Hemingway and Agency Agreements

Hooray Hemingwaywantabes- you have discovered a literary agent who wants to represent your book. Count the blessings for this is a key step to taking your book idea to publication as outlined in How to Become a Published Author: A to Z as noted in the above chapter listings. (Remember – you may print or download the book free of charge.)

So, what does an author/agency legal agreement look like? Here is a sample agreement for your information. There may be differences with the one offered you, but this gives you the basics.

Sample Agent Agreement With Legal Tips

(Tips—If you are offered a literary agent agreement, hire a competent entertainment lawyer. He or she can best represent your interests. Regardless, familiarizing yourself with the basic outline of an agent agreement can be helpful.)

Representation Agreement

This letter of agreement will confirm the arrangement between us by which you have appointed Scarborough Literary Agency as your exclusive agent in the sale, lease, license, and/or other disposition of literary and related rights to any and all works penned by you during the term of this agreement.

(Standard language detailing the representation during a defined period.)

You understand such appointment to cover the active marketing throughout the world of all your literary rights, including but not limited to, publishing, motion pictures, electronic, stage, radio, television, recording rights, and generally to advise you professionally.

(Details specifics of representation. Tip—Keep language as specific as possible to avoid confusion. The clause, “Generally to advise you professionally”—should be left out if possible.)

Scarborough Literary Agency will actively market and represent your best interests to the best of its ability utilizing its contacts throughout the entertainment industry. The agency will not enter into an agreement on your behalf without your written consent.

(Provides language requiring agency to act in your best interest, but restricts their ability to enter into agreements without your having final approval. Tip—This latter language is essential to protecting you

against acts by agent that are adverse to your interests.)

You agree that Scarborough Agency will collect for you revenues due from the marketing of any and all works covered by this agreement. Said revenues will be forwarded to you within fifteen days of receipt by the agency.

(This language authorizes your agent to act as your depository for monies earned. Tip—Learn when the reporting periods are for your publishers and be certain to check as to whether revenues are due.)

In consideration of Scarborough Agency’s representation, it will retain a fifteen percent commission of all revenues collected in the United States of America and twenty percent of all revenues collected from foreign sources.

(Standard fees for literary representation. Tip—Attempt to include the word “gross” as in gross revenues so there is no doubt of the amount

being commissioned. Tip—When dealing with theatrical agencies, the commission will be ten percent.)

When marketing your literary work, Scarborough Agency will incur certain out-of-pocket expenses including photocopying, postage, messengers, and overnight courier services. You agree to reimburse the agency for said expenses within ten days of billing. Any other expenses must be approved by you in advance. Scarborough Agency agrees to keep all expenses to a minimum.

(Specifies your responsibility to pay for out-of-pocket expenses. Tip—Insert “under one hundred dollars” after the word “expenses” in line four. This protects you against excessive overruns.)

This agreement is effective as of the date both parties have signed below. It will continue to be valid for a period of one year unless cancelled by either party with sixty days written notice.

(Details term of agreement. Tip—Stay away from any agreement longer than one year. Also—watch for language that continues agreement indefinitely subject to one party or the other canceling.)

Regardless of the cancellation by either party to this agreement, Scarborough Agency will continue its representation and collection of revenues for all works initiated or completed during the term of representation.

(Standard language protecting agency after cancellation of agreement. Tip—If possible, limit collection of revenue to five years.)

This agreement is binding under the laws of the State of ______. All parties agree that in the event of dispute, the matter shall be subject to arbitration under the auspices of the American Arbitration Association.

(Specifies mechanism for legal matters. Tip—Attempt to designate your state as venue.)

Agreed to by all parties designated below this ___ day of ____, ____.

____________

Maude Bonderbast, President Scarborough Literary Agency

____________

Author

Hemingway and Anatomy of a Murder

There is no absolute proof Ernest Hemingway ever read the classic book, Anatomy of a Murder, but I will bet he did. Published during the 1940s, this exceptional novel was the forerunner of all legal novels that followed. Such prolific writers as John Grisham, Scott Turow, James Patterson, etc. should tip their cap to John Voelker, the author who wrote under the pen name of Robert Traver.

Perhaps you have seen the splendid film of the same name starring James Stewart, Lee Remick, George C. Scott, and Ben Gazzara, one of the few book to film ideas that ever truly lived up to its billing. The courtroom scenes are magnificent as Stewart, whom I knew in the mid-1980s, tries to convince a jury that Gazzara’s character should be excused for killing a bar owner who raped his wife based on the defense of insanity.

The lesson to be learned through this classic, Hemingwaywantabes, is not only how to write a terrific novel, but that belief in a book and the ability to never give up are the necessary ingredients to having it published. Voelker/Traver sent the manuscript to many publishers, all of whom turned it down. But remember, it only takes one to say “yes,” and in this case, an editor at St. Martin’s Press saw the worthiness of the book, and after some severe editing, accepted it for publication. Otherwise Anatomy of a Murder might never have been published and a great novel would have been thrown in the waste basket.

As I like to say, when doubt occurs, keep the faith, you never know when a miracle might be right around the corner. Patience and perseverance are the keys. Never give up.

Hemingway and Book Promotion

Okay, Hemingwaywantabes, for those who who want to know how to promote your damn book once you have written it, here’s the scoop.

If your publishing company funds the promotional campaign, you will gain needed exposure by working with them on a publicity campaign. If the publishing company can’t fund the campaign, or if you are traditionally self-published, consider expending funds to cover promotional costs. Outstanding public relations companies exist, but make certain they specialize in book promotion. Ask for references and copies of public relations campaigns they have designed for other authors or poets. This is also true with regard to those who will assist you with an internet campaign to promote your book. Have them send you a kit outlining exactly what they are going to do and how much it will cost.

Regardless of who is funding the promotional campaign, you must be clever to promote the book through any means possible. The saying, “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” is most appropriate. This includes all the internet possibilities including having a website, a blog, multiple blogs, You Tube, Facebook, etc. Email announcements and newsletter exposure also will help your cause.

One author who splashed onto the national scene through self-promotion was Terry McMillan. When Mama, her first novel was published in 1987, she handled the marketing and promotion for her book. She forwarded hundreds of letters to African-American organizations requesting them to promote the book.

McMillan contacted bookstores with requests for book signings. Her efforts resulted in appearances and readings across the country. Mama was a moderate success, but when Disappearing Acts, her second book, was released, additional recognition occurred. In 1992, Waiting To Exhale became a bestseller. Four years later, How Stella Got Her Groove Back proved McMillan, the self-promoter, was a literary star.

To circulate interest about your book, keep an “address book” listing every friend and acquaintance since childhood. When book signings or other promotional appearances are scheduled, mail invitations to everyone in the area you know. You will form a group of loyal readers who will purchase future books.

Free publicity is the author or poet’s best friend. Convince magazines or newspapers to print an excerpt from the book. To gain exposure, telephone radio shows, contact libraries to schedule readings, and work through local writer’s centers. Public speaking also provides the opportunity to promote the book.

Author or poet Internet websites are a must in the twenty-first century. Designing them has become an art form, and there are multiple companies available to assist the writer. How fancy the site is depends on your pocketbook, but you can promote your book online to enhance sales opportunities.

To further publicize a book, consider creating a full-color flyer, brochure, or a “One-Sheet” (book cover on one side—descriptive material about the book on the other). Postcards displaying the book cover can be forwarded to media outlets, prospective purchasers of the book, and friends.

Publicizing a book not yet in the bookstores is the kiss of death. If buyers interested in the book based on media exposure visit the store and the book is unavailable, chances are they will not return to buy it. Make certain the publisher and the bookstores coordinate stocking the book at least a month before the promotional campaign begins. If you decide to self-publish, consider handling the matter yourself.

Double-checking everything about your book signing is essential until the day it occurs. Make sure media exposure is secure and check the store a week or two before your book signing to see if posters are on the front window and displayed throughout the store. Most bookstores employ “community relations” managers to handle book signings, but they have many other duties. Good communication is a key to assurance that your book signing will be a success.

Regardless of how many books you sell at the book signing, request the opportunity, if it is not offered, to sign multiple books to be stocked in the store. Most stores do this as a courtesy, but publishers relish this opportunity since a signed book cannot be returned to them. This also applies to self-published authors or poets guaranteeing that you will be paid for the books left at the store.

If you are self-published, negotiate your share of the cover price with the bookstore. Splitting the revenue is fair, but many stores will permit you to keep as much as 70 percent.

If you appear for a book signing at a library or not-for-profit organization, consider donating a portion of the cover price. This promotes goodwill.

Most important, remember that you are your own best salesperson, and you believe in your book and its message more than anyone. So get busy, hemingwaywantabes – promote, promote, promote!!!

Hemingway and Outlines

This morning I talked with an aspiriing writer Hemingwaywantabes, and first bit of advice I gave her was to sketch out an outline whether it’s on a torn napkin, a yellow sheet of paper, or the computer. Just a few potential chapter headings will do along with perhaps three or four lines describing the proposed content. This is a great starting point since while the initial outline may not be the final one, the book starts to take shape.

A common mistake aspiring authors and poets make is to begin writing before they prepare an outline. Whether the genre is long fiction, non-fiction, short stories, or magazine articles, a roadmap of some sort is essential. Working without an outline is akin to a builder starting construction without blueprints.

Many fiction and poetry writers swear that preparation of an outline inhibits the creative process. They insist the story flows best if they have no preconceived idea where creative thoughts will lead. This process can be effective for seasoned writers, but beginners should consider preparing at least a “mental outline,” if not a written one, to guide organization of the text.

An outline doesn’t have to be formal. I scribbled the outline for one of my books on folded sheets of torn paper while awaiting the arrival of a playwright in Mill Valley, California. Within a few minutes, the backbone of the book was created. Since then, revisions have been made to embellish the text, but the outline has never varied.

An outline should be well defined. Meat from the bones of the outline—manuscript text—will flow more freely when you have an established direction. This requires a clear understanding of the message to be conveyed through the story. Accomplishing this goal will take time and considerable thought.

Jeffrey Deaver, author of the best-selling Bone Collector, is an advocate of outlines. “I sit down with a very rough concept of the story,” he stated, “and then over the next eight months, I do a very elaborate outline . . . That’s my full-time job doing the outline for six or seven days, eight to ten hours a day.”

Once the outline is completed, Deaver permits it to settle in a manner similar “. . . to the ritual with baking a cake.” “You let things solidify,” he explains, “and then you go back and look at it.”

Outline forms vary, but the standard practice is to utilize chapter headings with abbreviated text describing the chapter content. The chapter headings will become chapter titles when the book is completed. They provide readers with a guide to the text.

The outline will dictate the means by which the story unfolds, whether in chronological order or through other storytelling alternatives. Never forget the reader demands entertainment, excitement, and information unavailable anywhere else. The last thing you can afford is to be boring, confusing, or predictable.

The Prologue, if there is one, or the first chapter if there is no Prologue, must be strong enough to hook the reader. When considering storytelling alternatives, determine the most compelling moments within your anticipated text. They may occur in the initial stages of the story, in the middle, or toward the end. This text should be the leadoff man, so to speak, the foot soldier to set up the remainder of the book. Potential purchasers may turn to the Prologue and/or Chapter One to check the beginning of the story. If they’re hooked, the book is sold.

Teasing readers with an episode of the story without revealing the entire mix of events or characters has proven successful for many authors. To determine if that style will suffice for you, test it. Consider providing just enough information to hook the reader. Once the material is fashioned, begin the story in chronological order and move forward. Flashbacks are said to be the work of the lazy man, but millions of authors have utilized this mechanism.

Creative revision of the outline, again and again, will produce a solid foundation upon which a successful novel or work of non-fiction can be built. Patience and hard work pays off.

Like fiction writers, many poets view preparation of an outline as akin to blasphemy. They say the words simply flow, and the creative process would be blocked if they took the time to outline their intended message. If this is the case, then there is no need to labor over the blueprint for the poem. But many poets also swear that by jotting down a few thoughts about the intended poem, they may organize their thoughts to better stay on course.

Outlines are one of theauthor or poet’s best friends. Good friends.

Hemingway and Storytelling

Hemingwaywantabes, never forget that competent authors are superb storytellers. While reading the classics, note how the canonized authors weave a story. Whether the choice is fiction or non-fiction, the story must be clear, have a good beginning, middle, and end, and never be boring. Reading well-written books helps you realize how others have accomplished the feat. In On Writing, Stephen King states:

Good writing . . . teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. A novel like Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good, old-fashioned jealousy—I’ll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand—but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing . . . is a part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

In Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott, the author presents an interesting strategy regarding fiction storytelling. Lamott quotes Alice Adams from a lecture about short story writing. The excerpt reads:

[Alice] said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know whom these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot – the drama, the actions, the tension – will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what they are left with, what happened, and what did it mean.

Fiction writers can learn from Scott Turow, author of several bestsellers, including Presumed Innocent. An excerpt reads:

The atomized life of the restaurant spins on about us. At separate tables, couples talk; the late-shift workers dine alone; the waitresses pour coffee. And here sits Rusty Sabich, thirty-nine years old, full of lifelong burdens and workaday fatigue. I tell my son to drink his milk. I nibble at my burger. Three feet away is the woman whom I have said I’ve loved for nearly twenty years, making her best efforts to ignore me.

Besides being a terrific storyteller, character description was Jack Kerouac’s specialty. An excerpt of On The Road reads:

He was a gray, nondescript-looking fellow you wouldn’t notice on the street, unless you looked closer and saw his mad, bony skull with its strange youthfulness – a Kansas minister with exotic, phenomenal fires and mysteries. He had studied medicine in Vienna; had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling to his life’s work, which was the study of things themselves in the streets of life and the night.

In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, author Dai Sijie sweeps the reader into his novel portraying life during China’s Cultural Revolution. An excerpt reads:

The room served as shop, workplace, and dining room all at once. The floorboards were grimy and streaked with yellow-and-black gobs of dried spittle left by clients. You could tell they were not washed down daily. There were hangers with finished garments suspended on a string across the middle of the room. The corners were piled high with bolts of material and folded clothes, which were under siege from an army of ants.

Providing a good beginning, middle, and end to a story by doing so with each paragraph provides excellent storytelling. In Down and Out In London and Paris, George Orwell presents a worthy example. The excerpt reads:

The Jew delivered the cocaine the same day, and promptly vanished. And meanwhile, as was not surprising after the fuss Roucolle had made, the affair had been noised all over the quarter. The very next morning the hotel was raided and searched by the police.

While Woody Allen may be better known for his comedic films, one of his books, Without Feathers, is a classic. A short stories he weaves is called The Whore Of Mensa, a great “what-if” detailing one man’s search for intellectual companionship instead of the usual sexual gratification. An excerpt reads:

One thing about being a private investigator, you’ve got to learn to go with your hunches. That’s why when a quivering pat of butter named Word Babcock walked into my office and laid his cards on the table, I should have trusted the cold chill that shot up my spine.

“Kaiser,” he said. “Kaiser Lupowitz?”

“That’s what it says on my license,” I owned up.

“You’ve got to help me. I’m being blackmailed. Please.”

He was shaking like the lead singer in a rumba band. I pushed a glass across the desktop and a bottle of rye I keep handy for non-medicinal purposes.

“Suppose you relax and tell me all about it.”

In the non-fiction bestseller Seabiscuit, author Laura Hillenbrand captures the reader’s attention by providing visual and dramatic scenes propelling the reader into the middle of the action. An excerpt reads:

A minute later the field bent around the far turn and rushed at the grandstand. There was one horse in front and pouring it on. His silks were red. It was Seabiscuit. The crowd roared. Pollard [the jockey] and Seabiscuit glided down the lane all by themselves, reaching the wire in track-record-equaling time. Kayak was right behind them. It was Pollard’s first win since 1938.

Storytelling – the key to any good writing. Tell a good story and readers will come.