MAGAZINE WORK

Secret Agents – one potential authors attempt to contact the living

I opened the email and began to read.

“Dear Mr. Browne, thank you for your communication dated 21November 2003 asking us to consider you for inclusion on our list”

As I read further my heart swelled with pride.  At last, I had made it; I had joined the ranks of the literary great and good.  I could now be counted alongside Le Carre, King and Twain.  Finally, after nearly sixteen weeks of trying, writing letters and emails, sending resumes and samples, telling the truth, telling lies and telling lies which may have been the truth for other people, after all of this I had finally been rejected by an agent.

The process had started four and a half months earlier.  I have written seventeen complete manuscripts, not including magazine articles.  The shortest is around 20,000 words, the longest over 100,000.  Until I started a web site to publicise the mountain bike race team I run for charity, I had never considered publishing anything. 

Writing was a private pastime undertaken purely to keep me from spending money on women of loose moral principles whilst travelling.  People read the web site and an unnervingly large number of them encouraged me to write something for publication. 

I already had the ammunition; all I needed was the cannon to fire it out of.  It must be a very large and loud cannon, in short, I needed an agent.

So, I sat down with the Writers and Artists year book and, despite what Ray Bradbury told me, I began to plough through them in alphabetical order.  I did have a plan, though.  I would only write to the ones I thought were open-minded to new technology. 

This needs some explaining.  Many years ago, I was a teenage hacker, I avoided the pentagon web site as everybody was doing that at the time and it no longer had enough “cool”.  The pinnacle of my success as a hacker came when I was 32 and it was a point proving exercise.  I re-routed all of the picture links on the Corvette Club of America to a public jpeg hosting service who, unwittingly, handled a graphic for me which declared all Corvettes to be not very good; and they said it couldn’t be done.  I was a computer scientist when it meant something.  In short, I wasn’t going to talk to anybody who would not communicate by e-mail.  I was too tight to buy stamps.

So, I started at the beginning.  AP Watts, Adam Roberts, Ableman, Alcock and Aitken all ignored me without a moment’s hesitation.

I mailed more; I tried enclosing small snippets of my writing in the text to tempt them.  Almost immediately, I heard nothing.  I sent a mail to a friend to see if I was getting messages out.  She sent a reply saying that I should keep trying.  It had taken her nearly two years to find an agent.  Thanks Jessica, very encouraging.

Then, success; Mike Etherington at Effingpot told me that I was almost exactly what he wasn’t looking for, but that I should keep trying and best of luck.  This was it, this was my success.  Somebody gainfully employed in the business of producing books had acknowledged my existence.  My heart did little flips.  It was late at night, but I woke my wife to tell her “I’ve been rejected wake up!!”  Rejection happened for a second time, that very night.

My initial plan was to send two mails for every rejection.  Had I stuck to the plan, I should now be sending my third mail; luckily I am ill disciplined.  I did a quick stub count in my mail database; seventy four.

But the floodgates were open, nothing could stop me now.  The following week I got another rejection, then on Tuesday 13th Jan, oh joyous day, I received three rejections in a row.  Now I was getting somewhere, I felt like a literary heavyweight.

Overall, the rejections were quite nice. One agent even went so far as to describe me as “A writer of some talent, although we obviously have no idea how little”.  It was my own fault really, had I known then what I know now about the mindset of the average agent, I would have thought twice before engaging in playful e-flirting.

On it continued, I was constantly mistaken for a door and ignored by the glitterati of the publishing world.  Sometimes there was a glimmer of hope in the rejection. 

Annette Green was very pleasant in her rejection and wished me well in whatever career I eventually chose.  “Hold on”, I responded “you even represent Patrick Thompson, and he’s from Birmingham, can you explain this?”  Her return mail was unable to offer an excuse, so I felt confident in pushing home my advantage.  “Not only is he unable to program in structured languages,” I explained, “he is also a good deal shorter than I am, which must give me an advantage at publishing fairs and publicity events and the like, and I don’t talk through my nose”.  Annette terminated our correspondence.

Carol Blake of Blake Friedman sent a pleasantly wordy rejection.  This time I really felt justified in my response.  “Ms. Blake”, I wrote “The communication you received followed the guidelines which are set out in Chapter four of “From Pitch to Publication” a fine guide on the art of getting ones name in print, and yet you reject me, I would be interested to hear your reasons, given that the author of FP2P, Ms Blake is one Carol Blake, yours, etc’.  Her response was swift.  “I have been away from work for two months following an operation; I’m quite behind in my work”.  I sent my best wishes and some chocolates.

But it’s not all been bad news, I have hand delivered manuscripts to two agents – Antony Harwood poked an owlishly bespectacled nose out from behind a door in Oxford just long enough to take the proffered documents from my hand before rapidly retreating away from the suns damaging rays.

Andrew Mann Ltd asked to see samples.  I finally found their offices in a seedy threadbare building in Noho – Not-Quite-Soho.  I struggled to the top of their eight flights of stairs before falling asthmatically through the door, making the fatal mistake of hiding my embarrassment with humour, it was not well received.

“Are you one of Anita’s?”  The shrew within enquired.

I wasn’t sure.  The representative I communicated with refused to identify themselves.  Just deliver it, they commanded.  I relayed these facts.

“You must be one of Anita’s.  She’s expecting something.  She’s not here”.  The shrew barked.

My reply was ready formed.  “No problem, I have just battled against rush-hour traffic, paid the congestion charge, parked in a car park space worth more than my house and found myself endangered by menacing gangs of lairy teenage smack-addict-rent-boy-muggers as I criss-crossed the West End trying to locate the AM Megapoly before ascending Mount Mann in order to see her.  To be honest, I always expected the secretive Anita to be out sharing a double-triple-frappe-chocca-mocca-cino with some Russian secret-passing lover, I really only came here for the pleasure of observing whilst you to practice your rudeness technique against me, I live only to serve”.  All of which somehow got compressed to a mumbled “Can you give her this, thanks” before I sloped out, this time aided by gravity and a humbling realisation of my own self-worth. 

That was when I concocted my theory of the London Rudeness School for Literary Agents.  Entry is free, you just have to convince the entrance vetting team of your suitability by convincing dead mammals to leave the room, rather than run the risk of another withering outpouring of scorn from the potential student.

Following a successful three year study course in awkward mannerisms, straight answer avoidance and ego crushing, the successful student will be set free to roam the highways and byways of the kingdom of authors, where they will tackle their life’s work, putting people in their places and being un-contactable.  Any showing a leaning toward bright clothing or optimism will be directed toward specialist agencies dealing in film scripts.

But it doesn’t have to be like this, oh no, not at all.  For instance the very lovely Simon at Orion almost seemed pleased to speak with me; he took a great deal of time to discuss the state of the market in general and how the parody in particular was “on the up” and how my treatment of Terrorist Toad, a parody based very loosely around the Wind in the Willows may be timely.  We chatted about working in London and commuting, we talked about electronic publishing and marvelled at the number of new titles hitting the shelves each week and what a struggle it is to publicise them.  He even offered helpful advice about my manuscript before he had even seen it. This was more like it, I was finally being treated like what I was – a potential source of new revenue, something to be nurtured and milked dry; a resource.  I felt warm and even went as far as double-spacing my manuscript before posting it, regardless of the extra costs in paper and postage. 

So, why do we bother with agents at all?  Again, I have a theory.  If we didn’t have nasty, rude, no-time-for-writers agents to shield us, we may have to spend some time talking to pleasant helpful people who work for publishers.  The fact that we are willing to lock ourselves away from society for days, weeks or, if we are poets, minutes at a time to write something that very few people, if any, will ever read tells the truth about us as a sub-species.  We just don’t fit in with the normal rules of society.  We’re like the unpopular kid at school who pushes a tiny bit harder to do well at the sports that may make him more acceptable, such as football or, er, football.  If people were routinely nice to us, perhaps we would stop pushing so hard to write the best we could; we may even start believing them when they said that our work was more than “borderline acceptable”.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to start again on the yearbook, this time I’m looking for agents who only communicate using colours.