Hi,
I was recently texting a friend about submitting her debut novel to agents. It's something I'm often asked about, and I find myself repeating the same advice over and over. I thought I would put all my thoughts in one place so I can direct people here from now on.
Most of you are probably not attempting to do this rather deranged thing. But if you should happen to be curious about the inner caprices of British and Irish publishing, maybe it will still be of interest.
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First of all, do you need an agent? For traditional publishing, I would say almost certainly yes. The commission charged by agents is actually a good thing: it gives them a stake in driving up your advance, and they will more than pay for themselves if they’re any good. A minority of editors might read the odd manuscript from the slush pile or from non-traditional channels. But by and large, editors only read submissions that come to them via an agent. It's not intended as an elitist firewall, though of course in practice it often is; they do it because the volume of submissions is so huge that it's the only way to keep their workload manageable. Essentially, editors use agents as their filters. Most people need an agent to get published at all, and you'll certainly need one to get the best possible contract.
Here is how I found my literary agent seven years ago in the summer of 2018.
I had a manuscript I'd written in early 2017 that I'd just spent a full year editing. When I was sure it was ready, I did the following:
1. Found this list of UK literary agencies on Wikipedia. It doesn't contain all of them, but for a first round of submissions it's pretty solid.
2. Went through the websites and filtered out any agencies that were closed to submissions or that did not represent my niche, i.e. contemporary literary fiction.
3. For each remaining agency, I went through the individual profiles of all their agents and found the one whose interests and current client list seemed best to correspond with the kind of writing I do. You can only submit to one agent per agency, so this step is crucial. I wound up with about 15 agents I felt could represent me well.
4. Crafted a cover letter for each of those agents, stating which of their clients made me think we could be a good creative match and which authors I saw myself situated amongst in recent fiction more broadly. These two aspects are vital: specificity to the agent and to the current publishing scene. It's undeniably a bit of a game, but that doesn't mean it has to be insincere.
5. Submitted cover letter and sample chapters according to the instructions on each of the websites. It's important to thoroughly read each agency's instructions. Due to the volume of submissions, they will often filter you out at the slightest bureaucratic misstep.
6. Waited. Luckily I didn't wait long. Within a few hours, an agent had asked to read the full novel. I emailed all the other agents informing them I'd received a manuscript request. Don't worry about looking pushy; agents are by nature competitive, and want to know when someone else might beat them to their spoils. After a few days, I had several offers (and several passes; every writer gets rejections) which put me in the happy position of getting to choose.
With my new agent, I completed further edits on the manuscript before she submitted it to publishers in early 2019. There was a seven-way auction and a two-book deal, with the novels published in 2020 and 2023. Relative to the industry, all this happened fairly fast from a book I had written in 2017.
My experience was not the norm. It often takes weeks or months for agents to get back to you; it doesn't mean you're doomed, it just means they've busy. Tactically speaking, I would avoid submitting right before any big book fair (London, Frankfurt etc.) as that's when they'll be most preoccupied with their current clients. Probably best to send it in the morning on a workday, and ideally not during August, the month in which publishing enters a collective coma.
Four caveats :
1. Do not do this until the novel is 100% ready. There is sadly no egg timer that goes off to confirm this. The pacing of my edits came about naturally from my having other commitments: a master's, the LSAT (long story) and various jobs. Life forced me to keep putting my drafts aside and coming back to them a few weeks later. I'm glad it did, as I am not a naturally patient person. The key is not to send the book off when you're freshly excited from the latest flurry of edits. When you think it's finally ready, put it away for another month. If, when you come back to it, you feel no urge to change anything, that's a pretty good indication that you're good to go.
Most agents won't read a re-submission of the same book, and agencies often have a rule that you can't submit it again to a different agent. So as tempting as it can be to send it off ASAP, you've got to be strategic with your one shot.
2. On the same note, you don't have to spam all the agencies at once. It's a fine balance: you want to have enough people reading it simultaneously that you're not constantly hanging around for a response, but you don't want to blow all your chances in one fell swoop if it turns out the book wasn't as ready as you'd thought. I think around 15 agents at a time is a decent balance of these priorities.
3. This is not the only way to find an agent. It is the most autism-friendly way, hence my doing it. But there are other, more informal methods. Agents do scout literary journals and mentoring schemes for early-career writers, and if you know anyone in the industry then they might be able to get your manuscript directly into the right pair of hands. For me, networking seemed much harder than simply making my novel better, so I decided up front not to bother with it and to just pour all that energy into the book.
4. I do not know how things work in other countries. My understanding in Italy, for instance, is that editors are more often willing to read manuscripts submitted directly by authors. I would imagine the process in the US is yet more convoluted than that of the UK. Research how it works wherever you are.
I did all this seven years ago, so it's possible some things have changed. But I think the fundamentals still hold: 1. by far the most important thing is writing a good book, 2. do your research and follow the instructions carefully, 3. fingers crossed, 4. stay strong.
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Not much else to report. I have started writing columns again and, two in, am already once more the subject of circa three online controversies per week. I do not participate in them anymore, and yet they come and find me. I mind a lot less now. It seemed much realer to me when I was very online myself. Now I can briefly open the small Twitter account I only keep to sporadically post work things, see five hundred notifications from militant terfs, and just think: 'What a sad way to spend one's Sunday evening'.
My own was pleasant, and this week is looking good too.
Till next time,
N
Thank you. This is very valuable advice