The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer #7

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 11^th. He’s tweeting developments @Ian_at_theWord.