It took two years of methodically going through the Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book, not once but twice, before I gave up on the idea of getting an agent. Received wisdom instructs that getting an agent is the only route to getting a publisher, because publishers’ slush piles (their teetering skyscrapers of unread manuscripts) have become agents’ slush piles - presumably because publishers no longer have the time or energy to pan the odd nugget of gold from the tons of slushy gravel. So, no agent; no publisher.
But why couldn’t I get an agent? Was there anything ostensibly wrong with my novel Etc Etc Amen? Obviously it’s impossible to be objective; I am a professional writer (The Independent, theartsdesk.com) and so technically it should have passed muster. And by the time I was taking my second trawl through the W&AY I’d picked up a fair number of extremely enthusiastic comments from other writers which I’d hoped would at least arouse some curiosity from these people. Alas, the general response was a template-rejection on the strength of the synopsis or opening chapter alone. I can categorically state that not a single agent I approached read the novel that they unanimously rejected.
As bad luck would have it, I completed EEA just as the country went into recession meltdown, so maybe that was a factor: almost immediately I got wind of the fact that no, that’s NO, first-time novelists were being offered contracts at the moment. Also one of the novel’s main themes might have counted against me: EEA has no truck with organised religion, frequently pointing at its absurdities and anachronisms in a blackly comic manner. Was the industry still running scared – post Satanic Verses - of publishing any fiction that could be perceived as anti-Islamic? Nick Cohen in his excellent You Can’t Read This Book certainly thinks so:
“Before Rushdie, publishers praised themselves for their business acumen in buying books that offended the authorities. After Rushdie, the smart business move was for a publishing house to turn down books that might offend religious zealots.”EEA isn’t anti-Islamic – it’s simply anti-all deity-specific religions. But one thing I learnt early on in this process is that publishers want to quickly land on reasons not to publish your book rather than reasons to publish it. In other words, the job of that work experience kid just down from Oxford is to move on to the next manuscript as quickly as possible, because that next manuscript might be the next Hunger Games - or whatever other current success one publisher has that the other wants to replicate.
What else might have put them off? Well, there was my synopsis. In retrospect, the sorry 300-word effort I eventually squeezed out made EEA sound like a cliché-ridden rock novel that even I wouldn’t have touched with a mic stand. I agonised over writing this synopsis for weeks but could never find a way of conveying the full spirit of the book without going on for thousands of words. Unfortunately the briefest plot summary is all agents want, even if such a summary is doomed to make any novel sound like a great deal less than the sum of its parts.
Finally, EEA’s worst crime in their eyes is probably that it’s not easily categorisable: is it an airport novel with ideas above its station or a literary novel that’s too much fun for its own good? EEA is part murder mystery, part conspiracy thriller, part love story, part hate story and part religious satire. Not a problem in my eyes, but try convincing someone who’s unwilling to even read it that this is the case. I’d had arts critics from various broadsheet newspapers as well as a Whitbread Prize-winning novelist all say that EEA is something special. And only the other day an Italian woman informed me that she was translating it into Italian for her sister; she was so enamored by it. So why didn’t agents take the bait? Why didn’t they care that Jim Bob and Patrick Neate had registered their approval? One day I put this question to an agent whose rejection email had just landed in my inbox. His response was immediate:
“If you could get a quote from David Beckham saying he loved your book I could get you a publishing deal tomorrow.”I doubt that these proudly cynical words tell you anything you didn’t know already about our stultifying celebrity culture, but placed on the table like that with such brutal finality made them seem quite shocking to me. After all, this is a novel not a pair of trainers. It was at this juncture that I started to think about Plan B. In recent years we have been told repeatedly that Plan B no longer has the credibility problem it used to. Plan B used to have to cower under the moniker ‘Vanity Publishing’, but now it’s stepped out into to the light as ‘Self Publishing’: what a difference a word makes. And what a difference a financial crisis makes.
Now that so few first-time novelists are being picked up by publishing houses - yet conversely it’s become relatively easy to get a book formatted for the increasingly popular Kindle and iPad - everyone and their …er…. cat can put their masterpiece out there for the world to either ignore or embrace. Not only that; a few of these authors are actually making money from their books. Admittedly it’s likely to be the writers who are industriously churning out teen vampire novels, chick litter (sic), or S&M lite, but one can still live in hope.
