This is part two of the talk I gave at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this week. You can read the first part here, and the final part will appear tomorrow.
The Writing Business
25) How hard is it to get an agent? Let’s look at some statistics.
26) At her talk at the Romantic Novelists Association summer conference this year, literary agent Carole Blake said she receives between 20 and 50 submissions every single day of the week.
27) She has not taken on a new client in over three years.
28) Her associate agents also get 20-50 submissions a day, which works out to between 7000 and 18,000 submissions each year, of which they take on perhaps four or six new clients.
29) I’ve been told by other good agents that they find publishing deals for about half of the new writers they take on each year.
30) How can we, as writers, become one of those six new writers the agent takes on? Preparation.
31) QUESTION what do you think we need to do to be properly prepared?
a) We can submit to the right places! When I worked as an editor, the majority of the submissions I received each day were of genres which we didn’t publish. So they got rejected regardless of their quality.
(If writers sent their work out only to appropriate markets, slush piles would reduce by at least half, and I think that the big publishers might well reopen their doors to unagented submissions, but that has little to do with my talk today.)
c) And we can make sure our work is good enough: because the vast majority of submissions are dreadfully bad.
32) QUESTION what proportion of submissions do you think are coherent, reasonably well punctuated, follow basic rules of grammar and don’t contain many spelling mistakes?
a) Between 5 and 10%
b) Which means that if your submission is well-written, properly punctuated, and so on, you’re already miles ahead of most other writers. And suddenly, the odds look a lot better, don’t they?
33) So to improve the odds for ourselves we have to
a) Revise and polish our work until it gleams; and
b) do our research, and submit only to appropriate agents and editors.
34) Revision first. How can you improve if you don’t get good advice?
35) Seek help only from people who are qualified to advise you.
a) Writing well often doesn’t necessarily translate to editing well.
b) Success in the field is often a good indicator;
c) being an English teacher is not necessarily a good indicator.
36) Don’t expect your writing to improve as much as it could if you can’t accept fair criticism.
37) Do expect fair criticism to hurt like hell sometimes:
a) try to remember that it’s the writing being criticised, not you;
b) and that it’ll be worth it if it helps you get published.
38) Don’t expect your writing to improve if you only learn from people who aren’t very good. Work with writers who are better than you wherever possible.
39) At this point, we are going to step back and consider Yog’s Law.
40) QUESTION Does anyone know Yog’s Law? All together now:
a) Money flows towards the author. What does this mean?
i) Publishers pay writers, never the other way round
ii) You work hard at your writing: you deserve to be recompensed for that work. Writers should be paid for their work.
41) There are certain things that writers should not pay for:
a) Never work with an agent who demands a reading fee or any other sort of upfront fee
b) Publishers pay for editing, design, printing, marketing and sales, not writers.
c) Don’t pay for copyright registration agencies as this is simply not necessary
d) Don’t pay manuscript display sites to showcase your writing: such sites very rarely have any positive effect.
e) Don’t pay for query-writing services—you wrote the book, you are best-placed to write the query
f) Don’t pay for submissions services either, as many agents and publishers won’t even read the submissions which are generated by such services.
42) So now we know what Yog’s law is, we have to know when to break it. Because sometimes it’s ok to pay.
43) When is it wise to pay for help? Remember the guideline that you should try to get advice from people who are better than you.
a) The first option is to look for free help: writing groups or online writing communities can all be very useful, and provide emotional support.
b) Editorial agencies. Hilary Johnson, The Literary Consultancy, Cornerstones and Pen2Publication are all very good. Sally Zigmond occasionally offers paid-for feedback for short stories and is excellent.
c) Writing courses: Arvon Foundation courses are almost always excellent.
d) Entry-fee competitions can be ok if they are well thought of.
e) If you’re thinking of taking an MA in writing make sure it’s taught by people who are successful in the area you want to write in, and not by academics without a background in commercial publishing.
f) And of course you can buy books about writing, which is never a hardship.
The final part of my talk will appear tomorrow. Thanks for sticking with it!
Great posts, Jane: straightforward, clear advice every writer should have tattooed on their foreheads. I thought this one was particularly spot-on “Don’t expect your writing to improve if you only learn from people who aren’t very good. Work with writers who are better than you wherever possible.”
Far too many new writers hang onto the words of those who are strong on opinion and low on experience and knowledge and argue with the industry professionals.
Loving this; thanks so much for sharing it.
Sally, I’m glad you like this: I really should have checked with you first before sending people your way, but I know how much you’ve helped me in the past and know how excellent your crits are.
Charlotte, thank you. I hope you find the third part–coming tomorrow–useful too.
Excellent advice. And, “Far too many new writers hang onto the words of those who are strong on opinion and low on experience and knowledge and argue with the industry professionals.” is one of the truest comments ever. Often the loudest voices heard are persistent, strident, advice-givers who know as little as those who read them.
Thanks, Carole. It sounds so obvious when Sally writes it: I just wish more people realised this.
Thanks, Jane, excellent advice, succinctly and clearly set out.
Have read lots of 43f), have booked a 43c) and am about to take step 43b) so feel encouraged by your post.
Alison, let me know if you find any other literary consultancies, won’t you? I might know how good they are, or if you should avoid them.
Great advice, both in the post and the comments.
I’m going to be using this post to keep my resolve in the face of family members and friends pressuring me to submit my MS and “just send it off and see what happens” – before any of them have even read it.
I don’t feel ready to submit it yet but, when I do, I want to be professional and business-like by having polished it and made it the best that I can before sending it off to the right people, once I’ve researched who they are. Following your advice, rather than that of well-meaning friends and family, is much more likely to help me achieve that.
Thanks again for posting your talk in this way, Jane. It is extremely helpful.
Good for you, Kath. You’re on the right track. It’s hard to stick to it, sometimes, especially when well-meaning people encourage you to take a different route: but do, it makes such a difference.
Let us know how you get on, won’t you?
This is great stuff. I once had an agent send me a form rejection that laid out pretty much all this. It was super encouragement – basically saying the figures sound bad but provided your submission isn’t dreadful they are better than you think
And as someone who was there in the audience, I can say that you presented your material as lucidly and succinctly there as you have here!
Thank you, Nicola. You’re responsible for me getting the gig, so I hope I didn’t let you down. Incidentally, part one of this series was included in Stephen Fry’s Daily yesterday, which made me rather pleased.
I am average at table-tennis. I always find it helps my game to play with people who are slightly better than me because they help me to improve my game without frustrating me. There is an analogy there with what Sally says above about learning from better writers! (Of course, it all breaks down because there is no point in my playing my brother-in-law, a former UK top 40 player, as he would thrash me on every point – whereas we can all learn from the top writers!)
Absolutely, Jane. Be happy to do that. @ Jane Smith:
Everything you say is right. Unfortunately it’s lines like this: “How can we, as writers, become one of those six new writers the agent takes on? Preparation.” That make me cringe.
Problem is, no quantity of preparation is going to change the ratio of queries to acceptance. And that’s the part that matters.
I am still playing wall myself, but I’m more realistic than that about my actual chances.
Anon, I’m sorry to have made you cringe.
The thing is that I’ve seen the slush pile from the editors’ side, and I know that most writers simply don’t do enough preparation before they submit.
They don’t revise their work enough (some don’t revise it at all); they don’t research the agents or editors they submit to; and they don’t submit in the format requested.
If these writers (who make up the bulk of the slush pile) were to better prepare themselves and their work for submission, they’d have a far better chance of succeeding.
The significant factor isn’t the “ratio of queries to acceptance”, because that implies that there’s a fixed quota for acceptances, regardless of the quality or quantity of work to hand. It’s “how good the work is”, and “getting it seen by the right people”.
If writers don’t prepare and so submit their novel to an agent who only deals in non-fiction, for example, then they have NO HOPE of getting representation regardless of the quality of their work.
If non-fiction writers are unable to recognise a cohesive argument let alone write one, then again, they have no hope of getting their work published until they learn and improve.
Good preparation DOES improve a writer’s chances of getting published. It’s not the only issue, as I said upstream; my talk was only about the business side of publishing, and not about improving your writing, which is a whole other can of worms.
However, if you’re not good enough (and how to quantify “good enough” deserves its own separate discussion) then it doesn’t matter how well you prepare: you’re just not going to get there.
This is so clearly presented. It’s confirmed/denied many pieces of advice I’ve read or heard and as I know I can trust your advice on this subject I now know what I should keep/chuck into the bin.
I’m surprised at the copyright paragraph. I thought it was always advisable to register it. Although I did read an agent’s blog where she said, something like your work won’t be as good anyway, so who will want to pinch it.
Sarah, those copyright registration services are completely unnecessary: copyright exists in your work the instant you create it, and usually your computer records and various drafts are all you need to prove that the work is yours, in the very unlikely event that anyone tries to steal it.
When a book is published then yes, in America in particular, it’s necessary to register the copyright: but that’s a whole different thing. It’s generally unnecessary prior to publication.
[...] The Writing Business: Part 2 [...]