Why We Have Gatekeepers

In fiction and in life there are often gatekeepers who guard the entrance to the castle or the enchanted kingdom. Consider St Peter, standing guard at the pearly gates, or those big blokes in dark glasses and wash ’n’ wear suits who stand outside the nightclubs and only let the pretty girls in. In both cases there are good reasons for them to be there: the big blokes are fulfilling a health and safety function by ensuring their nightclubs don't get overcrowded, and a public relations function by only allowing the prettiest admission (thereby establishing their club’s reputation for being a hot totty spot); while St Peter makes sure that heaven doesn't get filled up with non-believers and troublemakers, and therefore remains heavenly.

These gatekeepers do an unpopular but necessary job. So when people complain that literary agents are no more than self-appointed gatekeepers who are preventing writers from reaching editors they fail to consider what would be the result—to writers, publishers and readers—if agents stopped carrying out their literary gatekeeping role.

Editors are very overworked. A lot of their time is taken up by reading, and close reading at that. In order to do their job well they cannot skimp on this: editors were already horribly overstretched year ago; in the last year many have lost their jobs, and the books that they were responsible for have been handed over to the editors who remain employed, adding to their already too-heavy workload. This lack of time is nothing new: but it has been compounded recently, to a horrible degree.

No wonder, then, that editors prefer to work with agents. Doing so frees editors from the tyranny of the slush-pile; and they know that anything an agent submits is likely to be both publishable, and appropriate for their lists. It gives those editors time to work more closely with their writers, and to do their best to ensure that their books are the best that they can be. This means that we, as readers, have better books to read; and also that we, as writers, are displayed to our very best advantage.

There is a cost to the publisher: the contracts that agents negotiate are usually far more beneficial to the writers who sign them than a standard publisher’s contract, and so the publishers’ shares of income is cut: but the advantages of not having to deal with the mountain of slush outweigh this by a significant degree.

How To Find A Good Literary Agent

A couple of weeks ago, a thread began at Absolute Write about a new and as-yet unproved agent. Said agent rocked up; questions were asked; a magnificent bun-fight ensued. After a few frustrating days the uproar moved to a part of Aboslute Write's forum which is not Google-cached (I doubt that the agent concerned realised how lucky he was with that); and it culminated in this particularly unprofessional tweet from him here.


This witty and concise livejournal post from Beth Bernobich provides a treasure-trove of linky background about the agent concerned: it's pretty safe to say that he has a history of being argumentative and confrontational online which doesn't bode well for how he might behave when negotiating a particularly difficult contract, or when dealing with editors who reject the books he represents; and I'm not convinced that a few years working in the book division of a product-licensing company is extensive enough experience, or is even appropriate, for anyone intending to embark on a career as a literary agent.


If you read through all the links supplied, you'll find plenty of reasons not to submit to the agent concerned: his lack of experience, his argumentative nature, and the extraordinarily bad advice he gave about children's books all count against him. But without all those things on a plate in front of them, how can writers avoid the agents who might not serve them best?


To paraphrase James McDonald, the job of a literary agent is not an entry-level position. If you're looking for a literary agent you'd be wise to avoid submitting to the new and unproved, no matter how well-behaved they are online. Wait a year and see how well they do: the bottom line is that a good literary agent will make sales to good publishers, at no up-front cost to the authors they represent.

If You've Ever Wondered...

...what reading slush for months on end does to your mind, then just read this.

It is a bloody brilliant blog and I wish I'd written it.

(I wish I'd discovered the blog, too, but have to admit that Janet Reid got to it first. Now I know what her competitors feel like.)

Robert Fletcher of Writers' Literary Agency Labelled Fraudulent And Frivolous In Legal Ruling

Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss today announced that Robert Fletcher of the Writers' Literary Agency has not only lost the lawsuit he took out against them and James Macdonald eighteen months ago: Robert Fletcher's suit has been deemed frivolous in the judge's findings, and his business habits have been labelled fraudulent. Robert Fletcher brought the case because he claimed that the warnings that Writer Beware had issued about his company were defamatory, but the judge disagreed with him. I particularly liked the piece by James Macdonald, which Fletcher objected to, which you can read here (I did want to quote it here, but Blogger still won't let me copy and paste).

Robert Fletcher has now been ordered to pay Writer Beware's costs, and according to a lawyer over at Making Light he's going to find it very difficult to wriggle out of doing so. At this point I wish that Ann and Victoria had hired a more expensive lawyer, but we can't have everything.

Just in case anyone who reads this page is considering submitting to the Writers' Literary Agency or one of its many subsidiary companies, here is a link to the discussions about the Writers' Literary Agency and Robert Fletcher over at Absolute Write: and I'll finish with an extract from the judge's findings which I found particularly interesting:

The plaintiff, Robert Fletcher, sent multiple e-mails to both defendants, Crispin and Strauss threatening them both with physical harm and threatening them with this lawsuit. In fact, in two of his e-mails, he indicated that his purpose was not to prevail in the lawsuit but just to bankrupt the defendants, Crispin and Strauss.

Hands up anyone who fancies an agent who behaves like that. No one? Can't say I blame you.

My warmest congratulations to Ann Crispin, Victoria Strauss and to James Macdonald for winning the case. And yah-boo-sucks to Robert Fletcher. Frivolous and fraudulent has such a nice ring to it, don't you think?

How Readers Drive Publishing

Publishing is a business which produces books in order to sell them. It depends on writers, agents, editors, designers, illustrators, copy-editors and printers to produce those books; and on marketing staff, publicists, sales agents, wholesalers, distributors, bookshops and booksellers to sell those books.

All of the people who are involved in the production and sales of books depend on one thing to fund the work that they do: the reader. And because readers fund publishing, they drive the whole of the publishing process. When readers don't buy books, the publishers lose money and everyone involved in that supply-chain suffers.

So when publishers recognise that a particular type of book doesn't sell well they stop publishing it, or they stop publishing so much of it and get really picky about the books in that genre which they will consider.

Conversely, when publishers notice that a particular type of book is selling very well, they will look for others of that type to publish.

If publishers won't consider a particular genre, agents won't be able to sell it to them; so agents quickly learn what publishers will and will not consider. As those agents don't eat if they don't make sales, they don't take on books they don't think they can sell no matter how much literary merits those books might have.

So please: don't suggest that literary agents are unfairly stifling new writers because of their own personal agendas, or that publishing is ignoring whole swathes of talented writers because those writers write stuff that is somehow too contentious or unpopular to make it onto their lists: agents, editors and publishers all look to the reader when deciding what to take on, and if readers aren't prepared to buy a particular type of book, then that type of book is very unlikely to get published.

It comes down to this: to stand a chance of being published, your book has to be well-written, but that’s not enough on its own. If readers are likely to buy your book and it is well-written, then it has a good chance of getting published; but if publishers know from their years of experience that a book like yours is unlikely to attract enough readers to make it commercially viable then it is not going to get published no matter how well-written it is.

Guest Post: Avoiding The Conmen, by Victoria Strauss

The final guest blog post today comes from Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware. She's very well informed about writing and publishing and has been quite ridiculously supportive of me and my blog this year; and she works incredibly hard to educate and protect writers and in so doing, presents herself as a target for a lot of people who occupy the nastier side of publishing. She takes a lot of criticism, rudeness and downright abuse, and never fails to respond with grace and humour. I am profoundly grateful to her for all the support she's given me this year.

This piece isn't even something she wrote as a special post: it's just one of the many helpful posts she makes every week over at Absolute Write. As usual, she's got things bang-on. Thanks, Victoria. I owe you.


It's incredibly easy to avoid the conmen (and women). Query only agents with verifiable track records of commercial book sales (which you should be able to find on their websites. No track record, no query). Approach only publishers whose books you've found on the shelves of bookstores and libraries. If writers would just stick to those two simple rules, most of the conmen (and women) would go out of business.

The reason the conmen (and women) survive is not just because writers are inexperienced, or don't know their names from reading them on a blog somewhere. It's because so many writers assume that all agents and publishers are essentially equal. This makes no sense at all. In the real world, would you hire someone who had no skills that qualified them to do the job you wanted them to do, and could offer you no references? Probably you wouldn't. So why should agents or publishers be any different?

Guest Post: Avoiding Scams

When I began this blog I hoped it would help writers avoid losing their work to vanity publishers and fee-charging agents. Preditors & Editors has always been a useful resource for wary writers and here its editor, David L. Kuzminski, discusses how we can all take steps to avoid scams and protect our work.


Many scams depend upon the victim wanting something a lot and being relied upon to not inspect closely upon being given an offer. The more that someone wants something, the more likely the scam will succeed.

Many of us have seen or heard of the TV scam where someone offers a top of the line TV for a reduced price that would save the buyer a lot of money. All sorts of reasons are given such as the retailer accidentally sent two instead of one to the seller who's willing to share his good fortune by selling you the second TV. He even lets you look at his that’s still in the box so you have no reason to believe that the other identical box doesn't have a TV as well. Besides, it weighs like it has a TV in it and you even get to look through a hole in the sealed box so you can verify there's a TV screen in it. However, the box conceals that it's only an old picture tube and enough bricks to make the box feel right in weight.

Unfortunately, with publishing it's more difficult to inspect ahead of time because the physical product isn't going to be immediately available because it's your work that's to be published. In fact, the emergence of the Internet has made the process even more difficult because you have no idea where the other party is located or whether they can even deliver on the promise. This is made more difficult to discern between legitimate and scam operations because you're faced with the same problem from both. So, how do you know who to avoid and who to trust?

The first rule is never pay anything up front to publishers. Legitimate publishers do not charge writers to publish their work because they make their money from selling your work to readers. In fact, legitimate publishers pay you, the writer, and many of them even pay an advance while all of them assume the actual risks of publishing your work. Those risks are what make publishing so difficult to achieve because publishers aren't in business to lose money. They want written work that the public is willing to pay for. Consequently, they inspect what they're buying. If your writing isn't up to their standards or fails to fit the niche they fill within the marketplace, they're very likely going to pass off on your work.

The same advice about not paying anything up front to a literary agent is also true. Likewise, it's difficult obtaining an agent because they're taking a financial risk on your work from the moment they agree to spend some time reading your query. They don't have days with more hours than any of us and they have to use that time wisely. Therefore, they ignore anything that fails to interest them or anyone who proves to be too difficult to work with which could range from ignorance of the publishing industry to poor writing to unreasonable demands.

The second rule in avoiding risk is to conduct an inspection of your own. Look in a bookstore to see if the publisher you feel is worthy of publishing your work actually has any titles on the shelves. Don't just accept a listing in Amazon as sufficient because Amazon might be big, but it's not the entire market. Besides, readers still like to browse and that's not quite as easy to do online. Yes, it can be done online, but some publishers won't permit online browsing within their products. That's not a good sign. If the publisher is unwilling to permit the reader to see the first few pages, it could mean the publisher has something to hide such as poor or non-existent editing.

When you inspect a literary agent, look to see what the agent has represented before. Legitimate agents are quick to reveal their successes. Scams generally don't have any successes, though there are a few exceptions where agents found it was easier to just charge fees and not bother with doing any actual selling because the first couple of real sales turned out to be hard work. So that means you have to ask or check on when those sales were last made. If the agent can't point to any sales within the last twelve months, then you're better off without them on your list of who to trust.

Remember that the moment you seek publication, you're placing yourself in the ranks of professionals who get paid for their work. That makes you a target for scams so it's important that you question and research any and all claims anyone makes to you before you trust them. By the way, the really legitimate publishers and agents won't make claims about what they can do because they have more than enough offers coming in to them that they don't have to seek out manuscripts.

The third rule is to never spend money where your publisher or agent suggests. It's their job to see that your work is good enough to begin with before accepting it for publishing or representation. If they even bring up the subject of having you get your manuscript edited by someone else, then they don't have your best interests in mind. It's their job seeing that your work is shopped around to publishers or readers. It's not your responsibility to make a tour at your expense or to purchase promotion services.

The fourth rule is that their contracts must share the risks equally. They don't get to recoup their costs before you see any profit for your work. You're not in the business to support only them. You're entitled to fair compensation in the form of royalties aside from any advances which have to earn out first.

So far, we've ignored contests, editing services, and promotional services. Let's get to those now.

Contests are a definite ego trip. Beating out other writers is like winning a race and on occasion it can benefit the writer by influencing others to want his later written work. Of course, scams rely upon all that as well. They know writers have egos and are willing to part with money to enter a contest that might expose their work to more opportunities. However, only a few contests actually can deliver on that expectation. Scams rely upon that knowledge. They don't have to really produce any results other than offer a prize and that could come from the reading fee that many contests charge. After all, it seems reasonable to writers that they can't just expect judges to work for free to read thousands of entries and that's where it starts getting nasty. Many contests don't have knowledgeable judges to determine a winner. Some don't even name their judges. As well, the work is subjective and they can essentially name anyone they choose to be the winner. So long as an actual prize is awarded in accordance with the contest rules, they’re pretty safe from the reach of the law.

Editing services are once more a subjective matter. So long as something is produced in the form of editing, there's little a writer can do as almost all editing services have caveats in their contracts making it clear that they don't guarantee their work will produce an acceptance by a literary agent or publisher. Besides which, the really good publishers have their own editors who do the same thing for manuscripts with minor problems and the publisher pays them, not the writer.

And of course, promoters make the same caveats apply to their work. They can only get the title and author's name out there. Any sales are dependent upon what the public or industry is seeking so it's basically a gamble with better odds for them than any of the games in Las Vegas because they always win. That's one reason why so few books are ever advertised in the media by publishers.


Preditors & Editors maintains a unique and fascinating database for writers. If you want to know if an agent has made any professional sales, if a publisher is worth submitting to, or if a writing competition is likely to cost you a lot more than the entry fee it demands, then you'll almost certainly find something useful in its lists—even if it's not what you want to read. My thanks to David Kuzminski for allowing me to use this article here.

Do Agents Edit? And Is It Really Their Job?

Literary agents have two main functions. They separate the best writing from the rest, so that editors can spend more time editing and producing the best books they can; and they get their clients the best deal possible—which doesn't always mean going for the biggest advance.

Is it also part of an agent's job to provide writers with editorial advice? I would say yes. In order to get the best deal for their clients they have to know that the book is as good as it can be before it goes out, and doing this requires some degree of editing. It might not be substantial (although sometimes it is): it could consist of a couple of general comments or it could be a far more rigorous and penetrating process.

Some agents say that they don't edit their clients’ work and while this might well be true, it doesn't mean that they offer no editorial advice at all. They do it every time they reject a submission and comment “I didn’t love this enough”, or "this is not right for me". Such comments constitute valuable editorial advice. Even more valuable is the blank rejection which implies that the writing is just not good enough, which every writer would be wise to pay close attention to no matter how hurtful they find it.

What Happens When An Agent Gives Up?

It can seem, sometimes, that agents make too little effort on behalf of their clients—particularly their newer, unpublished ones.

There are relatively few major fiction publishers in the United Kingdom. If an agent can’t place a book after ten or fifteen submissions, they might not try further: chances are there won’t be any other good-enough, big enough publishers which they think would “fit” the book well. So it might seem that an agent has made only a handful of submissions before advising their disappointed clients that the book has failed to sell, and that they should move on and write a new, more commercial book. In this situation writers are often left feeling that there’s not been nearly enough effort made on behalf of their precious books—especially when they consider the pages and pages of publishers that are listed in the Writer’s Handbook. To make it worse, it’s almost impossible for a writer to then find another agent to take their book on, as the highest-earning routes for it have already been exhausted.

But all is not lost. There are some wonderful smaller presses which fall beneath most agents’ radars because of their lower (or non-existent) advances. These presses usually accept unagented submissions, so there's nothing to stop a writer from making submissions for themselves if their agent gives up on their books.

Some of these presses produce beautiful books, and achieve sales that the bigger presses envy: Sarah Bower's The Needle in the Blood, from the consistently good Snowbooks, and Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost (or try this edition, with a much-improved jacket design), from Tindal Street Press, are prime examples.

Writers have to be careful: there are plenty of vanity publishers out there masquerading as small presses. And I'd still always advise a writer to find an agent to check and negotiate any contract before they signed. But if an agent is unable to place a book, that doesn't mean it's unpublishable.

Agents

Most writers can benefit in all sorts of ways from having a good agent: agents make sure that their clients' work gets seen by the very best publishers, and they negotiate contracts which squeeze out every last drop of value for their clients. I've written several blog posts about agents, and am certain to write more.

Many agents have websites and blogs, and here are links to several. This is by no means an exhaustive list as the Writer's Handbook (and other similar guides) already do that so much better than I could. These are the places that I find the most readable, informative and fun. Do please let me know if any of the links are broken, so that I can correct them; and if you know of a useful and informative agent website or blog, do please link to it in the comments so that we can keep this list as up-to-date as possible.


UK agents:

Andrew Lownie is a London-based literary agent with a preference for non-fiction, and his website has a good list of articles and opinion-pieces of interest to writers. Subscribe to Andrew's newsletter: it's consistently informative and funny.

Simon Trewin heads up United Agents and has a very useful blog.


American agents:

Jenny Bent, of The Bent Agency, has a new blog with a few very useful posts already in place.

BookEnds, LLC is a New Jersey-based literary agency with a blog written by Jessica Faust.

Nathan Bransford blogs frequently and is very well-regarded. He's an agent with Curtis Brown in San Francisco.

Dystel and Goderich is an agency in New York, with an interesting blog which all of its agents seem to contribute to.

Colleen Lindsay is an agent at Fine Print Literary Management and her blog, The Swivet, is on my list of essential daily reading.

Pub Rants: a blog from Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency in Denver. Make sure you subscribe to her agency's newsletter, which is always good.

Rants and Ramblings is the blog of Rachelle Gardner, a literary agent at the WordServe Literary Group. WordServe represents Christian writers, and works out of Colorado.

Janet Reid is based in New York. She has her own blog which is updated almost daily, her own website, and works at Fine Print Literary Management.

The Rejecter: a blog written by an anonymous assistant at a literary agency.

Miss Snark was a much-loved, but incognito, New York-based literary agent who stopped blogging in 2007. Her blog remains available, and is well worth reading. And no, I don't know who she was.

A New Model for Publishing?

For decades, the publishing business has worked pretty well. Writers write books; agents sell those books to publishers; publishers make the books available to the market. Money flows through the system from reader to writer via the publisher and agent. Everyone involved makes money, and gets what they want.

The publishing process—and the flow of money through it—begins to break down when the people involved in it aren't up to scratch.

You've written a book but your writing is so poor that you can't get an agent or a publisher to take you on? Learning to write well is the Old Model for writers, and therefore outdated. Publish your book yourself, then you'll have books in your hand within a week which you can sell direct to your own readers, mistakes and all!

You want to be an agent but you lack the expertise, experience and contacts you need to sell books to publishers? No problem! Make your money direct from writers! There are plenty of them and if they’re paying you direct, you can do away entirely with submitting to publishers. This New Model saves you both time and money!

You're a publisher, but can't sell your books to readers? No problem! Sell them to your writers instead! They’ll not be put off by poor writing or mistakes in their own books, so you can do away with editors; and you won’t have to employ sales people to get your books into bookshops (not that they’d stock them anyway, with all those mistakes in them), as your authors will buy their own books online, direct from you. Your New Model for Traditional Publishing will earn you a heap of cash—and you won’t even have to read any submissions. Just stick them out there as fast as they’re submitted, and watch the cash roll in.

Be very wary of new models of publishing. The old one works just fine.



[Note: this piece first appeared on my blog last June but somehow moved itself back into my list of draft posts, along with a couple of others. I will republish them all when the schedule allows. If you have read it before, apologies for the repetition; if you haven't, then please ignore this!]

Queryfail Two Is On Its Way!

Following the rather mixed success of the inagural round of Queryfail, which spawned Agentfail and stirred up so many people that even I blogged about it, Queryfail 2: Queries Never Die has been announced. It's going to take place this coming Friday, April 17, and people are already twitching in anticipation. In all sorts of ways.

Just bear in mind that Colleen Lindsay, who organises the whole thing, works in New York, so the timing is going to be a little strange for those of us in the UK. It'll give us all time to have a decent amount of coffee before the fun starts, and to have a few glasses of weekend wine before it finishes.

Queryfail?

Ten days ago Colleen Lindsay (who blogs over at The Swivet, and is a literary agent with the USA-based Fine Print Literary Management) organised Queryfail Day: a day-long Twitterfest. Colleen was careful to advise those taking part not to post anything which might indentify any of the writers whose queries were being discussed; and she warned that the exercise was not being done to make fun of anyone, but was an attempt to show, in real time, how overwhelmed agents and editors are with submissions and why so many of them fail.

I thought that the concept was potentially useful, very interesting and funny (although I haven't read it all and I didn't participate—I'm not one of the Twittering classes). However, plenty of people take the opposite view and many seem to feel that those who took part ridiculed the writers concerned.

In a few days I'll post my own response to Queryfail: Publishingfail. Expect it to move slowly, as most things in publishing do. And to keep you going until then, here’s some further Queryfail reading.

Editor Unleashed discusses The Queryfail Trainwreck; Justine Larbalestier leads her own excellent discussion; Book Publishing Today discusses Queryfail too; and even The Guardian gets in on the act.

Cutting The Slush Pile Down To Size

The slush-pile is an ever-present sea of despair. Some writers wallow about in it for years, while editors avoid it's depressing claggy depths. Most of the books it contains have no hope of ever being published by a mainstream publishing house; and yet their writers are so determined to be published that they submit their work repeatedly, racking up the volume of the slush pile and making it even harder for agents and editors to discover the few commercially-publishable works that the slush-pile contains.

If the books which stood no chance of commercial publication were removed from the heap, the submissions system would be transformed: volume would be reduced and response times could be improved; and the big publishing houses might just well reopen their doors to unsolicited manuscripts.

How could this be achieved? First, by writers taking more care with their submissions by editing their work more carefully, and by ensuring that they submit only to appropriate markets; and then by the provision of an ethical alternative route into publishing for the manuscripts which are commercially unpublishable.

I’ll be discussing that last point in greater detail soon.

Andrew Lownie, Literary Agent

If you’re keen to discover exactly what a literary agent does, take a look at Andrew Lownie’s website.

He’s a fabulous agent and has written several very candid articles about his work, in which he discusses his reasons for rejecting submissions, details his daily routines, and reveals his submissions statistics. It’s funny as well as informative: I laughed out loud as I read his descriptions of his slush pile. He regularly invites other publishing professionals to contribute (although quite what he was thinking of when he requested this piece I cannot imagine); and if you subscribe to his newsletter you don’t even have to visit his website to read all of this wondrous information as he’ll send it straight to your inbox.

Just remember to come back here when you’re done with him, because I do want you back.

Authonomy Signing Update

Two days ago, I blogged about the three Authonomy authors who have been signed to HarperCollins. One of the books signed was represented by Andrew Lownie (for whom I have a very soft spot--he's a wonderful agent) and I wrote,

...it's probable that they were picked up following Lownie's submission of their book to HarperCollins, rather than through the Authonomy site.

The ever-vigilant Sally Zigmond has this morning spotted this comment from the man himself over on Galleycat:

My agency submitted Never Say Die by Melanie Davies and ghosted by Lynne Barrett-Lee in the normal way. The fact the authors had put it on Authonomy may have helped in Collins's decision but the editor was only aware of the script being on Authonomy after the submission. Andrew Lownie

God, I'm good.

(Now, if Sally could just find out for me if the authors of the other two books are represented, I'd be very grateful indeed.)

ETA: Here's a news story which explains how HarperCollins made its offer for the book in December, nearly a month before Authonomy announced the sale.

Query Blasting: The Scattergun Approach

There are all sorts of organisations out there which will, for a fee, send your query to agents or editors, or your press release to newspapers, TV stations and the like. They usually do what they promise, and e-mail your information out to all the names on their mailing lists—and those lists can be vast, with tens of thousands of names on them. But what is the usual outcome of such a scattergun approach?

Well, first, you pay for their services. Then they send out your information (and if they've written your press release or query letter for you, they'll have charged you extra for this and will probably have written a formulaic, template-based piece which will have a very limited effect); and then—nothing.

You're unlikely to see good results, or to even make back the money that you paid them. Because the queries that they send out on your behalf will be generic, one-size-fits-all; they're not going to be personalised, addressed to individual people, or even targeted to appropriate agents or editors who represent your genre; and the press releases will go out to all their media contacts regardless of whether you're promoting a book about train-spotting in 1920s Sweden or a contemporary romance novel with an S&M twist.

Let me remind you: each time you send anything out, you have to target the right people. If you had a problem with your phone bill, you wouldn't just write to every person in every phone company you could find, would you? Regardless of what country you, or they, are in? No. You'd write to the customer services department of your phone provider, and tell them exactly what the problem is. It's the same with queries, submissions, media packs, press releases, and review copies. You must send them to the right people, otherwise the whole exercise is a pointless waste of everyone's time and money.

Why Does It Take So Long?

The months which pass between submission and response can seem terribly long and I’ve heard all sorts of desperate reasons offered for that long delay. Some writers insist that agents don’t bother to pay attention to the slush pile because they hold all writers in contempt unless they’re top-selling celebrity types: that’s a great slur on agents who are, on the whole, committed, passionate professionals with great talent, scope and flair. One particularly embittered individual insisted that submissions were purposely not returned for several months in order to give the impression that the agents were busier than they really were: the logic of that one, coupled with my own experiences of slush, left me reeling.

The best editors and agents tend to be very overworked. Both jobs require a lot of reading, which is very time-consuming; and they have to prioritise clients and books which are already under contract and which they depend on to earn their livings. Reading through slush is purely speculative and very unlikely to earn them anything at all and consequently, it can’t be given priority.

Here’s an excellent account of how much effort one particular agent makes to clear her slush pile, from Rachel Vater from Folio Literary Management: she’s an established, successful agent, and describes the problems far better than I can.

A Closed Shop?

There’s a common misconception that it’s impossible for a new writer to find themselves an agent unless they’ve got friends in the business, or a publishing deal already on the table. It seems that publishing is considered a closed shop. And this just isn’t the case.

I got my agent by emailing her, and asking if she’d consider my work: I didn’t have any sort of deal in place. She asked for a sample of my novel, then she asked for the whole thing; then she bought me a very nice lunch and off we went. The whole process took less than a week. Honestly: if a writer’s work is good enough and is submitted to an appropriate agent, it will find representation sooner or later.

Janet Reid: The Two Parts Of Brave

I've just read a wonderful post over at Janet Reid's blog.

Janet Reid is a literary agent, based in New York. She's exacting and pernickety and very difficult to land as an agent (I make her sound like a prize carp): but she's also knowledgeable and successful and supportive, and makes fabulous deals for her clients.

She's also very much aware of how heartbreaking the writing life can be, as you'll discover if you read this old blog post of hers.