Interview: Literary Agent Natalie Fischer

12/03/10 Update: Natalie Fischer has joined the Bradford Literary Agency. The quote below is from an email written by Natalie and posted on querytracker.com. 

Effective February 22, 2011 I will be leaving the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency to join the Laura Bradford Literary Agency. 

During the transition period, I will not be accepting any new submissions. 

Today I have a rare treat. Natalie Fischer of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency is here to answer a few questions about her agenting style and literary preferences.  

Natalie Fischer (pic from her agency web site)

 From her blog:

Natalie M. Fischer is a Literary Agent and office assistant at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. An honors graduate of the University of San Diego, California, Natalie holds a B.A. in Literature/Writing. She started as an intern at the Agency in 2007.... Natalie is actively seeking new clients, and is especially interested in talented, hard-working new authors with a fresh, unique voice and hook. Her specialty is commercial fiction, with an emphasis in children’s literature (from picture book-YA/Teen), romance (contemporary and historical), historical fiction, multi-cultural fiction, paranormal, sci-fi/fantasy in YA or romance only, fairy-tale/legend spin-offs, and “beautiful dark” novels. She will also consider select memoir (has to be really unique) and that amazing project she never even knew she was looking for! She is always drawn to an open and positive attitude in an author, good grammar, and fantastical, engaging and sexy plots.

Katrina Lantz:     What is it like working at such a respected agency as the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency?

Natalie Fischer:  Busy and rewarding! As a new agent, I have the invaluable advice and history here to turn to, as well as the opportunity to work with more established clients on sub-licenses and contracts I wouldn’t otherwise have had. Sandra is an incredible agent, and I feel so lucky to be learning from her!

Katrina:     Aside from your love of felines, what is the most important thing queriers/aspiring authors should know about you?


Natalie:  I’m tough, but I’m not unapproachable.

Katrina:   You've put out the rallying cry on twitter for Romance queries. Is there a specific type of romance you crave? Nicholas Sparks? Sarah Dessen? Twilight?


Natalie:  Adult romance, actually! Steamy, steamy, steamy! Good question though; for YA I would say the tension in Twilight is more my thing, though I’m also a fan of the slow-build! It’s really a matter of connecting with the characters, and caring enough about them to care about their relationship.

Katrina:    What is the strangest book you have ever read? What is the most beautiful?

Natalie:  I have been stuck on this question…forever…I have no idea…

Katrina:    Besides starting with a rhetorical question, what is the single worst mistake you see in queries?

Natalie:   Improper word count. If I see anything over 100,000 words, I usually don’t read.

Katrina:    Both you and your colleague Taylor Martindale represent the YA category. What is the primary difference between the books you seek to represent?

Natalie:   I’m a bit more fantastical than Taylor, I think; more unicorns and princesses and sci-fi for me. I’m less inclined to take on a contemporary than she is unless it has an absolutely amazing voice (snarky, usually), a really stand-out plot, or is really dark and literary.

Katrina:     What is your take on tense and POV (point-of-view)? Do you prefer past or present? Third person, first person, limited, omniscient?

Natalie:  I don’t care what tense or POV it’s in as long as it’s done well. That said, I find that present tense is almost impossible for most people to do well. Too many grammar issues – they lapse into past for a few sentences etc. I almost NEVER like omniscient; I really like to connect to the main character, and along with that, I don’t like multiple POVs usually (two is my limit).

Katrina:     As far as online presence goes, what is the biggest mistake new writers are making? What should they be doing to catch your eye in a positive way?


Natalie:   A lot of new writers don’t realize they have an audience, and whine whine whine. This bothers me to no end. No matter how much you think your query/agent search story is the WORST EVER, there’s another one out there that is WORSE. I admire the most those who stick it out and do their ranting and meltdowns in private.

Katrina:   Since there's some cross-over in literary and film preferences, I find it helpful to know an agent's favorites. What are some of your favorite T.V. shows and movies?


Natalie: TV: Supernatural, The Ghost Whisperer, Bones, House, Family Guy, Futurama, South park, CSI: Los Vegas, NCIS, Law and Order: SVU, Eureka…

Movies: Anything with Hugh Grant, The 10^th Kingdom (technically a mini-series…), The Fifth Element, Taken, etc.

Katrina:     You're currently in the high 700s for twitter followers. Do you still plan to accept e-queries once you reach 1000? Or might that switch happen earlier? (The obsoleteness of this question just proves how popular Natalie is on twitter!)

Natalie:  Just did! J

(Submissions should be directed to: nfsubmissions@dijkstraagency.com)

Thank you so much to Natalie for being here today, and congratulations on your recent engagement! 

Querying friends, be sure to check out her submission guidelines and 

Other interviews:

Agent Spotlight
Teens Writing for Teens Interview
Let the Words Flow Interview 

Angels and Demons and Portals Interview

WriteOnCon queries livechat

WriteOnCon livechat video

Follow Natalie on twitter

Don't miss her very helpful blog: Adventures in Agentland

It's like dating all over again: The Agent Hunt

Peacocks: the quintessential dating metaphor

Finding the right agent for you and your work is kinda like dating and courtship. It has a lot to do with personal taste and, sometimes, fate.

I was a bit of a serial dater, I must admit. I never had trouble finding somebody to hit dinner and a movie with.

But that doesn't mean I didn't get rejected...a LOT.

Now that I'm happily hitched to my hubz (that's way too many H's in one sentence), I look at that previous life with not a twinge of longing. You couldn't pay me enough to go back in time to those years. Nope. Not even that much.

I'm finding the agent hunt to be quite similar, with one very clear difference so far:

I can hardly even get a first date!

It's all about the makeup...er, I mean query letter. If it doesn't sparkle like a vampire (without actually mentioning vampires), then it's an automatic NO. And sometimes, they don't even call you back!!

(Wow. This metaphor is working horrifyingly well.)

If they do call you back because they think your makeup's pretty, then you get to go on an actual first date: the partial submission (sometimes they request the full right off, but it's the same as a partial request b/c they can still read five pages and decide you stink).

Then you get to wait, which is kind of like waiting for a call from that boy you just gave your phone number to. Sometimes he never does call.

If you're lucky and he likes you (or she, as is maybe more often the case with literary agents), you'll get a second date: THE FULL MANUSCRIPT!!


This is the holy grail of the dating/querying metaphor.


Not only does your makeup sparkle, but you ordered more than a salad and dazzled him with your obscure Duke Nukem computer gaming knowledge (apparently, we're dating in high school in the 90s). He like-likes you! He's just not ready for any kind of commitment yet. Who would be after only one date?

So you move past dinner and a movie to the really-get-to-know-you specialty date! This can be anything that really lets your personality show, like paint-balling in some hay (10 Things I Hate About You), a beatnik poetry reading (So I Married An Axe Murderer), taking a ferry to meet his family (How to Lose A Guy in Ten Days), or even skinny dipping (Hair, the movie).

Any one of these activities could represent your full manuscript. But at this point, agents are not just reading your book. Nuh uh. Not if they're really interested in you. They're also twitter-stalking you, just like you twitter-stalked them before you queried. They're checking out your blog to see if you share their ideals, passion for animals (mainly cats, I'm told), and maybe even political leanings (yikes--I hope not). And they're googling you to read every review you ever wrote on amazon.com...

If they like what they see, you might just get....THE CALL.


This is not a myth.


I'm pretty sure it's not. I've never received THE CALL myself, but I hear it is fabulous. Like a marriage proposal. And now we reach the end of our metaphor. At this point, you get to pick an agent, accept his or her proposal of marriage representation, and live happily ever after....

and--we all hope--never be single again.

(Any agented writers out there, or agents, feel free to set me straight if I'm getting this wrong. I'd love to read your true stories, especially if they're romantic. *tweengirl sigh*)

Dreaming of rejection...

Last month, I was catching up on my favorite agent blogs when I came across a funny story about an aspiring author actually dreaming about her dream agent. I thought, You know you're in too deep when you're dreaming about agents offering representation.

Imagine my surprise when I woke this morning with a vague memory of this: I dreamed I stumbled into an agent in my apartment complex parking lot. Two other agents appeared next to her and they started commiserating over "these clumsy authors." lol. Come to find out, one of them lives two doors down in my building! (not true, btw, just a dream) My dream-self giddily plotted another accidental run-in to fix the terrible first impression.

Then my seven-month-old's crying woke me from bizzarro-world, thank goodness.

Even in my dreams, I'm working through rejection. The funny thing is that I'm not actually submitting right now. A fresh look at my work made me realize it needs extensive revision. That, and I'm knee-deep in a writing project I like better. So why am I dreaming of rejection? All I can think is that my brain is trying to process all the snarky and benevolent publishing advice I'm reading on the blogosphere.

I just hope tomorrow night's processing at least ends in an offer of representation.

The Joys of Twitter

I have to admit, I was slow to join the tweet-train, but now I probably spend more time reading links from twitter and/or re-tweeting my favorite posts than I do on facebook and in emailing combined.

Not as one-track as it seems:

I had been under the impression, when first invited by my dad about a year ago, that twitter was yet another place to post a status update, like myspace and facebook--except without the rockin' sense of community. I thought, "Why do I need another place to talk about myself? This is getting out of hand!"

It was the popular media that finally brought me around to take a deeper look. I'm a Twilight Saga fan (well, more of a Stephenie Meyer fan, really), so I frequent www.eclipsemovie.org, which has all the most up-to-date info on everything Stephenie Meyer, with a special emphasis on the films, of course. After seeing a few headlines about "David Slade Tweets Filming Complete," etc., I realized that twitter was being used effectively in shameless self-promotion. Isn't that what every author needs? A platform for frequent and shameless plugging! It was brilliant. So I re-signed-up for twitter, deleting my old account so I could target my profile to other writers, agents, publishers, and readers. (And just for fun, I added a second twitter account so I could post wilderness survival tips, my secret hobby.)

In order to be effective as a self-promotion tool, it had to be just a tad more connected than a simple status-updating tool. And I discovered that it was!

My discovery of mentions and hashtags:

This is where it gets really cool! While reading a Writer's Digest blog called Poetic Asides, I discovered Poem A Day, which happened to coincide with nanowrimo. In my super ambition, I decided to do both (until my computer crashed and I lost all my work #sadbuttrue). This blog gave me my introduction to hashtags, the method twitter uses to categorize posts by topic, using the # symbol. On twitter, clicking on a hashtag takes you to everything posted recently with that same hashtag. Mentions are simple, too. @person takes you directly to their profile page where you can see a small bio, find links to their webpage, and see what types of tweets they post. If you enjoy posts by a certain person, you can mention them by putting their name (@person) into your own tweets.

This isn't meant to be a comprehensive how-to for twitter. Most of it, I believe, is pretty intuitive anyway--just a matter of playing around with it.

My point is to exclaim over the ease of slipping into a public conversation on #globalwarming or #writing, or to find @peoplewhosharemyinterests. It's a fabulous, though imperfect, system. Through it, I've been able to connect with agents and publishers who constantly post advice, industry trends, and funny stories in 140 characters or less. I've met up with other writers, people who share my religion and political beliefs, and been able to legitimately stalk celebrities. Seriously fantastic.

If you haven't jumped on the tweet-train yet, here are a few reasons you should:

1) Publicity

2) Community

3) Education

4) Entertainment

I said a few, not an exhaustive list! So there they are. Happy tweeting!

Tweet with me - that's katrinalantznov

Tweet with my alter ego - that's wildsurvivegirl

As always, collaborate with me at WEbook.

See you around the web.

-Katrina Lantz (katrina.lantz@gmail.com)

#pubtips

#writechat

#scribechat

#writing

#scifi

Update: end of March 2010

Still revising Empty Vial, and learning more about the publishing industry and all its little cogs. I now believe that my third book (Empty Vial) is YA fantasy science fiction. Apparently, that's the new word for "soft" science fiction. But if I could specify it to death, I would call it YA neuroscience fiction. It's really the only label that fits 100%. I also now realize why, when somebody convinced me my work must be literary (because it had to do with the mind), agents turned and ran when I labeled my MS as literary science fiction. Apparently, very few agents work with "literary" anything. Good to know. Some of my favorite industry blogs are Nathan Bradford's agent blog, and one he recently linked to: http://www.pimpmynovel.blogspot.com - VERY helpful!

My fourth work (work-in-progress, really) is middle grade fantasy of the superhero/super villain variety. I'd be more specific, but I really like my premise and--although it isn't perfectly original (it was actually inspired by a favorite movie)--I don't wish for the market to become saturated before I finish it. So I'll write about it when it's agented. Count on it.

As for the Empty Vial project, it still needs a lot of work. It's been out for submission before, rejected around 8 times, and I hope it will be out for submission again soon. But I am NOT going to jump the gun this time. I need to get it industry-ready. I have also decided that nanowrimo projects aren't so easy to revise into working novels. I have limited experience, to be sure, but it's been surprisingly difficult with Empty Vial to take my stream of consciousness, first person ramblings and turn them into a tightly plotted story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It's still not there yet. I have a very supportive group of family and friends reading for me. They are wonderful and usually tell me when something is way off in my work. Of course, it would be nice to have an industry professional reading my stuff, offering advice, etc., but I'm not rich. I don't see us being able to afford a real editor until after my first book is on the shelves for a while, ironically.

I'm off to write chapter 4 of mysterious new project, and revise chapters 8, 9, 10, etc. of the last one. Wish me luck. As Margaret Atwood said, "...there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine."