Literary Agents

Let me nail the ‘Long-Distance’ bit of the title as I don’t imagine that the ‘Loneliness’ part needs any explanation.    It’s purely a function of time, not miles.

In the time-honoured cliché, I’d always felt a book lay within me, albeit invisibly deeply.  Being made redundant and deciding to go freelance created the space and time in which to contemplate the possibility.  I didn’t set out to write something that might be published.  It was much more that I needed to know that I could do it; ‘it’ being create something from thin air that worked. ‘Worked’ meaning that it had integrity, a sense of purpose and being.

If you’d told me then it would take eighteen years from first contemplation to final realisation, I may well have taken up some other life challenge, perhaps crocheting or self-waxing.

But then again ...

Who, once they’ve written, would ever really want to be without the joy of sculpting a …

The journey begins ...

... or, to be more accurate, the next stage of the journey begins.

A publishing contract has been signed and so the first leg, writing the thing, is over.  I now must treat it as though hewn from stone, rather than the waters of creativity.  No more tweaking, time to move on.  It's been with me so long that it might be hard to let go ... but let go I must!

So what are my hopes and fears for ‘Grosse Fugue’?  Should I reveal my innermost thoughts?  Perhaps not yet.  As any author knows, the greatest hunger is for an audience, preferably one as large as possible.  Of course, there's a revenue attraction to that.  But for many, it's just the notion of our work being read by many hearts and minds.

A few may love it, many may loathe it.  A handful might be moved, others offended.  With any luck, no-one will be indifferent, the true mark of failure.  But I hope that some may be …

At one point at this Spring's 2011 Insider's Guide to How to Get Published I feared that a few writers might actually flay our lovely yearbook editor for not providing them with the definitive, catch-all answer to securing a book deal. In fairness to Jo, her talk was on How to Assemble a Book Proposal and not on The Definite Failsafe Guide to Avoiding Rejection.

I understand the vexation of course. why would anyone ask you to run a gauntlet after completing a marathon? and yet  that's exactly what agents do demand.  every single agency site now seems to offer up their own particular rules applying to how you should submit a query to them. why do agencies do it? to distinguish the professional from the riffraff? to test your mettle? or simply a personal preference of someone who, more than likely, is no longer even with the company?

let's look at it from the agent's point of view. they have thousands of submissions each year, and it seems reasonable to …

Have you ever thought about trying to get published?  I can hear the hollow laughter coming back at me, no - I don't mean the big one, your novel and a lovely fat contract, I'm talking about stepping stones.

I read the unsolicited pile for a variety of agents, and one of the markers that gets a submission pulled from the rest, and given a little more attention, is previous publishing experience.  My clients are looking for anyone who has had a short story published, who writes for a newspaper, or has written books in a previous context - even in a different genre.

There are two reasons for this, one is that the author has already got experience of 'how' to be published, they have an idea of the editing process, of the demands on an author and an editor's time.  The second, and more important reason is that the author has already been quality controlled.  Another professional has judged the author's work to be publishable.

If you feel that getting published in a magazine …

I’ve had a few queries recently from writers who’ve been asked by literary agents for a ‘reading fee’. Their main concern is whether or not these fees are legitimate.

Like everyone in business, literary agents need to make money. They make theirs by taking a commission from the sale of their clients' books to publishers - and this is why agents only take on clients they believe have written a saleable book.

So, are reading fees a money-making scheme? Well, it’s a grey area.

Some years ago reading fees weren’t uncommon – the rationale being that it took time to read and evaluate a manuscript. But, as the numbers of writers grew so did the potential for agents to make a profit from reading fees alone, with no need to sell manuscripts to publishers.  This put the reputation of all agents at risk, not to mention being to the detriment of the industry as a whole.

To help end the practice, the Association of Authors' Agents (AAA) made the prohibition of reading …