Should the agency take on your work it’s in the hope, not the certainty, of finding you a publisher. They are talent scouts, the middleperson between you and your desired goal to appear in print. They normally enjoy good relations with acquisition editors and know where your novel is likely to find a home. They pitch your book and try to get you the best deal. It is in their best interest to negotiate lucrative contracts as they work on commission (usually 15 per cent of what you make). It is as well to have an agent – though a few prosperous writers use lawyers – since they manage your affairs with the publisher once the deal goes through. Do vet your contract to make sure you haven’t given away more rights than you need, collect your money, keep records, settle contract disputes – leaving you on good terms with your editor at the publishing house and freeing up your time to write. The better you get on with your agent the easier life will be.
Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, is my motto. Argue, but never so much they throw you out the door.
So let’s envisage the scene at, say, the Silk and Stone (UK) literary agency, when your novel rises to the top of the pile – an old-fashioned metaphor related to paper submissions which will soon enough find a digital equivalent – and is to be discussed. Samantha, Crystal, Carol and Agnes will be in the room with their laptops open, scrolling through the ‘possibles’. (There might be a Tom in the room but it’s less likely than it was, the gender balance in the lower ranks of today’s publishing industry being what it is.)
Let’s say for the sake of argument you have called your novel Whither Charles? – a bad, boring choice; they will hate it. It is about a dentist in Leeds called Charles whose wife discovers he’s having an affair and is trying to send him mad and succeeds. A kind of reverse Gaslight, but you didn’t say that in your synopsis, instead rather rashly describing it as a mixture of Strindberg’s The Father and Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Agnes is the one who first opened the submission, seven weeks after it pinged up on the agency website. (Silk and Stone are a conscientious agency and usually send out notice of receipt immediately, but lately, what with ’flu and pregnancies, have found themselves understaffed so this practice has rather gone by the board. They’re doing what they can. But then everyone does what they can.)
Agnes read the first seven pages and the synopsis: put it into the ‘possible’ file. Agnes is ageless and in charge. She’s clearly top totty; a double first from Oxford, elegantly skinny, beautifully coiffed and clothed, with cropped hair, amazingly long, long legs and bright blue eyes. Age: uncertain. ‘Ten possibles to discuss today,’ she says now, ‘and a limit of three to submit to our publishers.’ (Agents tend to work with their favourite publishers. A lot of lunching goes on.) ‘Unless something fantastic turns up, of course. So shall we get a move on? We’ll begin with Whither Charles? At least this one’s basically literate. It’s a good rich plot, but unbelievable and with an inconclusive ending. I’ve no idea who’s meant to be good and who bad. Let alone what genre it is. But does that matter?’
She describes the plot. Nice husband, dentist Charles, is being driven literally mad by evil narcissist wife Clara just because he’s having an affair with a fat mistress whom she murders by giving her an allergenic cat and shutting them both in the laundry room. Charles gets accused of the murder but fortunately can now claim insanity. Which Clara hadn’t thought of. Thus everyone is possibly punished, or possibly not. The intern was asked to summarise the synopsis, which originally went on for six pages, but only managed to get it down to four. Nor has he done a good job in that half hour on the novel that took you four years to write.
‘The writing’s not good enough for a literary novel,’ complains Samantha, looking through her notes. ‘And it’s an uncertain genre, so yes, it matters.’ Samantha is rather shorter and rounder than Agnes, but still expensive. She is twenty-seven, known to be brilliant and extra literate, has a 2:2 from Leeds (too busy politicking to do any better), a property developer boyfriend, and has just put down the deposit on a flat in Hackney. She has long black hair, mildly druggy eyes, a fringe which gets into her eyes, and pimples round her chin, which one hopes can’t be from glue sniffing. She’s pregnant and wishes she wasn’t.
‘Possible sale to TV, I suppose,’ Samantha goes on. ‘But plonk, plonk, plonk, the writer goes, and her stereotypes move around like robots. She says it’s a thriller but where’s the thrill? And hopelessly naïve, PC-wise: all that stuff about adorable male buttocks and sucking quims! Meant to be sexy but just isn’t. Out of the ark. I hated it from the first page and fell asleep. No way I can stand in front of someone from acquisitions and enthuse. I’d be a laughing stock. Abort, abort!’
Agnes: ‘Thank you, Sam. At least that’s definite. Anyone else?’
Crystal: ‘I think Sam’s being rather hard. There are still some women out there who fancy a mean male arse. But I found myself reading on, in spite of not wanting to. Of course they’re all stereotypes. Isn’t that the point? Easy reading? The new Dan Brown, perhaps? Get her to change the end and sell it to Marketing as a reverse psychological thriller – woman plots to murder man; it usually being the other way round. She’ll have to take out the boiled cat found in the hottest wash. Too many cat lovers out there. But I don’t mind having a go. Stodgily written but Marketing might not notice. Plot is all.’
Crystal came out of Springfield High when she was sixteen with a GCSE in English and all the rest fails but was so competent as an intern she was kept on, and thrived. She understands the zeitgeist: knows what she likes and likes what she knows.
Agnes (who doesn’t think plot is all): ‘Thanks, Crystal, very helpful. Carol?’
Carol: ‘“Might” is not good enough, Crystal. And you try getting this author to change anything! Not if she thinks she’s Strindberg and Munch combined. And wasn’t Munch some kind of artist anyway? She can’t be very bright. If you did try to edit, she’d only put the baby in the wash instead of the cat and make the mother watch it go round and round. No, she’d be real trouble as a client. This agency simply can’t afford to spend too much time persuading difficult clients to rewrite. And it’s about a dentist. Dentists never work. By the time I’d read the synopsis – I never got to see any summary – I was exhausted. So I must admit I didn’t read much of the text. But she spelt “necessarily” wrong in line three.’
Carol is the daughter of the CEO of Silk and Stone (US) and is, like Agnes, on the UK Board. She’s also on IVF and has been for four years and still no success.
Samantha rushes for the loo feeling suddenly nauseous, so everyone waits for her to return. If she doesn’t, Whither Charles? might still stand a chance. If a slim one.
Morning coffee is brought in by the intern, a lad straight out of uni with a BA in Creative Writing. No-one can say Silk and Stone (UK) don’t try to create gender balance. There is no coffee, but herbal teas, nut bars and pumpkin seeds. Caffeine is a no-no. Everyone is on a diet. Samantha is a long time away.
Whither Charles? is put on hold: a novel called Cloning with Claude is dismissed as too obscure and a misery memoir called The Light that Failed is accepted, Crystal having convincingly argued that it would appeal to any publisher of large-print books, though she has a vague unease about the title. Didn’t Kipling use it, or someone?
Samantha rushes back in and says she’s having a miscarriage. She suspects the image of the baby drowning in a washing machine is to blame. By implication this is Carol’s fault. Sam has taken off her five-inch heels and looks wretched and desperate and her white leather skirt is bloody. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well,’ she says, bravely smiling. Carol snorts. An ambulance is called: the meeting breaks up. The intern uses his discretion as he is always being urged to do, though usually gets into trouble when he does, puts Whither Charles? in the Reject file, and it’s forgotten.
‘Not for us’ goes out a month or two later. Silk and Stone (UK) are even more understaffed than usual.
This is a worst possible case, but I had fun writing it, and these things happen.
If it has, don’t give in, take steps.