Well I just finished doing my annual planning for the year, and it’s been a great year personally and professionally. As I said in my last post from about a year ago, I have an agent! In the fall of 2021 Elisa Saphier from MacGregor and Luedecke agreed to take my character-driven book Sugarbug to market. And as I look forward to 2023, I wanted to pause and sing her praises.
Elisa works hard for her clients. She put together an excellent package that took an obviously difficult manuscript—not that many editors would even consider a pandemic book—and got us some great results. The book has yet to sell. (Yes my friends, even after you take years to get an agent, it can take years to actually sell a book. If you want to be a writer, learn to run marathons, not sprints.) But over the course of the year she continued to find new editors that would be a good fit for my work. When I wanted to give up, she didn’t, insisting that we were getting a significant amount of positive feedback. In fact, she’s back at it again here in January with a new list of editors. Clearly, she believes in my book. That’s all I can ask.
Another reason I love my agent is that she communicates well. I get short monthly updates regarding what she’s sent out in the last month and what she plans to send out next month. All of that communication has kept me from going crazy or diving into the conspiratorial defensive parts of my mind. (Trust no one!) Elisa’s communication also extends far beyond just telling me about her hard work on my behalf, she also is an excellent first reader for my manuscripts. In both Surgarbug, where she was a formal beta reader even before she became my agent, and in my work in progress, Elisa’s instincts have been superb. Recently she kept insisting that I needed a different opening scene for my work in progress. I didn’t really agree because I really loved my darling. Well sure enough I eventually wrote myself into a corner and spent yesterday crafting the scene Elisa said the book needed.
Finally, Elisa Saphier cares about books and authors. I once asked her years ago, when she owned a bookstore, “why books?” She looked at me with heat almost bordering on anger and said, “Books save lives.” In books we human beings find that we are not alone. We find that there is a better perspective than our own. We learn to love people who behave strangely to our eyes. Elisa Saphier knows this to her very core. She and I come from very different places in the world. I am a mostly straight-hetero-white-cis-male who still clings to some semblance of his childhood faith, though most of my family worry about my soul. She is an atheist lesbian, who grew up Jewish. She has every right to dismiss me, to declare the package too dangerous, too deluded by privilege and circumstance to be worth her time, but I have never seen her do that to anyone. Instead, Elisa Saphier makes me feel seen and she draws the best of me into my work. I don’t know what else you could ask for in an agent.
The good news for any of you fans is that I hope to have another manuscript to Elisa by the end of the year if not the first quarter of next year. All the Little Cuts and Disappointments (working title), centers on a man who comes home to find his wife having an affair with their evangelical pastor. Similar to Sugarbug the book tells the story of a hetero marriage in crisis and what it takes for a couple to see each other eye to eye. I’m looking forward to getting it in your hands someday. One thing I know, there is no one I would want more as a midwife to those efforts than Elisa Saphier