The Submission Process - Part 3
Last week I covered the initial steps in submitting a manuscript to a literary agent. This week I plan on finishing the process (if I’m lucky, in under a thousand words! I’ve spent all morning photoshopping stuff and I need to get to proofreading Beyond the Brink before the day runs out!) but I make no promises. Edit: Having just finished writing this, the word count is just south of 2,000!
3. Prep Your Submission Material
So, you’ve looked at the submission requirements of the various agents you intend to submit to, and you’ve learnt that there are basically three components to any submission: a cover letter, a synopsis, and your manuscript.
i. Cover Letter
This is pretty much what you’d expect. Chances are, you’ve had to write a cover letter before if you’ve ever applied for a job; its essentially the attached intro section to any CV that tells your prospective employer who you are, why you are applying, blah, blah, blah. Maybe your CV doesn’t have a cover letter; maybe yours is literally just a list of your qualifications and employment history, but I’m willing to bet if that’s the case either a. you are unemployed, or b. the person that hired you is a psychopath.
Either way, it’s a similar idea when it comes to submitting your book. The letter says who you are, the title, genre, and word count of your manuscript. It gives a short pitch of your novel, then explains the basic idea, plot, characters, outline etc. whatever feels appropriate for your book specifically, in the hopes that it intrigues the agent to read the other stuff you have sent them. The major difference between one of these and a CV cover letter is that this type is (probably) filled with a lot less BS!
Like with CV cover letters, everyone will tell you: you need to make your cover letter stand out! Be different. Don’t just follow the same format as everyone else! Well, I think that is terrible advice. This isn’t a personal statement for applying to university, nor are you really trying to sell yourself. Its about your book, not you. And if literary agents are as busy as they all claim to be, then they probably aren’t interested in the obscure quote you open your letter with, nor the backstory on your passion for reading and writing, or why you decided to pen this magnum opus you’ve sent their way. They want to know what you are selling, pure and simple.
That’s not to say that you can’t big up your work and be a bit grandiose or self-indulgent, but make sure your book is in the spotlight.
Another suggestion I’ve seen is that you make a point of telling the agent why you are submitting to them specifically—this is great and all, and whilst it might flatter the agent, I don’t think it increases the merit of your work, and it seems like a colossal waste of time; as I mentioned earlier, submissions take ages, and writing a bespoke letter to every agent is going to take even longer! If the chances are a hundred to one that the submission is going to amount to anything, why bother with an extra bit of fluff to massage their ego? If they like your work they’ll ask for more, if not, it doesn’t matter how right you think they are specifically for your book, they won’t be interested. Sure, it shows you read their bio, but a good majority of agents won’t even give you much to go on.
So, my advice is that you have one prewritten blanket cover letter in which you change specific details where necessary. If after a couple rounds of submission, you aren’t successful, then write another. And, the mundane reality of your cover letter will be that it follows the same basic format as everyone else’s—but that’s okay; I’m willing to bet that most cover letters are only ever skimmed. You want the agent to get to the meat of it with ease, and if it follows the same basic formula, then they know where to look.
Here’s how it will probably go for you:
Dear (insert agent’s name here, and for heaven’s sake, please spell their name right!)
I am writing to seek representation of my novel (insert title here), a (insert genre) of (so many thousand) words.
Then you’ll go on to write the pitch. Here is mine for Conflux:
2321, Iris Jackson, an American astronaut for the International Space Agency is sent to investigate a mysterious anomaly on the fringes of the Solar System. But before her ship, the Hermes, can arrive, a cataclysmic event known as the Conflux brings human civilisation crashing down at the height of the golden age of space exploration.
Then you go into further detail, maybe describing the characters and the plot etc. Here’s a bit from Shadow of the Golden Dawn:
The story initially follows the traditional framework of a detective crime thriller, albeit in a fantasy version of Victorian London where technology has developed at a faster rate and where underground occult societies seek to practise black magic under the noses of law and government. Though the plot revolves around magic, the majority of events remain grounded in real history, with every character save the protagonist being based loosely on historical persons of the period, all of whom were genuinely involved with either the Whitechapel murders, or were themselves members of legitimate historical occult societies that existed at the time.
Then you finish up with a little bit about who you are, what you do, anything you’ve written in the past etc.
Its all fairly simple, but writing your letter can be a bit daunting. Chances are, even though you intimately know your plot, characters, themes, etc. you’ve never actually had to pitch your book to anyone before. Summarising it in broad strokes whilst also making it sound appealing is not an easy task. It’s always a good idea to get someone else to read your letter to give you feed back before you submit it.
ii. Synopsis
Now this is a tricky little number. Here you have to write a short summary of the plot, start to finish, in as much detail, in as few words as possible. This isn’t a blurb, nor is it a pitch. If you want a good example, go on Wikipedia for a film or book and read the Plot section. It isn’t supposed to be interesting reading; chances are it will be quite dry, and it leaves nothing to the imagination. The whole plot should be laid bare, spoilers and all, in a form that is not too far away from bullet points.
If all of this doesn’t sound too difficult, that’s because I haven’t explained the kicker: some agents want you to do this in under one page! Now, they aren’t all that extreme; a good number of agents have the common decency to allow you two pages, but either way, boiling an entire book in detail down to so few words is no trivial task… well, I guess if you write women’s fiction it is but…
Again, this is the classic example of why Fantasy and Science Fiction is so much more difficult to submit and sell. Sure, if it’s a thriller, or a romance, or whatever, you can set up what’s going on in the book in a few simple sentences. If I’ve written a detective novel set in 1920’s New York, assuming you aren’t an alien visiting Earth as a tourist, you know what all of those things are. Even though you may have never been to New York, you’ve seen movies set there. You probably weren’t alive to remember the 1920’s, but chances are you have a rough idea what the time period was like. And although you aren’t in the police, you know what a detective is. In just one sentence you can set the scene for the entire novel. With SFF however, you’ve got a lot more work to do.
Middle Earth and Westeros are not real places. The near future of Ready Player One could not be any more different than the near future of A Brave New World, or I Am Legend! You can’t just say the year 2049 and expect someone to form a full picture of what you have imagined that future to be! You have to explain that, in this future, killer robots have taken over the world, or all food is now only available in pill form, and even then, you are using crazy broad strokes for what might well be a detailed and nuanced world you’ve created.
With Science Fiction and Fantasy, you have to dedicate a significant proportion of your synopsis to explaining simple themes and concepts that, though perhaps incredibly minor in the book itself, an understanding of them is integral to explaining the plot. With other genres you can dive straight into explaining the plot itself, but with SFF you have to lay so much groundwork before you can get to setting out the story, and when you’ve got a budget of words in which to do it… well, depending on the book, some agents have unrealistic demands when they insist on one page.
Without dwelling too much longer on this subject, I recently found an agency that demanded a synopsis of 400 words maximum, but had a long list of requirements that had to be included, all of which were supposed to be in detail. So… yeah.
iii. Manuscript
Usually not your whole manuscript, but it does happen sometimes. Normally, it’s the first three chapters (great variance in length depending on how long your chapters are!) Sometimes its more, sometimes its less. Occasionally they do it by page count, (assuming like most people you are using font size 11pt or 12pt then it won’t vary to much) or word count. First 50 pages or first 10,000 words are often used metrics.
This is pretty much what is says on the tin. You just cut the section they want and attach it to the email (or insert into the body of the email for all those agencies terrified of malware.)
Sometimes they want it double spaced—I guess they have to waste paper and print everything they read!? But otherwise, this part is reasonably standard.
So, email (or snail mail) is written. You’ve attached your synopsis and your manuscript. You hit send. Then what? Well, a good third, verging on half, of agents will never even respond. Others will respond in about a week or two (I’ve had one rejection in under ten minutes before!) But for the majority, it’s about 6-8 weeks. Often, they say on their website what sort of response times they have.
If they like what they read, they’ll ask you to submit more of the book. If not, you’ll get a blanket rejection letter that says the following:
Dear (your name),
Thank you for considering me to represent your novel (whatever the title is.) Unfortunately, I don’t think it is quite right for me. Other agencies might feel differently, however. Good luck in your search.
Unless you strike gold with your first stroke, you’ll get a lot of these. Exceedingly rarely you may get some titbit of feedback, but this is usually the way it ends. When I get a response these days, I usually just skim for the word unfortunately—its pretty much always in there and it saves me having to read the rest of the email.
So, there you have it. That’s the process of being rejected by agents. Hopefully, anyone reading this looking to submit their own book will have more luck than I!