Encouraging agents

I've been thinking about yesterday's post. Specifically the question: how do you know when you have a bad book on your hands?

How do you know if the reason you're not meeting with success is that your book is rubbish? How can you tell when you should just give up?

Here's one thing I can tell you now: agents won't help. There are few greater exercises in tact than the agent's stock response; the standard letter they send to nearly everyone they don't plan to represent. This letter takes no account of how brilliant or appalling the writer's work is.

I've received several. They are good for the soul. As J.K. Rowling said "these were real rejection letters – even real writers had got them" (Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2008). Here's the first one I received by email, a response to a posted submission including the first three chapters of my book:

Dear Ego,

Thank you for writing to us regarding your work [my book]. We are afraid that, despite its qualities, we do not feel sufficiently enthusiastic to offer to represent your work.

We apologise for the impersonal nature of this email and regret that we cannot enter into correspondence about your work.

If you wish to have the material you sent to us returned please note that we need to receive an s.a.e. and sufficient postage within one month of the date of this email.

We wish you better luck in finding representation elsewhere.

Best wishes,

An Agent.


I will now deconstruct this email for your edification.

"We are afraid that, despite its qualities, we do not feel sufficiently enthusiastic...."

This sentence is a brilliant excercise in ambiguity. It must have taken hours of painstaking thought. The master-stroke is the absence of an adjective before the word "qualities". The enthusiastic writer will mentally fill in with "intriguing" or "brilliant" or "extraordinary" or "fantastic". So they'll take it as a compliment when in fact the agent sending the letter may be thinking "dreadful", "horrendous", "unbelievably bad" or "criminally awful".

Why not just say something unambiguously nice? "wonderful qualities" for example? Because if they do, then all the writers rejected via this standard letter will immediately email back saying, "But surely if my book has wonderful qualities then you should reconsider?"

As it is, the irate author is deprived of ammunition.


"We do not feel sufficiently enthusiastic..." this too is masterly. The subtle implication is that they do feel a little bit enthusiastic. But the sentence remains correct even if they feel utterly unenthusiastic and can't believe you ever had the cheek to inflict your piece of sh*t on them. They may know they'll lie awake for the next few weeks shuddering at the thought of your awful novel, but "we do not feel sufficiently enthusiastic..." remains technically correct.


"We apologise for the impersonal nature of this email and regret that we cannot enter into correspondence about your work."

This is for the writer who still hasn't worked out that the letter is a 'form reject'.


"If you wish to have the material you sent to us returned please note that we need to receive an s.a.e. and sufficient postage within one month of the date of this email."

In my case, I specifically mentioned in my brief letter that I didn't want the material returned. This sentence is a further reminder – if one is needed - that the agent is so busy that they probably didn't read past line two.

In a curious way this is reassuring. We writers tell ourselves that the agent is obviously SO busy that it's not surprising that the intriguing, brilliant, extraordinary qualities of our writing escaped their attention.

Finally:

"We wish you better luck in finding representation elsewhere."

All agents encourage you to keep looking. Here's a quote from another email:

"Since the decision taken in representing work is a subjective one and will vary greatly from person to person, I would encourage you to contact other agencies."

Agents all claim to be snowed under with submissions, so I often wonder why they encourage us to inflict our work on their competitors. I have concluded that they want to spread their misery. Furthermore, if there's one thing they don't want, it's for a writer to fixate on them. They don't want chocolates in the mail, they don't want tenners between the pages (well maybe some of them do), they don't want angry emails berating them for their ignorant rejections.

For example, here's a memorable quote from an article about agenting on the BBC website.

"The author who turns up uninvited at the office, or who bombards an agent's assistant with phone calls, is not likely to elicit the sort of response that will lead to a happy professional relationship. We recently had an author visit us clutching a bottle of champagne and asking whether she might read her novel aloud to an agent while the agent sat back and sipped her drink. This betrays a view of the life of literary agents that is romanticised at best."

Morale and Perseverance

In my other incarnation as an I.T. person, I read Joel Spolsky's occasional articles about his company, Fog Creek Software. Today's was about why startups fail.

Spolsky quotes Paul Graham: '"The biggest reason founders stop working on their start-ups is that they get demoralized," he writes. "Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme, there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck)."'

The parallels with writing are obvious. Similar questions occur to me. Is it possible for a start-up to succeed with a bad business? Is it possible for a writer to succeed with a bad book?

The answer in both cases is probably: sometimes, but you're making it a LOT harder for yourself.

The reason why would-be entrepreneurs lose morale and abandon their business is probably the same reason why would-be writers throw in the towel. Things aren't working out, and they conclude that they have a bad business. Or a bad book.

Irish coffee anyone?

One of my reviewers made the following point: You wouldn't drink Irish coffee on a first date. I disagree. However, I've asked around. It seems that opinion varies.

The scenario is this:

Cynthia finds her boss's murdered body in the office late one evening. She's terrified of being done for the crime so she decides to investigate.

Fortuitously, she's due to have dinner with the boss's attractive stepson the following night. He's a suspect too but she goes along anyway. She wants to suss him out. Also, murder or no murder, he's still GORGEOUS.

Dinner goes well. There's a spark, albeit slightly dampened by the spectre of his stepfather's corpse. At the end of the delicious, champagne-soaked meal they have Irish coffees.

Yes or no?

According to my reviewer, this just SO is not romantic. If anyone reading has views on this, let's have 'em.

(And if not Irish coffee, then what? Flaming zambucca? Tequila? A pint of Carlsberg?)

Sinful Self-Indulgence

Since yesterday's post I've been mulling over why I can't seem to get around to my next novel-related task. I'm not in the middle of any short stories. I do a bit of I.T. consulting, but I've nothing urgent on at the moment. I only have about three hours a day when I can work at anything, and right now I should be hard at it. My main outstanding task is a full read-through of the novel, reviewing my latest improvements.

This morning I realised what's wrong. I enjoy it too much. The jokes are perfectly attuned to my personal sense of humour. The sad bits are precision geared to making me cry. Whenever I glance at a page I get sucked in for half an hour.

Stiletto takes about four hours to read. It feels like a criminal waste of four hours when I could be doing something more objectionable, like work. The guilt level is up there with pulling a sickie, going for a walk by the seaside and sitting on a rock with an Agatha Christie and a glass of wine.

Hmm. Maybe I'll start that revision now.

The Long Wait

"Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo", said Don Marquis, whoever he was.

A bit like sending your novel to an agent then. I've queried a few agents now and so far I've had a request for a 'partial' and a request for a 'full'. The 'full' at the end of October, the 'partial' about three weeks ago.

I've heard nothing back from either of them – nada, nowt, rien. I imagine them floating in a leisurely way towards the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The 'full' is a pink petal, the 'partial' is yellow.

Meanwhile I've submitted several short stories to different short story competitions. None of the winners are due to be announced until March. Although the odds are against my stories winning or being placed, I can't try to sell them elsewhere until I know for sure.

It's a period of hiatus, a weird interval of suspended animation. The only solution is to get stuck into something new. But right now I'm going to get stuck into Joshua Ferris' "Then We Came to the End" instead.

Please be my agent!

The query letter for my novel, "Stiletto in Old Street", used to be awful. Thanks to online advice from Nathan Bransford and Agent Kristin amongst others it's now brilliant. I wish. I sent a batch of four out today; the response rate might tell me something. Last time I sent five inferior queries and got one request for what we in the trade call 'a partial'.

It's an appalling time to query. See Crapometer today for some of the reasons why.

Those of you who are not aspiring writers may wonder what a 'query letter' is. It's the letter you send to agents describing your novel and begging them to represent you. There's a formula available – see Nathan's blog. If you know about that, you're on to a good start. The challenge is to be unique and persuasive and gripping and outstanding within that formula. I'm sure an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters could get it right, but for the rest of us there are an infinite number of pitfalls.

For example, you are supposed to say something personal about the agent. What if you don't know anything personal about them? I'm querying UK agents. Half of them don't have websites. I can't find their author lists and when I do I've never heard of anyone on them.

Common advice is to find books that are like yours, find out who the authors' agents are and then query them. Bingo! You're agented!

Yeah, yeah, that's so not going to happen. For a start I can't find any books like mine. They must be out there but I have not been able to locate them in Cahersiveen Library. Furthermore, this technique would probably generate a list of maybe five agents. What do we do if they all say no? Give up? Well yes, that's what they'd like us to do at 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. But I'm too bloody-minded, at least for now.

So I get my agents from the "Writers' and Artists' Yearbook". There's a whole list in there, over a hundred of them. If they have an asterisk beside their name they're members of the society of agents or something, and that means they get a query from me. Eventually. I'm starting at the end, on the principle that the agents at the beginning probably get a lot more queries.

When I've run out of asterisked agents I'll take my chances with the unasterisked. (Incidentally I did once send a highly personalised query to an (unasterisked) agent who claimed to like representing both women's fiction and crime. My crime novel has a contemporary, chick-litty tone. A perfect match! Plus her agency promises to respond to emailed queries within a week. That was in May '08 and I still haven't heard back.)

When I've queried all the unasterisked agents, I'll either give up or self-publish. It depends on just how bloody-minded I turn out to be.

Welcome!

I believe it's traditional for a first blog post to list the reasons why the author has started blogging.

I've been thinking about what to say over the past couple of days. It's not easy to gather up the mish-mash of different impulses and sculpt them into something that looks sensible and focused. But I shall attempt to do so.

Frankly, the reason I first considered blogging was the general view that seems to prevail on the web that writers who wish to be published should have a blog. They should also, apparently, have a big bunch of journalist and PR friends, and a website with a readership numbered in the hundreds of thousands. I don't have any of these things, but hey you gotta start somewhere.

The question on my mind was, if I started a blog what on earth would I blog about? Instinct told me that the cute sayings of my one-year-old son wouldn't cut it. (This morning, by the way, he made the great mental leap that allows him to distinguish between 'egg' and 'leg'.) Likewise, my opinions on Ireland's economy, trenchant though they may be, don't seem like the best material for impressing agents and publishers with my writerly abilities.

Gradually I began to realise that as a writer with a blog, what I would blog about would be writing. This seems dangerously self-indulgent. Just, like, tell people all the nonsense that's churning around in my mind all day? Just, like, expect them to listen?

Do you remember when you signed up for a pen-friend in primary school? Guidelines would be issued as to what to write in your letter. Guideline number one was not to start every sentence with 'I'. They didn't say what you should use instead, but I was an obedient child. Religiously in each letter I would refrain from saying 'I' at the beginning of each sentence. If I wished to tell my correspondent that I'd been to the beach, I would say “My sister and I went to the beach.” Describing my new shoes, I'd say “Some new shoes were bought for me.” Perhaps I was missing the point, but I took it all terribly seriously.

And now the suggestion has been made that it's my duty to write something that's all about me! Me and my inner life! Start every single sentence with 'I' if I like! Bore people rigid with detailed information on my every writer-like thought! And don't do all this in a secret diary to be published after my tragic but noble early death - instead put it out there on the internet in the hope that someone, somewhere, will be fascinated!

What's not to like? Welcome to 'The Egotistical Writer'. If you want to read a blog redolent with modesty, reticence and a desire to avoid boring the reader, go somewhere else. Or, as my one-year-old would say, “'way!”