Dear Roger
As promised, I have now read your material – I do apologise for the delay. I can see the imagination at work here, but I can’t honestly say I loved it. After fifteen years in publishing before setting up the agency, I'm all too aware how difficult it is to get a publisher interested in a new writer, so I feel that I do have to love my clients' work - personally and professionally - to do the best possible job. If I don't feel that strongly, I'm the wrong agent. Publishing is a notoriously subjective business, and every new author needs both an agent and an editor who do love their work. It's hellishly difficult getting the bookselling chains to take a new novelist seriously, so that initial enthusiasm is vital. If an author’s prose doesn’t set me on fire, first and foremost, I say no, as do editors in this situation.
Most UK editors see around thirty books every week and only take on one or two debut novels over an entire year.
The entry level for a new novelist now is 'special', not 'good'. This is partially because sales and marketing directors have so much more power than they did a dozen years ago. If they don't believe they will be able to sell a first novel into W H Smiths and the rest of the bookselling trade in numbers, they'll block the editor from acquiring it in many companies. A senior editor told me a few weeks ago that even if he loved an author's writing, he wouldn't make an offer until the book that was submitted to him was 100% right for the market - he has just acquired an author whose previous four novels he (and everyone else in London) had turned down despite liking them a great deal. Thus, I have to believe the writers I take on are truly wonderful, or it's pointless submitting them. I’m afraid your writing and characters just didn’t draw me in, I’m so sorry. Incidentally, 100,000 words is the short end of this market, and most of the debut novels I’ve sold have been over 120,000 words long. Long books sell in SF and Fantasy, short books don’t.
Who would you compare your work to? An editor considering a new writer has to be able to make comparison with two or three recently-successful authors in the same genre (not long-term bestsellers), since he or she will have to make those comparisons should he take the author to a Publishing Meeting, at which the Sales Director’s first question is always: Who will buy this book? Then, when a new novelist is taken on, the Sales Director has to make those same comparisons when pitching the author to the retail book trade (WHS, Waterstone's, etc) at head office level, where 70% of books are now sold. Remember, above all it’s a commercial business. But this does not mean you have to write EXACTLY like a successful author. It’s about the parameters and areas of a genre within which the publisher believes they can sell books to the book trade, not detailed comparisons.
FYI, I've taken on about forty writers as clients and turned down well over 8,000, so far...I know it can be as difficult to get an agent as it is to be taken on by a publisher. You just have to keep plugging away.
All best wishes for the future – and apologies again for not coming back more quickly.
Yours
John Jarrold
Website:
John Jarrold - Literary agent and script doctor
Sigh ...
(JJ was much too kind. It was cr*p book, lol)
