If a book is a piece of debut fiction and there's an acknowledgement that names the literary agent, that's all it takes to get me to check the book out of the library.
Doesn't matter much about the plot, as long as the genre fits my manuscript. Reading has become research, to personalize a query letter to a literary agent in the hope that one of them might be interested in reading my work.
Deirdre Shaw isn't the best choice for the game.
She's got writing credentials, non-fiction but even so, so she's not exactly a complete rookie. Then there's the writing award she received for a short story. That alone could have garnered the attention of an agent, who would have been calling her. Never a query letter, no struggle to market the manuscript.
Katherine Cluverius of ICM is her agent. The problem is, Ms. Cluverius isn't taking any new clients.
I didn't realize that until I'd wasted part of the weekend reading Love Or Something Like It. I'd already begun to write the hook for the query in my head, imagined how I'd present my plot so that it could be shown how it would resonate and appeal.
Then I went looking for Ms. Cluverius' submission requirements but she's full up.
Just as well. The book is dull, whinging and wouldn't you know that the main character is seeing a therapist. That's the sort of thing that resonates with New York based agents who can relate to psychotherapy. There was the requisite paragraphs that trashed the Bush administration, to present those liberal Democratic credentials that resonate with New Yorkers. There's lots of inside roman-a-clef bits about Los Angeles screenwriters which Ms. Shaw once was, but I'm not much interested in the gossip of Hollywood.
No point in struggling to finish the book, not if it's of no use to me.
There's two others in the stack to be read. There's other agents out there, other books that tell a good story. Other books that I can compare to and use jacket flap copy to compose a query.
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