“Well I woke up this morning/Got a letter in the mail/’Yeah, we like your novel/But it ain’t the Holy Grail.’”
The Literary Agency Blues
“Well I woke up this morning/Got a letter in the mail/’Yeah, we like your novel/But it ain’t the Holy Grail.’”
It may be that massive shifts in the publishing industry being driven by new modes of production and distribution are forcing change upon a business sector of strange and impenetrable habits - so it’s possible that I’m a little out-of-touch here. But my dealings with them lead me to characterise literary agents as remote and inaccessible, with ways of working almost designed to be as user-unfriendly and capricious as possible.
An antipathy to e-mail, discomforting submission criteria, a general feeling of loftiness, an abiding sense of arbitrariness ... and, perhaps, an apparent lack of the hunger which we expect to be the key driver of an essentially entrepreneurial business.
Believe it or not, I did actually get an agent ... and then lost him, so please bear with me while I recount the tale.
I did have the odd contact. One friend went to the gym with an agent, another was chummy with a best-selling author and knew who represented him. A third was a friend of a director of one of the largest in the business. And finally one who was a patient of my wife, but having his mouth full of sharp instruments at the time may have had something to do with his offer of help.
All were approached, kindly considered it – and declined to represent me. One gave me constructive criticism; the others said it deserved to be published but they could not act for me (too busy, not taking on new authors, or some such blather).
None dismissed it, which was either encouraging or infuriating, depending on what my mood was. But what I found strange about these commercial engagements was that I felt absurdly grateful for their attention, a puzzling inversion of the normal rules of commerce, in my experience.
In the end, I found a list of UK agents online, identifying smaller, more personal outfits with three criteria: they claimed to handle my genre, acted for virgins, and accepted e-mail approaches.
And one responded. I’d never heard of the (one-man-band) operation, nor did I care. We spoke, I sent him the manuscript. He commissioned a reader to review it and, as result, declared that he wanted to represent me. I received a contract, we met, did a deal.
Then came the phone call. Here was the question he asked: “When did you first meet Reuben Mendel?”
The front page of my script proudly proclaimed “Grosse Fugue – a novel”. Now, I was being asked about my relationship with its purely fictional hero. Collapse of relationship as it became immediately clear that I had been signed on the basis that it was a biography!
It raised an interesting question: Is literature great when you know it to have been invented? Or is it great when it is so compelling that you believe it to be true? If the latter, I was at least gratified, even as ‘my agent’ fled hotfoot over the horizon.
Around now, my business was really hectic so I laid my novel to one side for a while and barely touched it. Soon enough, however, the worm in my brain reminded me that the work could not forever lie dormant.
The quest to publish began again.
Ian Phillips is a freelance writer for businesses whose first novel, Grosse Fugue, will be published by Alliance Publishing Press on April 11th. He’s tweeting developments @Ian_at_theWord.
I'm sure you're right in your assessment, Louise.
I guess the bottom line is that there is no short-cut and perseverance, tenacity and belief in one's work are the order of the day. This is a difficult business from both the writer's and the agent's perspective - it's labour-intensive and there is a huge disconnect between the quantity of manuscripts on one side and the number of agents and publishers on the other. It's hard to see how that situation will resolve itself any time soon - unless we all stop writing (fat chance!).
As future posts will, I hope, eloquently testify, to use the word 'method' in relation to how I got to where I am would indeed be generous.
I guess I ought to be rather ashamed, given the provenance of the site but, no, I didn't use WAYB. Perhaps I should have, given my lamentable lack of success! But I wanted to work electronically, so used an internet list that had clickable links. This was a little while ago, so my memory might be faulty here.
Interesting views on my fiction vs believability conundrum. I remember reading 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' which I found so compelling that I believed or, perhaps, wanted it all to be true - I think it is great just because I know it to have been the product of creativity. This is perhaps why I've never really been particularly drawn to magical realism, science fiction and their ilk. I want to be taken into a world of believable reality, even if it's a dystopic vision like 1984 (if that's not too contradictory).
Well, Christine, I'm sure there are a lot of visitors to this site who will recognise your tale. It seems to me that agents who demand some degree of exclusivity re submissions are completely out-of-order. Writers should, quite simply, boycott them - and tell them. It's perfectly reasonable to ask for a period of non-competition once negotiations have begun but certainly not before.
Of course we need a thick skin - but we also have to believe tenaciously in our work. I really do sense that the times-they-are-a-changin' and the boot will return to the foot of the creative talent. We are beginning to have genuine choices.