Hi everyone.
This is a brief post to update anyone who may be interested in my writing/agenting journey. If you read this blog, you’ll have seen my excited announcement last year that I’d been taken on by an agent for my latest novel. And if you follow me on twitter, you’ll have seen my slightly-less-excited announcement there this year that we’d parted ways.
So today, I’m going to give a brief explanation of what happened. It may serve as a cautionary tale for anyone in the writing game, and certainly serves as a reminder that at no point in any endeavour can you assume you’ve finished the hardest part of the journey.
OK, so go back in time to last summer, when lockdowns were easing slightly and people were allowed to talk to one another.
I was offered representation by an agent, and was delighted. She suggested several changes – a couple I thought were excellent and would make the book better, some more I was uncertain about but was willing to try, and a few I disagreed with. We talked about them; she told me it was my book at the end of the day and she wasn’t an editor, that she trusted me and wanted me to go off and make a really good book better.
We were both excited, both optimistic.
This was in May, and we agreed I’d aim to do all the changes and revert to her by the end of August. There was some mention of a hope that the book could be on submission at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October.
So I got stuck in. Really stuck in. I changed points of view, removed characters, added characters and storylines, changed the ending. Did a lot of work and rework. And the book was better. A bit rough around the edges, sure, but better. A lot better.
I was done with it by the middle of August and thought I should sent it to her to get her feedback sooner rather than later. I knew it wasn’t done, but I’d changed so much that I wanted to know if I was going in the right direction or not.
In fact, I think about 30-40% of the whole thing was completely new, 20-30% was significantly changed and only the remaining 30-40% (mostly at the start) was left untouched.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a good time to send the book through. She didn’t have the chance to read it; other clients were sending her things; there were holidays and other submissions to deal with; the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair to deal with.
It was November before she got to it. And once she did, she got back to me and arranged a call.
In it, she delivered the bad news. The book wasn’t sellable. I hadn’t resolved the key issues she had with it, and the things I thought weren’t important – the things I disagreed with – were big problems for her.
In fact, some of the problems were so key to the entire structure of the book, that she suggested one solution might be to ignore everything I’d written already and start again.
And she told me that she wouldn’t be able to give me much more feedback after this, because her focus would be on her other clients, the ones who had publishing deals and deadlines and contractual obligations to fulfill.
So, rather than go through the exercise again without knowing if I’d achieve what she wanted – and even if I did, not knowing if the book that was left at the end of it would really be what I wanted it to be – I decided it was better to end the relationship.
*May not actually be me.
To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I was devastated.
(As an aside, I expect she was fairly disappointed too, as I’m sure she had visions of my new draft being not only sellable, but a blockbuster that would produce movies and all sorts of exciting possibilities. And in the end, what she got was something she didn’t even like.)
Now, reading back through all that, it might sound as though I’m critical of the way the relationship evolved.
Let me be clear that I’m not. In my own day-job, I’ve been involved in many business relationships where both parties started out with the best of intentions, but things eventually went wrong due to incompatibility.
{I guess, when I put it like that, it’s not only business relationships…}
In the end, she and I simply had very different views of how the book would work best, and it turns out that I thought I heard things at the start of the relationship that were very different from what she was actually saying.
{God, that line could explain a lot of my life, couldn’t it?}
Fundamentally, we both wanted different things from the book.
{OK, the parallels between this agent/author relationship and my personal life before I met my wife is just getting scary}
It was one of those situations where no-one did anything fundamentally wrong; we were both (primarily me) just blinded by optimism at the outset until reality intervened.
Anyway, the disappointment was pretty crushing. Especially since – and I didn’t say this in my blog from last year – I’d had another offer of representation at the time as well. A credible one from a really excellent agent I’d have been equally proud to work with.
But that ship has sailed too – he’d taken on several new authors in the interim and didn’t have the space to deal with me as well – so there I was, on my own again.
It took me a month to be able to look at the book. Not that I’d looked at it at all since August when the last draft was completed.
But in late January, I went back and started to piece together a new version. So far, most of it has come from the August draft, but I’ve put back in a few sections and chapters from the earlier draft – pieces I really liked that I’d taken out at the request of the agent. And I’m about 60% of the way through it now, and moving forwards.
My hope is to send it out on submission sometime in spring this year. Because you’ve got to keep on trying, don’t you?
Martin J Gilbert's blog of writing and thinking 