The Fallacy Of The Dedicated Agent

I have been up since three o'clock this morning looking after my very excited and slightly apprehensive grandson while his mother went, with her husband, to the hospital to have a baby. Consequently this blog post may not be my finest piece of prose. However, it is with immense pleasure that I can announce to the world the birth of my third grand child, and my first grand daughter. I know that medical experts will tell you that new born babies can't smile but I swear she smiled at me.

Now it is six thirty in the evening and in a little while a builder is going to knock at my door and I will have to talk coherently to him about the work that we want done on our house. Also, I see from my emails, which I've only just had a chance to glance at, that my Mexican publisher has been experiencing problems making payments to my account. Oh, and a portfolio of work has arrived from one of the students at the summer school I have been teaching for the last couple of months.

All of this perfectly illustrates one of the points I was trying to get across at that summer school. It's a publishing myth that I have called the fallacy of the dedicated agent and it goes like this: the publishing world is full of agents who are constantly on the lookout for exciting new manuscripts by promising new writers.

In fact, agents, being human beings with complicated lives, have a great many other things on their minds. They may be worrying about whether their daughter's labour will go well, or they may be rejoicing that it has. They may be trying to remember the key points they need to make clear to their builder, or they may be trying to get hold of their bank to find out why their money isn't appearing in their account. They may simply be wondering whether there is anything even vaguely edible in their kitchen that they might somehow be able to conjure into a meal tonight.

Whatever it is that is filling those agents' heads, it probably leaves very little space for all those manuscripts that keep arriving in their postbags. That is why, if you want to get their attention, you had better be good. You had better be very bloody good indeed.

Because if you're not then they are just going to sit at their desk with a silly expression on their face, gazing at a photo of their newest grandchild, thinking over and over again, 'Isn't she beautiful!'

What Editors And Agents Are Really Thinking

Most aspiring authors assume that editors and agents are constantly on the look out for new and exciting talent. But a fact worth bearing in mind is that editors and agents are ordinary human beings.

Here’s a sample of the sort of thing that might really be going through the mind of an agent or editor while your manuscript is sitting on the desk in front of them.

Oh god, how I wish I was still on holiday in Italy!
I could really murder a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
Why has my car started making that weird noise every time I go over a bump?
I wonder if my partner still finds me attractive.
That mole on my left shoulder blade has started itching again.
What I really need is a new kitchen.
I'm not convinced my daughter is really happy at university.
Why am I always so tired?

You get the picture? They can be, and probably are, thinking of just about everything else except your manuscript. They’re at work, for god’s sake. Ok, so it’s a job they enjoy but it’s still a job, isn’t it?

Even published authors with long experience have little idea of what is really going on in the whole gigantic sausage machine that is publishing. If editors take a long time to get back to us, we start to think they don’t like the manuscript. Then we start to think they don’t like us. Then we start to think they might be right: we don’t like us either.

But really we are like someone trying to make their way round a room full of furniture in the dark with only a very small torch to aid us. All we can see is the bit of the room that the torch lights up; about the rest of the room we can only make assumptions.

The thing is that publishers don’t realise this either. They assume that the author must realise the reason for the delay with the book is that the art director has just announced that he's going freelance and the publishing director is off sick and the poor, harassed commissioning editor is trying to do about three jobs at once. Surely they can see that can't they?

That’s why so many editors think that authors are difficult or temperamental. Of course some authors are difficult and temperamental. But most of them are just blundering around in the dark with their pathetic little torch, stubbing their toes on something that could be a chest of drawers, or an upright piano, or even a stack of coffins.

How To Choose A Literary Agent

I’ve had more than one agent. When I was first scouting around, I was looking for status and success, hoping that the glitter of the agency would rub off on me. So for a time, I had an agent who was a partner in a well known, high-profile agency. At first I was delighted to be part of her list, but like many marriages of convenience, ours was a relationship that was ultimately doomed to failure.

She was a physically imposing woman with a large mouth, like a trout, and narrow, mean-looking eyes. Either she possessed a collection of identical tweed suits or she always wore the same one. I suspected the latter. Indeed, I used to fantasise about that suit, imagining it making its way around literary London all by itself while its mistress slept. I wondered which one cut the best deals: my agent, or her suit. Maybe I should have written a novel about it.

She behaved liked the head of a private boarding school in the nineteen fifties and whenever I was obliged to meet her face-to face, I always felt like an interloper who had been caught hiding in the shrubbery near the girls’ dormitory.

She did not like me calling her; she did not like me asking questions about what she was, or was not, up to on my behalf; in fact she did not like me, period. When I finally decided I’d had enough of this treatment and terminated our agreement, she wrote me a letter to say that she thought my latest novel was mediocre.

This was more than twenty years ago. But I still know writers with agents who behave in a not dissimilar way, writers who never hear from their agents and are too intimidated to pick up the phone and ask how things are going. So why do they continue with the relationship? Because they are impressed by the name of the agency and its list of illustrious clients, just as I was.

Writing is a lonely and insecure profession. Authors are at the mercy of editors, publicists, reviewers and booksellers, not to mention the general public. Even when you do have a success, book clubs, supermarkets and powerful book-chains demand outrageous discounts. In this dog-eat-dog world you need an agent who is fairly and squarely on your side. So rule number one: forget the list of famous clients, pick an agent with good manners.

And if you’ve already got an agent, ask yourself this. Does he or she return your calls promptly (or at all)? Do you agonise before picking up the phone to discuss something to do with your career? Do you find yourself stuttering uncharacteristically when you’re in conversation with your agent? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then it looks like you’ve got yourself the wrong agent.

Making Friends With Dragons

My agent rang me up on Friday to say how much she enjoyed the First Draft of my new book. That was nice of her but then she is a very nice woman. She has performed all sorts of kind actions in the time we’ve known each other, including on one occasion driving me home from a party in Central London during a snowstorm when I was, insanely, wearing a light Summer suit.

After her call, I recalled how incredibly intimidated I was by agents when I first started out trying to be a writer. The idea of contacting one was a bit like setting out to slay a dragon and I regularly meet aspiring authors nowadays who have the same attitude.

To such jaundiced individuals agents are at best a necessary evil and at worst a parasitic life-form. I had a graphic illustration of this when I arranged for my agent to give a talk to a group of students on a publishing course run by a friend. When I asked her how it went she told me that many of the students had been openly hostile.

I think this comes about because people get confused about what agents actually do. They exist to sell author’s work. That’s it. Plain and simple. They’re not a general critiquing service, though people often treat them as such. A friend who joined a writing group, reported that one of the writers who’d been struggling with a half-finished novel for some time said she was thinking of ‘sending it to a few agents to get a bit of feedback.’

In my opinion that’s a bit like going into the office of an estate agent (or realtor to use the US term) and saying, ‘Listen, I don’t actually have a house to sell just a lorry load of bricks, but when I do it will have five bedrooms a fully-fitted kitchen, a bathroom with an enormous jacuzzi, a large mature garden and heated outdoor swimming pool. Are you interested in selling it?’

It’s because they get asked questions like this that agents can seem inaccessible and even frosty to writers at the beginning of their careers. But the fact is, they exist to sell literary property and, given something saleable, they will work hard to sell it, because in doing so their own interests combine with the writer’s.

Of course they don’t always get it right. An unpublished writer once showed me a manuscript for children which I thought was very good. I recommended an agent to her. The agent read it and liked it. Then she asked her daughter to read it. The daughter didn’t like it. So the agent decided to reject it. I advised the author to go directly to a publisher I thought would like it, and they did. Which only goes to prove that agents are human, like everyone else. They don’t always listen to the right people or make the best choices.

But the truth is that the real problem generally lies not with the agents but with us, the writers. I regularly read manuscripts by developing authors and I have to tell you that an awful lot of them are so bad it’s almost physically painful reading them. Only a sense of responisbility and the memory of my own early days keeps me plodding on to the end. In these unpromising manuscripts it’s nearly always the case that the writer isn’t considering the audience at all. He or she is thinking only of his or her own creative impulses. This is the book he or she wants to write and the rest of us should therefore be prepared to read it, whether we like it or not. But no-one has to read anything. We can pick and choose. That’s the beauty of the market.

So if you get overwhelmingly rejected by agents, my advice is this: don’t get mad; and certainly don’t waste time thinking about getting even; just get better.