How to Meet an Agent

 I have a little news: an agent has asked to read my full manuscript.

This is a tiny step that has never occurred before. It’s still very early days because the agent may read the entire novel and decide it would be too hard to sell. I’ve accepted that. However, she has promised to give feedback, so even in that scenario, hopefully her advice will make it more attractive to other agents. She’s already given me some excellent feedback on the opening chapters that I’m working to implement before I send it back to her.

Getting a full manuscript request has always been the stumbling point, the point at which I put my novels on hold and write something new. In some ways, the last ten months have been harder than when I was submitting to agents in my teens. Back then, I received a nice piece of paper with a generic rejection after a long wait. These days, the best I have received is an email, and in most cases, nothing at all.

It turns out that submitting work to the slushpile (the inbox of an agent) isn’t the best way to approach an agent. The route into communication with this agent came from a very different avenue: my attendance at Bradford Literary Festival.

I don’t know how typical this is of literary festivals, but I should note here that Bradford Literary Festival 2023 was an amazing event for emerging writers. They had many sessions which were pitched to unpublished writers, and as well as offering encouragement, real stories and practical advice, they also had a 1:1 event to meet an agent.

I booked onto this event through luck. I had no idea it was happening until a writing buddy on Critique Circle told me that she was doing it, and then I was lucky enough that I was in the country to attend, because the day before we arrived home from a holiday in Europe. Anyway, after wrestling with my own insecurities briefly (the terrifying prospect of receiving verbal feedback), I decided to go for it, because that must be the attitude to make something happen.

I had no expectations for the event. The website description simply said it was a chance to receive feedback from an agent. I thought it would be helpful to know which elements of my pitch were off-putting, and more specifically if the novel concept itself just wasn’t saleable and I should work on something else. So, it was an amazing experience to be told by someone in the industry that my writing style is good. It’s a huge validation of all the efforts I’ve put in over the years.

A third piece of luck I should mention is the agent I originally booked to meet was unable to attend, and the agent I met replaced him. From researching her, I was already happy, because her bio expressed her interest in Young Adult, while the original agent (from a pick of three not yet booked up) seemed only partially suitable due to his interest in Adult Fantasy.

The lesson I have taken from the festival generally is that this is a much better way to get in touch with agents. Meeting them in person begins a dialogue, allows them to see your passion and understand your aims much better than a sentence or two bio in a query letter ever can. Another statistic I learned from another session at the festival is that a big agent receives 700 to 1000 submissions every week to their inbox, of which they might accept just two new clients a year. I always knew the chances were slim, but statistics like that really hammer home just how infinitesimally slim the odds are. A really good question was asked in the general agent meet, when they referred to how most of their clients are not unsolicited. Someone asked how they find new writers, then, if they don’t find them in the slushpile, and the answer was: events like this one.

If nothing else, I know to look out for future events which involve agents. And that my writing is good.

Drafts and Redrafts and Redrafts

It’s been a busy few months, especially November, which became my editing month (as opposed to NaNoWriMo, which traditionally turns November into the drafting month). Each day my target was to edit one chapter, from the feedback I received on Critique Circle. I knew that I had time to edit the entire novel if I stuck to that target, and I managed to speed up towards the end (sometimes able to edit two chapters per day), meaning that I finished the entire draft on 24^th November.

So, as a reward for ‘gaining’ time, I can now give the blog a little attention…

This is the fourth draft. When I talk to people about the process, people fall into two camps generally: those who don’t understand drafting and those who wonder how you ever stop drafting. So, this blog can be about the drafting process.

Stephen King’s memoir On Writing compares the drafting process to excavating a dinosaur skeleton. The skeleton is the fragile story concept, and each draft is about trying to reach it without destroying the entire thing. He completes a novel in four drafts, if I recall the details correctly.

My process for this novel can be more aptly compared to swinging a wrecking ball and then collecting the rubble for the basis of the new building. There was nothing fragile about the movement between the first and the second drafts, which I suppose was because the skeleton was far from exposed after the first draft, buried in a primordial sludge of misdirection and misjudgement. A necessary sludge, I should note – because without a first draft, you can never go any further.

That hopefully explains why drafting is necessary. From the second draft, I received feedback from people on Critique Circle. Feedback comes in all forms, but the best feedback allows me to reconsider elements, and key world building elements came to light in this draft, which again significantly altered the novel.

Perhaps it’s better to think about redrafting as a series of earthquakes. Draft one to two was perhaps an 8 on the Richter scale, whereas two into three was more of a 7. From the feedback on draft three, the impact of the seismic shifts has significantly decreased. There was one major character decision that altered things, but overall, it was probably more a magnitude 5 shake up.

It's too soon to know what it’s like while the dust is settling. At the end of every draft, I inevitably think ‘yes, this is it!’ and then realise later (through reading myself or letting others read) that there are still major problems. However, I feel confident from the diminishing damage reports that it is moving towards its final draft.

My plan going forward is to submit to CC what is known in the industry as a ‘betaread’. The purpose of this is to receive overall feedback, which is different from CC’s usual week-by-week, chapter-by-chapter process. It should help me to know how well the novel as a whole is working. CC only brought this function in part way through this year; it may have been helpful, probably, at an earlier stage in the drafting process – something I will consider for future novels.

January 2023 will be the beta month, and from that feedback I’m hoping to be finished with this novel by the end of February. I feel like there are no more substantial changes to be done, though I’m happy to be proven wrong. However, if the Richter scale continues to diminish, I think the February draft (number five) will be the final one.

I’ve also been putting my ‘gained’ time to use to research short story competitions (the plan for 2023), but I’ll say more about that in another blog.

Submission Time

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but I’m now at a stage where I am ready to submit my novel to agents.

An amusing digression that highlights the passage of time: back when I submitted a novel in 2011, the convention for indicating italics in a manuscript was to underline. Naturally, I imitated this with the current novel submission, and then thought to myself, when preparing the emails, this is a hangover from the typewriter era that probably no longer exists now that everything is digital. A little research proved my speculation to be correct.

Nothing much else has changed. I wish I were in a stronger position with my ‘Writer’s CV’ but perhaps next year, I might be able to do something about that (more on that in a future blog).

Anyway, the current novel has been through three redrafts to get to this stage and is now entering its fourth draft. The feedback I have received so far from Critique Circle has confirmed that the fourth draft is more a refinement of the third, rather than a complete rewrite. This gives me the confidence to feel I can submit the first three chapters to agents to see if they are interested.

The wait time for a response from an agent varies, though the shortest promises a 6–8-week turnaround. At this stage, they will either reject you or ask to look at the full manuscript. I’ve never been beyond the stage of a simple rejection, so that’s currently what ‘success’ will look like for me.

I plan to use the interim period to keep working on the refinement of draft four. I’m in the process of digesting the feedback, although I won’t have the full picture until the beginning of November. However, the feedback so far has given me plenty to work on, week by week.

Another thing I plan to do is continue reading current Young Adult Fantasy to find new agents to query. I have compiled a list so far of about eleven agents, which is relatively small still (ideally, I’d like to submit to twenty agencies). My usual process is to let the book guide me to the agent, so it does take time to widen the net. However, the pleasure of this is being able to discover new authors.

What chance, realistically, do I have? All I know is that my current novel is my strongest to date. Should I receive twenty rejections over the next six months, I have various alternative options to consider, so it won’t be the end of the story.