Ensnared in the Internet (Part 2)

When I sat down to continue writing this story, I intended to lead (lede?) with caustic comments about literary agents, editors, publishers and young people in general. But, as I reflected on the months of rebuffs I endured trying to sell the book Dr. Kessler and I had put together, I realized that the people I tried to interest in publishing BITTER MEDICINE were not the cause of my frustration. It was my own ignorance and thin skin.

Fifty years of experience as a professional writer – a couple of books, several magazine articles, but mostly radio and television scripts – gave me no understanding of the profound changes in the publishing business that agents, editors and publishers were trying to deal with every day.

I hadn’t had a literary agent for many years. The ones who did represent me hadn’t been hard to find. People who knew my work had introduced me to agents who had the time and inclination to groom a bright young writer “with promise” and a slim resume. But that was a long time ago. Today was today.

Fortunately, I knew how to Google. I identified a lot of potential agents. A lot had hooked “Do Not Disturb” signs on their office doorknobs. Other websites had Requirements-for-Submission lists of Dos and Don’t Evers. Many of those had daunting questionnaires to be filled out: Was our book Non-Fiction, Memoir, Medical, Legal, Crime, History, Current Events?

Hell, it was all those things. Which category box should I check? And how should I compose persuasive answers to the marketing questions? What qualifies the author to write this book? Who did I think would want to read this book? What were its strongest selling points? How would I suggest promoting it? All legitimate questions, of course, but they rubbed me the wrong way.

The answers were all in the manuscript! Why not just read the damn thing? It seemed obvious to me that a lot of today’s agents had dug moats and put up walls to protect themselves from writers they didn’t know: guys like Dick and me! It never occurred to me to ask: Why?

We didn’t intrude on the agents hiding behind questionnaires and began e-mailing queries and outlines and treatments and synopses to those agents who indicated that they would accept such submissions. Some replied with boilerplate No Thank You e-notes. Some didn’t respond at all.

Only a couple of agents who looked at our synopses were courteous enough to elaborate on their negative feelings about our book. One said it did not fit into any category; the other felt it fit into too many. Both advised us to pick one category – and stick to it.

We sent a follow-up note to one un-responsive agent who had allowed us to submit our manuscript. He admitted that he had misplaced it and hadn’t been able to read much of it. Even so, he didn’t think it “worked.”

It was hard not to take all the rejections and dismissals personally, but they really hurt. I had revised the queries and treatments six ways to Sunday trying to find a magic cliché that would entice agents to take a look at our manuscript (or even some sample chapters) before they told us to go away and get lost. At least, we weren’t wasting money on postage stamps. Today’s agents preferred e-mail. I finally concluded that they were allergic to paper – or anything written on it.

Only later did I remember what a successful author told me years before. “No matter what an agent says about your book, he’s made a business decision. It’s not a decision about good or bad. He may have some valid literary opinions and you should consider them. But what he’s really telling you is that he can’t figure out how to sell your book to a publisher.”

It was Dick who suggested that we forget about agents and query some book publishers directly. “Lots of luck with that,” I thought. But I agreed to give it a try. I walked a few blocks to the three-story Barnes & Noble bookstore in my midtown Manhattan neighborhood. (It closed a year or so ago. It’s now a three-story bargain dress store.)

I spent an hour or two browsing through the Medical and Legal and Non-Fiction shelves to see which companies were publishing books like ours and who was editing them. Lightning did not strike, so I dropped into a few more bookstores, did a few more Google searches and asked some of my writer friends for advice.

Ed Hannibal, who made a big splash as a young novelist before making waves in the advertising business, tipped me off to a small publishing house here in Manhattan whose website he’d come across on the Internet. “They publish general interest books as well as medical books,” he said, “and they accept manuscript submissions. They may be just the publisher you’re looking for. Why don’t you let them take a look and see what happens?”

Ed and his wife, Maggie – an RN who teaches nursing – had been reading BITTER MEDICINE while Dick and I had been writing it, checking it for accuracy and coming up with ways to make it even more readable for people with no medical background. They knew the book and liked it. I trusted their writing and medical expertise. So I followed their suggestion. It changed everything – me included – in ways I never anticipated.

Stay tuned for Part 3 – coming as soon as I can get my deus ex machina to work.

Originally published on September 12, 2012