Your Antennae
Trust your tuner, people. What is your tuner? It’s your antennae. You’ve got one, you know, and you’ve absolutely got to listen to it. It’s your first and best tool, aside from what editorial writers like to call “common sense”, for writing and publishing. I just finished looking at an interview I did recently with Heather Barbieri, the edited version of which will appear in our September issue. Hers is not an unusual story. She needed an agent (a new one actually, as her old one had stopped representing fiction) and so set about her search, which involved scanning through listings on agentquery.com. When she saw her eventual agent’s name, Heather for some reason thought to herself, “She might be the one.” And indeed she was. The agent took her on one day after receiving the query and sold her novel a week later. Talk about a good antennae.
But what is doubly interesting about this story is that when she began her search, friends – and by that I mean published writer friends – had recommended various agents to her. Conventional wisdom says, start with recommendations. But she had the idea that these recommended agents weren’t right. Whether they were or not, she certainly found an agent who knew how to sell her book.
You’ve got to trust your antennae. To be sure, in the beginning stages of your publishing career you won’t have the opportunity to meet face to face a lot of the people you’ll have to deal with. So listen closely. I understand that for some folks intuition on this level seems like so much transcendental hocus-pocus. Fair enough. But I have spoken with so many writers who have talked about information “coming to them” both for their books and when searching for a publisher.
So trust the antennae. Because it’s really just a muscle. And the more you trust it, the stronger it becomes.