University of Arkansas Athletes Help Launch Beanies, Ball Caps, and Being Bald

Arkansas Razorback basketball players Rylee Langerman and Jordan Walsh who both have alopecia help launch Beanies book

We are so grateful to Razorback Women’s Basketball player Rylee Langerman and Razorback Men’s Basketball player Jordan Walsh for standing beside Matthew Shelby to help launch Beanies, Ball Caps, and Being Bald: Different Isn’t Bad, Different Is Just Different on Sunday, October 1 at the University of Arkansas Student Athlete Success Center. Fellow alopecian and Arkansas Razorbacks Football player Landon Jackson was present in spirit. It was so meaningful that these athletes took time out of their busy schedules to share the message of Beanies and give kiddos and adults alike someone to look to for inspiration!

Is This Publishing Agent Legit? A Checklist for Agent Legitimacy

Photo portrait of Et Alia owner/publisher Erin Wood with a pink affect applied and a graphic reading: Ask the Publisher: Is this agent legit?

A law firm recently hired me to help with a client situation. In a nutshell, I needed to determine whether an agent offer to their client was legit so she could determine whether or not to sign the contract the agency sent her. Because for many writers there is a veil of mystery surrounding how agents work, I thought it would be helpful to share:

  1. A checklist to help you figure out if an agent or agency is legitimate;

  2. Reliable ways to find a legitimate agent. (Whether the agent is a good fit for you needs a separate conversation!); and

  3. More details about this particular situation that could help others avoid bad actors.

Checklist for Agent Legitimacy

  • Website

    • Having a good one is a given.

    • Site includes proper grammar.

    • Nothing should stand out as odd on site such claiming to sell rights to all the big studios but just saying “Netflix etc.” rather than listing them. Items should be listed and will likely be linked.

    • Site probably will include a list of clients/authors/books and you can easily follow the chain. These may be listed under individual bios.

    • Agency has bios that you can read and things check out on LinkedIn or you can find those people elsewhere on the internet. They should be highly visible. Think about it. Selling books is how they make their money. Why wouldn’t they want to brag on the biggest projects they’ve represented (so that they can convince more authors of their skill and more publishers that they have a nose for the next big thing) and make themselves as easy as possible to discover by authors and publishers?

  • The standard agency fee is 15% of the selling price so they shouldn’t ask for anything up front (e.g. those agents asking reading fees are not legitimate)

  • Although there are exceptions (see below), generally you will be reaching out to them with a query letter versus them reaching out to you

  • The first contract they send you is for representation by the agency. It should be called something like “Offer of Representation.” You are hiring them, so you have to agree to be represented by them before they begin acting on your behalf by shopping your manuscript to publishers (and hopefully selling it to one!). In other words, they wouldn’t start by sending you a contract with a publisher name.

 

Tips for Finding a Legitimate Agent

  • First ask: Do I need an agent? Small press? Rarely if ever. Medium and large presses? Likely. You can look at the “submissions” tab on the site of your desired publishers’ sites to see what their rules are on unagented submissions.

  • See the current year’s Writers Market and/or Guide to Literary Agents (the “gold standard” for decades, these books are available for purchase most anywhere books are sold)

  • Look at free Literary Agent listing on the Poets & Writers site: https://www.pw.org/literary_agents

  • Select books in your genre that are similar to yours, read the acknowledgments, and look up the agent that is most likely listed there with a generous dose of thanks

  • Agent(s) may contact you after you have a piece published via a well-known outlet to see if you are working on a book manuscript. If this is the case, be sure that all of the above on the legitimacy list checks out before you reply.

The Situation I Was Hired to Sort

An agency called Inkstone Literary contacted the firm’s author client by phone, saying that they had come across and believed in her self-published book and wanted to connect her to a larger publisher and help her sell movie rights. After the phone call, the caller sent a follow-up email that had his name in the signature line. Another person called from the same agency and invited the author to come to New York where they were located. She declined to travel. They sent her a contract titled “Pre-Acquisition Publishing Agreement” that featured the Macmillan logo.

Seems like an exciting situation! But was it real? Here’s how I figured out that it wasn’t legit:

  • The contract was purportedly from Macmillan. It didn’t make sense to me that the parent company Macmillan would issue a contract versus the contract being with one of the publishers under its umbrella, but I wasn’t certain. What definitely didn’t make sense is why an agency would be asking the writer to sign a contract with a publisher when the writer hadn’t even signed a contract with the agency hiring them as her agent! If they were legitimate, they would first send her an offer of representation and the terms of representation (length of contract period, percentage of sale price that would go to agent, etc.). Only then with that contract signed would they be able to legally act as the writer’s agent and sell her book to a publisher. Also, when I looked at the signature line, the supposed “VP of Acquisitions” for Macmillan was not findable on the Macmillan site or LinkedIn. (Eventually, I’d get an email back from the Macmillan compliance department reinforcing what I pretty much knew: fake.)

  • The website didn’t show any bios or any people behind the organization.

  • The website’s grammar was wonky in places.

  • The agency address on the email was different than the agency address on the website and the phone number was not in the same location as either of the addresses (not necessarily damning in and of itself, but when taken as a whole it adds to the evidence).

  • The site claimed they had helped 300+ books to become New York Times bestsellers yet none of the supposedly bestselling projects are linked. They even have videos! But once searched, the books have few if any Amazon reviews and are hardly the big deals claimed.

  • The agency is listed on the Writer Beware site. Writer Beware’s mission is to track, expose, and raise awareness of the prevalence of fraud and other questionable activities in and around the publishing industry.

Of course, this is massively disappointing for any writer. But in good news, they were outed as fakes so she didn’t sign anything or get further taken advantage of.

I’m checking with the writer whether it is okay to share this bad actor’s business name, so stay tuned!

Invitation to Intimacy Launch at the Home of Writer Elizabeth Shores

 
 

Is intimacy worth the risk?

Attendees pondered the answer at the warm launch reception for Judy Tiesel-Jensen’s Invitation to Intimacy: What the Marriage of Two Couples Therapists Reveals About Risk, Transformation, and the Astonishing Healing Power of Intimacy. Held at the Maumelle home of writer Elizabeth Shores, the reading felt like a return to the meaningful and inspiring events that our literary community has missed during the pandemic. We are deeply thankful to Elizabeth and her husband, Buddy, for so generously opening their home for the launch.

A biographer, Shore’s latest book is Shared Secrets: The Queer World of Newberry Medalist Charles J. Finger, published by University of Arkansas Press. For nearly a century, British expatriate Charles Joseph Finger (1867–1941) was best known as an award-winning author of children’s literature. In Shared Secrets, Elizabeth Findley Shores relates Finger’s untold story, exploring the secrets that connected the author to an international community of twentieth-century queer literati. Shared Secrets is both the story of Finger’s remarkable, adventurous life and a rare look at a community of gay writers and artists who helped shaped twentieth-century American culture, even as they artfully concealed their own identities.

About Invitation to Intimacy, Shores says:

“Judy Tiesel-Jensen brings the laser-pointer empathy she demonstrates in person to this memoir of marriage and loss, revealing how much she understands about how we all sometimes suffer. From a cliff-hanger opening to the final tender scenes, Invitation to Intimacy is a relatable book that the reader will not soon forget. It is a book for couples, for other marriage and family therapists, and for anyone who feels the urge to write her own story. Why, after all, do any of us write memoirs? To preserve those feelings? To ask the universe for forgiveness? To be remembered when no one who knew us is still alive? For all of those reasons, Judy Tiesel-Jensen has shown us that love doesn’t die.”
— Elizabeth Findley Shores, author of Shared Secrets: The Queer World of Newbery Medalist Charles J. Finger and other biographies