Celebrating 6 years since signing with my agent!
A few thoughts on: how it happened, and how to get an agent of your own
Fairly often, either at a Q&A about the business of writing, or perhaps at a panel event, someone will ask me how to get an agent.
The short answer is that I don’t know.
The longer answer is that I don’t think anybody knows. Not really. Not with 100% certainty. Not writers or editors or lit agencies. Not even agents. Because there is no way to guarantee a particular agent will like a particular writer’s work – or even that any agent will like that writer’s work.
But of course, there are some things that you can do to improve your odds.
Today marks six years exactly since I signed with my agent! Which is a long time when I feel like I only left school about five years ago.
So I thought I’d celebrate by talking a bit about how that signing came to happen.
In 2017, I got a place on Penguin Random House’s inaugural WriteNow mentoring scheme, which is a programme for writers underrepresented in the publishing industry. This scheme gave me a year of mentoring with a Penguin Random House editor, as I worked on completing my first novel.
I’ll be totally honest: when I applied to WriteNow, I’d only written the first 960 words of the novel. I wasn’t sure if it even had legs, let alone whether it would be publishable when it was done. But the selectors at Penguin Random House liked it, and my editor-mentor liked it, so I kept writing it, and kept editing it, until eventually I had a finished manuscript. This was the book that would late be published as My Name is Monster.
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With WriteNow, there’s no guarantee that Penguin Random House will publish the book when it’s done – only that they will get first refusal on the manuscript, which is fair, given the resources they’ve put into developing it. So my editor & I talked about the submissions process, and he advised me to get an agent before submitting it officially to his team at PRH.
We talked about the sort of agents who might be a good fit. As an editor, he had working relationships with a lot of agents – people who had submitted work to him in the past, and on whose author lists he thought I might fit. We talked through names, and put together a list of about four people to send the manuscript to. Of those four, I ended up being offered representation by two.
I went with the one who I could imagine myself calling in a panic if everything went wrong.
(So far – touch wood – I haven’t had to do that, but it seemed a good way to choose.)
That was six years ago! Since then, My Name is Monster has been published (by Canongate, in the end), we’ve navigated lockdowns and release dates having to be pushed back, and my agent has negotiated the deal for my second novel, The Edge of Solitude, which comes out in July.
So how did I get an agent?
Personally, I think there were two main things that helped me in this. Or at least, two things which were in some way in my control.
1: I made sure the writing was good enough.
You only get one chance to make a first impression, so if there’s an agent who you really want to represent you, then it’s a good idea make your writing as good as it can possibly be before approaching them with it. I was lucky enough to work with an editor at Penguin Random House to develop my manuscript before submitting it, but over the years I’ve also had valuable feedback from friends, writing groups, and other writers who are further on than me in their development (often through mentoring, which has come via schemes or awards). I kept editing, and I kept making the writing better.
2: I knew someone on the inside.
I always used to hate the adage: ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’. It conjures up images of old boys’ networks, and stately homes, and rounds of golf played between people who work in finance somewhere in the City.
But in publishing, it doesn’t have to be like that – because networking happens through being involved in the stuff writers do anyway. Writing, and submitting your work to competitions / mentoring schemes / anthologies. Going to workshops. Attending readings and speaking to people afterwards. Getting your name known (in a good way).
When my editor-mentor submitted My Name is Monster to agents, the manuscript didn’t go through the derogatorily termed ‘slush pile’. Instead, it landed straight in these agents’ inboxes, recommended by a source they trusted. This gave me & the manuscript a huge advantage – but it only happened like that because I’d submitted to – and been accepted for – WriteNow. In other words, I’d made sure the writing was good enough, and then I’d put myself out there.
So yes, sometimes it can be about who you know as much as about what you know. But the good news in publishing is that you are in control of who you know.
The ball is your court, the book in your library, the word in your pen. Now go out & write it – and good luck!