I answered the phone one day,
and it was my calling...
©Kris Wallace

All Rights Reserved

Before December 1997, I had no idea literary agents existed. That month I responded to a help wanted ad in the paper; a literary agency needed an administrative assistant. Having just failed the California bar and working as a receptionist in a law firm, I decided I needed to do something else. Anything.

When I walked into the McBride Agency office I was puzzled by the framed book covers hanging on the walls. I didn't get it. For a few moments I spoke with the girl at the front desk to find out that the new hire would be replacing her. She had decided to go to law school. Well, I thought, I can't be too far off here if she thinks going to law school will help her somehow.

I was called into a rather large and impressive office. Behind the antique desk was a serious, though flamboyant, red head ordering her usual coffee drink, arranging the piles of paper on her desk. In one chair facing the desk was a wiry nervous woman who seemed to be trying not to knock anything over or make too much noise.

The red head needed someone to take the place of the girl in the front office as well as handle her contracts. Eventually I put two and two together to figure out what the red head was talking about. She would find authors with unpublished book projects and sell those projects to publishers. She wanted someone to handle the contracts for those sales.

When the big picture finally became clear, I thought I would start squealing or jumping up and down at my dumb luck. Before law school I had always figured that I would end up in some type of writing job. (The psychic said I would wait tables, not practice law or write.) Now I could use what I had learned in law school and college. It was too good to be true.

On the way out the door, the red head asked me if I liked to read. I didn't know what to say. Did she not notice my English degree on my resume? Should I have told her about the summer I first picked up Hemingway. Didn't I tell her that I had just spent the last few months reading all of the assigned titles I never picked up in school. "Yes," I said. "I like to read." Good, I was told, I would be doing a lot of reading in this office.

That was a Wednesday and I was told that I would hear something by Friday. Friday came and went. I knew it was too good to be true. Then Saturday I came home to find a message from the wiry timid woman I had sat next to in my interview. They offered me a job!

It was incredible. The New York phone calls, high-energy atmosphere, and piles of books were components of a world I never knew existed. The most amazing thing I'd ever been apart of. The first three months were an excited blur.

Then it happened. I answered the phone one day and it was her. It was Mary, then 93 years old. She would call ten times over the next ten weeks keeping me on the phone longer than any other writer. Of course I was still new in the game and had not developed the routine response to inquiring writers, the "please send a query letter with a self-addressed stamped envelope" response.

When I finally read her manuscript, something in me changed. I was so excited I couldn't contain myself. This was it. This was the book readers were waiting for. (And this is when I became hooked.) There is something about reading a book that no one else has read, finding that rare gem, experiencing something special before anyone else and then introducing it to the world. That's it. That's the lure. That's why people become literary agents.

Sure, you have to pay the bills. And sometimes that means taking on projects that don't affect you deeply. It means taking on projects by authors because their projects will strike the right person with the right budget, even if those authors are a bit irritating. It's a business after all. Some projects pay the bills and let you go after those hard-to-find gems.

My gem took me on a journey that included getting to know and love a tough 95-year-old woman and her story, then visiting the place of her story 3,000 miles away. This great-niece of Robert Louis Stevenson had written a book while in her early 40s but waited 50 years to submit it to an agent. I just happened to be the lucky person who answered the phone that day. I just happened to be the inexperienced person who let her talk on and on. I just happened to be the sentimental person who sighed after reading every page of her onion-skin manuscript. I just happened to be the person she trusted with her story.

Turning a box of personal pages into a real book available on the shelves of bookstores and libraries and handing thousands of dollars to a woman who just wanted new kitchen cabinets was one of the most rewarding experiences of my young life. And it's why I can't get away from this business.

There's something very intoxicating about the combination of being a book lover, an insider and a dream maker. It's good work if you can find it.

QUESTIONS FROM WRITERSMONTHLY.COM READERS

Lisa W: Hi Kris. I sent you a query on two of the books I had written...I realize it takes awhile for someone to get back to me. Just wondering if you were interested in reading the entire manuscript.
Thank you for your time,

Kris: Lisa, I’m guessing you sent your query to the McBride Agency in La Jolla. I’m not in that office. After working there for three and one half years as contracts manager, my husband got a new job and we moved to Ohio. I became an associate agent for MMLA working out of my home. Give them 6-8 weeks to get you a response.

[Editor's Note: Many comments regarding Kris' column "New York"—Writers' Promised Land? were received. The following is an excerpt from one.]

Q: ...a commercially published author...can be sure his/her publisher will actually get the books into bricks-and-mortar bookstores . . . the publisher provides him/her (free!) all of the basic distribution channels that get the books onto store shelves all over the country, thousands of miles from the writer's home . . . BOOM—thousands of books are in the stores, just like that, on publication day.

Kris: This is not quite true. An author’s book will appear in bookstores only if those bookstores have ordered copies of the book which depends on whether the publisher’s sales staff did its job of promoting the book months before publication. I have had trouble finding a number of books published by the big houses that I have worked on and loved. It’s not automatic. Plus, first time authors are lucky to get a first printing over 5,000 copies and that doesn’t go very far. It can be frustrating. I’m sure even big name authors have had trouble getting books into stores, even in cities they plan to visit. It happens more often than you think.