How I got my literary agent – what happened next

The continuing saga of how I got a UK literary agent whilst living abroad, far from all things publishing and with no personal contacts to call upon. Part one of this story is HERE

So there I was, the Blue Oyster Cult playing in the background, sobbing over an offer of representation from a Literary Agent.

The impulse, as with anything offering recognition of your creative effort, is to leap on the opportunity and send a superfast email of acceptance. But you don’t, because this is where the homework kicks in again, it’s not a good idea, it’s also rude to everyone else you have offered your work to, so now is the time for deep breaths and calm(ish) consideration.

A literary agent is an important person in your writing life. Your Mum may think your writing is brilliant (fat chance in my case), your husband/boyfriend/current shag may think you are literally moments away from literary fame, and your friends may be unrestrained in their praise of your overwritten prose (we all overwrite, it’s part of the process) but their opinion, whilst very very nice and motivational gold, is at this point basically worthless unless they also happen to be a reviewer on The Telegraph or Jamie Byng.

The world of publishing has always been complex and lately it has got even more complicated and it is changing fast. The world of Rights – world, digital, translation, reversion and dramatic etc ad nauseum is a minefield for the writer. You can learn about it, and I have, but I’d rather be writing and my working knowledge is as nothing to the knowledge combined with experience that an agent brings to the process of placing a book and negotiating a publishing contract.

Then there is the publishing itself, the distribution network, actually getting books into bookshops, the marketing budget, the future, the past, copyright, the legal scrutiny, the management of royalties, and the chasing of royalties. All of these roles fall under the remit of the agent. They find the best place for your manuscript, they manage the contract, and they look after things into the future so you don’t need to be sitting there with a calculator and a dog eared copy of a contract and past royalty statements the cat was sick on, trying to work out if you are entitled to 12.5% on the net book price or 10% on the gross book price in trade paperback in Outer Mongolia.

Your choice of agent is important; you will work together for, hopefully, a long time. This person, who has to like you and your work, will guide and shape and encourage and protect your written work. They will earn nothing without you and that is an important thing to remember. They work for you and whilst you may be orbiting the stratosphere in happiness that one of these creatures wants you on their client roster you need to make sure you fit together before you say yes.

So I had an offer. I now, according to protocol, had to write to the others I had offered my work to and advise them that an offer was on the table and I intended to make a choice soon and if they were interested would they care to say so. Sort of, speak now or forever hold your peace, in literary terms. Agents are massively busy people, they take on very few new clients every year and they are inundated with manuscripts. They are not normally the most responsive creatures on the planet to unsolicited manuscripts. However, they are all also massively competitive and they hate to miss out on something of value. So writing to the others means they will normally at least take a look, and anyway it’s polite, because otherwise when they do get around to your manuscript and like it and find out you are already represented you have wasted their time.

Due to particularly lousy timing I got my offer the week before Frankfurt Book Fair, the busiest week of the year in publishing. All the agents, even if they aren’t attending in person, are wrapped up in Frankfurt, negotiating deals for their current clients and selling translation rights. It couldn’t have been a worse time for me to be asking agents to put me to the top of their reading pile for an urgent appraisal.

Despite that I ended up with four offers off the back of my polite “I have an offer from someone else” email. Eeek. Really, seriously, eek, because now you have to choose between them. You don’t expect multiple offers, you’ve heard about them, but they are the thing of myth.

I struggled with this; I really struggled, because when you speak to them in person they are all nice. Agents tend to come across well, it is their job to be nice and sociable and network well and they all seemed so clued up and professional when I called them from my grubby little village in darkest Turkey. They were all enthusiastic. They all said nice things about the manuscript. They all offered advice and said how they saw it shaping up. They had all read books I admired. I spent happy times talking to them about books, which I don’t get to do often, and I think I gushed like an oil well, but I learnt so much from those conversations.

They all suggested I contact other authors they represented, which I did, and they were lovely too and loved their agents, which made me even more tense but gave me at least one new friend (Hazel, funny and clever and going far, fast).

I couldn’t choose. I even rang my Mother for advice but she was making a trifle so that didn’t help much. I umm’d and ahh’d and worried and didn’t sleep for three days. I had set the deadline for Wednesday of Frankfurt week (hahahahaha, pillock) and come the Wednesday morning I decided. For better or worse, we make our bed and we lie on it, and I chose the one I liked the most. Not the biggest, not the most famous, not the one with the biggest deals, I chose the one who I liked.

I also chose the one who had survived upheavals for thirty years, managed tricky legal situations, was founded by an agent who played air guitar at traffic lights and is run by people with serious international rights knowledge. And I also chose the one who straight away knew publishers she wanted to submit my manuscript to and they were the same ones I thought would be suitable. So we were on the same page.

The deep blue seas of the industries that surround the creative arts are treacherous waters. From film to art to music to publishing these seas are swum by sharks and storms rage across their surfaces. There are many people out there aiming to part you from your cash and dreams in an environment that is unfriendly and unsafe to the uninformed. I know people who have innocently signed away world wide rights to their work in the heat of their first publishing offer, I know people who have signed contracts so all encompassing they may as well have handed over the left hemisphere of their brain, and I know people who have paid people serious amounts of money for editorial advice that a good agent gives for free. None of these things are in the long term good for the writer and all of them are avoidable if you have a good agent.

Good agents won’t charge you to read your manuscript, they won’t charge you for editorial advice, they won’t charge you for the work they do until you get paid. They look at you in the cold light of your future worth and there is no more impartial judge than that.

A weird thing happens when you get an offer from an agent. Everything turns around. It is really quite bizarre. You spend a lot of time wanting an agent and then when an agent wants you it feels back to front. The ones I turned down were really disappointed and sent lovely emails saying so! The one I accepted was over the moon! It was the strangest feeling in the world. I’m not used to being wanted like that.

It takes a lot of getting used to. I have conversations where my agent talks about Fed Ex’ing publishing contracts to the village. You feel like saying, “Yeah, as if!” and then you realise that she really does expect to do that, Fed Ex you contracts, it’s a normal thing for her.

And then she sends you an email saying “had lunch with one of the editors from Bloomsbury last week and they want to see the manuscript when it’s finished” and you think, Bloomsbury, shit! And you giggle for two days. Because that’s just mad.

Of course none of this means I will get a publishing contract, there are no guarantees, but it lays the foundations for the kind of publishing I want to be involved in. I like foundations, I’m big on them, start properly and build from there, houses or books, lay a bloody good foundation, start it properly and it will stand forever.

So I have my agent who talks to me and supports me and encourages me and I have a half written book that moves ahead in the light of her enthusiasm and advice, that’s where we are currently, and I have Bloomsbury willing to look at it when it’s done. I’d best get on with it. Because once it is done then we go shopping, in a literary sense, and I’ll explain that another time.

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