10 Facts about Agents

Fact 1: You don't need an agent to approach a publisher, and you don't need an agent to be published. However, most publishers won't look at unsolicited manuscripts. If they do, be prepared for a long, long wait. Or for your manuscript to be looked at by someone on work experience.

Fact 2: It is NOT an agent's job to carefully read every unsolicited manuscript that comes in through the door.

Fact 3: An agent's job is to look after existing clients and their work. That's why authors like having agents; they don't want to have to read the small print, or negotiate, or invoice or do any of the hundreds of things agents do for clients.

Fact 4: Every agent wants to discover a brilliant new talent, but just because you've written 100,000 words it doesn't automatically follow that they're brilliant.

Fact 5: Every agent gets fed up with badly written, rude, demanding, illiterate letters

Fact 6: Every agent sees far too many of the above

Fact 7: Every agent receives hundreds of manuscripts to look at a year - for some it may be thousands - and can rarely take on more than a couple of new clients in each year

Fact 8: The maths of Fact 7 means your work may be above average, it may even be rather good, but only exceptional work will get taken on.

Fact 9: It is your job to make your work exceptional, not the agents.

Fact 10: New writers are taken on by agents every year.

I'll write about how to make your work exceptional tomorrow.

Before and After

Before I was published I went to writing groups and talks about writing.  I found writing friends and set up workshopping groups.  I devoured every article or book I could read on How to Get Published. I researched agents.  It was a happy time, endlessly absorbing with, at the end of it, at some unspecified date, the prospect of publication. 

It was a bit like being pregnant.  Suddenly anything and everything to do with pregnancy – a subject which I had previously avoided – became endlessly interesting.  Every twinge was fascinating, every new development to be pored over and discussed with my NCT group.  Then, finally, the great day came and at the end of it I had a baby. After the euphoria had died down and I was left alone with my vulnerable little son I was suddenly struck with the awful thought: I’ve got to look after him for the next twenty years or so.

When you get published you’re taken over by the wonderfulness of what has just happened to you.  You sidle round bookshops rearranging the shelves so your novel faces out, and have your picture taken in Sainsburys against the book section.  You start a scrap book with every press cutting, every scrap of promotional material you can find lovingly stuck in with Pritt stick.  Enjoy it.  It will never be like this again.

I’m not being cynical, it’s just that once you’ve got published, it’s like holding the baby in your arms and realising you’ve hardly thought about what was going to happen next.  Because what happens next in writing is you’ve got to produce another book, and then another.  One a year for commercial fiction, longer for literary fiction. It becomes a job.  A fascinating job complete with an adrenaline rush – closer to a high wire act than the checkout – but it’s still a job.  So, even if you’re desperate for publication, take time to enjoy the process.  Believe it or not, one day you may be looking back wistfully at those happier, simpler times before you got published.