Getting my submission reviewed

Sometimes, you get a rejection letter from an agent. In theory, you sometimes get a request for more information but this is an exceptional case. On the plus side, I am yet to get a restraining order so that is a positive.

.Sometimes the agent doesn't respond. Well, that is fair enough, I suppose. Agents are busy people. How long you should wait before assuming that this is the least formal version of "Thanks but no thanks" depends on the agency. Some will tell you that they will look at submissions within 3 months. Some say that they will try to look at submissions within a certain time frame and in those cases it is becomes a judgement call as to when you should move on. It makes sense to keep your book in front of a reasonable size pool of agents. Too small and you are hurting your chances. Too large and you run the risk of irritating the very people that you most need to impress. It is a balancing act and, since you have no idea what happens after you send the submission off, it is a blind-fold balancing act.

Since several agents have been silent for 3 months and I know that another is on maternity leave (I don't stalk them but twitter is public), it is time to send out a few more emails but I have decided to pay for an editor to review my submission. I know that there are a lot of sharks out there and advice may not be worth what you pay for it but I have been impressed by the integrity of Agent Hunter (http://www.agenthunter.co.uk/) and I am going to see if they can help me

As I said in a previous post, an author has at most minutes to make an impression and perhaps as little as a few seconds. I would be a fool not to want to make the best possible use of that time.

Will I follow their advice? Well, probably most of it. We shall see. I am planning on publishing a "lessons learned" post as soon as I can claim to have learned anything.

The quest continues...

Why people write books and why you shouldn't do it for the money

So, there is no news from any agents but that is not unexpected. A week may be a long time in politics but it is the blink of an eye when seeking an agent. That is very much the long game.

My first book was self-published as I said and I have helped a few other people self-publish. As part of that, I attended a workshop run by Entrepreneur’s Circle (a business development group) for authors looking to market their books.

There were some good tips on climbing the Amazon best seller lists in specific categories and it was a generally helpful course but one thing that I found interesting was the reason why the people wrote books. I write because I can’t imagine not writing. I have stories to tell and I love sharing them. However, the people there were all writing non-fiction. The books that they were writing were all in support of other business goals.

I think that it is fair to say that many people write books to establish themselves as experts in the subject matter. I can see that a consultant who has written a book on the best ways to unscrew the inscrutable would be well placed to represent themselves as the expert that you need when faced with a problem in that domain. Profits from selling the book will be (for these people) a bonus.

Some write to share their passion with others. I got my brother a book on how to carve decorative wooden objects that was written by someone with a deep love of the subject that he clearly believed that everyone should share. He was writing about his passion and that came across well despite his lack of skill with words.

Text books are a bit of a special case. While novels and most non-fiction books are written and published as more or less one off events, text books are constantly revised. Sometime the subject is one that changes rapidly such as the case with books about technology but other subjects don’t seem to change much. Many students think that it is an attempt to milk profit from the students that form a captive audience. Certainly, the publishers of such books tend to do well with double digit profit margins but I don’t know how much of that gets back to the author. I suspect that the writers of text books are motivated by a desire for reputation as much as any financial motivation.

Others write because they are trying to send a message to the world. Certainly the bible and Chairman Mao little red book proved to be good sellers. Even Mein Kampf has rarely been out of print.

As for writing for the money, well, many authors may do that but it doesn’t really work for most people. There is an illuminating and rather discouraging study here: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/self-publishing-debate-part3/

To pull some figures from the report, most self-published authors make under $5000 (£3500) from their writing with over half of them reporting no profit at all. I make more than that a month in my day job and some of these books will have taken years to write. When I looked at how this compares to conventionally published writers, the result surprised me. About a third of conventionally published authors are in the same $5000 and lower bracket. Fewer than 10% of conventionally published authors and fewer than 2% of self-published authors make a living wage from their writing. In terms of financial returns for the time spent, most authors would be better off with a minimum wage part time second job.

Now, an agent typically takes a 15% cut. It is clear from these figures than this is often 15% of very little. I can quite understand why they looking for the rare sure fire winners in their huge piles of submissions. If these figures are a good guide, it is a wonder that most agents can afford to eat.

Their cut seems very modest indeed when you look at the numbers.

Still, the search continues. Best of luck, folks. I wouldn't say no to a little luck for myself.

In the spirit of full disclosure…

I come from something of a family of scribblers. My brother wrote a regular page for a local paper and my father wrote a book about the interactions of the native Canadians of the north-west territories and the Canadian government of the time.

I read my father’s book. It was well researched and cogently argued. The style was, I have to admit, very dry and more than a bit dusty. It was clear that he had learned to write from teachers in the 1940s and they were often older men. Many teachers were pulled out of retirement to work at the blackboard once more. That said, there was much of value in there and considerable original research.

Now, a history is not necessarily a “trade book”. If you are not familiar with the term, it generally refers to the sort of book that you would find in a big book shop and specifically not specialist books such as text books or manuals. The definition can be a bit blurred especially with the rise of online stores but if your book is called “A history of windmills in 17^th century Florence” then it is not really aimed at the general public and so not considered a trade book. It was hard for my father to believe that not everyone was as fascinated with the topic as he was. I suspect that this is a common trait among authors. Of course, I am immune from this delusion and know that everyone loves zombie survival guides and SF/religious/comedy crossovers.

Anyway, for non-trade books, an author can still approach a publisher directly without needing an agent which was fortunate. My father is still around and closer to his 86^th birthday than his 85^th but he was in his early 70s when he completed his manuscript. I have heard that agents (quite reasonably) much prefer authors who will produce multiple saleable books and my father could not be described as a prolific writer.

He approached publishers one at a time. More accurately, he approached one publisher once. The publisher rejected it saying that they did not think that it was publishable in its current form. It probably didn’t help that he had asked for a large advance. The manuscript went into a desk drawer and has stayed there for the past 10 years.

I dare say that the publisher knew his business and the book would not be of much use to a general publisher. It is a very specialist subject. However, such books are generally part of the long tail. You might not be familiar with the term but, in retail, it is where the profit comes not from large volumes of a few best selling items (for example, the Twilight books) but from many items that sell a relatively few copies. It generally costs more to handle these low volume items and that has to be figured into the retail price.

There are online publishers (and self publishers) that exist almost entirely on the long tail – CD Baby, Lulu and many others. Without the backing of a publisher and a professional editor, a lot of books and CDs are a bit rough around the edges but they can still be of value. If yours is the only book on a subject, it is by definition the best book on that subject.

If it had been my book, I would have considered the validity of the feedback, looked at what I could do to fix it and then tried again with another publisher. If that was unproductive, I would have looked at making it part of the long tail with a print on demand publisher. Hey, better to sell a few copies a month or even a year than none at all. However, my father is a proud man and it is his way or the highway.

I am not that proud. I write because I can’t imagine not writing. And I rewrite. One short story that I had published in an audiobook was rewritten from scratch 4 times without any change of characters or plot. It was worth it. The last version was greatly improved. I don’t think that more than 100 people ever heard it but I am still glad that I did it.

So, do I write just for myself? No, not wholly. If what I am writing works for someone then it is worth doing it. Of course, if it works for a lot of people and they all want to give me money then everyone wins. That said, Neil Gaiman (a fine fellow) has given excellent advice here. If you write just for the money then it won’t be worth it. If it doesn’t sell then you won’t get the money and you won’t have enjoyed the work. If you write what you love and it doesn’t sell… you still have the pleasure of writing it and something that you love. I also think that a writer will write what he knows and loves far better than what he thinks will sell.

I am away on a training course (like almost everyone that writes, I have a day job) so I am going to be off the radar for a week or so. I will post an update if anything exciting happens but it is a waiting game at the moment.

If it helps, think of this bit as the epic trek through the forests that so many fantasy heroes endure for purposes of character development. I should really have some quirky companions.

Why I quite like rejection slips

I have had a few rejection slips/emails. I was pleased to get them. This may seem masochistic but there is method to my madness. I am questing for an agent, not tilting at windmills.

Rejection is horrible. Do you remember that time when you asked that cute girl/boy out and they said no? It was pretty awful. I am told that a relationship with an agent can last years and you can come to trust each other to a remarkable degree. How many teenage relationships could you describe that way?

However, let us consider how much they know about you. As I said in a previous blog, an agent might easily be getting 166 or more submissions a week. They will probably have spent less than ten minutes looking at your submission and maybe much less than that. They may not have even got to the end of the cover letter. “Wild west action novel? No market for those this week.”

You might say that a rejection from an agent is as impersonal as choosing to buy a different book in a well stocked book shop but that wouldn’t really be accurate. If we consider that at least one agent passed over nearly eight thousand writers and took on five, it is more like someone coming into a bookshop, looking around and then not buying any books.

Of course, it might be personal and that is actually useful for a number of reasons. Imagine that I had the following rejection.

“Hey, Mark, I read your submission. Your main character is derivative and the pacing was way off. Consider writing classes and don’t quit the day job.”

So, the agent read the cover letter and was interested enough to look at one or more chapters of the customary three provided. That tells you that your elevator pitch (the 30 second explanation of the book) must have been at least OK for this reader and he was willing to consider this sort of material.

They have helpfully explained what they didn’t like. You may not agree with them. It is just an opinion. Even if ten people say the same thing, that doesn’t mean that you didn’t make a valid artistic decision although it may indicate that your sales would be weak. By itself, the feedback is not something that you should act on. I have been told that the same short story was too packed with plot, too character based and glacially slow. At least one of those has to be wrong. There is a saying that if one man tells you that you are a horse, he is insane. If two tell you that you are a horse, it is a conspiracy. If ten men tell you that you are a horse, it is time to start counting your legs.

A response that looks like the agent didn’t read your submission may indicate that they are not looking for that sort of book (or possibly any kind of book if they have recently taken on several authors) or that your cover letter failed to excite.

However, one thing that you can say for sure about a rejection notice is that they don’t want to represent you, at least for now. That is really good to know and here is my reasoning.

If I contact an agent, the things that can happen in worst to best order are:

1.      The agent agrees to represent me and then never sends the book anywhere. The worst worst case is that they ask for loads of changes and then never do anything with it.

2.       The agent says that they would like to represent me but requires fundamental changes to the book that would make it into something that I would not want to have written.

3.       The agent doesn’t respond at all and I wait the three months before deciding that they are not interested.

4.       The agent asks for a reading fee. This one is easy. I failed to do my research. Ok, refuse the request and move on.

5.       The agent declines the submission.

6.       The agent likes the submission and ask for the full text.

A straightforward “no” is the second best option. Option 1 could delay me for years, cost me a fortune and prevent the book ever coming out. Option 2 is only bad if I decide that yes, I could change the gender and culture of my hero and change the setting from Morecombe Bay in the 1970s to China during the Boxer rebellion. Option 3 might be worse than option 2. It is unreasonable to submit to more than about ten agents so long delays prevent you getting your words in front of someone that might like it more. Option 4 is not bad. I will have wasted some time but I am not silly enough to fork over cash.

Option 5 is the dreaded rejection. By comparison to the other choices, it is looking pretty good about now. Option 6 is the only better one and that could fall back to option 5 in the end if they don’t like the rest of the book or if the later chapters just need too much work.

A refusal may tell me whether they read the cover letter. It may have feedback. It also ends the uncertainty. It can be hard to cope with uncertainty but we have all handled a bit of rejection in our day. Dust yourself off, maybe have a small chocolate bar, consider the covering letter again in the light of any new information and look for the next agent. A rejection letter is not a failure. Every writer gets one and then another one and yet another one. Look up rejection letters that famous authors have had if you feel blue after getting one.

Some people claim that you shouldn’t give up until you have had 100 rejections from agents. That would take a while to get and you could polish your work quite a bit in that time or write another book. At my current rate of rejections, that would be about twelve years. Z-day UK took me three months to write. Someone to believe in me took about eighteen months spread over several sprints.

How many rejection letters will I need before I give up?  That would depend on why they were saying no. If there is no market, well, markets change. If they didn’t like the length, I can fix that. If they hated the idea then it would come down to how much faith I have in the book. My test readers (all but one) liked it a lot. Several of them liked it enough to spend many hours on it. I have a fair amount of faith in this one.

So, we have considered all the possible cases where we don’t get published, right? No, not by a word or a line. Imagine that you get the perfect agent. They love your work. You get on really well with them. They can hook you up with an editor if you need one. You are the lucky 0.06%. Now the book gets sent to publishers. The first one may well reject it. So may the second one. It may be that none of them will take it. In this case, option 6 is really option 1 all over again but with much better intentions. That rejection is not looking all that bad suddenly.

If no-one likes it, I can still self publish and maybe get a few sales - it is unlikely that a book that no agent liked will be a great seller but that is not a hard and fast rule. It worked out OK for 50 shades of Grey.

More thoughts on selecting an agent

So, there are many agents and a great many writers. As one of those writers, I want to maximise my chances. Here is what I have been doing. Maybe it is the right idea and maybe it is not. As I have said, I don’t have an agent yet.

Agents generally list what kind of books they are interested in. Some agents only handle fiction and some only handle non-fiction but even within those broad categories, there are multiple specialities. 

A very common complaint from agents is that people send them books outside of their area of interest. I can see their point of view.

One of the things that must be valuable to an agent is their relationship with publishers. They need to be seen as reliable and reasonable so that a publisher is likely to read a submission; remember that agents are paid from commission and no sale means no money. Imagine two agents, A and B. A is that guy who offered up a self-help book, a sparkly vampire romance novel and a funny book about dogs. B is the guy who has offered up four wartime dramas that didn’t quite make the grade but who is getting better at finding what the publisher wants. Which of these guys would get more credibility? 

An agent that broadens his or her range too much could well be working against themselves.

There is also the question of personal taste. Remember what I said about the amount of time that you probably have to convince someone is under two minutes? How much harder is that sell when it is “Here is a genre that you don’t like and have asked people not to send you but people that like that genre might buy this” compared to “You said you like genre X and here is a great example of it”? 

Poor targeting wastes the agent’s time and it wastes yours. Wasting the two minutes that it takes the agent to shake his head and move on is unfortunate. Wasting the three months before you can politely give up and approach another agent is unforgivable.

This does make cross genre work harder to place, I think… and yes, I am trying to get representation for a cross genre book. I never said that I was smart.

There is also the question of experience. Agents come fresh from being an editor or even fresh from graduation and gain experience until they have an established list of writers and relationships with publishers.

The newer the agent is, the more reason they have to build their client list and the more time they will probably be spending reading submissions. They will have fewer writers to look after. Let us put ourselves in their shoes for a moment. Come with me on this and, yes, this is pure supposition on my part. Your name is John and you are a brand new agent. You don’t have any writers on your list. You have been given introductions to a few people at a couple of publishers by one of the senior agents. Any decision that you make is going to be checked by a senior agent. You are under some pressure to find something that the agency can get published and get some revenue rolling in. Your best bet is something that should be an easy sell to a publisher and which won’t make you look stupid. This is probably not the time to take a chance. If publishers are taking books on political infighting among dog breeders, you are probably going to be looking for the best book on that topic that you can find. You will have to voraciously plough through submissions looking for them.

Let us swap shoes now. You are Liz, an agent who has been in the business for 25 years. You have a string of writers and you know them well. You have contacts at most of the publishers and sometimes you catch up with them for lunch. Your client list is pretty full and you are not really looking for new writers urgently but you there may be something good in the submissions and it is worth a look. Maybe you will find a writer to take on for yourself or someone for John, the new guy. His agent list is very empty. What you are looking for is going to be different. A writer doing something interesting might be more appealing than the safer option of choosing the least bad of the genre de jour. Maybe you could spot a trend before it really gets going and end up with a best seller. If you decide that you like something, you can back it without having to justify it to anyone and a publisher is much more likely to give it a read because you have sent a lot of good stuff to them in the past. If they don’t like it, it won’t do you a lot of harm.

Are these accurate portrayals of typical agents? I don’t know. They seem like pretty credible models to me. If we assume that they are then it seems then that the hungry young agent is your best bet for getting an easy to place book read but your worst bet if you are trying to get representation for something unusual. If you go for a more senior agent, they are less likely to read your work (and the more astonishingly good your elevator pitch needs to be) but they are more likely to be interested in something that is not a safe option that is following the fashion.

Hmmm. I have been approaching newer agents. I am now wondering if this was a poor move. I saw a tweet from one agent that I had approached to say that she was nervous because she was approaching a publisher for the first time and that struck me as beautifully honest, refreshingly candid and a little worrying. I am a pretty new writer and I would hope that my agent was at least as experienced as me.

I could be wrong about these things. I have been wrong in the past and I know that I will be wrong in the future. If you think or know differently, I would be delighted to hear your comments.

Thanks for reading and good questing.

Mistake number 1

I wrote a cover letter and a synopsis (far too long a synopsis given what I later learned) and put the first 3 chapters of the book (double spaced and triple checked for errors) into a file. I explained why I was approaching that particular agent. The letter was probably too long.

Ok, let us call it mistake number 1 and children.

I sent it off and waited. I also made sure to follow that agent on Twitter. I waited some more. I was expecting to wait for a while. I had done my research.

The agent announced on twitter that that had just sold a novel for a new author to a major publishing house. Well, that is great. It occurred to me that I would probably have a lot longer to wait since her focus would clearly be on representing that author. It was at that point that I read an article by another agent from the same agency. It is a fine, fine article. http://hjreynolds.co.uk/publishing/literary-agents-submissions-tips/

So, apparently it is considered to be acceptable to approach multiple agents at the same time with a suggested upper limit of ten. Well, that seems reasonable. How had I not known that? Ten sounds like a reasonable number as it massively speeds up the process (well, you wait ten times as fast) and it is not too many to contact if someone does show an interest. Of course, it is polite to tell agents that there are a few other people that you are talking to; that is also wholly reasonable.

I now add a new agent to the ones that I am trying to woo every time I get a rejection. This has changed my approach to rejection as I will discuss in a later post.  

However, let us look at the numbers. One of the agents looked at 8000 submissions in a year and took on five new authors. So, that is a success rate of 0.06%. This is sobering but it is not time to give up hope. I have been in bookshops. I own books. Clearly, some get through this process. However, let us dive into this a little further.

If we assume that an agent diligently reads submissions for half of his or her time (and I would be astonished if they had so much time to dedicate to “panning for gold”) then that is around 20 hours a week. That would mean about 166 submissions per week. I have heard other agents talk about 250 submissions a week but let us go with the lower figure. That gives an average of 10 minutes per submission.

Ok. That doesn’t sound so bad. You have 10 minutes to convince someone that your work is wonderful.

Um, no, sadly not. To read the first three chapters of a book will take considerably longer than that. If I were the one reading the manuscripts, I don’t think that I would have time to open most of the files. If I read the covering letter, that will take me two or three minutes. If I don’t like the synopsis or if the synopsis takes more than a minute or so to read then I would pass on the submission and send a standard “Thanks but not for me. Good luck!” email. The exact sort of email that I had soon after sending my work to multiple agents.

So, I think that I need to convince an agent that my work is going to be more valuable to them than the other 166 submissions that they had this week in probably two minutes. I need to persuade the agent that my work is worth losing the chance to read those other guys. This is not a leisurely discussion between potential friends. This is not even a speed date. This is having to sell something complex in virtually no time while being very personable.

Now, do you remember that I said that sales and marketing were not my sort of thing? By training, I am a computer scientist. I could not have prepared worse for this quest if I had chosen to study flower arranging instead of horse riding. The farm boy that rides off to defeat the dark lord in his castle is far better prepared.

So, I shortened my letter. I focused on the elevator pitch while being my most charming. I decided that I would use every one of the seconds that I was allowed and hope for the best.

Did that fix my mistakes? You will have to ask me again after I have found an agent. The quest goes on.

But I don’t know any literary agents…

As might be expected of a profession where they rely on people providing material for them to represent, agents make it very possible to find them and contact them.

However, here be dragons. There are “agents” out there who will charge a reading fee. Now, the time of an agent is valuable. They are professionals and experts in their fields. Clearly their time is valuable. It seems reasonable that they will want paying. It might initially seem wholly reasonable that they would charge for their time. Of course, they do charge, typically about 15% of any profit on sales. When you approach an agent, you are asking them to give up some of their time in the hope that what you have to offer will pay them in the long term.

There may be perfectly decent and honest literary agents that charge reading fees or submission fees. However, there are certainly many “agents” that have never or rarely spoken with a publisher and make their living reading submissions by hopeful authors. This is a kind of vanity press but without the benefit of getting even a limited print run at the end.  I did my research and didn’t approach anyone offering such a deal. A lot of honest agents offer a similar warning on their websites so it seems that it is a widespread issue and that honest brokers do not like those that follow this practice.

So, how do you find a reputable agent? Google or another search engine of your choice will certainly find you agencies. Wikipedia has a list of them too. As always, if something seems too good to be true, it generally is. I decided not to talk to agencies that were all about how they could help me and how much they loved submissions without talking about published writers that they represent or genres that were of interest to them. Essentially, you find an agent or agency and then research them. 

If they check out then you approach them.

You can save yourself some time by using a service such as Agent Hunter (http://www.agenthunter.co.uk/) which collates a lot of information about agents including what sort of fiction they like, whether they are looking for clients and so on. The fee for this seemed modest and so I decided to pay it.

Was this the right approach? Hmmm. I don’t know. Ask me when I have an agent.

I did my research. I found an agent that I thought would like the book. I studied the submission guidelines.  I read the twitter feeds of agents that had them. I found someone that I thought would be perfect. I discussed the choice with my friend.

It was at this point that I made my first mistake. Well, the first that I knew about anyway. I like to think that I learn from my mistakes. I learned a lot.

Agent Quest: The story of how an author approached literary agents; an epic dystopian fantasy in an unknown number of parts

So, I have been a writer for a while.

Writing is a bit like a drug. You start off doing just a little and that is enough to get you through the day. Before you notice, you are polishing off a short story as if it were nothing. You start to build up a tolerance.

Eventually, I started hitting the hard stuff. I was working on a cross genre religious satire/SFF novel and a YA fantasy novel in parallel. I interrupted this to write and self publish a guide to surviving the zombie apocalypse.

Self publishing taught me a few things. Knowing how the process works has helped me to assist other writers to do the same. The book sold tolerably well. I did a talk or two at literary festivals and similar. I sold some copies through Amazon and some directly, both signed and unsigned. It was good to have some sales but I didn't really have the will to market books. My addiction is to writing fiction.  I also don't have the financial clout to really market the book by myself.

I decided that I needed a publisher to promote the book, get the book into bricks and mortar stores and get it reviewed. However, the days when publishers would talk to authors in the Trade Book space (that is to say general and genre fiction) are long gone. Publishers talk to agents. Indeed, many of the functions that I mentioned are done by agents rather than publishers these days.

On the plus side, I would not be sending a manuscript in for a publisher to ignore. On the minus side, I would need to chase an agent. They are remarkably elusive!

Questing for the One Ring (TM) or the McGuffin of Evermore may be hard for heroes in a novel but questing for an agent is pretty tough for a mere mortal. However, I have allies. I have an editor who has patiently pointed out that I almost certainly meant "bold" rather than "bald". I have test readers who told me which bits they found funny. I also have a brass neck allowing me to approach strangers with unreasonable requests that they read my work.

It turns out that the brass neck thing is rather valuable.