sarah eve kelly

It is Agent Appreciation Day. Today we celebrate our advocates, re-experience our astonishment and gratitude that someone so knowledgeable, so hard-working, and so excellently beyond cool believes in our work, and generally raise a toast to the people whose zeal brings us closer to our dreams.

My agent, Jenny Bent, until recently of the Trident Media Group, hung up her own shingle in March 2009 and has been jumping from strength to strength since, as any subscriber to Publishers’ Lunch will know. The Bent Agency has been so successful, in fact, that Jenny’s recently hired on a new agent, Susan Hawk, to handle young adult  and middle-grade authors. Jenny’s online presence is gentle, encouraging, savvy, and very occasionally whimsical. (Ref. a tweet from 18 Nov: ‘So sad that I ate all the skittles. I should have bought the economy bag’, followed up on 2 Dec by this: ‘Because skittles may in fact taste better than skinny feels.’ A woman very much after my own heart.) Her love for writers and writing shines through in her blog posts, in her tweets, in her constant advocacy, and (most importantly) in her emails to me.

The truth is, though, that there are a lot of agents like that. What sets Jenny apart is her willingness to nurture her authors, her awe-inspiring patience in the kind of market that makes editors demand that manuscripts be more or less press-ready, in a market where there’s no time or money or manpower to take the rough edges off the best work we have to offer. Jenny flouts that trend and takes the time.

Believe me, I know. When I started querying I was an agent’s nightmare. I was terrible at pitches, terrible at synopses (my stomach still churns just thinking of them), and my novel - if you’re kind - was rough, rudderless, and not remotely agent-ready. I got a lot of requests for material and they languished until Jenny came along. I queried, got a request within an hour, and within four days I was on the phone with her, discussing at length what a colossal shipwreck my manuscript was.

Here’s the cool thing, though: she still wanted me. She saw the good in the manuscript and wanted me. And over the course of six months, she helped me turn an idea for a good novel into a good novel; she taught me what a story is and made me a better writer. She’s been patient with my questions and my blunders; she’s been effusive over my successes; she’s always written back quickly; and she hasn’t been paid a penny for any of it. With tenacity like that, with belief like that, it’s really no wonder she’s one of the best literary agents in New York.

So Jenny, I raise my glass to you, and hope you get some much-deserved rest over the holidays. It’s very easy for a writer to be colossally self-absorbed, and most of the time I am. But it does me a service to remember, every now and again, exactly where I wouldn’t be without Jenny fighting for me.

Hug your agent. Do it now.

Till next time, &c &c.

Related posts:

1. links for writing and reading
2. in defence of writers
4. time capsule: querying
5. the auction block