Beware rapping white woman selling books from car trunk
The Secret Agent has been spending weekends playing hold ‘em bombarded with manuscripts since the last “Ask the Secret Agent” Q&A appeared in November. Today the agent resurfaces briefly to provide a transcript of a recent call with a would-be author:
Yenta-ish sounding lady on the phone: “You’re a literary agency, right?
Me: [...]
Ask the Secret Agent: short story collections, and more
I have a big collection of fiction (350 pgs), some of which has appeared in mags/journals. It’s west-of-the-Mississippi stuff and includes novellas and short stories. The novellas are linked and the short stories are somewhat related to the novellas. Things happen in these stories, so they’re not simply brooding, epiphanic pieces. And my question is [...]
Ask the Secret Agent: the transference installment
In the therapist/therapee (heh) relationship, there’s the common experience of transference, where the patient falls in love with the therapist or assigns her/him various other familial roles. Do people sometimes think you’re Mom/Dad/THE Ultimate Lover? Do they haunt your office at night, calling repeatedly, feeling betrayed that you represent “other authors”? Or are they mostly [...]
Ask the Secret Agent: installment #2
Are foreign-rights to publication negotiated in a standard contract, or is a publisher more likely to wait and gauge a book’s success before attempting to launch a book overseas? How many languages might a book be printed in? Or is a book only sold in the English language format? If an author’s book sells well [...]
Ask the Secret Agent: installment #1
Questions for the Secret Agent are already pouring in, so I guess we should get this show on the road.
As I explained yesterday, the Secret Agent is an agent with a small, but well-regarded, literary agency in Manhattan. In this short interview, the Secret Agent will answer my own questions, but after this week all [...]
Excuses; also, coming soon: the Secret Agent
It’s always nice, when you’re already late dragging your ass out of bed for work, to discover that service on your subway line is “suspended until further notice due to flooding.” The G train is running again at last, but (after being deadened by the rantings of a crazy preacher lady on the [...]