Ludicrous

Good morning!

Did you ever stop to consider the matter of cover letters when submitting a work to a publisher or an agent? When I still did that kind of thing, I came across an agent who had a questionaire for the author to complete and enclose with the cover letter and novel submission. As I read it, I discovered that it was very similar to a job application and one of the things he wanted prospective clients to do was to tell him why they were exclusively qualified to write the story that they were submitting.

The story I was submitting was one that I had sweated and agonized over because the primary impetus for my writing it was to achieve a cathartic release. I tapped the negative and painful emotions generated by my own situation to create the characters, give them depth and advance the story. How was I supposed to tell him that? How was I supposed to tell him that I used my personal connection to the very emotions the characters were feeling to write the story?

If I had been writing a fantasy, how would I have told him why I was qualified to write such a story? Or, any story? For example: "I have read fantasies all my life." Or, I suppose someone could have written something like: "My Journalism Professor in college made us write a fantasy as an exercise."

Maybe the guy planned on judging the writer's ability to generate some inventive story about why they were 'exclusively qualified' to write the story they had written. I don't know. I guess it was a way to weed through the submissions he received. But, why couldn't he approach it in the way the writer was forced to? The agent is selling a service and the writer needs that service. The agent would get paid for his work and the writer hoped to get paid for his or her work. If the agent did his job creditably, both parties would be satisfied. Why did the agent feel the need to play games with the writer?

Perhaps the agent was indulging a need to exercise his own negligible power. Oh, I'm sure the agent would say something like his time was valuable and a lot of the submissions he received were a load of 'crap'. What about the submissions he would have received if the author hadn't been repulsed by the game the agent played? Some of those may have been worth his while. Maybe the business model for agents and publishers needs to be changed. I believe it is changing at this very moment and the agents and publishers are too slow to take advantage of the current situation because they are locked into the frame of mind fostered by their past experience.

Digital publishing is the way of not just the future, but the present. Big publishing as we know it is taking a big hit. While it will not die, it will be horribly wounded if publishers and agents don't find a way to market their services to authors without having everything their own way. The business has been heavily weighted in the interests of the publishers and agents for so long that they don't want to give that up and in their denial, they hope to ignore their problem in the hope it will go away. That isn't working and will not work in the future. Everybody is too busy looking for the next blockbuster that they are overlooking steady work.

Okay. Time to get off my soapbox.

Thank you,
Derek A. Murphy
Author of Gulf of the Plains, Taken Apart, Questionable Interests and others.
Available on Kindle