Baker's Dozen, properly spaced

Josh Getzler

I spent most of my day today involved in one of the more fun publishing events of my year: Authoress's Baker's Dozen agent auction. It's a pretty simple idea: Ms. A puts out a call for submissions on her ridiculously well-monitored blog, Miss Snark's First Victim; gets too many so has to spend a couple of weeks culling a few hundred to sixty roughly half adult, half kid); then asks (politely--she's very polite) 13 agents to look at the first 250 words of each and bid on how many pages we'd like to see.

The auction, which started today, lasts two days and the winner of each of the individual auctions receives an exclusive on the pages for a while. The fun of this auction, apart from seeing a pretty wide variety of projects (more on them in a moment), is the interaction (read trash talk!) among the agents.

I enjoy it because I get to write emails, comments, tweets, etc to a number of colleagues I know mostly from their deals on Publishers Lunch and their Twitter Avatars. I see whose taste is close to mine; who is particularly competitive; what kind of strategies folks use.

This was my second time participating in the auction, and I found that a significant change from last year was the fact that much of the posturing among agents happened on Twitter. It was a little more public than writing smackdowns in the Comments section of the blog, and it got a lot of people talking about how the process humanized us a bit (one writer said she had never even heard of Baker's Dozen before, but was watching the bicker-tweets like Game of Thrones. I was honored. But doesn't, like, EVERYONE die in Game of Thrones? Just asking...) The other thing that I enjoy is seeing What's Out There in a concentrated space.

Admittedly this is not precisely reflective of the entire market because Ms A has her own biases (particularly toward YA fantasy and unhappy girl teen lit), and the writers skewed overwhelmingly female. But I can tell you that there are a LOT of suburbs with girls who have the ability to kill with a kiss, or are really faeries or succubi or doxies or demons. Fewer sparkly vamps than usual, but that market may finally be saturated. And no zombies that I can recall. Adult books were much more all over the place.

So over the course of the first day of bidding, I won 3 auctions. Two were manuscripts I knew I wanted from the beginning for their settings and set-ups, while the third was one I liked because of a particular turn of phrase in one paragraph. I will be interested to see if any of these turn into passion projects. I certainly hope so--one of the things a Tweeter said today was that she was very happy to see so many agents so excited to FIND things. It's very true. And it's nice for the mask to come off sometimes, and let us reveal ourselves for the excited, optimistic, enthusiastic supporters of books we are. Best of luck to everyone on day 2, and I look forward to more trash talk (politely, of course!)

Comments

[Authoress]

I summarily refute "unhappy girl teen lit bias." ;P

[lchardesty]

Wow. Thanks for the interesting post.

But I'm curious. I only saw one entry that had a girl who could kill with a kiss/succubus, and one or two demons. Did I miss something? I felt like the ya/mg entries were fairly evenly spaced between sci fi, paranormal, urban fantasy, contemporary, ghosts. Can you elaborate on what you saw connecting the entries?

[Stephanie Thornton]

The auction today was definitely exciting. Authoress should find a way to sell tickets!

You won my entry--I think it's one of the two chosen for the setting. I'll be interested to see what you think!

[gayle]

Polite trash talk, would that be an oxymoron?

[Honeywell Humidifiers]

Nice post. Thank you for taking the time to publish this information very useful! I've been looking for books of this nature for a way too long. I'm just glad that I found yours. Looking forward for your next post. Thanks :)