Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Conversation >

Literary agents

Less searchable M0rd4nt

11:58 / 29.12.02

Is it possible to interest a literary agent when you have no completed-type books? Is a synopsis and first chapter enough? How much writing would a person usually need to make a decent case for thier literary merits?

(I ask merely because if I have to finish this sodding novel and work at the same time, there's gonna be blood.)

12:40 / 29.12.02

When writing the book I've just finished, I rounded up three agents who were interested in the final product, two with a synopsis and three sample chapters, and one on the synopsis alone, so the answer to your question - at least in my experience - is no, you don't need the complete manuscript before appraoching agents (although it certainly helps if you do, or can at least give a rough date by which you can deliver the finished product).

I started by obtaining a list of UK literary agents, a pretty comprehensive list of which can be found here, and then approaching those that seemed to deal in the genre I was writing at the time. All agents have their own submission guidelines, but the standard seems to be synopsis first, then, if they're interested, X sample chapters, then, assuming they're still interested, the full work.

12:41 / 29.12.02

I had an agent for a while. I met her at a writers conference, which is one of the places where you can meet agents. She was very sensible in that her policy was not to sell first novels on the basis of first chapters. "First thing that happens to writers when they sell their first novel is that they stop writing." Agents are in business to broker manuscripts; and as in businesses of this kind, their time is money and the game is to keep up a higher proportion of chargeable (getting their hands on good manuscripts) vs. nonchargeable time (holding your hand).

15:00 / 29.12.02

Forget it, for now.

It's the agent's job to negotiate deals so you don't get screwed. If there's no deal in place, there's nothing for the agent to do, and no 10%.

The agent doesn't care about the quality of the writing (at least not as part of the job description): that's for editors to decide. An agent finds markets for your product and hammers out the terms of sale. If there's no saleable product (and saleable means you've got a track record of sold work), there's no ned for an agent, and none will be interested in you, nomatter how good your writing is.

Rule of thumb: You don't need a literary agent until you're making enough money to be worth stealing from.

06:33 / 30.12.02

Hmmm...I suspect, and hope, that that jaded nonsense was meant as a joke, Jack. It's possible that you've received rejections for full work because you've only sold a small amount of work before, or it might well work differently in the States, but certainly in my humble experience that's not the case.

Of course agents are going to be slightly wary of taking a gamble on new authors, and, by extension, are going to be harsher in their judgement of your work than in that of established names, but that does not equate to a refusal to take new authors "nomatter how good your writing is" or until they're "worth stealing from".

If there's no saleable product (and saleable means you've got a track record of sold work), there's no ned for an agent, and none will be interested in you, nomatter how good your writing is.

Again, I suspect this stems more from your personal experiences than from an objective view of the publishing industry. A close friend of mine - who publishes under the name Tom Arden - is a fine example of a new author without a "saleable product", who was signed into a five book deal on the strength of two sample chapters. So again, the answer to Mordant's original question is no, you do not need a finished manuscript, or be an established name, to interest an agent in you.

07:42 / 30.12.02

From my personal experience, I think agents really want you to have a workable complete draft ready before you submit to them. We do hear about first novels being sold on the basis of the first three chapters or even the first three paragraphs, but the reason we hear about it in the news is because it's so unusual.

I think Jack and Tezcatlipoca are both sort of right. The agent is there just to make 10 or 15 per cent of what you're worth to an editor, and is really interested in the cash, but they are there to also nurture authors and position people in the right markets. If you send in three chapters and tell them it isn't yet finished, it's far more likely to end up on the slush pile rather than three chapters and a letter saying you can send the rest immediately.

And don't be disheartened; I could paper my bathroom with rejections from literary agents. I'm not pissed off. But I may well hunt them all down like the swine they are if I'm not published by the time I'm 40.

12:02 / 30.12.02

With all due respect, Tezcat, I stand by my comments.

It's not agents that you need to interest or impress: it's publishers. After all, it wasn't an agent that signed Tom Arden to a five-book deal, now, was it?

Looking for an agent before you've got a publisher seems to me to be a classic case of putting the cart before the horse.

13:02 / 30.12.02

The problem is Jack, the number of major publishers in the UK who'll even open your envelope if it isn't forwarded to them by an agent can be counted on a fifth of a hand, probably.

13:09 / 30.12.02

Not quite true. Damned few publishers will open anything unsolicited: but there are ways to finagle an invitation to submit other than entering into a business relationship that may not be profitable either party.

Starting somewhere other than a major publisher is probably a good start.

13:12 / 30.12.02

Fair enough, Jack. It just think - and I could be barking up several wrong trees here - that an author needs to acquire an agent first, who then approaches publishers on their behalf, but I suppose there are several different methods to achieving the same end. You're right inasmuch as Tom did admittedly approach a publisher first instead of looking for an agent, but I still think it can be important and ultimately beneficial to impress an agent and get them supporting your work, if only because a publisher is more likely to take up a book on a well-established agent's recommendation than they are to go with a brand new author whose just approached them out of the blue.

13:48 / 30.12.02

Starting somewhere other than a major publisher is probably a good start.

Unless Mordant wants to make some serious money from what she wrote.

And we all know that, to paraphrase Sting, "writing is its own reward", but I don't think we should look down on people who would still like a nice big many-thousand pound advance for their first novel.

13:56 / 30.12.02

And again, we're putting cart before horse.

Write the novel. Do the work.

Worry about the rest after.

14:12 / 30.12.02

Yeah, Jack, you're right, of course. But there's no harm in getting to know the mechanics of the game a bit. I know I've personally shot potential chances out of the water by making the wrong kind of approach to both agents and editors. If you are, as Mordant appears to be, wanting to write for a living, it makes some kind of sense to be aware of the nuts and bolts end of the business as well. Not, obviously, to the detriment of getting the fucking thing written, but as some kind of preparation of what's to come. Very often, the really hard part starts after you've typed "The End".

14:58 / 30.12.02

My personal experience of agents based in London has been damningly poor; almost every single one of them has got either my name or the title of my book wrong in the reply letter, one took over five months to respond to sample material sent in at her request, and several of them have replied to ‘would you be interested in seeing some of my book?’ letters with letters thanking me for the synopsis and/or sample chapters which I didn’t send but saying that they’re weren’t quite good enough (well, not being there, they won’t have been). As Ian Brown would chant, ‘amateurs’, and it’s galling when you then read agents interviewed in the Bookseller, asking ‘Where are the bright young things of the future?’ Buried in your slush piles, methinks.
Anyway, rant over.

They say that it’s bad form to send stuff to more than one agent at a time, but given the lengthy delays that are usually involved in getting a reply at all, I’d suggest hitting them as broadly as possible, scatter-gun style. Ten or so at a time, with return envelopes and all that.

DBC

19:01 / 30.12.02

Another side to this: I really, really want to find an agent once I'm at least a few chapters into my novel. I'm sick to death of small press editors. I love the concept of the small press, but I've had enough of people who think they're gods because they put a magazine together and expect a person to kiss their arse and take out a fucking subscription before they'll take a story. The writing seems to come last, even out of the mainstream.

I'll try and turn this into something more constructive - a proper thread - when I've calmed down a bit.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

20:56 / 30.12.02

Thanx, guys. I've been operating under the assumption (labouring under the delusion?) that sending stuff to publishers was a non-starter these days, and the smart money was on finding a literary agent to plead your case for you. I might well be mistaken, especially since on reflection the Literary Agent meme may have been implanted in my mind by, er, a literary agent.

And yeah, unless you put in the work you will not get the nice big advance. I completely get that part. I write. I really do. It's just that there are only 24 hours in a day, and if you've worked a ten hour shift every day for the last week... well, let's just say that Mr. Coherency doesn't pop round for tea'n'stickies as much as he used to.

09:26 / 15.05.03

Kind of a question about protocol... when looking for an agent, do you contact a whole bunch of them in one go and hit them with it simultaneously? Or do you go one at a time, starting with your favourite?

09:55 / 15.05.03

Does anyone know how to go about becoming a literary agent? I have a dozen friends who write, and five completed unpublished manuscripts of theirs in my bedroom. How hard is it?

Whisky Priestess

10:04 / 15.05.03

The answer is both, but if you're sending out multiple submissions it's polite to tell people so, even though they are likely to process it more slowly if they know other people are looking at your work.

The best thing to do if submitting in the UK is to buy (or borrow from the library, like me) a copy of Carol Blake's book "From Pitch to Publication", which has shitloads of info about submitting to both agents and publishers. Especially useful is ch 4 - How to Get an Agent. Carol Blake is a top dog at a top UK agency and her recommendations are of course, what she would rpefer to see, but I think there's a lot of sense in them.

She recommends completing a book first (duh) but if you only have three sample chapters and want to send them in, you'll have to lie about having the rest redy to go. And then be prepared to take a month-long sickie and write the rest when someone comes back to you asking to see the rest of the book.

She recommends sending, as far as I can remember:

Three chapters
A synopsis
Character profiles (about a para each) for all the lead characters
A back-of-the-book style pitch
A short bio of you, including records of stuff you've won or published, and why you wrote the book

Think that's it - know it sounds like a lot but it makes sense to me. It's always nice to have feedback on whether, subject-wise, you are barking up the wrong tree or not. One of the worst things is to complete a 180,000 word novel and then be told that the subject is "unsaleable". (180,000 is almost double the generally desirable length of 100,000 as well).

Good luck ...

10:10 / 15.05.03

Thank you, WP. Much appreciated.

Book will be finished before I go near an agent...

10:11 / 15.05.03

I know how you feel, Mordant. I know I can do the writing thing, but I'm working on having all these experineces, so it's hard to find the time to write more than a chapter. Agents can be helpful with the mundane reality stuff, right? You can come up with the ideas, but putting them to use isn't always a writers forte. I know I have stuff that has the potential to make money, (though I'd rather go the underground classic route) but I have no idea what to do with the stuff. This is the complicated part, you know? The writing is simple.

Rollo Kim, on location

10:32 / 15.05.03

Great stuff. I've got one completed 'novel', and I've got another couple of things on the go as well. I now figure I've got to take the plunge and find an agent. I've put in so much time and effort over the last couple of years - now it seems like there's as much energy required to 'sell' the thing.

14:27 / 15.05.03

Carol Blake's book "From Pitch to Publication"
is there an equivalent book (or books) for the US?
...er, i'm sure there is, a more proper question would be: anyone know what it is/they are?
are there any good books w/pointers for getting articles published?