To get a novel published, you first need to find an agent to represent you. There are around a hundred literary agencies in the UK. Almost all are in London and most have a number of agents. Each agent is quite specific about the sort of novels that they are looking for. It took me a week of research to come up with a shortlist of agents to approach. The next step was to send out my work to them. Each agent specifies what they want to see. The basics are a covering letter, explaining why you’ve contacted them, a short pitch of your novel and a brief writing bio. Then you enclose a one-page synopsis of the novel and a sample of your writing. Some agents want just the first ten pages of your novel, others the first fifty pages. So I wrote the emails, attached the files and pressed send. Surprisingly, I got a reply from one the very next day. Were they so impressed with my glittering prose that they wrote back straightaway?
Unfortunately not, it was a rejection. Despite submitting my literary endeavours for twenty years, the stab of rejection still hurts. I’ve had countless rejections. You just have to shrug each one off and keep going. If you gave up at the first rejection, you’d never have any successes. It’s a hard lesson to learn, but rejection is a normal part of being a writer. Reassuringly, many famous writers had their first novel rejected multiple times (e.g. William Golding, JK Rowling, etc). One of the agencies I approached stated that they received 10,000 submissions a year and ended up taking only ten of these. Those are not good odds. They are probably worse than submitting to most poetry journals.
In fact, I should be pleased that they bothered to write back to me at all. A good number of the agencies stated that because they received so many submissions, they didn’t bother to respond to the ones that they weren’t interested in. If you hadn’t heard from them within a specific number of weeks, then you should assume the worst.
No comments:
Post a Comment