Representation

[DavidDvorkin]

I just signed with an agent at a big New York literary agency.

Fame and fortune! Any day now!

[orleans]

1. that's great!

now, would you please detail how you went about finding this agent, how you first approached said agent, etc. etc.

what type of mss. did you write?

i'm really happy for you.

[DavidDvorkin]

2. It was standard, and a long slog

The book is science fiction, a time-travel adventure novel. I came up with the idea in the 1990s and wrote a few sample chapters and an outline, but instead of finishing it, I worked on other novels. Some of those were published by a small press, Wildside.

Eventually, wanting to get my career back to life (it seemed promising in the 70s and 80s), I finished the time-travel book and polished it and buffed it to a blinding glare. Then I researched agents via querytracker.com and agentquery.com, as well as a few other sites, and the agents' on Web sites when they had them. And then I sent out brief query e-mails. This is all the standard approach. I didn't know anyone personally, for example.

My agent (I still love saying that!) responded with enthusiasm and asked for the ms., which I sent him as an e-mail attachment after a delay of .00001 second. A week or two later, he e-mailed to say he was reading it and liked it a lot. Shortly thereafter, he e-mailed to say he wanted to represent me. When I agreed to that, he e-mailed me an agency contract.

The offer of representation is more commonly done by telephone, but this agent seems to prefer e-mails, which he often sends late at night, his time.

[orleans]

3. sounds like it's a long time coming--i'm glad you finally "landed" one.

i was/still am on agentquery, litmatch & publishersmarketplace tonight, sniffing around. i have a series of middle grade fiction and i sent out a batch of query letters to agents and am rewriting the query and preparing for round two.

and i was just reading a couple articles on contracts with agents. not that i need that yet, but...when i got a call from a publisher who wanted to send me a contract i freaked. well, first i celebrated but when i looked at the contract i freaked. quick! i need a lawyer--but it can't be just *any* lawyer. (i didn't know how hard it was to find one that did publishing contracts/law--thank god i found one within a month. chicago has an organization called lawyers for the creative arts--and it's wonderful!!! so was the lawyer i got.)

do you have a lawyer to look over the contract? here's one of the articles i was reading earlier: when agents offer representation http://www.agentquery.com/writer_or.aspx

maybe check it out.

anyway--best of luck (my only experience with time travel was "somewhere in time" and "back to the future," though i did see the lake house--i'm more of a time travel romance girl but adventure is good too.)

[DavidDvorkin]

4. No lawyer

The clauses were standard and the agency contract was pretty much boilerplate. I probably should have spent more time looking it over, but I signed it and mailed it and burbled happily all over the Internet.

Yes, it has been a long time coming. My first novel was published in 1977, and my career has been through cycles of up and down ever since then.

One of my previous novels used time travel. It was a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, titled Time for Sherlock Holmes. The time-travel aspect of that one was fairly simple and straightforward. Getting the complicated plot right in the new book was much trickier.

I love the Back to the Future movies. They strike me as a time-travel story done right.

[sybylla]

5. Hey, congrats.

That's gotta feel terrific.

I'm in the middle of looking for an agent myself. I'll be checking out the websites you mentioned.

[DavidDvorkin]

6. Thanks

Good luck with the search. It can get discouraging, but, to quote Winston Churchill, "Never, never, never, never, never give up."

[valerief]

7. Congratulations! nt

[DavidDvorkin]

8. Thanks.