I've just submitted my work

[user48675]

Well, I've gone and done it. I've been working for a number of years on my book and this evening I have just sent it to an agent (just one agent because then I lost my nerve). I can't believe that on this very evening, I pressed the send button. I know not what the agent will think. Most likely I will receive a thank you but no thank you. But, I have at the very least had the courage (I suffer from chronic anxiety) to do it. Nothing much else to say but I just wanted to tell someone.

But it looks like no-one is going to give it decent consideration in the first place, so this is unlikely to happen

OP, once an agent takes an interest in your work they will spend literally hours and hours on it! That's even before it goes off to an editor. When they read a book it takes them ages because they have so much to consider: plot, characters, point of view, dialogue, setting etc. They are not reading it like we'd read a book.

It sounds, however, as though you don't want to make any changes to your work. That's fine but you won't get anyone taking you on if that's the case. Every single book is edited and the constructive advice given by editors and agents is massively helpful. But if you want it to be published as it is, then you might be better going down the self-published route - you're always free to do that.

Social media, particularly Instagram, will help you much more than a website, too. You'll reach far more people. Just think about the last time you looked at an author's site.

It's natural to feel a bit envious when others succeed, but it's best to try to be inspired rather than envious. Look at what you can learn from success stories. IIRC one of the successful writers on that thread was following an agent on Twitter and happened to see that the agent was on the lookout for the exact type of book they'd written - so of course they approached the agent and the agent was delighted.

So, the rest of us can take from that the value of following agents and seeing what's on their wish-list so we can get in there quickly if an agent says they're looking for the sort of book we've written.

@PreparingForDisappointment, screw up your courage — it might surprise you by being better than you remembered, albeit with problems you can now see how to fix.

OP, absolutely multiple refusals are normal, and you need the hide of an ox and the stubbornness of a mule. Well done on writing your novel. No one can take that away from you. But I think you’re misunderstanding the role of the agent — they aren’t there to offer constructive feedback, their interest is purely in whether they think there’s a market for your book and can sell it to an editor.

Yours does sound like it crosses lots of genres, which may make it more difficult to sell. As a pp asked, have you had someone read your submission letter/synopsis critically? Some agents won’t open your chapters unless the synopsis intrigues them.

And if a bit of dejection would help, I was on the other thread linked by @Preparing — I got an agent, but the novel hasn’t been bought, after a couple of near-misses. So I’ve started another one. I won’t say it hadn’t been desperately disappointing, but you pick yourself up etc etc.

I'm published - it was the fourth book I'd written. I'd sent the second and third book off to about 20 agents with only one woman being very encouraging. When I wrote the fourth book I sent it to about 12 agents who wrote nice responses, then to someone who immediately took me on. It takes perseverance and a thick skin and a sense of humour and a lot more perseverance. I know people who were taken on immediately and others who had a longer journey than I had. It's just a matter of finding the person who fits you, that's all.

Publishing is full of romantic book lovers. There is a lot of genuine passion to bring great books out. It isn’t full of cold-hearted Wall Street types counting cash. But it is an industry and books need to sell to keep the wheels turning.

If you put a book out there, not everyone will like it. Every book in the world has some bad reviews. Rejection and criticism is an inevitable part of any creative path. Even if you self publish, you will have to face some people making harsh or dismissive comments about it. Go on Good Reads and look up the best book you have ever read - you will find one star reviews and really mean comments along with the five star praise and love!

Editing often involves adding a lot - my first draft was 85,000 words but three rounds of edits saw it grow to 120,000. Now I face a final edit cutting it back down a bit! I can promise that as proud and happy as I felt with my first draft, to see it grow and flourish in the edits is a million times more rewarding. When you find the right editor you will be amazed at how they can see your story’s heart and how they can help you make it more powerful and beautiful. It will still be your story!

It’s an odd experience because writing is something you love but if you want to publish your work, it involves treating it as a job which means stepping back and analysing it from a more objective point of view. It’s the best job in the world in my opinion but it’s very emotional.

BeroccaFiend Thank you, I will try, but it's worse than writer's block. .

Yes, I'll open the file now ... but I'll just take a moment to rearrange the cutlery drawer in my kitchen. .

Hollow, I think I would consider making changes if an agent took an interest in my work, especially if the main theme was still preserved. The first agent wrote 'I read with interest' but obviously not enough interest! Or more likely that was a standard response, it sounded like it to me. But ultimately they didn't feel passionate enough. I think, I would need to find an agent who had experienced some of the things I talk about in their own personal life - then they might show some 'real' interest. But then again, that is probably an 'inherent' flaw...that my book is destined for just too narrow a market.
Preparing - your positivity is amazing!

Oh, I hear you, @PreparingForDisappointment, I’ve been there. And once I’d steeled myself to stop rearranging my teaspoons, it was actually a better book than I’d feared. Best wishes.

OP, on the subject of changing your work. If you want to publish traditionally, you will need to revise extensively, eg be prepared to lose your favourite bits because they slow down the narrative, cut an entire subplot, change the ending, cut 30,000 words from the saggy middle and replace. An earlier version of my novel was 120,000 words. The version my agent sent to editors was just over 70,000 and had lost one of the two narrators. And it was a much stronger novel.

A friend who is a well-known mid-list novelist sent a 100,000 word novel — her sixth — to her agent a couple of years ago. The agent felt that only one of the three interlinked plots had legs, so my friend ended up back at 30,000 words and making that plot strand the whole novel.

Preparing I bet when you come back to your book you will be pleasantly surprised! And after six months away, if there are any fixes required it will be easy to spot. I really hope you get it back out there again - it only takes one agent to love it and they might be out there waiting!

Alas, I am better at sounding positive than feeling positive.

'Read with interest' is fairly standard, but probably not untrue - ultimately agents need writers and therefore need submissions, so they will look at everything that comes their way with interest - but if it doesn't grab them, they won't read beyond your elevator pitch.

If you think your book will appeal to an agent with particular life experience, tailor your research to finding that agent. Are there any published writers writing from a similar background? If so, find out who they are agented by, and highlight the comparison in your pitch.

Thank you for your encouraging words, Captain. It's great to hear the editing process is going so well with your novel - it sounds blissfully rewarding from what you've said. I'd love to work with someone in that way!

Maybe you can enjoy these rejection letters. They're fairly blunt at times.

Rejection letters to famous people

I particularly like: "We hate no rival publisher sufficiently to ask you to inflict them on him."

Don't give up with one rejection, but maybe finding someone completely different to read through might help-preferably someone that doesn't know you. It can be hard to see bits which don't work when you've written it yourself.

And just to add - I’ve been thinking about this! - I know agents who get 80+ submissions on average every single week of the year. That’s 80 people’s hopes and dreams in their inbox every week. An agent has to negotiate contracts, sell manuscripts, edit drafts, handle publicity, have meetings, attend events and a host of other things as part of their job every day. Can you imagine trying to read and give feedback on 80 lots of first three chapters in addition to a full time job?

I’m saying that just to try to help you see that a cursory rejection is not personal, though it can’t feel anything else but crushingly disappointing. The odds are stacked very high so the only way through is to keep persevering, OP.

First of all, OP, a massive well done for actually finishing your book - it's far rarer than you think. I did a very well-respected MA, and I don't think even a quarter of my cohort actually finished their books - and that's off the back of spending a lot of money on a course.

A few thoughts...

Firstly, you say you've been working on the book for years - was that just writing it, or have you done a lot of editing? Most books aren't ready to be submitted until they've been through multiple edits. If you haven't worked on it much since actually finishing it, I would strongly suggest holding off on submitting to other agents at the moment, and give it at least two full run-throughs with the red pen. Yes, it's more time before submitting, but you'll be giving it the best possible chance.

Even if it's all edited and ready to go, I would now wait until after LBF. Agents will come back to very full inboxes, so it might be worth giving them time to get through their backlog before you submit.

The email you got does sound like one of the standard rejections - 'read with interest' is a classic. But that doesn't mean they hated it. They may have read the covering email and realised there was no way it was for them. They may have read the first page and come to the same realisation. Form responses can mean a huge number of things, right from 'this actually looks quite interesting but I'm too busy to give a personalised response' to 'OMG this is dreadful' and, at this early stage, you have no idea where, on that spectrum, yours fell. If you'd had a completely damning personalised response, that might be a little more worrying, but still only one person's opinion. So put this rejection out of your mind - there's no way of knowing what, if anything, it says about your work.

I am slightly concerned about what you say about the quite niche nature of your book, and about your reluctance to make changes. Niche is difficult to sell. Crossover is fairly difficult to sell. I'm published, and in discussions about my next book which could probably fit into more than one category, and this has been raised as a possible issue, even though the category it probably best sits in best has seen a fair bit of blurring of genre boundaries recently. It might be worth thinking about if you can make some changes that reduce the number of genres you are trying to straddle - two might be workable, while three or four might be tricky.

In terms of willingness to make changes, I think you need to have a very hard think about what you want from the process. If you want to be traditionally published, via an agent, you are going to need to be open to anything from small changes to a complete re-write, using some of the themes/characters, but cutting others. If it's this book that you want to put out there, then, yes, self-publishing might be a better option. Getting an agent is hard, and most of them won't take on something that needs a complete rewrite. What is more likely to happen is that you'll get a response along the lines of 'There's something here, but I couldn't sell it in its current form. Happy to have a look at it if you were minded to rework it by [insert suggestion]'. If it has a very strong USP and the writing is sound, you might just get someone willing to work with you on it, but that would be unusual. You need to work out just how much you love the book in its current form, and how willing you are to sacrifice some of that love for the sake of making it into something that has a chance of being picked up. I have considerable sympathy for that dilemma - I've recently re-read my first unpublished novel, which had a reasonable amount of interest, but which didn't get anywhere, and I've realised how much I still love it - far more so than anything else I've written, including the one that got me published. The writing is fairly bad - I've learned a lot since I wrote it - but I think there's something there. I can see how I could rework it, but I'm not entirely sure I'm willing to do that kind of hatchet job on something I'm so attached to. So it might have to sit in a drawer and just mean something to me and nobody else.

So have a good think about it all - with as much detachment as you can muster - before you take the next steps. When you do decide to submit to more agents, it might be worth getting the Writers and Artists Yearbook and making a list of likely agents. And follow lots of them on twitter - they often talk about their likes and dislikes.

Good luck - you've done the really hard bit. Nothing from here is as hard as writing the bloody thing in the first place!

I did a very well-respected MA, and I don't think even a quarter of my cohort actually finished their books - and that's off the back of spending a lot of money on a course.

A friend of mine teaches on one of the top creative writing MAs in the country and she frequently has students not meeting deadlines or not circulating material in advance of a workshop where their work is to be discussed. I personally find it baffling these things are so expensive, and one of the draws of that particular MA for fiction writers is the very high calibre of novelist teaching the fiction modules but it seems not to be unusual.

Good luck with it. That takes a lot of courage.

I was the only person on my MA who finished a book. One of the things that annoyed me most (regarding deadlines mentioned above) was that I put a lot of effort into critiquing other people's work whereas I'd turn up ten minutes early and find some people in the group hastily making notes.

I think some people like the idea of being a writer far more than actually writing anything.

Thanks all, no more news received (3 more submission s sent). I did a bit more research into the sort of books declining agent likes. Not my cup of tea and not really akin to the book I have written aka. more research definitely required. Don't know what my next excuse will be though! Lol. I think I got so nervous about the whole thing, I just fired it off - a bit of a now or never sort of mindset.

Interesting comments about ma. I would love to do ma but due to the deadlines would probably wish to do much of the work i.e write a novel before I signed up. It costs a lot of money though.

And an ma would in my case not be for career aspirations but for personal development, so difficult to justify as currently not earning.

these agents, are very important people and overloaded with work to even think of taking the time to nurture someone else's dream. Why would they possibly think of doing a thing like that when there is money, money, money to be made and time after all, is money

They're not there to nurture your dream though. They're there to sell books. If you want to get published and you want an agent, you're going to have to accept that changes will be made to your book. Nobody will pick it up and say "this is perfect" and voila its published. If you don't want changes to be made perhaps publishing it in the traditional way isn't for you.

Definitely research agents - I think the Writers & Artists Handbook is a good resource for this. I got to grips with Twitter and started following literary agents as well - you can get a lot of useful information there! Read their submission guidelines carefully and make sure your tailor your submission accordingly. If they specify font size and line spacing and word limits, stick to what they say!

You might be waiting eight or twelve weeks for a response. Don’t expect anything in March; it’s an insanely busy time in publishing and the LBF uncertainty will be taking precedence over anything else.

Keep trying and good luck!

Yes, I understand your point chew.