Rem Seeking Literary Agents!
Thursday 10:25 a.m.
Some of the folk who land on the blog (hello, Jack!) come here looking for stuff about literary agents. I've said some mean things about literary agents before and they were all true. They light cigars with ten pound notes, do lunch, and I'm sure most of them are completely illiterate. But you can't knock doing lunch and lighting cigars with ten pound notes! Much better than wasting all your meditating time reading novels, which I certainly don't do.
Before I finished my book,I'd contacted some 350 agents through the site Everyone Who Is Anyone and I think I got two agents to look at my webpage from that. That's all. Then I started trying to send out emails about one or two of the books on the site and that took the total of emails up to nearly 400. That's from a year past last February.
In fact, I've been sending stuff to agents on and off for decades and got ... no, I had an agent for two years about 27 years ago! Anyway, bugger all!
So I reckoned I'd no chance of getting an agent when I finished the book, but I sent it to Pat Kavanagh, who is not an ice hockey player and might be famous to folk who know about these kinds of things. She was kind enough to let me send her three chapters. She quickly responded. "I like your tone of voice but, honestly, I just don't see that this is a novel or anything resembling one. It reads to me like autobiography infused with fantastical wish fulfilment and written while high on adrenalin? Speed? Dope? (paragraph) I know you can write but I don't know whether you can be published. To my eye/ear this first, isn't publishable."
At the end of the day, she might be right! And I did ask her to marry me once so I'm sure she's a very nice woman as well as a brilliant literary agent.
Having decided there was no point in talking to flatheids about ra bliss, I thought, Fung it all! I'll just go an emanate as a deity! But, as Pat Kavanagh reminded me before, you have to be undaunted. Or how else are you going to meet the 17th Karmapa in Rumtek? So I started at the bottom of Everyone Who Is Anyone this time and sent out three emails. Two were completely ignored, which is what usually happens, but lo! I got a response from Adrian Weston. And the book is now with Polygon. So we'll get the first rejection from a publisher by the end of next week. I wasn't even going to re-read the book till after Christmas!
The new book isn't off the wall. It's not even in the building! But if you're looking for an agent for a crime book ... folk getting their eyes stabbed out, lots of shooty shooty, one legged detectives from Hong Kong, or any of that stuff that sells, go to him. I checked him up on the Bookseller site. He's hot for stuff like that just now.
I always hope folk get what they want so they go on and want something else. Be careful what you wish for! Now that I've actually got a literary agent, I'll have to give everything up again (there's only the beer left!) and succumb to ra bliss! Two hours in the lobby before lunch. Done an hour today so far. Oh, if it wasn't for ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!
Some of the folk who land on the blog (hello, Jack!) come here looking for stuff about literary agents. I've said some mean things about literary agents before and they were all true. They light cigars with ten pound notes, do lunch, and I'm sure most of them are completely illiterate. But you can't knock doing lunch and lighting cigars with ten pound notes! Much better than wasting all your meditating time reading novels, which I certainly don't do.
Before I finished my book,I'd contacted some 350 agents through the site Everyone Who Is Anyone and I think I got two agents to look at my webpage from that. That's all. Then I started trying to send out emails about one or two of the books on the site and that took the total of emails up to nearly 400. That's from a year past last February.
In fact, I've been sending stuff to agents on and off for decades and got ... no, I had an agent for two years about 27 years ago! Anyway, bugger all!
So I reckoned I'd no chance of getting an agent when I finished the book, but I sent it to Pat Kavanagh, who is not an ice hockey player and might be famous to folk who know about these kinds of things. She was kind enough to let me send her three chapters. She quickly responded. "I like your tone of voice but, honestly, I just don't see that this is a novel or anything resembling one. It reads to me like autobiography infused with fantastical wish fulfilment and written while high on adrenalin? Speed? Dope? (paragraph) I know you can write but I don't know whether you can be published. To my eye/ear this first, isn't publishable."
At the end of the day, she might be right! And I did ask her to marry me once so I'm sure she's a very nice woman as well as a brilliant literary agent.
Having decided there was no point in talking to flatheids about ra bliss, I thought, Fung it all! I'll just go an emanate as a deity! But, as Pat Kavanagh reminded me before, you have to be undaunted. Or how else are you going to meet the 17th Karmapa in Rumtek? So I started at the bottom of Everyone Who Is Anyone this time and sent out three emails. Two were completely ignored, which is what usually happens, but lo! I got a response from Adrian Weston. And the book is now with Polygon. So we'll get the first rejection from a publisher by the end of next week. I wasn't even going to re-read the book till after Christmas!
The new book isn't off the wall. It's not even in the building! But if you're looking for an agent for a crime book ... folk getting their eyes stabbed out, lots of shooty shooty, one legged detectives from Hong Kong, or any of that stuff that sells, go to him. I checked him up on the Bookseller site. He's hot for stuff like that just now.
I always hope folk get what they want so they go on and want something else. Be careful what you wish for! Now that I've actually got a literary agent, I'll have to give everything up again (there's only the beer left!) and succumb to ra bliss! Two hours in the lobby before lunch. Done an hour today so far. Oh, if it wasn't for ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!
posted by Hotboy at 10:35 AM
7 Comments:
Polygon is a good publisher, from what I've read of them, and somewhat off the wall. Serious books- not shooty-shooty or chicklit.
Interesting comments from PK- you have a voice, can write but aren't publishable. That's essentially a commercial statement (there's only a small demographic to market to), and says nothing about the quality or content. Troppi was unrecognised in his lifetime, but is great precisely because he was writing for himself.
Ion: I think if you're going to represent a book, you've really got to like it, or know the right people to do lunch with. If Adrian Weston can't sell RaBlissBook, that's okay. There are more "publishable" books on my webpage anyway. Much worse books than Bomber and Ancient Futures have been published. Kids loved the kidbooks! As long as I don't have to keep trying to convince folk with emails and such! Hotboy
When I wrote Troppi I meant Trocchi- a slip of the tongue from the Italian. Quite agree about agent- pass on the selling to an agent if that's not your metiere. Cigars and lunches all round.
I say Hotboy!
Well done on finding an agent!
I must also say that Pat is obviously a wise one: "...autobiography infused with fantastical wish fulfilment and written while high on adrenalin? Speed? Dope?"
Why don't you tell us about the last time you were at Rumtek?
Was that in the late nineties?
MM III
I say!
By the way, the link in your last post to the literary agent's site needs attention. It was correct in yesterday's post.
MM III
Ion: I knew who you meant. Never saw the film they made of one of his books with Ewan McGregor though.
Mingin': Thanks for letting me know about the link. I've fixed it. Never been to Rumtek. I might have been to Rothesay. Hotboy
Wasn't Rumtek the drug testing place where you were a lab rat in the 70s? Don't go back to that.
Eureka! That's why RaBlissBook hasn't found a publisher - all the people who would like to read it are effed if they're going to bother wasting bliss time on reading a book. I told you it would have helped if we had done a feasibility study first. You could have been the next Rowling (with 10% off the top to me). Like Harry Potter but with Buddhist mysticism instead of wizardry. But, Oh No! You thought you knew better. Try working on the phemonenal ego loss.
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