“Well, those you take,” Kleinman says.
What agents crave is professionalism. They have maybe 30 seconds to eyeball a letter from an unknown writer, so if you can’t sum up your novel with crackling, book-jacket-worthy copy, you’ll be lucky to get an impersonal rejection note. “If you can’t write a good letter, they pretty much assume you can’t write a good book,” points out Whyman, who wrote her novel at the library while a homeless man snored nearby and another regular patron chatted on a cell phone. “I call it the ‘Not-So-Quiet Room,’ ”Whyman says. “But the librarians were wonderful, and it was a great place to work.”
Whyman recently finished her book and sent query letters to agents in New York. The letter-writing proved to be no easy task. “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to boil down a 350-page plot into three sentences,” Whyman says. Her book, which is set in the summer of 1980, reveals how the murder of the neighborhood busybody by a lawn boy affects her community of characters. The book is fiction, but was partially inspired by a true event—Whyman grew up in the same neighborhood as a Montgomery County teenager convicted of murdering an acquaintance. “It’s a literary novel with lots of black humor,” Whyman says.
Whyman’s hard work has paid off. Several agents responded to her letter, saying they wanted to see her manuscript. Whyman, who recently had a short story published in a Hudson Review anthology called Writes of Passage: Coming of Age Stories and Memoirs, is waiting to see if one will come back with an offer to sign her.
I’m well aware of how much work goes into a simple letter. When it came time to write mine, I Googled articles about query letters…wrote…found Web sites where authors posted their successful query letters and studied Web sites where agents critiqued query letters…and rewrote. Finally, I distilled the essence of my novel into a paragraph, listed my writing credentials and spell-checked that sucker to within an inch of its life. I blasted e-mails to agents I found in the acknowledgments section of novels I liked. If an author thanked his or her agent, I figured it had to be a good sign.
Unbelievably, the day after I e-mailed my query letters, I started getting responses from agents who wanted to see my book. But before you start thinking that my life has followed the path of Grisham’s or Giffin’s, let me stop you with a noise reminiscent of a record needle screeching over soaring, Chariots of Fire-style music. Remember that heartbreaking part of the publishing process? It’s real; I know it firsthand.
After the query letter responses, I sent out copies of my manuscript By UPS and e-mail, then sat back and waited. A few weeks later, I went to pick my kids up from school and checked my answering machine for messages remotely, which was completely natural since I’d been out of the house for seven minutes. I’d gotten the call. Victoria Sanders liked my book. She asked me to come to New York to meet her and her staff. In a misguided effort to sound professional, I spoke in a voice several octaves below normal when I called her back. I became paralyzed with fear that I’d have to talk to Sanders this way for the rest of my life.
Before going to New York, I e-mailed one of Sanders’ most well known clients and explained that she had expressed interest in my book. “Is she still your agent?” I wrote.
Minutes later, a reply arrived in my inbox.
“This is Victoria Sanders,” it said. “I answer [author] Karin Slaughter’s e-mail when she is on her European tour. Yes, I’ve happily represented her for seven years….”
Already I was offending agents, and I hadn’t set foot out of Chevy Chase!
Looking back, I realize how lucky I was. In addition to being a great agent, Sanders has a sense of humor (I eventually learned that she’d laughed out loud when she read my e-mail). But writers don’t always have such an easy time connecting with the right agent.
Wakeman-Linn, the creative writing instructor, was thrilled when a reputable agent fell in love with her novel. Unfortunately, the agent still hadn’t sold the book a year later. Worse, she hadn’t even tried. “It was terrible,” Wakeman-Linn says. “I was very inexperienced, so I didn’t realize this wasn’t the right agent for me.”
Wakeman-Linn was confident that she was on to a good story. Her book centers around two Zimbabwean men, one black and one white, who were raised like brothers, and it details what happens when everything they love—their homes, their livelihoods and even their lives—are threatened. So she started looking for a new agent.
Lindsay Maines tends to check her e-mail compulsively as she waits to hear from her dream agent, the one she met at the writers’ conference.
There’s an interesting story behind Maines’ book. It’s about a woman who is raising her three children while her rock star husband travels the world. There’s more to it than that, of course, but here’s the hook: Maines is married to a rock star who travels the world while she stays home with their children. Dan Maines, her husband for six years, plays bass guitar for the heavy metal band Clutch, which he started with three buddies while they were attending Seneca Valley High School in Germantown. The places they play range from D.C.’s 9:30 Club to venues in Japan and Russia.
Lindsay Maines’ unique insights into the rock ’n’ roll life are all tucked away in her book, which she wrote at her kitchen table between the hours of 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. while espresso propped open her eyelids. Now her hopes are in the hands of the New York agent who seemed so pleasant during the speed dating session. One night, Maines tears herself away from checking her e-mail long enough to go out for Chinese food with her husband at P.F. Chang’s. Incredibly, the fortune she pulls out of a cookie reads: “You should write a book.” It’s got to be a sign, Maines thinks.
Getting Published
Signing with a good agent is huge—but it isn’t the only path to getting published. Take Potomac writer Jeanne Adams, who retired from the Montgomery County Department of Economic Development a few years ago and finally sat down to write her novel. Her first book, she says, wasn’t publishable. But she kept writing. 
Adams joined Romance Writers of America and its affiliated chapter, Washington Romance Writers, and entered her second novel in the organization’s Golden Heart contest. She ended up being named one of 72 finalists out of about 2,000 Golden Heart entrants. She mentioned this to an editor for Kensington Books at a writers’ conference. The editor’s ears perked up, and Adams passed along her manuscript.
Weeks later, Adams was driving her kids to camp when her cell phone rang. “Hey sis’, hang on,” she hollered. “Boys, keep it down!”
It wasn’t her sister.
