Signed by the John Jarrold Literary Agency

Posted by on Jan 22, 2007 in Uncategorized

Well, m’friends, much has happened over the past two weeks. It cul­min­ated on Friday morn­ing, when a phone call to John Jarrold sealed my fate as the latest addi­tion to the John Jarrold Literary Agency. My steely pro­fes­sion­al­ism pre­vents me from writ­ing things like “I hope he knows what he’s let­ting him­self in for” but does per­mit me the odd swal­low of cham­pagne, in which man­ner I spent the greater part of Friday night.

Who is John? He’s a rel­at­ively recent addi­tion to the agently hordes of UK pub­lish­ing, hav­ing set up his agency in 2004. Before that, he ran Earthlight, the ded­ic­ated sci­ence fic­tion and fantasy imprint of Simon and Schuster. He’s also been dir­ector of Orbit Books (an imprint to which most SF read­ers will need no intro­duc­tion). At Orbit, he pub­lished Arthur C Clarke, Iain Banks, Harry Harrison, and many oth­ers. So John is well versed in the dark art of pub­lish­ing, and I’m very happy to have him rep­res­ent­ing me. He also sounds like a nice bloke, which can only help in deal­ing with my mon­strous ego.

The Cunning Plan For World Domination involves work­ing some more on the second edi­tion of Déjà Vu. As I men­tioned in a recent blog post, there is a good­ish chance that Déjà Vu will rise up again in 2008, so we’ll be work­ing on get­ting Déjà Vu into the best shape pos­sible. Next up is the second sci­ffy novel, which is set in the same uni­verse as Déjà Vu. John’s a well-read guy des­pite his genre spe­cial­ism, and I’m wait­ing to see what he thinks of Proper Job, my com­edy novel. If he doesn’t want to ritu­ally burn it, we’ll try to hood­wink some pub­lisher into tak­ing it. Sorry, that last sen­tence lacked pro­fes­sion­al­ism. I meant: We will try to find a pub­lisher that deserves a book like Proper Job.

Hmm. I’ll try to work on my pro­fes­sional pol­ish. Meanwhile, as an example to us all, here is the press release that John pre­pared over the week­end. I’m aware it makes me sound like a cer­tain Aramaic-speaking car­penter, but that’s all part of the fun.

PRESS RELEASE – IAN HOCKING

British SF author Ian Hocking has joined the John Jarrold Literary Agency. His first novel, a sci­ence fic­tion tech­no­thriller entitled Déjà Vu, was pub­lished in 2005 by the UKA Press. The Guardian described it as ‘show­ing quiet skill’ and SFX called it ‘a solid tech­no­thriller’. Author Ian Watson praised it as ‘grip­ping, fas­cin­at­ing, and power­ful’. Other review­ers have writ­ten ‘crisp and pro­fes­sional’, ‘a smart read full of fresh, clever dia­logue’, ‘mind-blowing’, and ‘thought-provoking’. The book is thriller that encom­passes time travel, vir­tual real­ity, and digital minds.

‘Ian men­tions Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Ken MacLeod in his acknow­ledge­ments,’ said John Jarrold. ‘Having had the pleas­ure of pub­lish­ing a num­ber of books by them both, I can say that the many read­ers who love their work will thor­oughly enjoy Ian’s writ­ing. Ideas jump off the page, and his char­ac­ters remain in one’s mind over a long period of time’

Hocking is presently writ­ing another novel in the Déjà Vu universe.

Contact John Jarrold for fur­ther inform­a­tion by e-mail at j.jarrold@btinternet.com or by phone at 01424 440652.

20th January 2007

  • Anonymous

    Tremendously good news! Well done to you, Ian. I’m sure it’ll be the start of a won­der­ful rela­tion­ship (where you write and he sells!)

    Aliya

  • Dr Ian Hocking

    Thanks, Aliya. Yes, I hope we man­age to get some books out there. Time will tell. Best of luck with your own stuff, too!

  • Andrea

    Huge con­grats, Ian. Here’s wish­ing you every success.

    Andrea UKA

  • Anonymous

    Congratulations, Ian! You’ll do mar­vel­lously with this, I feel sure, after a rewrite of a few awk­ward pas­sages in DEJA VU, and with the second book shap­ing up bril­liantly, as it cer­tainly seems to be doing, from the excerpts you’ve posted.

    Re Proper Job, speak­ing only from the sample pas­sages I’ve seen here, it’s full of ideas and energy, but I still think the humour doesn’t come out of the situ­ation often enough, and there’s too much wry com­ment­ary which means there’s not enough at stake. (Of course, you’ve prob­ably com­pletely changed it from those early posts, so I’m talk­ing through one’s hat, but there you go.)

  • Dr Ian Hocking

    Thanks, Andrea. As I said in my email, I wouldn’t be in this pos­i­tion if the UKA Press hadn’t pub­lished DV to start with…thanks again.

  • Dr Ian Hocking

    Thanks, anonym­ous. Considering how sick of DV I was after the first pro­cess of edit­ing, I thought it bore up quite well when I read it aloud for the pod­cast — in some ways, the awk­ward pas­sages are the easy bits to cor­rect. The ‘feel’ of cer­tain sec­tions, together with some struc­tural changes, will ensure that I get fed up with it again fairly rap­idly. But hope­fully not before I’ve improved it… :-)

  • John Jarrold

    Hi Ian!

    Yes, delighted to have you on board!

    For my sins, I also ran the Random House UK SF and Fantasy imprint, Legend, between 1992 and 1997. When Nick Webb asked me to go to S&S and start up Earthlight, RH sold Legend to Orbit…so all the authors I pub­lished between 1988 and 1997 — Iain (M) Banks, Ken MacLeod, Robert Jordan, Terry Brooks, Tad Williams, Harry Harrison, many oth­ers — are together at Orbit! Bloody inces­tu­ous, eh?

  • Dr Ian Hocking

    Thanks, John! There must be an awe­some col­lect­ive noun for the Orbit authors… I’ll think about it over a cup of tea…

  • Rolski

    BRILLIANT, BRILLIANT NEWS!

    Congratulations! I’m so pleased that such a pos­it­ive step has been taken in such a short amount of time. That in itself shows an enorm­ous amount of promise.

    We (Roly’s royal we) all had com­plete faith in your and you deserve all the suc­cess that you’ll doubt­less have.

  • Mark

    Congratulations Ian, saw this news over on GOB, and sounds fant­astic news.

    I’ll try to recruit some will­ing read­ers to help shape up DV 2.0…

  • Dr Ian Hocking

    Thanks for the kind words, Rolski. I’ll be look­ing out for a sim­ilar announce­ment on your blog… :-)

  • Simon Haynes

    Hi Ian, just saw the news via Grumpy Old Bookman’s blog. Congratulations!

  • roger

    Late to the party, but let me add my con­grat­u­la­tions Ian. This is fant­astic (as in won­der­ful) news and very well deserved. I actu­ally came here to tell you how much I’m enjoy­ing Deja Vu — about 2/3 of the way through and it’s a rol­lock­ing ride. I’ll share my thoughts when I’ve fin­ished it, if you’re inter­ested. Shouldn’t be too long now.

    (By the way, this morn­ing I did spot a minor nit/query, which may be me being thick, but… if I don’t men­tion it now I’ll for­get it. It’s very minor, as I say. On p 156 Besson says ‘Proctor’s side might have been picked up by a radio hack’ thereby show­ing he already knows Proctor’s name. But on p157 after Saskia says ‘About Proctor’s trans­mis­sion.…’ Jago says: ‘Besson, you can for­get that name right now. I mean it.’ As if Saskia men­tion­ing it is the first time it has come up.)

    I have a feel­ing John Jarrold also rep­res­ents another writ­ing friend of mine, Anne Brook, but I may have got that wrong.

    Bloody well done.

    Roger.

  • John Jarrold

    Roger

    Yes, I do rep­res­ent Anne. The JJLA’s tentacles are gradu­ally encirc­ling the world!

  • Dr Ian Hocking

    Thanks for your com­ment, Simon. Nice to vir­tu­ally ‘meet’ you. Hey, do we get a badge read­ing ‘JJ’s Barmy Army’ or something?

  • Dr Ian Hocking

    Thanks, Roger…glad you’re enjoy­ing DV. I’m par­tic­u­larly glad you’re enjoy­ing the first bit, because that’s the bit I want to con­cen­trate on with my improve­ments (noth­ing rad­ical, but it does require some attention).

    Re: ‘Proctor’s radio trans­mis­sion’ — well, clearly this is com­plex para-temporal ref­er­ent that is intric­ately linked to the meta struc­ture of the nar­rat­ive (to speak with my post­mod­ern hat on and my Peril Sensitive Sunlgasses). I hope that clears it up. :-)

  • roger

    Ah yes. I thought it might be some­thing like that. I should have kept my mouth shut and read on!

    (Rule num­ber one, trust the author!)

  • Dr Ian Hocking

    Phew, got out of that one…

  • Carla

    Congratulations! Saw the news on Grumpy Old Bookman. Best wishes for your future success.

  • Dr Ian Hocking

    Thanks, Carla. Best of luck with you endeav­ours too.

  • Anne Brooke

    I see my name has been men­tioned in des­patches, though wrongly spelled (shame on you, Roger!! — it’s Brooke, don’t y’know!) — so may I belatedly say wel­come to the JJ Gang, Ian.

    :) )

    A
    xxx

  • Simon Haynes

    “Hey, do we get a badge read­ing ‘JJ’s Barmy Army’ or something?”

    I heard it was a red hot brand to the pos­terior, but I’m safe in Western Australia so you can just fill me in on the grisly details once yours is done …

  • Dr Ian Hocking

    Hi, Anne. Thanks for the welcome!

  • Dr Ian Hocking

    Simon, I’ll see if I can get away with a bar­code tattoo…

  • James Aach

    Congratulations, Ian. I cor­res­pon­ded with you awhile back about my own online thriller on nuc­lear power — “Rad Decision”. I’m glad to report it’s now on book­shelves as well (and still online too). It’s a good thing the net has given would-be writers the oppor­tun­ity to reach the pub­lic at large and get their response — and only THEN have to worry about agents and pub­lish­ers (who often seem to have more nar­row interests). I also con­grat­u­late the Jarrold Agency for look­ing (slightly) out­side the tra­di­tional box. Good luck! Jim Aach

  • Dr Ian Hocking

    Thanks, James, and well done get­ting your own book onto the shelves. Is it POD? If so, did you have the Devil’s own time get­ting book­sellers to stock it? Either way, best of luck!

  • James Aach

    Yes, it’s POD. Not dif­fi­cult get­ting online book­sellers to carry it. I have some fiendishly clever ways (prob­ably destined for fail­ure) of get­ting it on actual book­shelves. But it will be a challenge.

  • Caroline

    WOW! Just figured this out because of Twitter! Huge con­grats!!!!!
    I am smil­ing for you ;-)

    x

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