The Submission Process - Part 2
So, last week I covered what the process of getting a book successfully to print via the conventional route looks like. Disclaimer: I have little actual experience of the latter steps in the process and my summary was based on what I have read/been told by people in the industry who have had some success, hence why ‘successfully’ was italicised. What I do have a vast wealth of experience in is the first few steps in the process. And, so, my plan for this follow-up blog post is to explain in moderate depth (by which I mean complain and moan about at great length) the arduous process of submitting to literary agents.
1. Google: Literary Agents
Yeah. This is literally the first step in the process. Reason why: agencies and agents are constantly changing. The industry seems to be something of a turnstile where old is replaced by new and where everything is in flux. For a start, you probably want an agency in your own country. I’ve submitted to a good few across the pond, but I figure my best efforts are spent here in the UK. Second, agents aren’t always open to submissions. You’ve got to make sure they are accepting submissions at the specific time you are submitting, or you are wasting your time. Also, every agency has a different list of requirements and a different system of submission, so its important to know exactly how they want your work. Most important of all, however, is to find agents seeking your genre.
If you have written a thriller or women’s fiction novel, then congrats! you are in luck, there are a metric f-tonne of agents out there looking for the two most marketable and best-selling genres in the industry. Chances are, they are probably quite competitive genres, but given that every women’s literature novel basically has the same plot anyway, it probably should be that way.
If, like me, you aren’t basic, and the genre that tickled your fancy enough for you to write a book in it wasn’t some trashy romcom or a wannabe I Am Pilgrim, then, once again congrats! you are an infinitely more interesting person. But also, I have to break the news to you that, finding a literary agent seeking your genre gets a bit more difficult. Now, I’m not saying its difficult—there are thousands of agents out there looking for just about everything under the sun, but if I had a pound for every agent that stated on their profile that they are not accepting submissions for science fiction and fantasy… well, I could probably quit my day job and just write science fiction and fantasy for a living!
The problem lies with the fact that there are subgenres. When I say fantasy, many people will think Lord of the Rings, A Game of Thrones, probably Harry Potter, but don’t forget that Star Wars is basically fantasy as well, as is American Gods, His Dark Materials, The Dark Tower, Rivers of London, even Dune! The breadth of the genre is obscene! You’ve got your classic high fantasy, where it’s more often than not a medievalish setting with knights, swords, and probably dragons; then you’ve got urban fantasy, where magic exists in the present-day world (just us normals don’t know about it;) or you can have a blend of genres, say with sci-fi, and have your space magic epic set in a galaxy far far away!
For every geographical and historical setting out there, you can have a fantasy version of it, where either the magic is overt and stupendously woven throughout every aspect of the world, or where its so fleeting and hidden that most people in said world don’t even know about it. Take A Game of Thrones for example: it is barely high fantasy, its basically a period political drama set in a fictional world where every now and then you have a few dashes of magic sprinkled in. It’s easy to label it as ‘high fantasy’ along with The Lord of the Rings, but they are really completely different genres!
So, when an agent puts on their bio that they are seeking fantasy, or even if they are a fair bit more specific, stating that they’re on the look out for high fantasy, urban fantasy, and dark fantasy, its kind of difficult to figure out what they are actually looking for. And that’s just it, the crux of the point: agents are normally looking for something specific—they might not know it until they see it, and they might not even admit such to themselves, but if what you’ve written isn’t exactly what they are after, no matter how well written it is, they aren’t going to represent you. Literary agents generally don’t represent too many authors, and so, if they aren’t super passionate about your book, they aren’t interested. They have to love it, not just like it. And that’s a difficult thing to achieve. Of all the books, films, TV series, and video games you’ve consumed, what proportion of them do you actually love? What proportion of them would you champion if no one else in the world knew about them. I’m willing to bet its not that many. And, when there is so much choice, so many options, so many hopeful aspiring authors submitting every single day… well, I guess you have the right to be picky.
2. Pick Your Agents
Now that I’ve spent a bit of time defending literary agents, I’m going to begin tearing them apart. By now, you’ve done some googling. You’ve opened about thirty tabs in your browser and found a bunch of agents claiming to accept your chosen genre, and so now you have to thin the herd.
Some agencies make this part super easy. You open up their website, click on the link to their agents, and they have in bold a list of their ‘wants’ and their ‘unwanted.’ Hopefully, your chosen genre and subgenre is in the first of the two categories; if not, close the tab and move on. Nota bene: if you are BAME or LGBT then once again congrats! plenty of agents like to make a point of how woke they are, stating that they are specifically looking for work from you! (Little known fact: your ethnicity and sexual orientation apparently has an influence on the quality of your work. Being a white heterosexual male, my writing is by default less marketable.)
Some agents and agencies are quite clear from the outset about what they are looking for. Others… not so much. To find out if an agent is worth submitting to, you have to read their bio. Sure, maybe they should write a little bit about themselves in that description, but the thing is, if there is a 99% chance they are going to reject you anyway, you probably don’t care about where they went to school, what films they watched last summer, nor that they love long walks on the beach. Sure, offer to represent my book and you can tell me your entire life story, but until that point, I don’t really care. And you know what I care even less about? Having to skim through paragraphs of self-indulgent autobiography to find where in all that text you have hidden the few key words to tell me the genres you are after! Just put what we’re all after in bold or UPPERCASE for heavens sake, and let us read the rest if we’re interested!
Sadly, the above scenario is all too common. Most agents fall somewhere in the middle of the two ends of the spectrum, but doing submissions takes hours and hours, and when you are wasting time basically reading some random person’s LinkedIn profile, only to discover they aren’t even interested in what your selling… well, it’s difficult not to get frustrated.
On a final note before I move on: do you know what’s even more frustrating? Going through all that rigmarole, concluding that, yes, they are interested in what you are selling, only for you to then scroll down, or click through to the submission link, or even submit your work via email, only to find out that your chosen agent is ‘currently closed to submissions.’ I’m not being funny, but… isn’t that something you should put at the top of your page!?
Anyway, the hope is that, after you’ve thinned the herd, you should have a list of agents that are a good match for your book. I reckon you’ll probably have about 30% of your original tabs open by this stage. Normally you can only submit to one agent per agency as well, so it might be slightly lower. But, when you get to this stage, assuming that you actually find a few agents (I’ve reached this point to find no viable options before!) then you are ready for the next stage… which we’ll get to next week.