Re: ST Comments I love it!
Paul Anderson, you are a miserable pismire, and a liar, and not nearly as literate as you ought to be if you're going to strut the way you do. "Qualified to give one wit of an asses opinion"? Man, you've got to keep better track of your words.
Victoria's outed you. You're an associate of the crooks who run the S. T. Literary Agency, formerly Sydra Technique, which suggests unpleasant things about you. You're self-published, which suggests unpleasant things about your "agents". Your books have received some of the most flatly deprecatory Amazon reviews I've ever seen, and the Amazon aftermarket prices for them range all the way from forty cents to a buck fifty-seven.
According to your own website, your latest book, The Future of Customer Service, "...is now available for your marketing and promotional use." The site goes on:<blockquote>INCLUDED WITH YOUR ORDER:<blockquote>•Custom imprinted cover with “Courtesy of your company name”.
•Custom Cover printed in company logo color.
•Two (2) page executive introduction for your company.
•Back cover url direct and sponsor note.</blockquote>Custom chapters and papers available.</blockquote>Which is to say, it's one of those corporate giveaways nobody ever reads. You sure are the big cheese, you betcha.
You came here to tell promotional lies on behalf of ST, which as Sydra Technique has a long history as a ripoff operation. I'm not saying they couldn't sell a literary property if someone held a gun to their heads, but I'm thinking it real loud. Sydra's been defrauding would-be authors for years, taking in quite substantial amounts of money but racking up few or no real sales.
I'll give you this much: you're a sleek liar. "What's the difference," you ask,<blockquote>"between a writer paying for a class to learn how to market their work and paying a company like ST to actually do much of the same thing? Different purposes, same result."</blockquote>It could almost sound reasonable. It's nothing of the sort. First, no honest agent works that way. Second, a class in "marketing your work" wouldn't turn anyone into an agent. Third, marketing techniques aren't what an author needs from an agent, nor what an agent employs on an author's behalf. Fourth, someone who pays to take a class has a fighting chance of being able to tell whether the lesson is pure gobbledegook. More to the point, he can tell whether the teacher shows up or not.
Some general remarks:
An author never sees an agent work. On any given day, an agent might be working their tail off, or they might be doing nothing. From the author's point of view, those days would look identical. I've known agents -- the real kind, not the ST kind -- to work long and hard trying to sell a book that, in the end, just didn't sell. What they took back to their client was the same thing a scam agent would tell their clients: "I've sent it out to this, that, and the other publisher. They didn't want it." In both cases, the author's disappointed. So is the real agent, because he's out all that work and he hasn't made a penny off it.
This is, by the way, one of the things that keeps honest agents honest about their assessments of a book's chances: the agent takes the hit along with the author. If you've been rejected by an agency, it's not necessarily because they think you're without talent, or they hated your book. Sometimes it means they don't handle that kind of book. More often, it means they're sufficiently uncertain about the book's commercial prospects that they don't want to risk the investment of time and effort they'd put into trying to sell it.
But a scam agent is under no such constraints, because the author is doing the paying, and the author will pay whether or not the book sells. I never cease to be amazed at vanity publishers and scam agents who profess their big-hearted willingness to "take a chance" on unknown writers. The one thing these guys aren't doing, ever, is taking a chance. Real agents and real publishers take chances all the time.
A lot of work goes into a real agent placing a book with a real publisher, but it doesn't take a lot of work to not-sell one. Aspiring authors tend to see agenting solely in terms of selling their books, because that's the breakthrough they're currently focused on, but a great deal of a real agent's daily work is done on behalf of books and authors that are already under contract. A book that doesn't sell is ever so much less trouble by comparison, aside from the "not getting paid" part; and scam agents have figured out how to get past that little catch.
I've read slush. I've seen roughly two-point-five bazillion submissions from scam agents. Of course, those are the ones who bother to submit the manuscript. They could just as well skip that stage with some of their clients' manuscripts. They know the things aren't going to sell, or would if they read them. Maybe they do read them. You couldn't prove it by the people who open the packages at the other end.
The inexperienced or self-made scam agents put all kinds of goofy stuff into their submissions -- marketing plans, author photos, cover suggestions, sales copy. So do the ones who've had the idea of selling additional "marketing services" to their clients. But most long-term pro scammers' submissions are utterly perfunctory. All that other marketing claptrap means you have to actually do something. With straight submissions, you just mail 'em out and wait for the rejections. It gives the best rate of return for the amount of work involved.
Mind you, auxiliary "marketing services" might be profitable if what they were actually selling people were instructions on how to do this marketing themselves. The outfit still wouldn't be obliged to do any real work for their clients. In fact, what they'd have would be yetanother variant in the "Make Money Fast" class of scams: making money by selling the public bogus or unworkable or unprofitable schemes for making money.
I'm just sayin'.