"Agent Advice" is a series of quick interviews with literary and script agents who talk with Guide to Literary Agents about their thoughts on writing, publishing, and just about anything else.

This installment features literary agent Nancy Love of the Nancy Love Literary Agency. Nancy is a member of the Association of Authors' Representatives as well as the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She specializes in nonfiction. 

GLA: What's the most recent thing you've sold?

NL: How Your Child Learns Best, by Judy Willis, to Sourcebooks. She's a noted neurologist and middle school teacher who tells parents how to use the latest revelations about the brain to help their children overcome the rote memorization in today's classrooms and engage in creative thinking and discovery.

The Management Company, a California-based agency focusing on film and TV scripts, recently changed their submission guidelines. Here are their new guidelines:

How to contact: Submit by e-mail only (tmco@mail.com), with the e-mail subject line reading "Writer Query Letter." Have a clear, one-sentence log line in bold type and include 2-4 short paragraphs summarizing the story (i.e., what would be on the back of a DVD).

This agency will contact writers by phone for more information, but only if interested. Queries that do not follow these guidelines may not be read. This agency is actively seeking "studio-quality, high-end action scripts with great characters, as well as really good comedies." No horror please.

Address queries to Tom Klassan, The Management Co.

If you're going to wheel and deal with agents and editors, you'll end up spending more time than you'd like discussing rights, contracts, advances, royalties and a whole lot of other boring important stuff. That said, I want to address a recent question that came in over e-mail regarding how advances and royalties work. In other words, how does the payment process work when you sell a book?

For this example, I'll keep it real simple (for my own sake and well as yours). Let's say you acquire an agent and sell a novel. The publishing house offers you royalties of $3 per book sold. 
      It's probable that you'll be given money in advance - more specifically: an advance against royalties. What this means is that they give you a lump sum of money before the book comes out as payment that's yours to keep - say, $60,000. However, the money is not in addition to royalties, but rather part of royalties - meaning they've given you royalties for the first 20,000 books (times $3/book) upfront. Since they've already paid you the royalties of the first 20,000 books, you will not starting actually making $3/book until you sell the copy 20,001.

Think of it like this. When you get hired at a new job, you ask for several months pay upfront and the boss agrees. It's not a separate signing bonus you're getting - it's your hard-earned money paid to you early. You get the lump sum quickly, but then you don't get paid again till the regular checks start months later.

Many things to consider:

• Royalties per book vary greatly. If you get $3/book, that's pretty darn good. If you write a typical nonfiction book, you may just get $1/book.
• Advances against royalties are a pretty sweet deal. You get a lump sum upfront, which you get to keep even if the book fairs poorly. (Repeat: The advance is yours. Period.) But if the book takes off, you will start getting royalties down the road.
• Reality check: Be aware that the money amount promised will hit your bank account as a lot less than expected, as Uncle Sam will take a big cut and your agent takes 15%.
• You may run into a "flat fee" situation, where a publishing company pays you one sum of money upfront with no talk of royalties. This is legitimate - just make sure it's what you want.
• It's common for a house to break up the advance. They may give you $30,000 when you sign the contract and then $30,000 upon completion of an acceptable manuscript. On this note, make sure you turn in an "acceptable manuscript," so that you get to not only receive the second payment, but also keep the first one, and not have a publisher demand it back.
• Read your contract thoroughly. It's all spelled out.

2008 Article Excerpt:

With the recent news that Imprint Agency is now FinePrint Literary Management (see last post), I wanted to post something else related to the merger. The principal of Imprint is the great agent Stephany Evans, who, it just so happens, penned an article this year for the upfront section of the 2008 Guide to Literary Agents. See an excerpt from her article below.

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Stephany Evans talks about how
the roles of agents and publishers
have changed over time.

" ... It's never been simpler to learn an agent's likes and interests before querying. But just as you have more access to agent information, publishers and agents have more access to information about you—especially if you've already had a book published.
      "Introduced in 2001, Nielson's BookScan ... allows editors a chance to 'run the numbers' on books in the 'competing titles' sections of their proposals. If too many (competing titles) show lackluster volume, an editor may conclude that the potential market for your book is not worth pursuing ... If you have published before, be sure to provide your agent with solid sales figures and be prepared to detail how and where the books were sold, whether you sold them out of the trunk of your station wagon, or at pet stores, or via your Web site. And if editors are paying attention to things such as BookScan, rest assured agents are, too. An agent needs to know about a project's vulnerabilities from the get-go."

       - "The Evolution of Agenting: An Agent Talks of Change" (page 68)