Category Archives: craft

how i didn’t get a literary agent*

* until I did

why did I want an agent?

Self publishing is really popular and I get why. The traditional route to having your book in your sweaty little mitt is long, fraught and paved with having your heart pulled out and tango-ed on repeatedly by people, who for the most part, can’t even be arsed to call you back.

Despite this, I wanted to go trad because from what I could see from the indie authors I knew, the marketing side of that path was a whole second job. The notion of putting my pen down only to have to then source a decent cover, get the book produced professionally and perma-hustle my butt-off to sell it just didn’t appeal at the time. For those of you doing this my hat is in the off position.

pitches

To hook an agent, I needed an elevator pitch sharp enough to slice a rock. Ever the overachiever, I concocted three: a rapid-fire version for if I was stuck in a lift with Carmichael from Umbrella Academy, a mid-length one, and a longish one for the fabled moment when your agent/victim actually wants-to-know-more.

Cue me, muttering my pitches to myself at writers’ conferences, loitering by hotel elevators with a spanner. Spoiler: I never pitched to an agent in person.

yes, Carmichael. He’s basically a goldfish

PitMad & PitReallyFreakingFurious

So then there was #PitMad. Once every three months writers pitched their novels to actual human agents on the hellscape formerly known as Twitter. Essentially, the brief was to post a 280 character pitch for your meisterwerk including the appropriate hashtags. e.g.

#PitMad #HA Persuasion: Bridgerton x La La Land- Yrs ago, Anne let Wentworth go. Now he’s back—rich, successful, & still wounded. Can she win him back, or has she lost him forever? A slow-burn, second-chance romance of longing & regret. #HistoricalRomance

All participants would retweet the ones they liked (not their own obvs) and the literary gods would ‘like’ any pitch that caught their eye for follow up. I did this a lot of times and yeah, you guessed it, crickets.

what worked for me:

In the end, I realised that the odds were so stacked against writers that the only way of shortening them was to become mechanical and relentless about submitting my manuscript to people.

I bought a copy of the Writer’s and Artists Year Book and with the help of my glamorous assistant/wife scraped all the agents that didn’t hate on fantasy into a big-ass spreadsheet, rated them by how much of a fit the agencies might be (size, focus, vibe et. al.) and then sorted the heck out of them. Then the real fun began.

Ah, agent websites. To quote Kahn Noonien Singh, quoting Melville: “[To] the last, I will grapple with thee from Hell’s heart, I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!”

Okay. Maybe I’m overreacting a teensy bit, but while agency pages will all feature monochrome, smiley headshots of their agents, the most useful information i.e. what genres they read, likes/dislikes and their submission statuses is always buried behind an extra click or two. When sifting through hundreds of names, this gets old really quickly .

Suitably informed, I added the appropriate names into my spreadsheet and vroom, vroom it was submission time, baby.

submissions

submit to the ones you’re most interested in first in batches of 10. That way, if you do get a partial or full manuscript request you can let the other agents know, then gasp and chuckle with mirth as they fall over themselves to get in contact with you. Shoe’s on the other foot now, eh, mother-fathers!

tune your comps. These are your comparative books, the titles in your query letter that you’re comparing your manuscript to. Pick recent books, not Frankenstein x Bridget Jones (tempting though it is).

tune your synopsis and have multiple lengths of it .Is it annoying that every agency has a pet length and format? Yes. Is it necessary to stick to them? Absolutely. Remember you have to tell the whole story from start to finish. This is the time to kill-your-darling subplots.

tune your pitch letter and have different versions of that too. This is where all that practice you had pretending you were in a broken lift with Forrest J Ackerman comes in.

grow a thick skin over your robotic heart. Most of the time you aren’t going to hear back (and if you do chances are it’ll be a rejection.) Each ‘no’ earns a silent tear, a spreadsheet update, and another submission. Remember this is a numbers game and you only have to get lucky once.

keep up-to-date

The agency universe is a small one, but is in a state of constant flux. Check regularly to make sure that the list you’re working from is still valid. Agents move agencies. Agencies change names and they close and new ones open. In my case, the agency I was lucky enough to end up with (Greyhound Literary), didn’t even exist in its current form when I started querying.

never give up, never surrender

Years ago, the standard wisdom seemed to be if you had tried ten agencies and no-one was biting then you probably needed to write another book. Not anymore. The agents I met as part of my MFA advised to keep going until you run out of agencies. Publishing is fragmented, and marketing-driven, so persistence is key.

Everything I learned about querying, I learned from Galaxy Quest

so what have we learned?

Querying is hard mentally and emotionally.

On balance, it’s probably just as much work as self-publishing and you have to be capable of dealing with a lot of rejection up front, but on the flip side you’ll then have someone in your corner who has not only bought into your current book, but you as a writer and be with you for the long haul

It is a lot of work, but never forget, you only have to be lucky once.

So who needs an MFA anyway?

What is an MFA?

It’s a Master of Fine Arts, so a form of post-graduate degree. The one that I studied was in creative writing, something which over recent years has become a favoured form of post-grad qualification if you’re in the business of writing.

If I’m a writer then, do I need one of these?

No, you really don’t need one.

So why did you want one?

My work was feeling a bit stagnant. Plus, I had a novel on submission to agents and no-one was calling back, so I needed the proverbial kick up the backside to start my next project. Oh and there was a pandemic on, did I mention that?

No, but I’ve spent the intervening time rocking back and forth in a foetal position pretending it never happened. So, how does this MFA thing work?

Depends on whether you’re enrolling full time or a part time. As a part time student, my course was two years long. The first year was focused on weekly lectures, reading, essays and craft. The second was a 40,000 word dissertation which is effectively a novel excerpt.

What are other common reasons for studying one?

There’s an assumption, I think, that you might need one if you ever wanted to teach creative writing (untrue). Secondly, there’s the hope (often sub-textually hinted at in the glossy brochures) that enrolling on one of these courses might help your career, either by aiding you in snagging an agent or a book deal. (This too, is pretty much a load of old cobblers).

Finally and most importantly perhaps, there’s writerly validation. If you’re putting your stuff out there on an even semi-regular basis, it’s easy to become prey to the creeping suspicion that you might not be any good. Being around a group of generous well-read writer types can really help you feel like a proper writer.

Are you a proper writer?

Why’d you have to go and ask that?

Okay, so what were the good things about the MFA?

One of the most useful things was the encouragement to take my work seriously. By this, I don’t mean shaking my fist at a world that refuses to understand my genius. Rather, I mean understanding more about other writers and the contemporary ‘context’ and seeing how you fit into it (or not).

Doing this sometimes meant writing essays about your own unfinished work, which is totally odd and arguably self-indulgent as a practice but, which was weirdly useful. It gives you context, distance and the ability to assess your work as a piece of ‘literature’. (I know, right?)

Secondly, there was the amount of required reading. Having an excuse to sit around and read was a real luxury, not to mention being liberated from the torment of choosing what to read next.

Anything else?

The best thing was probably the the aspect of the course that the faculty had the least control over, that is: the other people on it. Mixing writers together often has unpredictable results. At one end of the spectrum are the groups presided over by bores who wang on endlessly about manuscript format and at the other are the Milfords I’ve attended where most attendees are generous with their thoughts and feedback.

Thankfully, our MFA squad was totally the latter rather than the former, to the extent that even after a couple of years of post-graduation we’re in still in contact and reading each other’s work.

Ok, enough with this rosy glow BS , how did it suck?

Well, the obvious thing was how expensive it was. And it was hard to shake the feeling that once you’d ponied up your fees the university weren’t that bothered about much else.

The second year was a bit disappointing too. While the first focused on some great lectures, craft and reading, the following one was a much more isolated affair, with each of us toiling away on our dissertations/manuscripts with our respective supervisors.

The only break from this was a ‘summer term’ which consisted, for the most part, of an academic circle jerk wherein members of the faculty interviewed each other about their upcoming books.

So was it worth it?

I suppose if I consider this in purely concrete terms it was a failure. Did it help me land and agent? No. Did it help me get a book deal? Nuh-uh.

This is going to be one of those, “it’s about the journey,” things isn’t it?

But it is is an about the journey thing, my dude. I’m pretty certain I’m a better writer because of the books that I read (even the ones I disliked) and the essays I wrote. Most importantly, I’m probably a better writer because of the feedback I gave and received from my fellow students. Looking back, that’s ultimately what made it worth the time and money.

Fair enough. Are you a proper writer now then?

FFS.