A few of you have asked me to be more specific on how I got my agent. I’ve tried to put something together that will be of help to those struggling to find representation. However, a warning for those of you who read my blog “just for fun”: you might want to stop here and wait for my next, more entertaining, installment. Because finding an agent means getting down to the nitty gritty grunt-work part of publishing. It is not entertaining. Painful would be a better word. But no pain, no…book contract. So this is how it happened.

Some asked (in a nice, non-accusatory way) if any of my literary or film contacts introduced me to my agent. I would not mind telling you if the answer were “yes”. I had a ton of advice and constructive criticism from my very qualified friends and family. But none of them passed my manuscript to their agent or gave me a direct introduction – I had to send query letters like most people. Nepotism is not a bad thing. But I wasn’t able to profit from it.

I began looking for my agent in 2008, after writing my first book, an unpublished memoir called A YEAR IN THE VINES.

First of all I bought the indispensable tome, WRITER’S MARKET, and started with their “Query Letter Clinic”. There’s a pretty specific formula to use when writing query letters, and I worked on my letter for a long time before coming up with something I thought was presentable.

Now, when I read the first incarnation of that letter, I cringe. The first sentence, the “hook”, was something like, “How do you say ‘up shit creek without a paddle’ in French?” Oh, the shame. Luckily, only one agent got that letter. She never answered, and I don’t blame her one bit.

I looked up other query letters (both successful and unsuccessful) posted by authors on the Internet, which was also a big help. I won’t give you the specifics on how to write your letter, since WRITER’S MARKET does such a good job of it.

What was frustrating to me was knowing that, for most agents, the query letter was all they would ever see of my writing. Unless specifically requested, you don’t enclose a sample of the manuscript with your query letter. I thought this was terribly unfair, since I didn’t feel skilled in self-promotion, but rather in writing long, whimsical descriptions mixed with funny anecdotes. I learned that you have to be able to do both. Too bad if you don’t think of yourself as an ad-man. You have to get good enough at it to get that foot in the door, or in this case, that manuscript in front of the agent. Just bite the bullet and do it.

After I had my query letter, I flipped back to WRITER’S MARKET’S chapter on literary agents and made a list of the ones who accepted memoirs. I then cross-referenced my short-list with a few Internet sites that gave “grades” to agents and agencies. One was “Predators and Editors”. I can’t remember the others. But there is a lot of information out there, and you can benefit from the experiences of other writers who have gone through the same process.

I then went to each of my chosen agency’s websites and read their submission guidelines. You have to find an agent that accepts unsolicited manuscripts. You should find someone who is searching for manuscripts in your field. (Don’t send a memoir if they only work with science fiction. Unless your life has been extremely weird.) And then you should choose one person in the agency that you think is your best bet, and tailor your letter to fit them. (Many have agent bios or blurbs.)

From my research, I chose my top seven “dream” agents or agencies – the ones I didn’t think I had a hope in hell of getting – and decided to start with them. Why not start big? I thought.

I had read that (understandably) agents don’t like you to flood the marketplace with your queries. They want something fresh that hasn’t been shopped around to everyone and her brother. So I limited my first queries, sending them out two at a time. After waiting a week for the first two to respond, I suddenly realized that they might never respond, and I would just be sitting here in the middle of the French countryside twiddling my thumbs and waiting for something that was never going to happen. So I sent two more out, waited a week, and then sent another two. I got one rejection back right away. The others took months to respond.

I will admit that I only sent one snail-mail letter. I’m too impatient to wait for the transatlantic post. And I couldn’t enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope because I couldn’t buy American stamps here in France. So I enclosed a dollar bill and said it was for stamps. After that, I crossed out anyone else on my list who didn’t accept emails.

The one agent that I felt the very best about was with Dystel & Goderich. My book was about an American mom living abroad, and this agent’s bio said that she had kids and had lived in Spain. Perfect! I thought. Someone who will understand me.

I emailed her my query letter and my five-page prologue, as specified in her agency’s submission guidelines. And an hour and a half later I got a return email asking for the entire manuscript. She said she would read it “promptly”. All I could think was, What does “promptly” mean to an agent? A week? Three months? I gave her the benefit of the doubt, stopped sending out queries, and waited for her response.

Exactly two weeks later, I received an email from Stacey Glick, another agent at Dystel. She said, “[My colleague] shared your memoir with me and I had a chance to read it this weekend. I really enjoyed it and would love to discuss it with you.”

During our phone conversation she told me she had loved the book and wanted to represent me. She DID ask how many other people I had sent it to, at which point I was grateful to honestly be able to say “just a handful”. And the next morning I had a contract sitting in my Inbox.

I realize that this is the dream story. That things usually aren’t this easy and don’t move this fast. A friend who has now been published thrice told me that he wrote over two hundred agents in order to get his first book represented. What I do think helped me, though, was:

1. advice from a few people who had already gone through the process and learned the hard way;
2. banging away at the query letter (and getting several qualified opinions on it);
3. being extremely picky with the agents that I approached;
4. choosing one agent out of each agency to concentrate on and tailoring my query letter for that individual;
5. reading each agency’s guidelines and following their rules;
6. making my book start with a bang, knowing that the first few pages might be all that the agent would read.

There are other ways of getting agents, such as conferences and referrals from published authors. (And my agency has a wonderful blog at dglm.blogspot.com with lots of invaluable advice!) But this is how I got mine, and I can attest that the result has been far more successful than I could ever have imagined.

It was 1989, and I had just acquired a completely useless B.A. in Psychology, as well as the resulting crippling debt. To celebrate, I decided to take my big hair, my pet rat Vivien, and my mom’s Buick Century for a month-long wander through the Northeast.

I was as free as a bird except for two commitments. The first was to show up in Pennsylvania and carry a Bo-Peep basket of flowers while wearing a fuchsia bridesmaid’s dress. The second was to get back to Alabama in time to prepare for my own wedding, three months later. (No fuchsia or baskets, but frosted melon-colored nail varnish was required for all nine bridesmaids. Oh, yeah.)

I bought a map, and resolved to look at it only if I got extremely lost. And then I drove from Chicago, through Detroit, over the bridge into Windsor, Canada, and was on my way.

I did everything you would imagine a 21-year-old fresh out of university would do. I read Camus and Machiavelli in front of my tent on the banks of Lake Ontario. I exposed rolls and rolls of meaningful and deeply-felt black-and-white photos on my second-hand Olympus. I wrote long entries in my journal that I would never ever have even the slightest desire to glance at afterward. I listened to Kate Bush. And I slept with a baseball bat next to my pillow.

As I meandered, I checked my goals off my list. A pig-out at Ben & Jerry’s factory in Vermont. Eating lobster while sitting outside a Maine harbor. Taking photos next to every “Welcome to” state sign. (I’m still missing Alaska.) And finally I arrived at the site of my most daring venture: New York City. I parked my car near a campsite in New Jersey and took the train in with nothing but some cash and a bag sheltering Vivien in her travel-cage. Once in Manhattan, I headed northwards towards Columbia University.

My senior year, I had taken a literature class that had inspired me. It was entitled “Modern Myth” and was taught by the late Joe McClatchey. The syllabus included Thomas Mann, Frederick Buechner, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Walker Percy, Charles Williams, George Macdonald, and others, as well as the author who was the object of my current quest. Dr. McClatchey had just happened to mention during a lecture the singular location where this particular author chose to write: the library of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. I decided to find her.

As I walked through Spanish Harlem, more than a bit lost as I watched some rough-and-tumble low-key street quarrels spark up and then fade around me, I relocated Vivien from her cage to my shoulder. Her presence had an immediate effect: catcalls turned into expressions of disgust and I was left alone. Once at the library, I returned her to her cage and entered.

A librarian approached and asked me if I needed help. I told her who I was looking for. She turned and pointed at a woman writing in a notebook on a table. And there she was in the flesh: Madeleine l’Engle.

She was famous. She traveled the world for speaking engagements. And she lived part-time in her Connecticut country home. Why I ever imagined that I would find her there, on that certain day, at the very moment I happened to stop by, I can’t tell you.

I’ll chalk it up to youth, innocence and the unwavering conviction that it was the only possible ending to the story of my quest. Life for me was one big myth, and I was the seeker in search of knowledge. Why wouldn’t my oracle be sitting right there where I expected her to be, on her stool smack-dab in the middle of Delphi Temple, waiting to bestow me with the magic words I needed to become a writer?

I was so star-struck that I don’t quite remember what happened next. Did the librarian go ask for an audience for me, or did I just walk up and say, “Hi”? I do remember the illustrious writer asking me what was in my bag, and me pulling out a sopping wet Vivien, whose water bottle had sprung a leak. I remember her getting some Kleenex for me to dry Vivien off with. I remember telling her that I had studied her books with Dr. McClatchey. I told her I wanted to be a writer. And when she asked what my plans were, I responded that I was getting married, and she wondered aloud if I wasn’t a bit young.*

I don’t recall what all we talked about, but in the end she asked me where I was staying and I told her I was camping in New Jersey. She tut-tutted and said, “You could sleep at my house, but my granddaughters are staying so there’s no room. But let me call my assistant.” And that night I slept in her assistant’s tiny apartment on a fold-out cot. I sent them both pots of honey from North Carolina and later wrote a letter that I don’t think was ever answered, and that was that.

Whenever Madeleine L’Engle’s name came up in the news afterward, I thought of her almost possessively, as my own special mentor, though we hadn’t spent more than twenty minutes together. How many writers help their fans dry off their rats and then find a place for them to stay for the night? And when I read of her death, I was busy at work on my first book, and wished that I could tell her that I was finally doing what we had talked about almost twenty years before.

L’Engle’s book on writing, “Walking on Water”, contains an image which impressed me enough that I still remember it twenty years later. She quotes Jean Rhys as saying:

“All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”

I wish I could tell Madeleine L’Engle now that after all of these years, I’m finally doing it. I’m feeding the lake. And she was one of the people who gave me the courage to do it.

* Why, oh why, didn’t I listen? Oh yeah, young and stupid. Right.

I got the “editorial letter” from my editorial goddesses, Tara and Catherine on February 11. To be completely honest, this complex thirteen-page synopsis of their thoughts and suggestions put the fear of God into me. A few days later I got the marked-up manuscript in the mail. At which point I decided to change my name and move to Rio.

I’m not scared of work. I’m not even scared of a boatload of work. But a boatload of work, doing a job that I’ve never done before (I’ve never had to rewrite based on anyone’s but my own editing), um, yeah…it was a little intimidating. However, after a few days of floundering around and moving stacks of papers into different little piles around my office, I came up with a workable system. And two and a half weeks later, I had rewritten my way through the entire red-penned manuscript and the thirteen pages of notes, with just a few scenes that I couldn’t resolve right away put to the side for later.

When Tara and Catherine sent me the editorial letter, we agreed on a schedule. I would take six weeks to do a first rewrite, then send them what I had. They would read it, give any further suggestions, and then I would have around six more weeks to do a final rewrite.

So we’re half-way through my first six weeks and I have a very rough draft of the “new-and-improved” SLEEPWALKING (which, I must say, is much more action-packed and streamlined than the original). I’m giving my brain today and tomorrow off: must not think of monsters, plots, a better word for this or that…any book-directed thinking is “strictement interdit”! Then, on Sunday, I’m getting onto a train to Paris, where I will spend three days in a tiny (but creatively decorated) hotel room where I’m going to read my new draft from cover to cover and make sure it all ties together.

After that, it will hopefully just be clean-up work and I will get the manuscript in on time at end-March.

More juicy news:

• The name of the book will not be SLEEPWALKING. But the new name has not yet been concocted.

• From now on I will be using the pen name “Amy Plum”. This is for a couple of reasons: 1st, there is an American children’s book writer with my name. And 2nd, Plum is my grandma’s name and she is one of my favorite people on the face of the earth. So if I’m going to change my name, why not get it from someone as amazing as Grammy?

• My wonderful agent, Stacey, and her agency Dystel & Goderich have managed to sell the book rights in four different foreign languages already! The first contract to come through was from CAPPELEN DAMM for Norwegian language rights. (Thanks, Pia!) I will let you know the other languages as soon as I have put pen to paper contract for each of them.

• And that’s all for juice, besides the fact that Tibor cried at the end of the Disney version of Hunchback of Notre Dame last night, and I am still a bit alarmed. (Of course, show me a credit card or coffee commercial, and I’ll hit you up for a box of Kleenex. But I am also not a 4 year-old boy.)

I will be back. Soon.

I know I’ve only given you the bare-bones story of how I got a three-book deal for SLEEPWALKING. Since I didn’t actually put pen to paper-contract until three weeks ago, I was feeling too superstitious to go into detail about it. But since several of you have written to ask me how it happened (amongst you a few aspiring writers), here’s the story.

I told you about the process of writing the book.

Well, in late August I sent a few chapters of the manuscript to Stacey, my agent. She was enthusiastic. So, after fiddling with the text for a bit longer, I sent her the complete manuscript in October. She was even more enthusiastic.

And here is where the incredible time-line starts. November 5th Stacey and I had a phone chat to talk about some changes she wanted me to make before sending it to publishers. She asked me if I had written a query letter or pitch for the book that I might want her to use. I worked on a pitch letter that I felt was representative of the book and sent her this:

“Sixteen-year-old Kate Mercier finds her world turned upside down when, after her parents die, she and her sister move from Brooklyn to Paris, France to live with their grandparents. As she struggles to overcome her grief and adapt to her new life abroad she falls hard for Vincent, an eighteen-year-old Frenchman whom she sees around her neighborhood with his strange group of friends. But when she discovers that Vincent is anything but the normal teenage boy he appears to be, she is faced with a choice: will she follow her heart’s desire or trust her instincts and stay away from a love that threatens to re-immerse her into the world of death, grief and despair from which she is finally emerging?

If I were to pitch this book in the stereotypical Hollywood manner, I would say “Twilight…in Paris…with zombies.” However, SLEEPWALKING is so much more than that. The reader is plunged into the world of an American teenager living in a bewitching foreign city while attempting to rebuild her shattered life. She finds herself in the most typical teenage condition – falling in love – with the most untypical person imaginable: an eighteen-year-old Resistance fighter who died in 1942. As the book unfolds we see two young people discovering through their love for each other that (for Kate) life is worth living and (for Vincent) there is more to life than vengeance.

SLEEPWALKING introduces a new type of monster: the revenant. Like zombies they have died and been re-animated. Unlike zombies, they look like humans, don’t feast on flesh and brains, and are charged with carrying out a very special mission in their so-called-“life”.

As a forty-two year old American living in the Loire Valley with her French husband and two children, I have lived much of what Kate is experiencing: I moved to Paris when 23, fell in love with both the city and its inhabitants, and experienced the death of a parent. And though I would stop quite a ways short of comparing my husband to a zombie, who doesn’t experience seemingly insurmountable challenges in their relationships?”

Stacey thought it was perfect (and has since submitted it as an example of her favorite recent “hook” on Alan Rinzler’s blog).

I spent the next few days making the changes she had suggested and sent them back to her. And then I spent the following few days writing a 2-page plan for two sequels. Which was really going out on a limb for me because I usually don’t know what I’m going to write until I sit down and touch my fingers to the keyboard.

That brings us to (as I check my old emails) the 11th of November, a Wednesday. I emailed the sequel ideas to Stacey and sat back for what I thought would be a really long wait. Which is why I was shocked to hear back from Stacey on Monday saying that someone was already interested. They had a few questions for me, confirming that this was my first novel and wanting to see if I was open to making changes.

Exactly a week later that publishing house gave me a very generous 2-book offer. And it came with one of the most amazing compliments: the editor who had read it said she couldn’t put it down, and it ruined her date-night with her husband because all she wanted to do was go home and finish it.

Laurent and I cracked open a bottle of champagne. Although Stacey said that the process wasn’t over – she had to contact the other publishers who were currently reading the manuscript to let them know that an offer had been made – I knew I had one sure offer in the bag.

I went to the university the next day, and tried to teach my classes without floating up to the ceiling every time I thought about the deal. Then I went home and found an email from Stacey asking me to call her asap.

When I did she informed me that we had an offer from HarperCollins for a 3-book deal, and that it was a pre-emptive offer we had to accept within 24 hours. Then she asked me to sit down and told me how much they had offered. I’m glad I was sitting down. I would have definitely hurt myself if I hadn’t.

But it wasn’t just the advance they were offering that made the offer tantalizing. For those of you who don’t understand an “advance” (like me, a few months ago) it’s what it sounds like…an amount of money advanced to you, the author, by the publishing house. Once the book is published, they begin paying you royalties on the books’ sales after they have reimbursed themselves the advance money. So the goal is, of course, to sell a lot of books. And, man oh man, did they have a plan for selling SLEEPWALKING!

The offer spelled out a marketing strategy that was compelling enough to sell Velveeta to a Frenchman: online and offline promotions. They had a whole list of pre-publication buzz building efforts including sneak peaks, distributions, and advertising. They spoke of mobile platforms, multimedia, participating in teen writing websites, videos, newsletters, and podcasts. Their strategy went on for more than a page. To say that it was impressive would be seriously understating the matter.

So there was the advance. And there were the top-notch marketing ideas. But, for me, there was something else.

It was HarperCollins. The publishers of CHARLOTTE’S WEB, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, and WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE…for God’s sake! Mind you, I am not delusional enough to imagine myself being even close to a peer of Harper Lee, C.S. Lewis, or Doris Lessing. But I admit to being cheeky enough to relish the thought of seeing my name printed on the same page as their publisher.

The next day, November 25, I officially accepted HarperCollins’s offer.

Needless to say my feet didn’t touch the ground for a good few weeks. In fact, make that a month. I’ve described the feeling in my Sleepwalking post. And little by little, as things happened – “meeting” my editor Tara on the telephone, the Publisher’s Weekly article, finally getting to tell people about it, and now signing and mailing back the contract – it has begun to feel like reality.

And that’s the incredible story of how Sleepwalking morphed from a file on my computer to something that will be on bookstore shelves in summer 2011.

“Sandrine told me that you got a book published: how wonderful! I’m going back to school to study nursing.”

I stood in the preschool playground trying my hardest to work out any rational link between the woman’s two statements. I had no clue what she presently did, and only knew her because her daughter shared Tallulah’s nanny, Sandrine last year. We occasionally bumped into each other when picking them up.

I finally gave up my mental calisthenics and said the first thing I could come up with, “That’s fabulous! Is that going to be difficult?” The woman lit up and started chatting away about unemployment benefits. Which I had even less to say about. But I smiled and nodded in the universal language of “I have no clue what you are saying.”

I thought about it later, and came up with a few theories as to what she could have been trying to get at.

1. There was no connection between the statements, but since she finally had something to say to me she used it to start a conversation.

2. She thought there was some kind of link between nursing and writing (which was momentarily evading me) that would make us blood-sisters.

3. We would be blood-sisters because we would both be working women with kids.

I mentioned it to Sandrine, the nanny, last night when I picked Tallulah up. She told me what a leap it was for this woman to go back to school so late in life. (She can’t be older than 35, but the French don’t often make extreme career changes.)

And then it struck me. We’re obviously blood-sisters because we’re both changing careers “mid-life”. With young children in tow. Got it. And that made me happy. Instead of alienating me from my fellow townspeople, the book was opening a door to at least one parent who will now speak to me when we pick up our kids. Cool!

Other local reactions to my publishing news have been varied. When I told Sandrine, she looked at me blankly as if she hadn’t understand what I had said. Embarrassed, I began explaining it again and she cut me off. “No no, I understood the first time,” she said. “That’s very nice.” She gave me a professional-nanny smile and then turned to wipe someone’s nose. But, in spite of her poker-face, she was obviously interested enough to have mentioned it to going-back-to-nursing-school-lady.

I told Isabelle, Tibor’s teacher from last year, and she jumped up and down and hugged me.

Ludo and Sophie, the owners of our occasional hangout, the Café de la Promenade, found out about it from my FIL. They greeted me with big congratulatory hugs when Laurent and I were there last week, and Ludo confessed that he had been worried when my FIL told him it was a three-book deal.

“You’ve only written one book, right?” he asked. I nodded. “So, if you have a contract to write two sequels, how do you know you’ll be able to come up with something?” I explained that I had written a short plan for the next two books, and that the publisher had liked the ideas. “But you haven’t actually written the books?” “No.”

Ludo took a deep breath and leaned in towards me with an anguished look. “What if you get stuck? What if you lose your inspiration and can’t write the next two books. Do you have to give the money back?” “He’s actually lost sleep over this,” Sophie said, shaking her head.

I assume that my FIL has explained to the artisans who are working with him on the Boulangerie that they are fixing it up as a place for me to write. But no one has said anything, and they still stare at me with that suspicious-but-smiling expression that says, “Even though you are a totally weird foreigner, you’re Jean-Pierre’s DIL so you’re alright with us.”

My alternate-community, the online world, has had a much more pronounced reaction. You, my friends and readers, have all been either wonderfully supportive or tactfully silent about the news. But other reactions have been varied.

As I mentioned before, the Publisher’s Weekly article didn’t get it quite right. My book’s characters aren’t really zombies – they’re monsters I made up and labeled “revenants”. And the PW writer wrote that they carry out “special missions”. That makes them sound like delivery-zombies. So I didn’t blame people for thinking that it all sounds a bit ridiculous.

For example, I got the following comment this afternoon:

“Ha! I’ve found your blog. I’ve just read your manuscript as an emergency job for a [foreign language] publisher I do some freelance-reading for. And I have to say after some skepticism (the Twilight-blurb) I must admit I love your book. So sad that I have to wait until 2011 to talk about it. I will definitely buy it only to possess it. It’s so engrossing! I sincerely hope they do the deal.”

Holy cow…so do I! But people who haven’t read the book have been a bit more negative.

The comments on a website for new writers range from “This sounds the death knell of Western civilization” to the more colorful “I just puked through my eyeballs”.

But the second group, a zombie fan-site, seemed to take it more personally.

“I can just picture the dialogue…
‘Eat my brain, Vincent.’
‘No, I don’t want you to be like me.’
‘Eat my brain. Please.’
‘I would never wish this life on anyone.’
‘I don’t care. I’m stubborn and hormonal. Eat my brain.'”

“KILL IT. KILL IT WITH FIRE.”

“Chicks ruin monsters.”

“I wonder if zombies are attracted to codependent, emotionally retarded teenage girls as well.”

“I hope at some point someone has to stop to pick up an arm that has fallen off.”

After having a slightly embarrassed reaction to the writers’ site, I had so much fun reading the zombie one, especially when I found people actually TAKING UP FOR ME (remember…none of these people have read anything that I have actually written):

“To be honest sounds almost like an anime. If the missions are kool I may get into it. Until I read the books I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s automatically like Twilight. Plus — given ur jealousy….why don’t you try writing a book series? You can make bank instead of slaving in a 9 to 5 b—- job.”

Wow – thanks, “westpark”.

Laurent’s kind of worried that, if the books are successful, we will have fans hanging around outside our gate. But what if we had angry zombie lovers hanging out instead? Just think of what the neighbors would say!