AgentFest 2011 wasn’t my first attempt to garner the attention of an agent. And, if I’m any measure, I’d bet many of the authors who attended tried for years before deciding to see if meeting agents face to face makes a difference. I’ve been writing for seven years. Graphic novels, novels, new media writing and in several genres. I’ve really committed. And submitted. Let me tell you, face to face DOES make all the difference.

Seven years ago most agents made me send in Self Addressed Stamped Envelopes with my snail-mail query letters—that’s right, I had to pay to get my form rejection.  As a Canadian author, just getting my hands on American stamps was a challenge.  Even after having several of my graphic novels published, success with HURAKAN selling to a great independent press, and doing new media work with a major publisher, I still couldn’t seem to get my book into the right hands. I was willing to accept that my early work wasn’t strong enough, but my most recent novel, THE TERMINALS, was already optioned for film and to be published in graphic novel format.

It was time to invest in AgentFest.

And it is an investment. Having four daughters and coming from Ottawa, it takes a lot of monetary and family support to enable me to gallivant off to NYC. But I added up all the time I’d spent crafting query letters, personalizing notes, researching the right agents, printing and expediting manuscripts, etc. and the decision made itself.

It paid off.

This December, after pitching her at AgentFest, I received a request to speak on the phone with Literary Agent Gina Panettieri, President of Talcott Notch Literary Services. Under her wing ever since, I have revised and revised and the manuscript rocks. I couldn’t be more ecstatic.

But I’ve skipped the best part! AgentFest was nerve rattling …

Despite having honed my pitch at the CraftFest workshops and researched the top agents and agencies I felt would be a fit, my mind drew a complete blank as the countdown to AgentFest began. For the first few moments when the doors opened and I stood at the very back of what seemed like a herd of authors, it was as if I was being corralled into a slaughterhouse; I was a dumb cow ready for the bolt gun and the room full of agents prepared to carve my pitch into cubes of stewing meat.

So with total disregard for my carefully prepared list, I went to the first free agent I saw. In retrospect, a good plan. My delivery was terrible. Little did I know, however, I had time to loosen up.

In all, I pitched seventeen agents. SEVENTEEN! And had fourteen requests to see what I had. Some requests were for partials, but most for full manuscripts.

While writing this, my spell check corrected AgentFest to Agent Feast.  How apt. It was a feast.

I’ve had good experiences on and off the Internet with agents, but AgentFest is in a class by itself.

The first two said no.

They were both really cool about it, explaining they weren’t actually repping young adult titles anymore, and both offered referrals to agents who did rep YA. I jotted down the recommendations, thanked them, and moved on, turning once more to the daunting yet oh-so-exciting event that was AgentFest.

This was my first AgentFest—my first ThrillerFest, for that matter—and I’d come to New York with fairly humble hopes: if I could get one agent interested in seeing pages from my newly finished manuscript, a YA thriller I then called PHOENIX ISLAND and have since re-titled DISSIDENT, I’d count the experience a success.

But turning back to the room full of agents, editors, and hopeful writers, success seemed a long shot. I was 0 and 2 on the day. Gulp.

Truth be told, I didn’t tumble into total pessimism. I loved my book, and with the help of Jon Land, I’d polished and practiced a pretty good pitch. So I leapt once more into the fray.

And everything changed.

The rest of the agents I “speed dated”—nine in all—wanted to see the book. Needless to say, I was over-the-top excited.

I submitted to five agents. A week later, one offered representation. I couldn’t believe it happened so quickly. I was even more surprised, when three additional offers of representation poured in. Thus began a very exciting, incredibly nerve-wracking time, where, through multiple phone calls, emails, and a face-to-face meeting, I got to know the agents and worked out my best fit. The agents were great, one and all, brilliant and charismatic and generous with their time and patience; but in the end, I knew the right choice for me: Christina Hogrebe of the Jane Rotrosen Agency.

Christina read the first half of DISSIDENT in one night and e-mailed the next morning to let me know she was soliciting further readers within the agency. The next day, we had a nice phone conversation, and she invited me to visit the agency and meet “the team.” A few days later, when I rode the train into Manhattan, at least four people at the agency had already read my manuscript. Four people in just a few days’ time—talk about an advocate!

Since then, with the help of all the amazing people at JRA, Christina and I have knocked the manuscript back and forth, creating what she calls a “mean, lean thriller machine.” She’s also secured the help of Joe Veltre from the Gersh Agency, who has agreed to handle the film rights.

Needless to say, I’m a big, big fan of ThrillerFest and AgentFest. I owe a huge thanks to Shane Gericke, Jon Land, Kathie Antrim, and the entire army of amazing folks who make the convention come together so perfectly. If you’re an aspiring thriller writer, I can’t recommend the experience highly enough. ThrillerFest changed my life, and I can’t wait to attend again next year.

To learn more about John, please visit his blog.

By Martha Pound Miller

Martha Pound Miller was born and raised on the Arizona desert. She married an architect, had three children and went on to become the Executive Director of the American Institute of Architects Society in Arizona for 20 years. Writing was always of primary interest but with a family and job, there was never time. Much later came retirement and a decision to move to the cool, wet Pacific Northwest where you could turn over almost any mossy rock and find a writer. Possibly a web-footed one. It does rain a lot in Portland where she lives, but rainy days are great for hunkering down by the fire and writing thrillers, so that’s what she did, running her stories through three critique groups and polishing them to the best of her ability. Each manuscript she wrote got a little stronger and she began to get more courageous about pitching them to agents.

Last year, a friend suggested they go to New York for Thriller/Agent Fest, so they began to make plans. Martha went online and studied the bios and pictures of attending agents, astonished at how many there were. She printed all the Agent Fest information and began the interesting task of reading and rereading the bios to find the best fits for pitching her novel. One face in the crowd of agent photos stood out.  It seemed almost to say, “I’m the One”, so Martha put a double checkmark beside that picture/bio and on Agent Fest day made her way to the table of Marian Young of The Young Agency. Marian asked for a partial, then the whole manuscript, and after a few revisions, invited Martha to be her client.

In addition to college classes in creative writing, after Martha moved to Portland she studied extensively with and was mentored by James N. Frey of “How to Write a Damn Good Novel” and several other writing craft books.  She worked with him for many years, and credits him with teaching her the basics of good commercial fiction. “But if I hadn’t attended Agent Fest, this story would have a very different ending,” she says. “With that many agents in attendance, all looking for thrillers, it was the best thing I could have done for my career. Anyone who is undecided about attending next year, take my advice and go. You won’t be sorry.”

As a journalist and author, I am quite well known in the eastern states of Australia. This is a bit like being a household name in your own house. A couple of years ago, I wrote a thriller, King of the Cross, about the rise and (of course) fall of a Jewish gangster in Sydney. It won the Crime Writers of Australia’s Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction, I optioned the movie rights to a local producer, and assumed I’d quickly become internationally famous. But all that happened was I grew slightly better known in Western Australia.

Agents in the US showed no interest in my work, and didn’t even acknowledge my emails. I was complaining about this to Peter James, whom I met at a writers’ festival in Melbourne, and who had somehow become lost in a city built around one of the most logical gridding systems in the southern hemisphere.

He told me about Thrillerfest, the International Thriller Writers (ITW) conference in New York. I was mildly surprised to learn thriller writers had a conference of their own – although I’d recently shared a ferry ride with a global gathering of proctologists (honestly) so I guess every trade and profession likes to get together once a year and share industry gossip and ass jokes.

Peter described to me an afternoon called “AgentFest”, in which authors without US agents attempt to acquire representation through a process he described as “speed-dating”. (It’s distressing to imagine what the equivalent might be at the proctologists’ conference.)

I persuaded my friend Mark Abernethy, also an Australian thriller-writer, to come with me to New York, which had the predictable consequence of persuading most people we met that all Australian thriller writers were called Mark.

I was mildly surprised to find “speed-dating” wasn’t a metaphor, but a literal description of the event. There were about sixty agents and several hundred un-agented authors, and the writers had to form queues in front of the agent’s desk. On each desk is a digital timer and a bag of lollies. Suitors have exactly three minutes to impress agents with their proposal, after which an alarm sounds and the next hopeful steps up.

I’d imagined only desperate, unattractive, acned, embittered, left-on-the-shelf agents might be into speed-dating, but some of the biggest agents in the US were represented, and we were advised to impress them by wearing a jacket and smart pants. The dress code had to be instituted to prevent authors from arriving dressed as their character, which had apparently happened in previous years, when a writer of westerns – who shouldn’t have been there anyway – turned up in a cowboy outfit.

The other would-be writers had been to workshops earlier in the day to refine their pitches, and been told to reduce them to a single sentence, which should also be a question. The only one I heard was: “What if Dexter was a professor of philosophy who only killed sex offenders?”

I didn’t have a sentence (“What if the Sopranos was a black comedy about Jewish mobsters in post-war Sydney?”) but I had my book, my award and my un-placeable accent. I spoke with eight agents, all of whom asked to see my writing. We were told not to bring our books, but four of the agents requested copies of King of the Cross. Astonishingly, they all read it within days, and each one arranged a meeting with me.

I met with an obviously brilliant agent from Trident Media in a Madison Avenue building. I had to have a security pass made – with my photograph printed on it – just to access the elevator. (By contrast, my much-loved Australian agent doesn’t even have an office). But in the end I chose Yishai Seidman of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner, because he seemed so fantastically enthusiastic about my work and promised to “never, ever give up” trying to sell my books.

I am now signed to the same agency as Patti Smith, Marilyn Manson and Tommy Lee, and even a few people who are known for writing books.

The next night, I went for a celebratory drink with The Other Mark. Now, I’m not as young as I once was – terrifyingly, I’m not even as young as the current first lady – and an evening of mildly irresponsible drinking scraped the skin off my heart and sent darts into my brain.

So I was not particularly receptive when I woke up in my hotel room – how the hell did I get here? – to a phone call from Mark inviting me downstairs for a conference breakfast. But he appealed to my torn and bleeding conscience, so I gathered what remained of my faculties (i.e. nothing) and lumbered towards the lift.

Breakfast, on the other hand, was noisy and packed, and held in honour of a group of first-time authors who had joined ITW. I wanted to go straight back to bed. The waiter brought around coffee. I asked for tea.

Everyone knows Americans can’t make a proper cuppa, so I wasn’t surprised when the tea the waiter poured was pale yellow, or that he didn’t bring me any milk. I asked for milk, with a condescending smile, and the waiter brought over a little jug, because the customer is always right. But when I tipped it into my tea, it instantly congealed into foul little cheesy balls, because that’s what happens when you add milk to camomile tea. I glanced at it, gagged, and ran out of the room. The bloke sitting opposite me, another hungover journalist, made the same mistake and had the same reaction.

After a couple of hours and two pints of Earl Grey tea I was on the mend, which was just as well, since I was supposed to take part in a panel discussion in the afternoon. I was asked to write a short biography for my introduction. After the moderator read out my modest self-description – “…although quite famous in Australia, he is unknown to anyone but his family in the US…” – he moved right along to Karin Slaughter, introducing her with the words, “And now for someone people have heard of…”

Four months later, Yishai hasn’t yet sold my book, and I’m still not famous in the US, although I am rather well known to the good people who run the ITW and who have been enormously supportive of my efforts take over the world.

I’d recommend AgentFest to any thriller writer looking for a US agent. Unless, of course, they’ve actually written a western.

“So you’re going to fly across the country to one of the most expensive cities to attend a pricy conference? What if nothing happens?” a friend asked after I registered for AgentFest.

“I’m going. Something already is happening,” I replied, sensing that his skepticism was geared more toward his stay-in-Los Angeles plans than mine to attend.

I’d been to three other conferences since completing my novel, IN HER SHADOW. And although I benefited from every one, I’d met a grand total of twelve agents, several of whom did not represent thrillers. AgentFest provided an opportunity to “speed date” with rooms full of agents in my genre. (Can we say ‘heaven’???) Considering the stockpile of queries agents routinely receive, I figured any chance to stand out, demonstrate my commitment as an author and bypass the risks of accidental email deletions was worthwhile. Plus, what other opportunity do we have for immediate feedback?

It was costly, so I asked myself this: If you end up landing an agent at this conference, would the airfare, hotel and conference fees be worth it? Absolutely.

Lucky for me, that happened.

Before the two-and-a-half-hour pitch session, I stood in a long line of anxious writers, my heart pounding and palms sweating as though it really was an important first date. Thanks to a suggestion from the ThrillerFest website, I had my one-line, “What if . . .” statement prepared and an armful of information sheets with a synopsis of my novel and my name, photo and contact information.

I pitched to twelve agents and two editors. (Thankfully, my knees stopped shaking after my first.) Thirteen requested materials. About a month later, I received two emails requesting phone calls to discuss representation—one from John Rudolph of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. I knew as soon as I read John’s that I wanted to sign with him; he was my top choice of the twelve. We chatted by phone and I signed a contract the following day.

Even if I hadn’t gained representation, I would not have regretted attending. As writers, we often lead solitary lives. There’s little better than submersing ourselves in a community of others who “get” us—share similar passions and relate to the world through words and stories. You also get a gift bag of books and the opportunity to hear fantastic speakers. In this way, AgentFest beats most every conventional date I’ve been on.

I feel extremely blessed, both to have had the opportunity to attend AgentFest and to be working with agent John Rudolph.

As for my skeptical pal, he’s already signed up for next year.

–August McLaughlin

To learn more about August, please visit her website.

Camp is the author of thirty-one published novels, all of which have appeared, in one format or another, on the New York Times Best-Seller lists. He is also the author of two non-fiction books, one on plastic surgery and one on art. His books have been translated into most European languages, as well as Japanese and Korean.

To learn more about John, please visit his website.

~~~~~

Learn more about John Sandford’s latest book, Shock Wave.

The superstore chain PyeMart has its sights set on a Minnesota river town, but two very angry groups want to stop it: local merchants, fearing for their businesses, and environmentalists, predicting ecological disaster. The protests don’t seem to be slowing the project, though, until someone decides to take matters into his own hands.

The first bomb goes off on the top floor of PyeMart’s headquarters. The second one explodes at the construction site itself. The blasts are meant to inflict maximum damage-and they do. Who’s behind the bombs, and how far will they go? It’s Virgil Flowers’s job to find out… before more people get killed.

Given the incredible insanity of the publishing industry, Coulter thinks the best antidote is a lot of drinking and a big sense of humor.

To learn more about Catherine, please visit her website.

~~~~~
Catherine Coulter is the author of 65 novels, including 59 New York Times bestsellers. She earned her reputation writing historical romances. Over a decade ago she added suspense thrillers to her repertoire– with great success. The Cove, the first book in her bestselling “FBI Suspense Thriller Series” spent nine weeks on the New York Times list and has to date sold almost 2 million copies. The Maze, which was reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly as “gripping enough to establish Coulter firmly in this genre,” was Coulter’s first book to land on the Times hardcover bestsellers list. Since then, she has lived up to that promise with ten additional back-to-back bestselling FBI thrillers, including The Target, The Edge, Riptide, Hemlock Bay, Eleventh Hour, Blindside, Blowout, Point Blank, Double Take, Tailspin, Knockout, and two omnibus editions: The Beginning and Double Jeopardy. This summer will see the release of the latest in the FBI series WHIPLASH.

Coulter’s first novel, The Autumn Countess, was published at the end of 1978. She chose a Regency romance for her debut because, says Coulter, “as any published author will tell you, it’s best to limit the unknowns in a first book, and not only had I grown up reading Georgette Heyer, but I earned my M.A. degree in 19th century European History.” Following The Autumn Countess, Coulter wrote six more Regency romances. In 1982 she published her first long historical, Devil’s Embrace. She has continued to write long historicals, interspersing them with hardcover contemporary novels, beginning with False Pretenses in 1988.

Coulter lives with her physician husband in Marin County, California. She grew up in a horse ranch in Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas and received her graduate degree at Boston College. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, she worked on Wall Street as a speech writer. Catherine loves to travel and ski, reads voraciously, and has a reputation for telling jokes, believing the publishing business is too crazy not to laugh.

To learn more about Richard, please visit his website.

~~~~~

Enjoy Richard North Patterson’s extended biography:

Richard North Patterson graduated in 1968 from Ohio Wesleyan University and has been awarded their Distinguished Achievement Citation. He is a 1971 graduate of the Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law, and a recipient of their President’s Award for Distinguished Alumni. He has served as an assistant attorney general for the state of Ohio; a trial attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco; and was the SEC’s liaison to the Watergate special prosecutor. More recently, Patterson was a partner in the San Francisco office of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, now Bingham-McCutchen. In 1993, he retired from the practice of law to devote himself to writing. He has served on the boards of his undergraduate and law schools, the National Partnership for Women and Families, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, PEN Center West, and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and was chairman of Common Cause, the grassroots citizens’ lobby founded by John Gardner.

Patterson studied fiction writing with Jesse Hill Ford at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; his first short story was published in The Atlantic Monthly and his first novel, The Lasko Tangent, won an Edgar Allen Poe Award in 1979. Between 1981 and 1985, he published The Outside Man, Escape the Night, and Private Screening. His first novel in eight years, Degree of Guilt (1993), and his Eyes of a Child (1995) were combined into a miniseries by NBC TV. Both were international bestsellers, and Degree of Guilt was awarded the French Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere in 1995. Caroline Masters (originally published as The Final Judgment , 1995), Silent Witness (1997), No Safe Place (1998), and Dark Lady (1999) all became immediate international bestsellers. Protect and Defend (2000), about the controversial nomination of the first woman to be chief justice and her entanglement in an incendiary lawsuit regarding late-term abortion and parental consent, became Patterson’s seventh consecutive international bestseller and received a Maggie Award from Planned Parenthood for its treatment of issues regarding reproductive rights.

Balance of Power confronted one of America’s most divisive political and social issues—gun violence—and was chosen by USA Today as its book-of-the-month selection for November 2003. Conviction (2005) focused on the law and politics of capital punishment. Exile (2007) dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was nominated for South Africa’s leading literary award. The Race (2007) concerned a dramatic campaign for president and was Patterson’s eleventh consecutive New York Times bestseller. Eclipse (2009) deals with human rights, Africa, and the geopolitics of oil. The Spire, is a psychological suspense novel that deals with race relations on a college campus. In the Name of Honor is about the high cost of war and secrets. His latest, The Devil’s Light is about an Al Quada nuclear plot and the CIA officer racing to prevent the destruction of a major Western city.

Patterson has appeared on such shows as Today, Good Morning America, The CBS Morning Show, Inside Politics, Washington Journal, Buchanan and Press, Greta Van Susteren, and Hardball. His articles on politics, literature, and law have been published in the London Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News. A frequent speaker on political, legal, and social issues, in 2004 Patterson spoke at Washington, D.C., rallies in support of reproductive rights and against gun violence. His papers are collected by Boston University.

Ann Rule

To learn more about Ann, please visit her website.

~~~~~

Learn more about Ann’s latest book, In the Still of the Night.

FROM TRUE-CRIME LEGEND ANN RULE comes this riveting story of a young woman whose life ended too soon—and a determined mother’s eleven-year crusade to clear her daughter’s name.

It was nine days before Christmas 1998, and thirty-two-year-old Ronda Reynolds was getting ready to travel from Seattle to Spokane to visit her mother and brother and grandmother before the holidays. Ronda’s second marriage was dissolving after less than a year, her career as a pioneering female Washington State Trooper had ended, but she was optimistic about starting over again. “I’m actually looking forward to getting on with my life,” she told her mother earlier the night before. “I just need a few days with you guys.” Barb Thompson, Ronda’s mother, who had met her daughter’s second husband only once before, was just happy that Ronda was coming home.

At 6:20 that morning, Ron Reynolds called 911 and told the dispatcher his wife was dead. She had committed suicide, he said, although he hadn’t heard the gunshot and he didn’t know if she had a pulse. EMTs arrived, detectives arrived, the coroner’s deputy arrived, and a postmortem was conducted. Lewis County Coroner Terry Wilson, who neither visited the death scene nor attended the autopsy, declared the manner of Ronda’s death as “undetermined.” Over the next eleven years, Coroner Wilson would change that manner of death from “undetermined” to “suicide,” back to “undetermined”—and then back to “suicide” again.

But Barb Thompson never for one moment believed her daughter committed suicide. Neither did Detective Jerry Berry or ballistics expert Marty Hayes or attorney Royce Ferguson or dozens of Ronda’s friends. For eleven grueling years, through the ups and downs of the legal system and its endless delays, these people and others helped Barb Thompson fight to strike that painful word from her daughter’s death certificate.

On November 9, 2009, a precedent-setting hearing was held to determine whether Coroner Wilson’s office had been derelict in its duty in investigating the death of Ronda Reynolds. Veteran true-crime writer Ann Rule was present at that hearing, hoping to unbraid the tangled strands of conflicting statements and mishandled evidence and present all sides of this haunting case and to determine, perhaps, what happened to Ronda Reynolds, in the chill still of that tragic December night.

To learn more about Lee Child, please visit his website.

We hope you enjoy the video: Five Questions With Lee Child