Authors Electric

Don't get excited about the title, it's pure clickbait, I've not met an agent to discuss my work but rather I’ve just returned from a “meet the agent” event at the local uni. Although my friend did make me sit on the front row with her and it felt very up close and personal, there were probably a hundred other people sat behind us. The talk was informative but the leaflet handed out was copied from the website and I’d done my homework and already looked up the agent and her agency. Doing your homework and researching where to send a manuscript is just one of the pieces of advice she gave us. In fact much of what she said I would consider common sense - maybe I’ve just heard it all before – write, edit, research, query. Only I’ve never really got much further than the writing bit – at least as far as a longer piece of writing is concerned. Perhaps I just get bored too quickly, or I expect to be miraculously found on blogger and offered a lucrative book deal, because ...

Author launch - Then (take one) I started publishing book-length fiction in 1999, about ten years before Amazon opened their Kindle Direct Publishing platform and made it possible for authors to publish themselves without first winning the lottery. In other words, there was only one route to market, and it relied on an editor saying "yes". My first book Song Quest did the rounds, agented by me out of necessity, and eventually came out with a small UK publisher in the traditional way: hardcover first with a modest print run of about 1,000 copies (which sold out), and then paperback with a slightly larger print run that probably would have done quite well in the shops, since by then my book had won the Branford Boase Award  given to a debut author and their editor for an outstanding book for young readers, on the strength of which I had been taken on by a top London agent keen to develop my career. Unfortunately, though, Element Books went into receivership a few weeks after t...

"Proper writers have an agent." So said a ‘Top Literary Agent’ (TLA) panel member during a Q&A at a recent international writer’s festival I attended. There followed an immediate low growl from most of the audience. So I guess according to the TLA that made them all, not proper writers. I was one of the growlers. So is TLA right? Am I not a proper writer? If I don’t write, I become moody. Worse, I start to question the worth of my existence. So I suppose I must be proper in the sense that creating stories and characters is as essential to my well-being as breathing. But perhaps my writing is too poor to be accepted by an agent. Perhaps this why is I am not proper. I can’t answer this question. I find it hard to judge the quality of my own writing and that is why I go to writer’s groups for genuine crits. What I do know is that I’ve had ‘near misses’, with several agents and the BBC and I’ve won and been short-listed in enough writing competitions to have confide...

A whole heap of radio plays ...I'm lurking in there somewhere! Before I begin: if you’re somebody who gets pleasure from writing stories or poems purely for enjoyment or fulfilment or as a way of exploring human nature but doesn’t have any great need to communicate or disseminate the work or only to a select group of friends, then this is probably not the post (or rant) for you. There’s nothing wrong with writing just for fun. Lots of people do it, just as lots of people paint and draw or play sports for love and without any thought of turning professional, even though many of them are arguably more talented than some full time professionals. I remember back in my teens writing only because I loved what I was doing, although even then, there was lurking at the back of my mind the desire to make a career out of it. Along with that was the hope that somebody, somewhere, might pay me to write. And in fact quite soon, the BBC  did pay me to write a whole heap of radio plays, so ...

The Curiosity Cabinet started out as a trilogy for Radio 4 back in the 1990s. I then rewrote it, with significant changes, as a novel. It took a very long time to find a publisher. It was some time in the late 90s, when I was looking for a new agent, that one of them called it ‘a library novel fit only for housewives.’ I wasn’t a newcomer in any sense. I had a long and occasionally award winning career as a playwright and poet, and two published novels behind me so I could laugh it off. But it still stung a bit. Eventually, I secured representation at one of the bigger London agencies. She told me that she liked the novel, but she thought it was ‘too quiet’ to sell. Nevertheless, she sent it out to the big boys. I forget how many there were back then – certainly a few more than the current Big Five, but all the same, amalgamations had occurred and the so called mid-list was on the slide. Agents and publishers were already talking about the ‘decline of the mid-list’. One even co...

Jam tomorrow. Yum . Judging by the response, last month’s post urging caution before going all out to ‘find an agent’ struck a chord with a lot of writers. A number of people told me they felt that constantly responding to the advice of others had actually hampered them in their careers. Which is not to say that we don’t need good advice, because we do. The problem lies in judging when the advice is genuinely in the interests of you and your work, and when it’s given in order to make your project fit some other agenda, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the quality of the writing or with your own interests and obsessions. With the benefit of hindsight many people can see how rewriting the same novel countless times or trying to write an imitation of the current best seller on the promise of some hypothetical jam tomorrow has turned out to be a fruitless (or should that be jam-free?) exercise. To be fair, there used to be few other options. We were tied into the submissi...

As I packed for the move to Seattle this fall, I made decent progress on all but one front: a, mountain of personal papers. Imagine 3000-5000 pages--everything from old love letters to leases, poems, resumes, professional correspondence, contracts, published articles, ancient receipts...Okay, now imagine all of that thrown into a barrel with 600 rejection letters dating back 20 years--picture all of this shaken wildly, then removed in handfuls and tossed pell-mell into boxes. I faced something like that. And I suppose I could blame it on a half-dozen cross-country moves...or on a crushing divorce. But I think the truer answer may lie in the staggering number of rejections received over the course of two decades (after I'd published four novels preceded by twenty more years of rejection. Or to put that another way: twenty plus twenty years of failure with five years of success in between). I believe I numbed myself in ways I never knew. As I started to sift through the wreckag...

You’ve finished writing your book. It has an original plot with plenty of twists and turns. It’s well written. It’s a page turner. You’ve put your heart and soul into it, and it’s as good as it’s possible to be. Plus you’ve had it professionally edited, and critiqued.           After climbing down from cloud nine, you start the hunt for an agent and/or a publisher. You consult the Artists and Writers Year Book, and make a list of editors and publishers who handle your type of book. Then you send your baby off with a professional covering letter. In fact you’ve done everything by the book, followed all the advice, so you’re bound to be successful sooner or later. Yes?           Well, I’m afraid in most cases, unless you are exceptionally lucky, the rejections will start to bounce back. If your book is as good as you think it is, these will most likely be what are known as rave rejections. Y...

A Himalayan, not a hybrid rose: my Paul's Himalayan Musk.  Hybrid is, apparently, the new buzz term. 'You're going to be hearing about hybrid writers a lot soon,' remarked a colleague gleefully. Actually, the term was first invented (I believe) by the excellent Bob Mayer , some time ago but my colleague was absolutely right, and I already had been reading about it here, there and everywhere. I noticed it because I rather like the idea. It's one I'm comfortable with for various reasons and not just because I love roses, hybrid or not! Now I know that a percentage of new authors self publish in the hope of being noticed by traditional publishing, big or small. Nothing wrong with that either if that's what you've decided you want. The slush pile has all but disappeared, having an agent no longer guarantees publication - nor has it for some time - and stories of traditional publishers trawling Amazon for successful novels are legion. Although if you...

Cover illo for the 25th Anny edition of The Suiting 8/2013. I had a date with a model last night. I can’t talk about her, but I can tell you this: the road to hell is truly paved with the best dimensions. Then again, years ago, I found the road to heaven’s gate in a cross-country move. Act 1             Time: the middle-Eighties, when we still sent letters.             I set out from San Francisco, where a strayed loin is the quickest way to get from Pant A to Pant B. Destination: New York City, the heart of the publishing action.  I arrived with fire in the belly—and more in need of a fresh start than any hundred writers.              Why? In the previous decade I’d sent out thousands of queries. Though I now had something wild and fresh, a query recognized as mine would call to mind yesterday’s...