Better the Devil You Know

I did some­thing last week that I sel­dom do. I walked into the Canterbury branch of Waterstone’s¹. I wanted to pick up a copy of the new James Bond book, Devil May Care. As you may or may not care, this book was com­mis­sioned by the estate of Ian Fleming to con­tinue the Bond novel fran­chise. Sebastian Faulks was asked to con­tinue where the great man left off.

Read more →

So Lit Rep

This blog has been banging on like a mis­fir­ing Energizer Bunny since July 2004. At that point, I had writ­ten the first draft of my novel Déjà Vu, and it was — I think — in the hands my erstwhile editor, the top notch Aliya Whiteley¹.

My first entry, entitled Reading the clas­sics, began:

Today sees the start of my new blog, which is designed to express views and opin­ions about writ­ing and publishing.

Because my novel had already found a home with a tra­di­tional (albeit small) pub­lisher, I did not chron­icle my exper­i­ences of rejec­tion, re-submission and the gen­er­ally breakdown-inducing jig­gery pokery that con­sti­tutes get­ting pub­lished. I did, how­ever, go on to talk about my struggles to find an agent.

When I found him, and his name was John Jarrold.

Is an agent worth it?

I want to take a few moments to write down my cur­rent think­ing about lit­er­ary representation.

An agent is not necessary

There are many writers who make a good liv­ing without rep­res­ent­a­tion. I seem to recall that Iain Banks — who, coin­cid­ent­ally, will be in con­ver­sa­tion with my agent Lincoln Literary Festival this Monday — has never been rep­res­en­ted by an agent. He has dealt dir­ectly with edit­ors since the begin­ning of his career. But it is my impres­sion that the major­ity of writers are rep­res­en­ted. That alone should indic­ate that hav­ing an agent is, for the major­ity, a good idea.

An agent will take a cut of your earn­ings but will prob­ably increase your earn­ings above this cut

Your pub­lisher will, at length, pass on your roy­alty cheque to your agent. He or she will then, at length, pass it on to you — with a deduc­tion. I’ve often read that an agent is a bad thing for a writer because they reduce earn­ings, but the like­li­hood is that, sans agent, your earn­ings will be lower that your agen­ted earn­ing minus the ten per cent. There is a very real chance they will be zero.

An agent can act like an editor

Editors are not the raven­ous, bugblat­ter beasts of pub­lish­ing they once were. They can­not com­mis­sion a book imme­di­ately they read a draft; they must take it to one or more com­mit­tees and pitch it as though it were the next Harry Potter. They must love the book. They will not love the book if its com­plec­tion is spotty with typos, or wonky with under­developed ele­ments that the writer is hop­ing to fix later. The days when this was accept­able — accord­ing to my agent, and to other people I’ve met in the industry — are gone. You need to present an editor with a product that is nigh per­fect. This means that the editor is more likely to fall head over heels, and it means that the pub­lisher doesn’t have to invest in fur­ther edit­or­ial resources. The agent, of course, has a fin­an­cial stake in the suc­cess of your book, and should have exper­i­ence of what a given editor, or the industry at large, will and will not accept; they’ll help put the manu­script on a diet, check it into a gym, whatever it needs.

An agent can tell you to chill the fuck out

Until you have an agent, you’re essen­tially on your own. Sure, your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse/Wilson can give you sym­path­etic looks when you’re into the sixth month of a manu­script that’s going nowhere. They can send you a sup­port­ive SMS when every­one else is in the pub but you’re at home, writ­ing. But, with an agent, you can call them up and check pro­gress on your vari­ous pro­jects. Your agent will be used to deal­ing with pan­icky writers, and will be happy to say, ‘Yeah, well I showed it to Xavier at Yankie Doodle the other day and he asked to look at the manu­script; there’s some film interest’ und so weiter. It really helps. It cuts through the mad­den­ing wall of silence that bricks you out when you send unso­li­cited manu­scripts. Most pub­lish­ers don’t bother to get back to you; when they do, it’s often a little post­card cit­ing a rejec­tion that has noth­ing, of course, to do with the qual­ity of the manu­script but the size of their lists.

I’ve con­figured my email cli­ent to bounce its icon when some­thing arrives from my agent.

An agent is well connected

You might think you are. You might even know lots of writers, illus­trat­ors and com­mis­sion­ing edit­ors. But it’s dif­fi­cult to use these pro­fes­sional con­tacts because they won’t see you as a good source about the qual­ity of your own work. It costs you less to be rejec­ted. For the agent, who swims in these waters, the cost is a little higher, because each ‘rejec­tion’ is a reflec­tion on his or her judge­ment. So, all things being equal (i.e. you aren’t the god­son of the publisher’s major investor), when an agent offers a manu­script, it gets more atten­tion — and more pro­fes­sional atten­tion. An agent can attend trade fairs and talk to many pub­lish­ers, film makers and other cre­at­ive pro­fes­sion­als. A writer at the same trade show will get funny looks.

An agent can kick ass and take names

It might be dif­fi­cult for you to main­tain a busi­ness rela­tion­ship with your pub­lisher. After all, they like your work and this makes you grate­ful. So when the roy­alty cheques don’t arrive or the review cop­ies get lost in the post or your pub­lisher puts pres­sure on you to shoulder 90% of the mar­ket­ing, you may not find it easy to com­plain. An agent will have no such com­punc­tion. His or her rela­tion­ship with the pub­lisher is busi­ness­like and will not blush on mat­ters of nitty gritty.

How do you get one?

This can be summed up in a sen­tence: You need to con­vince an agent that they can make money from you.

Cash

This is not to say that the whole thing is about money. Agents are in the pub­lish­ing busi­ness because they like books. They will need to like, and even love, the work that you pro­duce. But they will not spend time advoc­at­ing work that can­not be sold.

Track record

So, you need to indic­ate that reas­on­ably inde­pend­ent, third-party (i.e. not you or your mum) pub­lish­ers have accep­ted your work for pub­lic­a­tion. That means short stor­ies, nov­els, art­icles, whatever. Do you have reviews of your work? Has any­one with their own track record com­men­ted favour­ably on your fiction?

Professionalism

An agent will prob­ably not be will­ing to work with someone who is stark star­ing bonkers. You might be a writer, but you will need to do many things that involve meet­ing people, being reli­able, and so on. You should come across as a nor­mal per­son. Agents don’t want calls at 2 a.m. com­pris­ing vitu­per­at­ive tirades about the people who just don’t get you. So I’d sug­gest approach­ing agents as though you’re a pro­fes­sional who has been doing this writ­ing lark for years, and intends to do it for sev­eral more years. Be polite, not quirky. Be brief. Don’t place time demands on the agent.

Agency size

Some are huge, inter­na­tional behemoths cap­able of buy­ing a small coun­try. Others are Jerry Maguire-style one-person out­fits who work from a broom cup­board. The advant­ages of a large agency: clout with edit­ors; abil­ity to lever­age large advances; in-house edit­or­ial sup­port. The primary dis­ad­vant­age: as a new writer, you are quite unlikely to make any money what­so­ever. This means that, if the agent is effi­cient (which they will be; they’re suc­cess­ful), they will pay much more atten­tion to the fewer writers who con­trib­ute most to their income. Your own manu­script might take longer to edit; it might be dif­fi­cult to get hold of your agent when you have a query; you might find your­self speak­ing to his or her sec­ret­ary more than you’d like.

The dis­ad­vant­age of a small agency: edit­or­ial sup­port might be lim­ited; your agent may have less clout. The advant­ages: a more per­sonal approach, and more sense of a team; you’re more likely to get hold of them for that 2 a.m. tirade about the people who just don’t get you.

My advice — and please let’s bear in mind that I’ve only had one novel pub­lished, and I’m no grizzled vet­eran (though I intend to be) — is that the smal­ler agen­cies will serve you better.

Agencies really don’t have to be large. Remember that the UK pub­lish­ing industry is the same size as the bagged salad industry. Repeat after me: Bagged. Salad.

Approaching an agency

You can cut down your work­load by exclud­ing the agents who (i) are not tak­ing on new cli­ents and (ii) would not like your work. The first part is reas­on­ably straight­for­ward. You can find a list of agents in the Writers and Artists’ Yearbook (enjoy that look of with­er­ing pity from the girl on the till as you pur­chase this tone). Or you can check out this list by Gerard Jones, author of Ginny Good.

Finding an agent recept­ive to your fic­tion is more dif­fi­cult. If you’ve atten­ded genre-specific con­fer­ences (I’m think­ing of sci­ffy), you may well have chat­ted to agents over a pint. Perhaps your favour­ite author was there; if so, go back in time and ask who their agent is. Who is your favour­ite author, by the way? If you write like them — admit it, you do — and they’re not push­ing up the dais­ies, type their name into Google and find out the name of their agent. Then email the agent. If the agent turns you down, tell them that you value their opin­ion as an import­ant per­son in the industry and ask them to recom­mend another agent. Then you can approach another agent, cit­ing that recommendation.

On that sub­ject, it is very help­ful if you have an ‘in’. It cre­ates the impres­sion that you’re not just some bloke or blokette off the street. So, if you read an inter­view with a given agent in a magazine, start your email with ‘I was inter­ested to read your views on.…and thought I would email you about the pos­sib­il­ity of rep­res­ent­a­tion’. Or ask someone in the industry if there is an agent they would recom­mend. Then you can start your email with ‘I spoke to Joe ‘M’ Bloggs last week and he recom­men­ded that I speak to you about representation’.

Email, by the way, seems to be the most suc­cess­ful method. I’ve left count­less answer machine mes­sages that have not been returned; I guess it’s just too effort­ful. A phone call is an inter­rup­tion; an email is not.

My exper­i­ence

There are many ways of being suc­cess­ful in this industry. It’s a rel­at­ive term, any­way. Here is how I landed my agent, the excel­lent John Jarrold.

I wrote my novel Déjà Vu and sub­mit­ted to all the super­mar­kets inter­ested in bagged salad. Sorry; I mean: I sub­mit­ted it to lots of pub­lish­ers (not agents). Probably about fifty. One or two asked for the full manu­script and I never heard from them again. Next, I sank into a fit of depres­sion and re-worked the manu­script. I sent it to a small pub­lisher called The UKA Press and had it accepted.

Nine months or so later, the book was pub­lished. More accur­ately, the ini­tial proof of the book was pub­lished — typos and all — because there wasn’t enough money to get around to pub­lish­ing a final proof. My pub­lisher sent out a hand­ful of review cop­ies. I bought about sixty and sent out cop­ies to every man and his dog. I also appeared on local radio, local TV (that was great! I miss you, YorkTV²), and did inter­view after inter­view. I was very lucky with the review cov­er­age I received, and most of the crit­ics didn’t men­tion the typos (snip­pets of the reviews appear ran­domly in the title bar). I still remem­ber open­ing up The Guardian and read­ing Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s lovely review.

I wrote a blog post about the ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult job I had of get­ting cop­ies of the book into Waterstone’s, in which, I seem to recall, I was very rough on a svengali char­ac­ter called Scott Pack, who was the Chief Buyer for Waterstones and gen­er­ally recog­nised as the most powerful/evil man in pub­lish­ing. He emailed me shortly there­after say­ing ‘If it’s so good, send me a copy and we’ll see about stock­ing it’. Scott emailed me back with a pos­it­ive review, but reit­er­ated that Waterstone’s would never pub­lish it because of its POD pub­lish­ing model and its awful cover. He did, how­ever, tell me to get in touch with an agent called Ivan Mulcahy. Ivan read then read the book, but that’s as far as we got. He didn’t ‘love’ the book and thought he wouldn’t be the best per­son to rep­res­ent me, which was entirely fair enough.

The book went out of print. I tried to keep it alive by pro­du­cing a pod­cast. I sent about writ­ing a sequel and an unre­lated com­edy novel. En passant, I com­pleted my PhD.

A New York film agency con­tac­ted me early last year enquir­ing about the film rights. Simultaneously, another small pub­lisher became inter­ested in Déjà Vu. The tech­nic­al­it­ies with my pre­vi­ous con­tract for Déjà Vu, together with the US agent ask­ing if I had a UK agent, nudged me into think­ing that it was time for representation.

I found John Jarrold by googling ‘sci­ence fic­tion agent’ (I couldn’t face another pity­ing look from the cash­ier at Waterstone’s when I pur­chased the new Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook) partly because so many agents don’t seem to have any exper­i­ence with sci­ffy. It turned out that John had already heard of my book from its review in The Guardian. He was impressed by this and other reviews, pleased to hear about the American interest and the interest from the small pub­lisher, and asked to read the book. He did, and snapped me up and here we are.

Conclusions

Well, that turned into a rather long post. I hope it’s use­ful to some­body. My advice would be: try to get as much work pub­lished as pos­sible, in order that you estab­lish your­self; find an agent who is avail­able, who suits you, and with whom you get on. Best of luck!

Materialism over at the Beeb

Melvyn Bragg’s Radio Four pro­gramme on the his­tory of ideas, In Our Time, rarely fails to be inter­est­ing and pro­voc­at­ive. This week the topic is ‘mater­i­al­ism’. Not the wor­ry­ing trend to dribble over the latest Apple hard­ware (I stand guilty), but the well-grounded notion that the uni­verse con­tains only phys­ical mat­ter, not non-corporeal entit­ies like the spirit (and per­haps, to an extent, dreams and beliefs). Do you have free will? Don’t be silly. Click here and let Baron Bragg screw with your head.

By the way, the OED lists Melvyn Bragg as the first per­son to use the word ‘prat’ in the sense of ‘muppet’/‘eejit’/‘pillock’. There appears to be no end to the man’s talents.

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Things I Hate

I’ve just said au revoir to an old friend, Daniel, who came to stay for the week­end. Before he left, we had a chat about things we hate in rela­tion to lan­guage. I thought it might be fun to put these on my blog.

Linguistic thingies that I hate:

(5) Top five lists

Cynical attempts to cre­ate traffic via book­mark­ing sites like Digg.

(4) People who think that the let­ter H is pro­nounced ‘haitch’

Indeed it is not. It is ‘aitch’. It has a cock­ney feel, if you will, and if you say ‘haitch’ in my pres­ence I will bludgeon you with the object I find nearest to hand.

(3) Misconstruing verbs that end with ‘-ize’

When you bru­tal­ize a per­son, you are mak­ing them bru­tal. “The police bru­tal­ized the rioters” means that the actions of the police made rioters bru­tal. You don’t have to act bru­tally towards someone in order to bru­tal­ize them.

(2) People who write ‘invari­ably, but not always’.

Should be made to French kiss a dog.

(1.5) People who don’t dis­tin­guish between ‘that’ and ‘which’ in their rel­at­ive clauses.

I’ve given up try­ing to explain this, but I hate to see it.

(1) People who go, ‘Urgh!’ and look dis­gus­ted when you use a phrase or term that think is American in origin.

This applies, as far as I can tell, only to British people who feel that their lan­guage needs pro­tec­tion from the bar­baric Americans. Well, for start, there’s plenty of good stuff in American English. And British English doesn’t need pro­tect­ing. The rumours of its death have been greatly exag­ger­ated down the cen­tur­ies by mup­pet after mup­pet. It ain’t pure, either, hav­ing done the lin­guistic equi­val­ent of sleep­ing around with every other lan­guage that so much as bats an eye­lid in its dir­ec­tion. Furthermore, ‘closet’, ‘fall’ (for autumn) and many other phrases you care to men­tion are not at all American but decidedly British and in com­mon use at vari­ous points in the his­tory of our nation. Making verbs from nouns, using adject­ives in place of adverbs — irrit­at­ing, yes, but not American in ori­gin, and part of the steady, ongo­ing trans­form­a­tion of English.

There! I’ve made my grumps pub­lic, as I prom­ised Daniel.

Any other lin­guistic thingies that get on your nerves?

Dancing peacocks

Cor blimey, guvn’rs and guvn’sses, it is awfully hot in south­ern India right now — though it is, as our gen­ial hosts never tire of telling us, actu­ally rather cold. I’m writ­ing this in a former French prin­cip­al­ity called Pondicherry (the com­puter has already had a Blue Screen of Death; no escap­ing Windows) under a very large and wonky fan. Any inter­rup­tion will be due to decap­it­a­tion and nor­mal ser­vice will not, I’m afraid, be resumed.

Too much done already to be fully recoun­ted here. Thanks to the gen­er­os­ity of our host, Nagarajan, we’ve been priv­ileged enough to visit the inner sanc­tum of a Hindu temple (had to take my shirt off for that one), been driven the wrong way up a dual car­riage­way (first clue: driv­ing over a large painted arrow that seemed to be rather too upside-down for com­fort), drunk many Indian teas and cof­fees, vis­ited a charm­ing col­lege, and spent lots of time with Nagarajan’s imme­di­ate, exten­ded and very exten­ded fam­il­ies. Everyone has been friendly, cour­teous and treated us like royalty.

Here are a few pho­tos — sorry, time for cap­tions. A fuller report when we get back in a couple of weeks. Happy Christmas everyone!

No cap­tions to fol­low apart from the next very import­ant photo: baby Madhangi!

Cowboy Angels

A quick post to say that my review of Paul McAuley’s Cowboy Angels is now avail­able on the Interzone site. Thanks to reviews editor Paul Raven.

Get hands-on with your brain

We were all very wor­ried when Paul, a child­hood friend of mine, turned up at school with a steth­o­scope and ther­mo­meter, and could only look on in hor­ror as he entered med­ical school. He went com­pletely off the rails a few years back, and became a spe­cial­ist regis­trar at the UCL Institute of Neurology. Perhaps he got in with the wrong crowd. Who can say?

To put on my grumpy old man hat for a moment, one of the things I lament about mod­ern psy­cho­logy courses (even those that are BPS accred­ited) is the lack of ground­ing in brain ana­tomy and func­tion. (‘Patient Y had a prob­lem in his brains’, as one of my stu­dents once wrote, quite breath­tak­ingly.) Psychologists do work at a more abstract level than most sci­ent­ists study­ing the brain and its effects, to be sure, but a ground­ing in fun­da­mental bio­lo­gical prin­ciples is worth its weight in gold. It cer­tainly makes optim­istic con­clu­sions by fMRI research­ers easier to eval­u­ate — and, where neces­sary, pooh-pooh the humbuggery.

So Paul has set up a course designed to give stu­dents (of any age or exper­i­ence) a work­ing know­ledge of brain ana­tomy, func­tional and clin­ical neuroana­tomy, and an oppor­tun­ity to get ‘hands-on’ with ‘real brains’. If I were a PhD stu­dent again, I’d give ser­i­ous con­sid­er­a­tion to divert­ing some of my pho­to­copy­ing budget to a course like this. It’s only 200 quid for the Spring 2008 intake; and remem­ber that you make can great con­tacts on an intens­ive course like this.

Paul is an enthu­si­astic teacher and his feed­back rat­ings have a mean of 4.8/5. He remains, of course, every inch the tit who broke a mer­cury ther­mo­meter over the back of my hand dur­ing double maths.

Norman Mailer

One of the writers whose por­traits I use for my screen saver, Norman Mailer, has died aged 84 of renal fail­ure, accord­ing to the BBC. This short video obit­u­ary is pretty much on-the-money: quite a like­able, gregari­ous, opin­ion­ated and con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure who broke noses fig­ur­at­ively and lit­er­ally, but I can’t think of another writer who used English in quite the same way. I reviewed a couple of his books for Spike Magazine — Ancient Evenings and Of A Fire On The Moon — both of which I can recall vividly even years after read­ing them. I’m still try­ing to recover from the mag­ni­fi­cent Harlot’s Ghost. You’ll get a good sense of Mailer from this mid-1980s Don Swaim inter­view. Not sure what more I can say without sound­ing trite. One of America’s greatest writers is gone.

Anxiety and creativity

As a psy­cho­lo­gist, I should prob­ably have some­thing sens­ible to say about the rela­tion­ship between anxi­ety and creativity.

*whistles tune­lessly*

Oh, wait, here’s a graph:

This n-curve is a plot of the Yerkes-Dodson law. In short, it sug­gests that per­form­ance on a task var­ies as a func­tion of arousal, i.e. alert­ness. Performance is optimal when arousal is mod­er­ate. Too little, and per­form­ance suf­fers — per­haps because of the ori­ent­a­tional and atten­tional aspects of arousal. Too much, and the neg­at­ive effects of arousal begin to kick in: stress, neg­at­ive ideation, and so on.

As an old psy­cho­logy lec­turer of mine, Brian Young, used to say: “Typical psy­cho­lo­gist. Stating the fuck­ing obvious.”

Take a look at these excel­lent posts on the rela­tion­ship between anxi­ety and writ­ing: first off, Roger Morris’s take on silen­cing the inner twat (in my humble opin­ion, Roger, you can tell him to take a run­ning jump); then David Isaak’s follow-up; and this inter­est­ing meta-follow-up by Jenn Ashworth.

I think there is some­thing use­ful in the anxi­ety that vis­its dur­ing the writ­ing pro­cess. The hom­un­cu­lus does have a neg­at­ive tone, and can be vicious, but he/she knows the dis­tance that a piece of prose has to travel before it can wind up on the page of a book. In my pre­vi­ous post, I spoke about the dif­fi­culty of research­ing ad nauseam or just crack­ing on with the novel, fac­tual accur­acy b’damned (nat­ur­ally, I’ll sort it out later). That means that my writ­ing will be unusu­ally dis­tant from the fin­ished product, and there is a very good chance that I’ll need to change more than 80% of the words — i.e. just throw them out. The hom­un­cu­lus knows this, and does make life hard. But he’s just apply­ing a pro­fes­sional stand­ard. Plus, I’m not the kind of writer who likes to sub­mit some­thing that is nearly fin­ished; I want it to be per­fect (or as per­fect as I can get it). So most of the time I agree with the hom­un­cu­lus. Only later, once the book is in its final drafts, do I actu­ally worry if the hom­un­cu­lus still has bitchy comments.

One of things I do, when the hom­un­cu­lus is so clam­our­ous that I can barely write, is to draw people from my books. It’s a way of spend­ing time in my fic­tion world without actu­ally writ­ing. Here are a couple of pics of a char­ac­ter in my third book. Can you tell who it is yet?

Sunday Salon test post

Just for Debra, here’s a test post to see if my scrib­blings appear in the Sunday Salon feed. Confused? You will be.