Dear Writers,
Recently, I attended a writer's conference. It was expected that I would teach a workshop, be on a panel with other agents and meet with a number of writers in one- on-one appointments to assess my interest in their work and provide them with feedback about the marketability of their books.
What I realized in the course of this conference was that the writers were paying a considerable amount of money for limited assistance in getting published. Attendees were paying: the conference fee of $325; the hotel at $130 per night (for at least two nights); at least $100 for meals not covered by the conference; and many, if not most, had paid several hundred dollars in air fare. In addition, attendees were being charged $50.00 for ten minutes of my time for the brief consultations (I was unaware of this before I arrived and was given my schedule).
Bottom line: Attendees were paying between $500 to $1,000. Many of the writers who were on my meeting schedule were writing books I did not even represent like horror or children's books so I could tell them virtually nothing that would be helpful and their time and mine was wasted. Some had only partially completed novels or nonfiction works that should ideally have been self-published and so on. Those whom I was endeavoring to help were put in the very stressful situation of trying to verbally pitch a full-length book in under five minutes so I would have five minutes of the remaining time to respond. It often happened that if I did have solid advice about how to make their work more salable that exceeded the time limit, the monitor would come in, ring a bell and insist that the writer leave while I was in mid-sentence. I often went over the allotted time.
Five or six of the attendees out of hundreds present seemed to be garnering most of the interest of agents and editors and were being asked by perhaps ten different professionals for copies of their manuscripts or proposals. My experience over many years of attending such conferences has been that writers who are good at these "pitch sessions" almost invariably turn out to be in professions like acting, public relations or sales where they have honed their presentation skills. They can sound great and make their books seem wonderful. However, the correlation between verbal presentation skills and writing ability is zero. Often those who are shy, anxious, inarticulate or untrained in such presentations are writing something that is publishable-but they are not able to condense a 400 page novel into a few hundred words when under stress! These writers were being screened out by a process that did not involve our reading a synopsis or partial ms. of their work at all. This may well have accounted for the fact that all of the other agents I spoke with said they had never acquired a client from this conference, and rarely from any other conference.
It is possible to provide excellent feedback based on sample written material. I have taught workshops at conferences that were very successful in which the author read from his or her material and I commented on what worked or didn't work. Writers who have participated in these sessions have gone on to become published as a result of finding out what their obstacles to success really were.
As a result of this experience, I realized that:
• Writers really do need feedback from industry professionals. In general, writers are intelligent and accomplished individuals who can revise and fix things if they know what is wrong. They are willing to invest a great deal of time, effort and money in producing the best work they are capable of.
• It is unreasonable to expect that writers must travel to a conference in hopes of getting an appointment with an agent who is a match in terms of the type of book she is looking to represent at that time.
• It would be a service to provide honest, straightforward feedback. Several writers came up to me at the conference and said they appreciated the standard rejection letters we had been sending out because at least they provided some clues as to what the problems with their submission might have been.
• This service should be available for writers who do not live within commuting distance of a good conference, cannot afford the time and money required to attend one, or simply want to consult with an publishing professional about the merits of their work.
Natasha Kern Consulting
The agency is now offering this service to fiction writers. We will provide better feedback than you would receive in a personal consultation at a conference. It will be better because it will be based on your query, a synopsis of your work and the first five pages of your manuscript which we will take the time to read uninterrupted.
This is not an editorial service but a consultation designed to tell you if:- Your concept is marketable and fits what editors are currently looking for
- Your query is well written or has flaws
- Your writing is at a publishable standard
- The structure of your work is appropriate for current fiction requirements
- The way you are presenting your work has inherent obstacles to getting published
- Your material is suitable for representation by an agent
- Your material is suitable for publication by a large, small or regional press your concept fits the genre in which you are writing.
It is important to understand the following about the consulting service:
1) We will continue to read all submissions to the agency just as we always have at no charge to writers. We will continue to request partials, manuscripts and proposals from writers we are interested in representing and read them at no charge. If you submit a query and receive a rejection you can resubmit with the consulting fee to find out why - only if you think that additional feedback might be useful to your project.
2) This is not a reading fee or an editorial fee. The consultation letter will not attempt to teach you to write or address issues that can best be determined by a reading of an entire work, whether a nonfiction proposal or a fiction manuscript.
3) This is a consultation fee for personal feedback regarding the reasons why your query is garnering rejection letters from industry professionals, or to spell out the reasons why this agency is not offering to read more of your work or represent you, and any other helpful information that will fit in a one-page letter.
4) If you send this consultation fee for a written response regarding material (a genre) that the agency does not represent, your check will be returned to you in the SASE with a form letter. See The Agency page for list of genres and subjects not represented by the agency.
5) The payment of this consultation fee does not obligate the Natasha Kern Literary Agency in any way to read additional material, to offer representation, or to develop a future relationship of any kind with the author. The response you will receive represents one agent's perspective on your work.
6) Note that at this time this service is available only for fiction projects. For the consulting service we suggest that you submit an (optional) larger sample of your material than for a regular submission (described in the Submitting Fiction guidelines).
For consulting on your fiction submission please include a 2-3-page synopsis of your book that includes the ending, and also the first 3 chapters (up to 75 pages) of your completed manuscript.
7) Please do not submit to the consulting service if your project is in one of the categories of fiction books that the agency does not represent (see About the Agency page). We will not process submissions in those categories, but will return your check.
8) Please include a $75 check or money order payable to Natasha Kern Consulting.
9) On occasion we have had consulting service clients edit their book according to our suggested changes and then re-submit their project with another fee. Please do not submit the same book project more than once to the consulting service. We will return the fee (without project evaluation) if a book is submitted a second time to the service. You are welcome to submit a completely different book project to the consulting service at any time. And, remember that you may submit a project as a regular (non-fee) query to the agency at anytime.
It is our hope that clear and honest feedback will assist you to get your
work published or at the very least spare you months or years of fruitless
submissions during which you are left wondering why you are having difficulty.
This should help you to evaluate your course of action as you strive for
success in the future.
Click here to
see some of the comments we have received from clients of our consulting service.