that should have been a red flag that in fact she didn't know beans about the popular science market.

Anyway after an initial face-to-face, she agreed to represent me, and we started putting a proposal together. A month or two later she sent it out to a rather large number of publishers who, she was convinced, would love my work. Now, the manuscript’s writing style is clearly academic. She knew that. Indeed she warned me up front that this was not going to land a huge advance. Still she was convinced it would sell. Well she’s the expert: if she thinks something like that is going to sell to trade publishers, who am I to argue??I figured she knew what she was doing. Indeed one of her own LinkedIn posts boasts “I know exactly what I am doing.”

Then the rejections started coming in. We were not too worried at first, and indeed the first one looked as if the editor hadn’t even read the proposal. But pretty soon it fell into a pattern: “interesting topic, author is clearly an expert, wrong writing style.” Then, amazingly, we got an offer. Or so she claimed. This was “fabulous, fabulous news” for me and it would also give her an opportunity to pressure the editors who had not yet responded, that they had better hurry or risk missing out on a great project. Except of course this “offer” turned out not to be one. And meanwhile, the remaining editors replied with a more or less carbon copy set of rejections: “interesting topic, author is clearly an expert, wrong writing style”.?So her final verdict: this was “100% the style that I chose”—forgetting of course that she knew this was the style when we started.?

OK, so everyone can make mistakes: As the Japanese say, “even monkeys fall from trees”. WK simply blew it on this one. In retrospect, WK was way out of her depth when it came to the topic area.?But in fact there were various red flags, not the least of which was that whatever story she gave me at one point, had a habit of changing later on. After I got some parts of the proposal finished way quicker than she had expected, and after she got done exuding praise about how amazing this was, she said that it could be ready to go on sale “as early as next week”.?But when it didn’t and I asked her about the actual schedule, her response was all about how these things take lots of time and she had other meetings to attend, and… It eventually went on sale about a month later. She was also going to consider sending to academic publishers—except that promise somehow disappeared. Etc. etc. Finally, when it was clear it was not going to sell, she suggested setting me up with an editor whom I could pay to coach me to write in the style that the trade presses want. I was fine with that idea, but that promise also mysteriously vanished. Her final offer was to free me from the contract. I accepted this, since at this point it was clear I was not dealing with someone I could trust.?

So this is not news in and of itself: I have certainly had enough instances in my career of people promising all kinds of things that never materialize. Typically the likelihood of that happening correlates positively with the amount of “enthusiasm” the antagonist exudes. Still, I would have thought that a literary agent couldn’t really afford to be like that. Apparently that was just my naiveté.

I don't blame WK for not being able to sell the book to the trade market: no agent would have been able to, given the style, which was clearly too academic. But I do blame her for not realizing this fact at the outset. If it was obvious immediately to a couple of dozen trade publishing editors, it should have been equally obvious to someone who touts her amazing success rate in the trade business over a few decades. Okay, so she liked the idea behind the project. Great. So what she should have done is (a) recognize the fact that the trade biz would not accept the book in its current style, and (b) insist from the beginning that I rewrite the book, sticking with me while I did that. She claims she has done exactly this with many authors. Indeed, as noted above, she even offered me that option: write a new version and put together a new proposal. I would have gone with that option, if she hadn't pulled that rug out from under me at the last minute as part of her ever-changing plan, instead preferring to blame me for the style, and freeing me from the contract.

The second thing I blame her for is unceremoniously dumping me after she had decided that it wasn't in her interests to continue. If I had to guess what was going through her mind, she probably went back to one of the first things she told me—that there wasn't going to be a huge amount of money in this project. She probably did a simple calculation, and decided that it was more cost effective to dump me rather than to work with me, as she had repeatedly promised. As evidenced by the huge amount of sensationalist but ultimately vapid nonsense that does get published, the trade business is not about promoting good content. It's just about making money. If good content does make it through, it's not because it's good content. It's because it's something that will make money—oh, and by the way, the content also happens to be good. As Joe Frank once commented about Hollywood deals in one of his monologues in the Karma series: "It's not art, it's commerce."

So here I am back to trying to sell it to academic presses, after having lost about 4 months due to this agent’s shenanigans.?After that is taken care of, and despite my tirade above, I may still try for a more popular book on the same topic. I will be on the lookout for another agent then, but that time I will be much more savvy.