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Insider tip
Trying to create a comedy game through dialogue or regular one-liners when the gameplay takes itself too seriously is likely to give the player the feeling of a game at odds with itself. Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince-
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What to ask your new agent
The day has come – a literary agent has accepted you as a client and your career as a published writer is taking off.
It’s hugely exciting – and only too easy to forget that you are entering into a professional partnership where it’s worth asking a few questions of your own before you Read more
The open-minded agent
There’s an agent-author conversation which crops up in a variety of ways all around the web and it goes a bit like this:
Hotshot literary agent: “If you don’t get my name right, make spelling mistakes and fail to follow the submission guidelines on my website, I won’t look at your work. I’m not interested. You’re wasting my time.”
Brilliant new writer: “Agents are totally stuck-up. They’re fixated on Read more
How to submit again
You wrote your novel, you thought it was great, and you sent it out. It came rushing back to you, bristling with rejection slips. The scales fell from your eyes and you realised you still had work to do.
After you have rewritten – how do you send your work out again? And indeed should you? Read more
500:1 against getting an agent?
I was reading an interview with a literary agent over on Galley Cat and among her answers, one thing stood out. The agent, an independent who is just broadening her client list to take on young adult fiction, mentioned the number of manuscripts she reviews.
Quite often you’ll hear a literary agent saying they are swamped by manuscripts or drowning under their slush pile, but it’s not often they attempt to put a number on what they actually look through.
Are they really Read more
Be a literary agent for a day
Filed under: Competitions and Offers, Literary Agents
News just in, the US literary agent Nathan Bransford has announced his second ‘Be a Literary Agent for a Day’. The first one made for entertaining reading, so I’ve high hopes for this new experiment.
This is what he’s testing:
“…whether or not queries adequately reflect an underlying work’s quality. Can someone really Read more
What it means to be an agent
According to a new Twitter thread, this is what being a literary agent means:
- “Reading books with covers is a luxury to be savoured” (KatApel)
- “Getting early rave reviews from your students for one of your clients’ books” (SMozer)
- “Sometimes having too Read more
“Make me forget I’m reading a book”
Our guest literary agent explains what he wants from a manuscript submission. It may surprise you…
Once I get through the hyperbole and overblown salesmanship of most covering letters, it is all about my relationship to the prose.
In the case of fiction (which it usually is) I am looking for a voice. Simple as that.
I am not so concerned about Read more
Literary agent runs away screaming
Can a simple comment on a submission make a literary agent howl with horror? Yes, absolutely, according to this agent’s guest post:
Let’s start with the science bit – every day by email, post, carrier pigeon and osmosis I receive 10 unsolicited approaches from unrepresented writers out in the big wide literary firmament.
These come from all genres. There’s fiction (from coming-of-age to fin-de-siècle), non-fiction (from ‘My 38 Years As a Bank Manager’ to ‘Mucus – the bodily secretion that changed the world’), poetry (from love poetry to stalker poetry), cookery books and academic texts to verse drama – usually about earwigs taking over the world for some reason. Read more
Found on an agent’s slush pile
Filed under: Getting Published, Literary Agents
A heartwarming tale for writers: Stephen Kelman’s book, Pigeon English, was spotted on an agent’s pile of unsolicited submissions, and went on to be hotly fought over by no fewer than 12 publishers, before being snapped up by Bloomsbury.
This story of violence on a council estate is narrated by a 12-year-old boy, and in an interview Read more
Agents – what’s the point?
Filed under: Getting Published, Literary Agents
To an aspiring writer, literary agents can seem like a parasitic race – they take their percentage, but what do they give back? And is it worth having one?
The short answers are ‘lots’ and ‘yes’. Read on!
An agent sends your manuscript out to see Read more
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On camera: Jon McGregor
"Being longlisted for the Booker Prize changed everything - it was the launchpad for my writing career." Click to view our video with novelist Jon McGregor »
On camera: Justin Cartwright
"Just write... If you're any good you may not know it, but certainly someone else will." Click to view our video with novelist Justin Cartwright »
On camera: Julie Myerson
The novelist and journalist Julie Myerson on how she got that all-important first publishing deal. Click here to view our video exclusive »