How to get yourself an agent in 60 seconds

OK, so you’ve decided to become a novelist. You’ve come up with a brilliant idea and you’ve written at least three chapters or perhaps even the whole novel and are now beginning to wonder whether it’s any good. The friends you’ve shown it to all say it’s terrific (but then they would, wouldn’t they), and yet some part of you wonders whether it really is publishable and will make you your fortune or whether it’s destined for the shredder.

You need an agent! But how do you find one - : The first port of call should be the Writers & Artists Year Book which has a comprehensive list of the major literary agents working in Britain today. Go through the list and read the entries very carefully. While most agents will try their hand at all sorts of books, the reality is that each agent specializes in one or two particular fields. There is no real point in sending a literary novel about alienation in a futuristic world to an agent who is known for selling thrillers and romances. There is no point in sending a book about management techniques in the field of human resources to an agent who sells celebrity autobiographies. The agent will just send it straight back to you. 

You must do your research. Read the entries and look up those agents online – try and find out all you can from Yahoo and Google about which books those agents have agented, how many years they have been in the business and what they are known for.  Do not kid yourself into thinking that if a particular agent hasn’t been known for selling the type of novel that you are currently writing that they will leap at yours – because it’s new and different. They won’t! Agents will tend to stick to doing what they do best. So you must be writing in a similar vein to their other clients. This does not harm your chances – it only enhances it.

So you’ve now whittled the list of agents you’re keen on to around half a dozen. Do not send a manuscript to just one of them waiting for a reply – send it to all of them at the same time.  This is a buyer’s market – if your book is any good they will rush to it. If it isn’t they won’t. At this stage you must assume it is brilliant and they should rush to want you on their lists.

Now here comes the important bit – however many chapters you send them, whether it’s a whole novel bound in a leather folder or a pink ribbon or with a photo of yourself or not (and I have seen all of these) none of this will matter – you will be solely judged on what you have written in your covering letter and on your first page. 

The covering letter should be short and to the point. Agents do not want to know what your partner or friends think of your novel. The most off-putting letter will sing the author’s praise and say the author has ambitions to write ten novels over three genres – oh, and a book of poetry to boot!  Such letters will get the mss rejected immediately.  Why? Because it smacks of Difficult Author syndrome. An author who is too full of themselves, who has no experience and who will not understand why you haven’t sold their poetry collection to Warner Brothers to make into a film. The covering letter should tell us a brief one paragraph description of your novel and another short paragraph about yourselves. Whether you have had any success with any writing so far, what you are currently doing with your life apart from writing, and how far you have got with the novel. And that’s it.

As for the first page, it needs to be brilliant. So does the second page and the third etc. but if the first page doesn’t grab the agent and I mean really grab the agent – you’re out. We receive around 5000 novels a year. We take on around 10 novelists a year and have a very good strike rate. Many of our most successful authors have been discovered straight from “the slush pile” (the pile of manuscripts waiting to be read by an agent). Once a week we go through maybe 60 or so novels and it takes us around an hour or so. This means that you have on average around 60 seconds to impress an agent with your covering letter and first page. ONLY 60 SECONDS.  If it’s good – the novel will be put aside and read more carefully later in the week. If not, it’s sent straight back – with nothing else having been read except for the first page!

The first page must pull them in – be indicative of the whole story and have no literals.  An author who cannot even be bothered to use spell-check on their covering letter is wasting everyone’s time.

Please remember this – agents are NOT doing it for charity. They are NOT doing it for the good of the Arts. They are NOT doing it because out of the goodness of their hearts they want to help wannabee authors. They are doing their job because they enjoy good writing and they want to make money for themselves and their businesses! They can only make money for themselves if they can make money for their authors. They can only make money for their authors if they can sell those authors books for lots of money. IT IS A BUSINESS. And Time is Money. So do not ask them why they rejected your book – they haven’t got the time to answer you. The answer is in the rejection itself. Do not ask to meet with them to discuss the wonderful novel you want to send them – they do not have the time to meet with you. Does this sound hard – you bet it does. And if you think this is hard – you should see how hard it is for agents to sell first time authors to publishers and for Publishers to persuade retailers in turn to make shelf space for first time authors. IT IS A BUSINESS AND A HARD ONE!

And yet there are brilliant authors out there waiting to be discovered. We know there are – this year a police constable sent us his first novel and it went for £800,000. Another unknown writer we discovered three years ago is now hitting the New York Times Bestseller list and has had his novel sell in 23 countries. A third has just sold a million copies of his book worldwide. All were unknown and discovered by us.

If you genuinely want to be published – do your research on which agent to go for, think up a terrific plot, work really hard on that first chapter and be professional throughout. 

With determination and a bit of luck it’s all yours for the taking.