To no undertaking is Samuel Beckett’s famous aphorism more fitting than the dispiriting search of a hopeful author for a literary agent. In my role as organiser of the local Society of Authors writers’ group, the most frequent question is “how can I get a literary agent”. So common, indeed, that I have banned it. Because there is no mystery to the answer, nothing that hasn’t been stated a thousand times on every agent’s website, in speakers’ panels at writers’ conferences and in dozens of free online resources. Simply, have a brilliant draft manuscript, follow the advice given to the letter and offer a novena.
Failing that, you may bump embarrassingly into a stranger in a public place, apologising profusely and spilling the typed pages of your book onto the ground. ”What is that?” they exclaim. “Oh, just my unpublished novel”, you reply sheepishly. “Really? Why, I’m a literary agent – please may I take it and read it?” they answer …. Fast forward to the ker-ching as you negotiate a lucrative contract with a top publisher.
Dear Vicky - many thanks for thinking of me. However, I didn’t connect to your writing as much as I had hoped to. I wish you all the best going forward.
During the last year, I have pitched to 52 literary agents and the few publishers I could find that are accepting direct submissions. I have received 20 rejections and the rest are “no reply”. Despite having not found representation for my memoir, I consider this result to be a modified success for these reasons:
Firstly, a 40% reply rate is clearly an achievement, especially as a number of those replies were from agents whose websites state that they do not reply at all unless they are interested in a manuscript. Interested enough, in my case, to turn it down.
I am afraid that after consideration I do not feel able to offer you representation but please do not be discouraged. This is a very subjective business and another agent may feel differently. Due to the volume of work, I do not give feedback to submissions at this stage – only if I call in a full manuscript. I wish you all the best of luck in finding representation for your work.
And of those replies, a number were clearly personal, suggesting that the material had been read, and expressing regret that they could not take on my work – because it is not a good “fit” for their list, or they only take on a handful of authors a year or they weren’t quite interested enough.
My project: a complete, 95,000-word literary family memoir – “Elegy for Echo” – that, to summarise, starts with the unanswered questions about my New York opera-singer grandfather’s suicide during the Depression and becomes an exploration of the impact of the trauma of his death on my mother and her marriage to my father, ending with my own journey of sensemaking.
Once I had completed “Elegy for Echo” and embarked on the attempt to find a literary agent or publisher, I had no delusions – I could see that a family memoir by someone who is not already famous is a hard sell. But having spent three years researching, writing and rigorously rewriting my manuscript -- which my writing mentor Nick Barlay has described as “powerful, assured, evocative and literary”, and which, he says, “deserves a wider audience” -- I owed it to myself, to the manuscript, and to my mother and grandfather to at least try to get it published.
Thank you for sending us a sample of your work which we have now considered.There is much to be liked about it, but unfortunately it is not something we will be able to represent successfully in today's crowded and competitive non-fiction memoir market, although it is well written. We are sorry to disappoint you, but we are taking on few new authors, and only when passionate about their work and confident it would attract a publisher’s offer. Another agency might feel differently of course.
My approach to literary agents was planned like a military campaign. I read all the advice I could find and attended online panels and writers’ sessions with agents. I drafted a query letter, joined Jericho Writers, got feedback on the letter and redrafted it. I paid Jericho £50.00 for a 1-2-1 session with a literary agent, who gave me the advice that has become familiar: book, intriguing and well written -- very difficult market for this genre – but worth a try. From Jericho’s agent database, using keyword of “memoir” and filtering “agents taking on new clients” I made a list of potential agents. I checked the websites and profiles for each one and listed each one’s requirements for submissions, leaving me with a shorter list of likely agents. I wrote a mix-and-match portfolio of query letter, synopsis, summary of comparison titles, marketing strategy and writing c.v. All of this required many days of work spread across several weeks. And it is hard if not impossible to do any other writing at the same time, because the mindset required to draft a set of marketing materials for one’s own book is entirely different to that required to write it in the first place.
I found much to admire in your writing but I’m afraid that, on balance, I’m not quite enthusiastic enough to take things further at this time.
I learned quickly that each literary agent has a very precise set of requirements for submissions. Fail to meet these demands exactly and you give them an excuse to delete your email right away. Some want just a query letter and the first ten pages, or the first chapter, or the first three chapters, or the introduction and a later chapter, or the first 5,000 or 10,000 words, so that you cut the selection off mid-sentence. Sometimes even the font and line spacing are specified. Some agents want the submission entirely in the body of the email. Others want the query letter in the email and the other bits either in a single attached document or as separate documents. Some have a specific word or page length for the synopsis, the bio, the marketing plan and the summary of comparison titles. In short, each approach to an agent or publisher needs to be uniquely crafted from the basic set of components and each can take an hour or hours to do. Given the hundreds, if not thousands of submissions they are receiving I cannot blame them if they are looking for a good reason, indeed any reason, to sort the wheat from the chaff.
While we enjoyed reading your material, we felt eventually that it was not quite the right fit for us. We hope that you are not discouraged by our response ...
What did people do during the pandemic? From top celebrity to your great-aunt, they churned out memoirs and cozy crime. Believe it or not, some of those celebrities aren’t even writing their own books. Then there are all the books that are being written about the pandemic. And all the graduates of the ever-expanding industry of creative writing courses, polishing their manuscripts and sending them off. Back in the day, a manuscript had to be painstakingly typed on a manual typewriter and redrafted and retyped, many times. Now anyone can bash out an undigested and unedited text and fire it off by email. That is what we are competing against. And some dreadful books are being published, for whatever reason, and we are competing with those too.
I so appreciate your sending us your proposal and chapters. We are going to pass. We are a small press and after reading your work I think you should try to find an agent for the work at agentquery.com so that you could find a press that knows the memoir book market. We wish you well in finding a home for this work.
I attended a number of panels of literary agents offered online by Jericho writers and other sites – but I have learned that they are all saying the same thing and there are no short cuts to the slog described above. During one panel – all young women, all terribly nice, throwing their long hair in one direction and another – I rather mischievously asked in the chat what the chances were for a memoir by anon-famous person. None, came the breezy reply, unless you were brought up in a cult or by a drug addict.
Back in the day, a publisher’s range might include some that were published because they were innovative or showed great writing, not because they were going to be best sellers. Now, very few publishers take direct submissions, and literary agents are inevitably more highly motivated by what will conform to the trends and fashions of the day. Publishers must sell to their readers, and literary agents must sell to the publishers. Publishers might once have been willing to take a risk with a book, but literary agents will not. The market is driven by hype.
Unfortunately this manuscript isn't a good match for our list. There's a lot to like, but ultimately we don't feel that we'd be best-placed to bring the work to market.
I am sure that not all submissions are being read at all – as agents are quick to point out, no-one is paying them to read unsolicited pitches, and in a large agency it may be the youngest and least experienced staff who do have to trawl their way through the inbox. Most publishers are closed to direct submission – they get literary agents to do their selecting for them, agents are swamped, and many of them are closed these days as well. That is why I figure a 40% reply rate is pretty good.
It’s a bold idea, but I am afraid I wasn’t quite convinced by it. It wasn’t quite clear enough to me what you were trying to do – or why I should join you in that journey. In theory I understood, but in practice?
After six months and twenty-three submissions, I took a break and went back to my writing mentor. I showed him the encouraging replies I had received, and asked him to look at my query letter, synopsis, bio and marketing materials. On the basis of Nick’s feedback, I redrafted everything. Even though the official advice is that the title is irrelevant, as a publisher would change it anyway, I was persuaded by two writing friends to change my title. And so, in January 2024, I started a new round of submissions. I went through every literary agent listed in the Writers and Artists Yearbook, checked all their websites, chose those that were interested in memoir and were taking on new clients, and had another go – again crafting each submission in line with the specific guidelines of a given agent.
Thank you for your submission to Jenny which we have now had a chance to consider and alas isn’t something for us. Please do see this as a sign of how few new clients we take on rather than a reflection on your writing. Many thanks for letting us read it, for your patience while we did, and good luck elsewhere.
And once again, no luck although my new title and query letter did result in two invitations to submit a proposal. So here I am again, with more “constructive rejections”, failing again and failing better. My overall conclusion? My book is Not Quite Good Enough to make it in a challenging publishing environment. So I will take some time out and decide whether to look for more agents, take the independent publishing route, or, like many other memoir writers, leave my book in a drawer for future generations to enjoy.