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."