Timothy's Thoughts

O ne of the things that scares me about my writing pursuit is that I might have to choose an agent someday. The more I learn, the less I like the thought of that. Ideally, you want an agent that you can get along with, but you also want someone who can stand behind your work. But when I look at some of the agents out there that seem to be great agents and are practically everyone’s short list, I am left saying “No for me.” I think that what scares me is that I see a lot of ecumenism in Christian publishing. I suppose it is to be expected because the publishers aren’t going to make money if they are too selective about which authors they choose and the conferences want to be as all inclusive as possible. We start to see a problem when we see that you can go to a Christian writing conference and they attempt to handle it like a church service. I’ve even heard of some conferences doing the communion thing. To me, that just says that the people running the conferences want to play church...

I think I’ll create my own religion. Everyone will want to join because in this religion, instead of going to heaven when we die, we’re all going to Disneyland. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Someone on Facebook said that Robin Meyers spoke at their church. I didn’t have a clue who Robin Meyers was, so I did a simple search and the first thing I found was this guy saying that using the “fear of hell” makes religion fundamentally bad and that any of the religions out there can get you to God. I asked if this was the same guy. She responded by saying that “Dr. Meyers doesn't believe in hell (and as he said today, he hopes he's right!), and he has great respect for the various spiritual traditions in which people find their way to God.” During my life, there have been a lot of things that I have hoped were true. Even though my parents never encouraged my belief in Santa Claus I wanted to believe that if I could believe hard enough then he would actually bring me all that stuff I ...

O n her blog, I’ve seen Rachelle Gardner write that she would rather see a well written manuscript with a poor plot than a poorly written manuscript with a great plot. The assumption here is that an agent can make suggestions concerning the plot and through a collaborative effort the author and agent can produce a good book, whereas poor writing is much more difficult to correct because it requires going through the manuscript sentence by sentence to make changes. I see some truth to that. Assuming the agent has the ability to do either, improving the plot requires less work, but is that a safe assumption. I kind of wonder if literary agents aren’t somewhat like movie directors who believe they can fix all of the mistakes that happened on the set in the editing room. The implication is that plotting is so easy that anyone can do it. Recently, I’ve watched many of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes. You would be hard pressed to find a television series with better written episodes...

B elow are four name. As you read each one, if you recognize the name and know something about them, clap your hands. Chip MacGregor Rachelle Gardner Steve Laube Terry Burns Okay, so now that you feel silly for clapping while reading a blog, raise your hand if you can answer this question: who are their clients? Yeah, that’s what I thought. And you back there, get your hand down. It’s no fair looking it up on their websites. But while you’re there, take a look at how many followers the four literary agents I mentioned have and compare that to how many their clients have. Or forget their clients and compare their blog readership to that of the well known authors. Some best selling authors have less than 200 people following their blogs. Some literary agents have over 1,500 people following their blogs. Perhaps this isn’t the problem that it appears to be, but it doesn’t seem like a good thing when the literary agent is better known than the authors he represents. To be successful write...

F orm letters are a fact of life. I suppose some people hate them. That seems to be the opinion of some literary agents anyway. They refuse to send a response of any kind. But me, I love form letters. No one expect busy people to respond to write a personal response to every piece of correspondence they receive. For that matter, most people don’t care if the response is personal, as long as they get a response. We know that some of the mail we send never gets past the secretary and the response is either a form letter or written by someone else.So maybe there isn’t much to love about that, but what I love about form letters is that occasionally one will come that is a little different. It is a reminder that we aren’t just another face in the crowd. The other day, I received an e-mail from a particular library saying that they would like to have copies of my books in their library and asking if I had copies I would be willing to donate. I gladly sent them a copy of each of my books....

This is the last post about searching for an agent (I think) and then I’ll get back to more interesting stuff. Originally, I planned to post something about how much I hate searching for an agent. I was going to talk about all of the rules we are supposed to follow to keep from offending an agent. I was going to say something about how some agents treat their potential clients in an unprofessional manner, even calling them kids . I’ve decided instead to talk about metrics. It sounds boring, doesn’t it? But authors seem to like metrics as much as engineers do. The difference is that engineers keep meaningful metrics. Authors track Amazon Sales Rank (a completely useless metric) and the number of rejection letters they receive (which is almost as useless). At what point are we supposed to count a rejection? If I send out a query and a literary agent writes back, “I don’t represent fiction,” is that a rejection? I would say not, unless you sent him a memoir. In that case, it isn’t only a ...

Many Literary Agents see themselves as the gatekeepers of the publishing industry. The sad thing is that they say this with pride. “We are the ones who keep out the riff-raff. The quality of books being produced by publishers is better because we only allow good books through.” Sounds great, doesn’t it? Too bad it isn’t true. Talking that way is good for a few people’s egos, but the publishing industry doesn’t work that way. You would think that there is a single point of entry that an author won’t be able to go through until his work is good enough to make it through the quality catches that an agent uses prior to agreeing to represent an author. Going with the gatekeeper analogy, what actually happens when an author approaches an agent and the agent says, “access denied” is that the author goes and finds another agent or looks for an unguarded gate. Instead of one gate, there are many gates. The true gatekeepers are still employed by the publishing companies and they always will be. ...