Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators - Agents' Day

So I just got back from the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators - Canada East (that's a mouthful - SCBWI CE for short) Agents' Day here in Ottawa. Two agents were there giving speeches, looking at portfolios and manuscripts, and generally chatting about the ins and outs of getting published. I had actually hoped to do a Twitter live blog on all of the talks, but the internet at Library and Archives Canada wasn't working, despite the fact that I had requested and had been given a user name and password. Annoying, but such is life.

In this post I'm going to cover Mark McVeigh's comments. While a longtime editor (at Harper Collins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster amongst others), he's new to the agent game and his McVeigh Agency is only about 6 months old. The other agent, Edward Necarsulmer IV of McIntosh and Otis, will be covered in a follow-up post. No favouritism - I'm just going with who happened to speak first.

(picture gronked from http://www.hungermtn.org/interview-with-agent-mark-mcveigh/ - I did not have a camera with me)

Now, these things are a little tricky, so this is going to be a fairly broad overview of what he was discussing. I'm basically cribbing from the notes I took, so hopefully it makes sense. Also note that I'm running on about 5 hours sleep! I don't want to speak for him so I doubt I'll be able to elaborate all that much, but let me know if you have questions. There was a Q&A that followed both talks and I'll try to cover those a little later on, too. Some interesting stuff, there.

He led off with indicating that this is one of the worst times in publishing history – editors are getting fired for books that don't sell. He mentioned that only 1 in 10 books is a "success" (though I admittedly wasn't clear on what metric he was using to qualify this. Is a "success" a NY Times best seller or just a book that's earned back it's advance?). Even though his agency is only 6 months old, he's already receiving about 100 emails a day - on a slow day! With just him and a subsidiary assistant agent, that's a lot of email to go through. Being professional, succinct and to the point in any type of query is critical - he does not have the time to go through long, convoluted and/or unprofessional emails.

When dealing with an editor in person, treat them like a human being. Ask them what they like to read. Talk to them about their favourite books and not just books they represent. Ask them questions they may not expect, not to catch them off-guard but to engage in conversation like you would with anyone else.

He noted that non-fiction books are a very tough sell right now. It helps if there's something you can tie it to; if the subject is being covered on a 4th grade curriculum, for example, that will help the sales potential for the book. He noted that it's easier for illustrated and picture books from this point of view - subsidiary rights can be sold to create calendars, post card books and the like. Non-fiction in particular is tricky, but they might be able to get a chapter excerpted in a text book or some such.

In terms of a writer's background, he encouraged everyone not to be judgemental. He used genre fiction as an example. He doesn't care if someone has written Scooby Doo novels and he himself has written a number of Spider-man novelizations. It's all writing and this type of writing, since it's fast and deadline driven, shows that you are dependable and can hit deadlines. So if you meet another writer who does this type of writing, never look down on them. He also believes that writers should join critique groups, but you should be picky about which critique group you actually join. Similar things went for illustrators and he mentioned that Maurice Sendak's early work were things like a Captain Kangaroo book. It took quite a while for him to get the ok to do Where The Wild Things Are. He mentioned another artist's first book was a Rambo colouring book (possibly this one, but I didn't catch the name and the names listed here don't sound quite right).

Query Letters: keep it business-like and professional. One page maximum. Treat the query letter as if you were writing to your lawyer or your accountant. Formal as possible, mainly because you don't know very much about the person you're writing to. Some agents will take offence to overly familiar query letters. Avoid being long or convoluted. Basically, he's looking for any reason to tell you “no.” Do everything you can to not give him that opportunity - but do it succinctly! He believes that it helps if you show you're expertise in the field – tell him why you are qualified to write the book. His example here was Martin Luthor King Jr. and the Black Panther movement. If you're a teacher and you've been teaching a section specifically focused on this subject and THEN you propose a book on it, that goes a lot further than someone else having a more casual interest. It helps to be very objective: if your book is similar to something else, something with a high profile (like a bestseller), it's ok to mention that. Of course, telling him how your book is different, too, goes without saying. This applies to both YA books and picture books. He believes very strongly in the pithy one sentence summation. Can you describe your story in a single sentence? This is important because he (and your future editor) will be engaging with sales reps and other marketing people and it really, really helps to have that one sentence description in their back pocket. While it's ok to send out queries to multiple agents, it's important to let him know that you've done this. He later added that he didn't just want submissions going to him - he's backlogged so much that it's not fair to you to keep you waiting. He prefers email submissions to snail mail and he made very clear that he wants a query letter first. He doesn't want to see an author's work until he's agreed to it via the query letter. Interestingly, much of his thoughts and feels on query letters are something that Edward Necarsulmer IV had differing points of view on. I'll come back to that in the next post.

He believes very strongly that writers (and illustrators?) should have blogs, even more so than websites. What's important is to keep the content positive and somewhat oblique. If you've been rejected from a publisher, it's ok to talk about that, mainly because you're writing to your peers. But it's NOT ok to name names and be pissy about it. In addition, talking about recent publishing news is a very positive thing as well as positive reviews of books you like and enjoy. The idea is to keep building a platform. He feels that if you have positively reviewed other works you'll have that returned when your own book is published - assuming the reviewer likes your book.

He also noted that agents and editors roles are blurring a bit. Agents are helping copy-edit the manuscript before sending it on to any editor. And then there will be more editing after that.

Lastly, he expressed hope that better funding to schools and libraries will lead to more growth in kids lit and young adult novels in general. He added that what a librarian likes and what a 14 year old likes are often two very different things.

So, there you have it. Having run a bookstore and the fact that I'm married to an editor means some of this I was pretty familiar with, but there's something interesting ground covered and I'm certainly glad I attended it. I'm also beat so I'm going to leave it at that for now. Here's the link to part 2.

Oh, and he's into tattoos, too!