Literary Agent Quotes

Getting an agent is hard, and I also think people rush to get an agent too soon.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

I wrote one book, signed with a good agent, and sat back and waited for the phone to ring. I was sure that the great news would come at any moment. Four books later, I finally got that call.

The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.

Always I'm working on some of book. That's the way I make a living.

My advice for finding a literary agent would be first, put your work out there as much as possible and hopefully someone will find you, because I still have literary agents writing to me after they find my site. You want someone who understands your work and is going to be your cheerleader from day one.

I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

I write a book over a period of months or years, and when I'm done with it, usually another year goes by before I see it in print. It's hard to be patient and wait.

When I started writing, I just hoped for a nice little paperback series.

I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to 'shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they're the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.' That sounded like bad advice to me.

I wrote 'Time Stops at Shamli' in 1956, shortly after 'The Room on the Roof' was published, and I couldn't find anyone to publish it.

It was not until I began to write a book called 'Light Years' that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House, and he wound up editing a subsequent book.

When my book was first sent out to publishers, my agent told me to buy a lot of ice-cream and wait. So I bought a gigantic amount of ice-cream, and huddled by the freezer eating it and shaking, hoping someone would like it.

I guess there's a sort of cycle with writing books. There's all the researching and then the imagining and writing - which is the real job - and then there's always a period when the book comes out and you have to lift your head and venture out.

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

Frank Morley, who had worked in London at Faber and Faber, was the new head of Harcourt Brace, and he hired me to start in 1940. The early years at Harcourt were wonderful. Almost my first assignment was Virginia Woolf's novel 'Between the Acts.'

Many writers will get a contract by selling chapters and outlines or something like that. I wrote the entire novel, and when it was all finished, I would give it to my agent and say, 'Well, here's a novel; sell it if you can.' And they would do that, and it was good because I never had anyone looking over my shoulder.

I'd sold the book first. Actually to a paperback publisher. I had nothing. I just had the idea.

I met [my editor] in a bar where alcoholic beverages are served and I bought her one and I told her the idea. And she said that she liked it very much, which embarrassed me because I thought it meant that she was a lightweight and that in the morning, as so many women say to so many men, what seems like a good idea, you know, turns out not to be.

Exclusive will not be published in book format.

My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction.

A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, 'Hang on... if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.' That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller.

It's hard to make a living as a novelist. My first novel 'Tapping the Source' made quite a splash in Hollywood, and people started asking if I wanted to write scripts. I quickly realized I could make a lot more money that way.

I am a writer (and one day I'll be an author). For a long time I was a bookseller (who wrote) or a TV producer (who wrote), but for the last decade or so, its been "writer."

If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher.