The Wordsmiths Project Journal

The renown litblogger Michael Allen (aka “The Grumpy Old Bookman”) announced last year that he would be retiring from frequent 5-day-a-week blogging. He had calculated that since he had started the site back in March, 2004, he had probably written about 1,000,000 words in his blog. (See “Change of Policy“)

1,000,000 words!

In other words, if The Grumpy Old Bookman hadn’t been blogging every weekday for three years, he could have conceivably spent that time and creative energy writing several books or hundreds of articles – presumably with some financial remuneration associated with the endeavor.

For several months, I haven’t posted anything in The Wordsmiths Project Journal. Instead, I’ve done the following things:

• Helped care for ill family members.
• Finished my novel “The Winter Boy” and delivered it to my agent, Mollie Glick, who is currently showing it around to possible publishers.
• Completed and sent in my first ever grant application.
• Received my first ever grant – from the Lackawanna County Council of the Arts – for another exhibit of The Wordsmiths Project.
• Created and exhibited more of my fine art photo images (and made a nice number of sales).
• Finished my novel “Jo Joe” which I recently sent to my agent to read.
• Trained our two year-old Golden Retriever – Watson – to be a therapy dog.
• Took Watson on our first visit to an assisted living facility and loved the smiles he gave the residents.
• Given various talks, lectures and seminars on The Wordsmiths Project, the publishing industry, writing as a career, photography, Photoshop, digital imaging and so forth.
• Launched an Internet radio show – The Photo Gurus – with Daniel.
• Started work on my third novel “Crossing the Line.”
• Helped Daniel and his staff at DigitalBenchmarks Lab, with various testing of imaging and photography hardware and software for clients, including my personal specialty of image quality analysis.
• And, as always, written a number of articles on assignment.

When I started The Wordsmiths Project Journal, I made a conscious choice to call it a journal and not a blog. That’s because my plan was to write in it when I had something to say and when I had time to do it.

My friend Ernest Lilly – the editor of TechRevu and SFRevu – told me that it wouldn’t be my decision what it would be called. That would be up to the blogosphere. But I think that those of you who do read this Journal will agree that it isn’t a blog, for the simple reason that I don’t have the time or temperament to keep up regular entries. Besides, I have more novels and articles to write, and new pictures to create.

However, I do promise that I will be writing a bit more frequently, when I have something to say that I feel would be useful and entertaining for folks interested in the publishing world, writing and writers.

And, yes, I will be getting back to doing more portraits for The Wordsmiths Project, so I continue to welcome nominations.

Back in April, I was thrilled and honored when Lance Fensterman of Book Expo America told me that BEA Cares (Book Expo’s charity arm) would be providing The Wordsmiths Project pro bono exhibit space at Book Expo. It was the best news I had heard in a long time; I would be launching The Wordsmiths Project and promoting the Writers Emergency Assistance Fund (WEAF) at North America’s premier publishing industry trade show. However, I had no idea all that would be involved in organizing, preparing and mounting the exhibit in New York City’s Javits Center. The past couple of months have been a hectic pressure cooker, which is why I haven’t had the time to journal recently. But the result, at last week’s Book Expo 2007, was wonderful and worth all the sleepless nights.

The space BEA Cares gave us was right in front of one of the main entrances to the trade show – near the BookTV bus and the Pen American Center table. (And, yes, BookTV did do an interview with me, but I’ve yet to find out when it will air.) So, we had a very nice amount of traffic. Initially, people walking by weren’t quite sure what the exhibit was all about, but they were drawn in by the pictures. Once there, I could tell them about WEAF and hope that those who took the envelopes will send in some donations. In addition, I asked folks for nominations of people I should consider photographing for The Wordsmiths Project. The nominations we received are quite interesting. But, please remember, The Wordsmiths Project will be ongoing for at least another year or so (as long as I’m enjoying myself and it’s doing some good). So, I’ll welcome nominations at any time. (Click here for how to nominate.)

I had a great time at Book Expo, seeing old friends and photo subjects and meeting all kinds of new interesting people. My only disappointment was that I was so busy at the exhibit, I didn’t have time to check out all the conference discussions and other events.

I met Jenny Rappaport (of the L. Perkins Agency) last year, when I was on a panel with her at the PhilCon conference. While I was impressed with her enthusiasm, I wasn’t planning on photographing her for The Wordsmiths Project. Then, I wrote up some of her comments in my Wordsmiths Journal entry about that panel (How to Lose Agents & Infuriate Editors). And the hits starting coming in. In fact, in looking over keyword statistics for this site, Jenny’s name is the second most common word that people searching on the Internet used to get to The Wordsmiths Journal.

At first, it didn’t make much sense to me that Jenny is so popular on the Internet. She is a relatively new agent, having been in this business for only a couple of years. While she has some rather interesting and talented clients, I don’t believe she has had a hit-it-out-of-the-ballpark big seller yet. Then, I looked at her Website – LitSoup.

Jenny maintains a very friendly, informative and responsive blog, making her one of the more accessible literary agents. On her submissions guidelines page, she is very clear about what she is interested in seeing and how to get in touch with her. She also tends to answer comments and questions (although not always immediately).

Like all agents, Jenny is swamped with submissions to consider, manuscripts to read and edit, books to send to editors, contracts to negotiate, etc. She told me during our photo shoot, that she finds blogging a nice break in the middle of her stressful day. What’s more, she enjoys the human interaction of blogging.

Jenny is looking to double her client list in the next year, which means she is very open to queries by new authors – as long as they fit into her focus, which tends to be genre books — science fiction, fantasy, romance, etc — and as long as they are very well written and avoid clichés. (Please be sure to read her submission guidelines first, of course.)

However, as accessible as Jenny is on the Internet. I’m not convinced that’s why she is the second most common keyword used to get to The Wordsmiths Journal. After all, the first most common – my agent, Mollie Glick of the Jean V. Naggar Agency – has very little Internet presence.

Do you have any insights as to why these two young agents are so popular on the Internet? If so, please let us hear them.

One of the ways my 91-year-old father keeps his mind sharp is with his daily Internet fix of U.S. and international newspapers. Every morning, he browses the world seeking stories that intrigue him. He prints out the most interesting articles (or the ones he feels might have some value to us), to share with my mother, my sister, me and my husband Daniel.

Recently, Dad gave me an article from The International Herald Tribune, titled “Book agents explore borderless world” by Eric Pfanner. In it, Pfanner discusses a trend among agents in which he says, more and more literary agencies are handling their own foreign rights sales rather than sub-agenting to specialists in the field of international sales. He sees this as “reflecting shifts rippling through the literary agent business as English-language publishers increasingly look for big borderless hits.” 

I found myself thinking about that article as I prepared to photograph Ben Salmon, an agent with Rights Unlimited. Rights Unlimited has long focused on foreign rights (for over 20 years) — hence, the name of the company. Among their more notable sales have been the international rights for the first 14 John Grisham books, Fern Michaels, Dr. Robert Atkins, John Lescroart, Dr. Ruth and others. But, in an apparent reverse of the phenomenon that Eric Pfanner wrote about, Ben was brought on board to give Rights Unlimited more of a presence in the domestic market (i.e. primary sales to North American publishers). As Ben explained, “Rights Unlimited… had a reputation for representing New York Times best-selling authors internationally. But the international climate has changed. Not that books aren’t doing well internationally, but they’re not being farmed out as much to international agencies.” Not only are the primary agencies going into international sales, he added, but publishing houses have become more aggressive in selling books internationally on their own.

So, one of the first thoughts that came to my mind was that, if primary agents and publishers aren’t using sub-agents as much, why are we, as authors, continuing to sign traditional contracts in which we agree to pay higher commissions for international sales versus domestic sales? Now, I’m certainly happy to have my agent earn a nice percentage of any sales she makes for me. Heck, one of my dreams is that she will become quite rich on her sales commissions of my books. But the traditional justification of international sales commissions being at least 20% (depending on the country), rather than 15% for domestic sales, was that the primary agent would have to split that with the sub-agent.

Ben had a very reasonable response. “The thing to remember is that there’s a lot of processing and administrative work associated with international rights. It’s a bit different than in the domestic realm. And the deals tend to be smaller. Often, you have to make many international deals to come close to what you could make with one domestic one. (I mean, how much money can you really get by selling Estonian rights?) But we like to get as many international deals for our authors as possible, even if it ends up costing more overhead money to make the deal happen than we actually recover in commission.”

What’s more, sub-agents are still an important component of the process. You can see proof of it in Rights Unlimited’s own offices. Of their five agents, only Ben focuses on domestic sales. The other four continue to concentrate on functioning as sub-agents, selling the international rights to books represented domestically by other agencies.

So, when I recently signed with my new agent (Mollie Glick at Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency), one of the things I didn’t argue about was the higher rate of commissions for international sales. As I said, before, I hope she becomes quite wealthy selling my novel — whether or not she uses a sub-agent.

What do you think?