Agent Provocateur

‘Thank you so much for letting me see this (novel), and my sincere apologies for not getting back to you sooner. I think it has a lively pace, good characters, and enough twists and turns to keep any crime fan reading. In short, I do think it is a really competent, solid piece of work, and I think it could find a readership (I think it would be well-reviewed, too).

However, as it becomes ever more difficult to break out new authors into the mass market, although I am very much on the look-out for new talent, what I am really looking for is something very different, a mass market author (in any genre) who is breaking new ground and who will genuinely be able to break away from all the other debut novelists out there.

And whilst I did like (the) novel very much, I just didn’t ultimately feel it offered anything new or groundbreaking enough to allow us to do the big launch on this.’

I suppose agents become inured to receiving rejection letters on behalf of their clients. Books like No Turn Unstoned (a wonderful collection of rejections edited by Diana Rigg) help keep things in perspective, like the number of publishers who rejected Harry Potter.

So I usually tell clients not to look too literally at reasons for rejection. As my mother used to say (when winning arguments with me): ‘Don’t be rational about my neuroses!’

The rejector has to say something. If they are an editor or film producer, they don’t want to be too brusque because they want the agent to send them more books or scripts.

So how should you read the rejection quoted above (it is a real one)? For a start most publishers and certainly most producers have more material on their desks than they could ever publish or produce. Like agents they reject good material because you simply cannot take it all on.

Increasingly the profile of the writer is important – will they be good at promotion, do they speak well in public, are they good interview material, are they well-connected? Are there spin-offs from the book, such as feature articles they could write, or short stories that could come out in magazines at the time of publication? Could there be a TV drama series or a feature film? Or if non-fiction a documentary sparked by the book.

So, being a good read, with ‘lively pace, good characters, and enough twists and turns to keep any crime fan reading’, is no longer enough.

Publishers who put out 100 books a year until last year may only be doing 60 or 70 now, as the recession bites. Each book must make more money than last year. This puts the emphasis on established writers, writers who can become brand-names faster.

It is notoriously slow to grow a writer into a brand, perhaps 4 to 6 years? The editor in question is looking for ‘something very different’ but in a genre, so essentially it is unlikely to be that different.

When the times in publishing get tough it is difficult to know whether to play the genre card or the originality card: the old saying among agents in response to ‘I have written something that has never been done before!’ is that, on looking at the material, one can see why.

So rave rejections are increasingly part of the business of being a writer. Hollywood is no different: a writer takes a screenplay to a Studio who says we love the plot but the characters don’t work, takes it to the next Studio who love the characters, but the plot doesn’t work.

I think that we should all take hope from rave rejections. It means we are not wrong. The market may be pusillanimous. Publishers will tell you that they can make a number 1 best-selling author even more successful. Good for them but not too difficult. But if they are not willing to make modest investments in talented and potentially commercial new authors, then agents must continue to do so because from those clients we get best-sellers.

I think I commented in an earlier blog (do I have to keep track of all of them if I do 5 a week?) that we are beginning to sell books first outside the UK. A sign of the times perhaps? It is no longer just about the domestic market, any more than it is about the printed page as the digital world takes hold.

We are increasingly in the business of managing authors. And when one does particularly well, it gives encouragement to all of us. The fact that one of our clients – the lovely Sheila O’Flanagan – is No 1 this week is a good feeling, and one that – for us – makes rejections a little easier to take. I wish it would make the rejected feel a bit better, but I guess it might not.