Completing the book turned out to be the
easy part as it was the next challenge that I set, which proved to be the most
difficult. I decided that I wanted an agent. After all, if I was ever to
progress my writing to next level, I would surely need professional
representation to guide me through the complex process of negotiating and
landing a publishing deal. In order to get my work out to an audience, first
acquiring an agent is essential. Or is it?
Currently, my pile of rejection letters
stands at 30. A further 7 did not even return my work in the pre-paid envelope
provided. And then there are the online submissions. Out of about twenty
e-mails sent, I only got a 50% response rate – all rejections. Polite, but
rejections nonetheless.
The question that I must ask myself is;
why?
The obvious answer would be to think
that my book was simply not good enough. That I do not have what it takes to
make it as a published author. Many writers would have come to that conclusion
and given up. But is that really the case?
The one common thread running through
each and every rejection was that not one of the agents in question had
actually read my book. In fact, I strongly believe that most of them did not
read the sample chapters or even the synopsis. At best, they may have very
briefly glanced over the cover letter. Put simply, I believe that the vast
majority of submissions were returned unseen by an actual agent.
Why do I think this you may ask?
Is it bitterness? Is it to shield myself
from facing up to the reality that maybe the quality of the writing was not good
enough?
Again, the answer is a resounding no.
The truth is much simpler. It is purely a case of mathematics. From the
information in their websites, the agents who I approached were stated to be
receiving between 50 and 300 queries per week. If three sample chapters comes
in at an average of about 5,000 words (a low estimate), that would amount to
between 250,000 and 1,500,000 words or the equivalent of between 4 and 24 full
length novels!
Obviously, the agent must give priority
to their current clients and then there is a case of reading the full
manuscripts that they have been sent/referred. When then, do they have time to
read all of the unsolicited submissions? The simple answer is that they don’t.
Most employ a reader to sift through the submissions and even then the volume
means that they will only glance over each cover letter before deciding if it
is worth reading further. Add to that the fact that many agencies will only
take on a handful of new clients each year and the outlook is far from
promising.
One example from my own experience is
Darley Anderson, which is possibly the biggest of all the agencies representing
authors in the UK. I have submitted 3 times to this agency and each time I
received a polite rejection letter stating they receive 300 queries per week
and only take on 5 or 6 new clients per year. 300 submissions per week amounts
to 15,600 per year. What this means is that the chances of signing with this
agency are roughly 6/15,600 or 1 in 2,600. Not impossible, but very, very
unlikely. No matter how good the writing is, the most important factor in
acquiring an agent is pure old fashioned luck and even then, the prospective
author would need a lot of it.
Therefore, I have decided that it is
about time that I tried creating my own luck. Over the coming weeks and months
I will be self publishing my novels (4 so far) online via Kindle Direct and Smashwords
and chronicling my progress on this blog. The returns are likely to be small,
but like I already said regarding the lottery: even £2 saved is better than
nothing. Most importantly, the only person who now needs to read my work before
deciding if it is fit for publishing is me. For the first time, I feel like the
odds are finally in my favour.
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