Silver Linings

Josh Getzler

There’s a lot going on this week that’s kind of a downer. Our rent has been raised so we have had to start investigating a new office. The breakdown in civility over politics has descended to such a toxic level that even fifth graders are getting into the act. Passes from the sixty submissions I made at the beginning of September are flooding in, leaving me repeating the mantra “remember, it only takes one…” (And authors other than mine—who understand already—know this: agents feel the weight of passes too. It’s an awful thing to hear that a manuscript isn’t quite right, or is not pace-y enough, or is going to be difficult to break out in this difficult market…and then need to tell you.)

So the beginning of the week was a bit of a bummer. But then I got to do the thing that makes the whole job worthwhile: I got to make the Happy Call and tell an author—in this case the marvelous Elaine Powell, who’s been waiting patiently in Manchester for a very long time—that we have a deal. And more than that, it’s one with a bit of an interesting twist: her book (a 12^th Century British thriller centered around the murder of Thomas Becket and featuring a knight, a nun, and a really NASTY villain) is going to be serialized in two week chunks before its publication, thus (hopefully) creating a nice buildup to publication. I got to hear the pleasure, the surprise, the uninhibited happiness in an artist whose work is going to be shared with the world—and for pay, too!

And then I got to do a corollary to that Happy Call: I got to write the Deal Memo to Publishers Marketplace. Anyone who follows Publishers Marketplace (one of the two most influential sources of publishing news, along with Publishers Weekly) knows that the deal reports listed in PM are important to authors, agents and editors. To agents they indicate legitimacy and activity—if you have deals in PM you are, to some degree, a Real Agent and are therefore worthy of following and further query and submission by authors and of being taken seriously by editors. To unpublished authors, they are sources of great research gold—you know who’s been representing your genre or time period or topic by who’s sold comparative books.

These deal reports have a unique and at times incomprehensible style and grammar, filled with convoluted sentence structure and semicolons. When I send my deal reports to friends outside the business they wonder when I forgot how to write a sentence. But they all need to have the same information in the same order: Author (with brief modifier); short description of the book, frequently in a run-on sentence fragment; to which editor at which house, in what kind of deal (more on that in a moment), by which agent, at which agency, for which territory or territories. That’s a lot of information for one four-line report. And the “kind” of deal has its own shorthand: a “nice” deal is up to $50k, while “very nice” is $50k-100k, then Good, Very Good, Significant, and Major. Some are at auction, some as the result of a pre-emptive offer that takes it off the table. Agents, editors and writers scour these deals for clues as to who’s doing well, what deals are interesting, which ones we wish we’d gotten. Writers and agents alike make up their submissions lists from these reports.

And there is a special thrill is pressing Send on one of these. It really means the deal is done, that it’s official. Not every editor or agent likes doing this—some would rather keep their business to themselves. But to me, it’s a marvelous combination of information, marketing, and public notice. And given all the effort that goes into taking a book from query to deal, I think it’s an acceptable way to show pride without really bragging. For just a few minutes we can forget the passes, the politics, the real estate tzuris and remember why we are in this business in the first place:

	October 22, 2012


	Fiction: Thriller		Manchester author E.M. Powell's first in a series of twelfth century British thrillers set around the murder of Thomas Becket and featuring a knight-for-hire and a surprisingly badass nun, to Andrew Bartlett at Thomas & Mercer, in a pre-empt, for pre-publication serialization beginning in November 2012 and continuing every two weeks through March 2013, when the book will be published; by Josh Getzler at Hannigan Salky Getzler (world). jgetzler@hsgagency.com

5 Comments

Josh, I don't think I'm along among writers who would settle for 'nice', not just happily but jumping up and down with joy.
I'm still working on the possibility. Watch this space!

Posted by: Lynne Patrick | October 24, 2012 at 06:49 AM