Not to slander, but to warn...

If you've written a novel and are looking for an agent, this was my co-author's and my experience with The New York Literary Agency. Two days after mailing an inquiry to them, they wanted to see our full manuscript. My friend did some further research on them and message boards were filled with warnings about them, much as with poetry.com for poets. The warnings stated such things as 'they accept your manuscript then start charging all sorts of fees for this or that and never make an attempt to sell it' and 'nonsense inquiries have been sent and accepted' and 'they claim to be New York based, but only have a mail drop there and are actually in Boca Raton, Florida'. Literary lists of agents said 'definitely NOT recommended'.

I submitted the following information about a mythical book titled Dracula Nights to them two days ago, intentionally misspelling the words in the description.

This is a whale of a story about a women who meets a vampire one night who turns out to be her dead husband brought back to life. She wants to fell in love with him agin, but she gets scared that he might bite her and make her a vampire, too. The novel is about their growing passionate love and how she finally has to decide whether to drive a steak through his heart or to let him bite her and become a vampire, too. Surprise ending!

Where it asked how long I'd been writing, I said 'since I was little and I finally decided I ought to submit one'.

Two days later, they were 'very interested' and wanted me to mail them my manuscript.

I'll let the post speak for itself. But...do you think... maybe I have a potential for a best seller here and was just too blind to recognize it?? :-)

All fired up, I submitted this one Nov 18 under the name of the 'husband' of the first author since I had to use the same email address.

One Lifetime

I think you're really going to like this book. A ninety year old man meets an alien. The alien tells him he'll make him young again for 24 hours if he will make love with the ugliest girl in the world and he shows the man a picture of this girl. The trick is that the man can live until he finds her. The book is about him traveling from country to country looking for this girl, but not too hard. When he finally finds her, she has a grate personality and he falls in love and tells the alien he won't make love to her, though, so he can still stay young.

bio

I'm a plumber ever since I got out of high school. This is my first book, but I think it's pretty good.


It took four days this time, but I just got a request for my manuscript on this one, too.

Now, if I let my dog walk over the keys and send that in, think they'll want one by him, too??:-)


NOTE: See Brian Campbell's post and look esp for the link to 'flarfing', the name he tells me that's been given to all the nonsensical poems sent to poetry.com to prove it's a scam. An interesting post. An interesting link!


Pris