Showing posts with label agents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agents. Show all posts

Not Your Friends


Charlie Brown and Lucy, by Schulz

If I had to give one piece of advice to writers who are just starting out, or to those travelling hopefully in the early stages of the journey, it would be this: many of the people you encounter along the way, agents, publishers, managers, interns, editors, producers, directors, even those who work for agencies charged with funding the arts - remember that they are not your friends.

I have plenty of fellow writers and actors I've worked with, and I would count almost all of them as my friends. We share experiences in common, we sympathise with each other, we may well compete from time to time, but we also look out for each other when the chips are down. And even when we don't see each other for a while, we pick up where we left off when we do meet. That's real friendship.

When I look back over a long career in writing and publishing, I can see that most of the mistakes I've made - and I've made plenty - have involved me misinterpreting a warm professional relationship as genuine friendship. 

It never was. 

This is not a bad thing. We don't, for example, expect our doctors or dentists to be personal friends, as long as the relationship is polite and 'friendly' and mutually beneficial. Ditto our solicitors, accountants, and whatever other professionals we work with. There may be exceptions, but that's usually because the friendship predates the profession, or the professional relationship runs parallel to the personal friendship and has lasted for many years. I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the situations where that was the case and, alas, the people in question are dead. 

Writers are often to be found extolling the 'friendship' they have with their 'wonderful' agent or director  or publisher. I've done it myself more than once. It's hard not to see it as friendship, when there are so many similarities with the real thing: the long, mutually supportive conversations, the praise, the positivity, the helpful suggestions, the promises. 

Unfortunately, and unlike real friendships that can persist through thick and thin, over many years, professional relationships may not. Sometimes they end suddenly and unexpectedly, with a letter or email. Occasionally, just when you thought things were coasting along nicely, you feel the chill wind of disapproval, followed by silence. Sometimes you realise that the person who was once so responsive - the person who made you think 'this time, it will be different!' -  hardly responds at all. You make a hundred excuses for them. To yourself and to other people. I've done this countless times with different people, giving them the benefit of the doubt, shrinking away from the obvious conclusion. Like Schulz's Charlie Brown, you can't resist one more try at kicking that ball. Afterwards, you liken it to those love affairs where you make excuses until no more excuses will do. 

It isn't a love affair at all. It's a professional relationship, no more, no less. 

The cut off is invariably a commercial decision. Mostly, it's that you simply aren't making them enough money. For professionals, the business always comes first. And you know what? That's exactly the way it should be. As long as it cuts both ways. 

It can't be said too often. A professional relationship is not a friendship, no matter how much it might masquerade as one. This is not to say that it can't be polite, congenial, supportive and very good while it lasts. All of that. But when push comes to shove, they are not your friends, and if you begin to believe that they are, you are, I'm afraid, doomed to disappointment. 

The corollary of this should be that you are free to do the same thing. Your career comes first. Look out for yourself.  Don't hang on to a failing business relationship, however cordial, because of misplaced feelings of loyalty. Save that for your real, personal friends. They're the ones who deserve it. Where business is concerned, and writing is a business as well as a vocation, speak softly and carry a big stick. Be nice, be polite, but always be aware of what suits you and your work best. They won't mourn the loss of you at all, if you walk away. Because they really are not your friends.


Wouldn't it be Great?

 


The picture is only there because I like it a lot, my husband Alan Lees painted it, it reminds me of some very happy winters spent working in the Canaries - and it's also going to be used as the cover image for one of a pair of novels, coming soon. Watch this space! 

Meanwhile, back in the real world ...

Many writer friends seem to be in the process of trying to secure the services of an agent, a process that involves sending out the dreaded 'query letters'. Dozens of them. It's a hideous process that involves browsing agency websites and how-to posts, trying to draft out the right letter, sending it out in whatever form the agency demands, keeping records and waiting. It's demoralising not least because, although it's a bit like job hunting, getting an agent doesn't necessarily mean you'll get a publishing deal, and getting a publishing deal doesn't necessarily mean you'll make any money ...

I've posted quite a lot about the hunt for an agent already on this blog, especially in 2021, with a post titled Disappearing Agents, and a follow up post here, a week later. 

A quick Google of that term 'query letters' throws up - I kid you not - 87 million results. That's a lot more than the entire population of the UK. Vast numbers of people are busy telling other people how to write query letters. On the other hand, a search for 'how to be a good literary agent' results in 23 million results, and of those, the vast majority are still about how to get an agent, or where to find an agent, with the rest focusing on simply 'becoming' an agent.

Anyway, in contrary mood, I thought, wouldn't it be great to find pieces online with titles such as:

You're claiming to be an agent? Why is your website such a mess?

How to design an agency website that wows your potential clients.

Five essential elements of a good agency.

How to be a darn good literary agent.

The essential traits of agents that work.

What not to do as a literary agent.

Five things that make a competent agent.

Ten marks of a poor agency.

Highly effective agencies and how they do it.

How to become the perfect literary agent. 

and in view of my own past experiences

Agents: how not to disappear. 


Well, we can but dream, can't we? 

 


The Amber Heart - The Long, Long Story of a Story and Pardon Me While I Scream.


Yesterday, a friend who had just read my new book The Last Lancer, was telling me that she had enjoyed reading it - but she didn't love it as much as one of my novels called The Amber Heart. She went on to tell me how and why she loved it, which is always cheering for an author to hear. And perhaps doubly so, when it was praise for a novel with a long and chequered history. 

Now that it's available as an eBook and in paperback, at long last, I think it's time to revisit the tale of how we got here, what inspired it - and what the connection is with the true story of The Last Lancer. 

Once upon a time, when I was young and optimistic, my first full length adult novel, titled The Golden Apple, was accepted for publication by The Bodley Head, an old and distinguished publisher. To be clear, this wasn't my very first novel. There were others, tucked away in folders, never to see the light of day. Practice novels. And there was a young adult novel, published in Scotland, before young adult was even a thing. But this was my first grown up novel that was fit to be seen.

I considered myself very lucky. My agent for fiction at the time was Pat Kavanagh, and she was a fine agent with a wonderful reputation. Among other things, and unlike almost all agents now, who will tell you that publishers are looking for an 'oven ready book' (that's a direct quote from one of my subsequent agents) she didn't consider it her job to edit. That was the publisher's job. If a book was good enough, she would sell it. Beyond that, the editorial relationship was with the publisher.

Half way through the publishing process, the Bodley Head was taken over by what was then Century, an imprint of mega conglomerate Random House. What should have been a thoughtful, typical Bodley Head novel, about a cross cultural marriage, was published as a beach bonkbuster and sank without trace. It was an early lesson in the power of branding. And the disaster of the wrong branding. My editor at the time, with whom I had no quarrel, wrote to me later to say that she felt guilty about what had happened to my novel, and the knock-on effect on my career.

Still, with Pat's encouragement, I embarked on a new project. That new novel was - in essence - The Amber Heart. Back then. I think it was called Noon Ghosts. It was an epic and passionate love story, a family saga, very loosely inspired by what I knew of episodes from my own family history, not least a somewhat scandalous liaison between an aristocratic forebear and her estate manager, one which you can read all about in The Last Lancer. Knowing that at some point in the future, I might want to tackle the true story of that relationship, I deliberately set my fictional love story in the previous century. 

To my relief, Pat approved. She quickly sent it out and the responses were wonderful. She related some of the reader and editor comments to me. 'I literally could not put this book down,' one of them said. 'I read it through the night and wept buckets at the end.' There were lots in the same vein. They loved it and said so. Cloud nine loomed.

Pat couldn't sell it. 
And she could have sold sand in the desert. 

You know what the stumbling block was? It was the Polish setting. It always fell at the last editorial hurdle. The consensus in every publishing house she tried (and there were already diminishing numbers of possibilities) was that nobody would want to read a piece of historical fiction set in Poland, especially one that was aimed at a largely female readership, never mind that some of those same readers had compared it to a Polish Gone with the Wind, never mind that it was a big, sexy and ultimately tragic love story. It was too foreign and that was that.

Years later, Pat told me how frustrated she had been that she couldn't sell the novel. For her too, it was the 'one that got away'. Sadly, she died far too young. I put the manuscript away, stored all the research in a big box under the bed, and got on with other writing. I forged a pretty successful career as a playwright but I was also working on more novels, finding the pull of fiction irresistible. Many have now been published by Saraband. I'm a compulsive teller of tales, so I finished up with more novels than Saraband could ever reasonably publish.

Three in particular fell through the cracks in the publishing business: Ice Dancing, Bird of Passage and, of course, The Amber Heart.  Sadly and inexplicably, I think these three are among the best books I've written, and I don't say that lightly. Other people have told me so too. 

Time passed. 

I found and retyped the old manuscript of The Amber Heart. You can tell how long this has been going on by the fact that its first faded incarnation was on old fashioned perforated computer paper - the kind that ancient printers spat out in long reams. I expanded it, wondering if it would make a trilogy. Realised that the answer was no. Filed it away on the computer, instead of in the box under the bed. Changed computers. Lost the file. Found it. Opened it up. Cut and edited it. A lot.

Throughout this time, I had several agents. One left the business. One of them decided that she could make more money with other clients (true) and jettisoned me.  My last agent was enthusiastic, but he  disappeared before he could send it out. For all I know he may have gone out for a loaf and never come home because I never heard from him again. All of them read The Amber Heart in its various incarnations, liked it very much, but still pointed out that nobody wanted to read a piece of fiction set in Poland. Two of them told me that it needed pruning. They were right about that, at least, but the problem was that one wanted me to lose the first third, while another wanted me to lose the last third. 

So why didn't I give up?

The answer came to me when, over lockdown, I realised that Pat and all those readers had been right. It is a good book. But the others were right too. It was much too long. Stodgy in places. Going back to it, years later, and with a lot more experience as a writer, I could see clearly enough that it needed rewriting. Just not the kind of pruning that destroys the whole tree. I took about fifteen thousand words out of it, here, there and everywhere. I killed a few darlings. I think now it's tighter, more readable, less verbose. A better book.

I'm still in love with my main characters. Still love the story. And I'm still quite proud of some of the writing in it. Interestingly, I did this while I was deep into research for The Last Lancer, just published by Saraband. My very last enquiry to an agent referencing this proposed new non-fiction book (why on earth did I do it?) elicited the faintly bored response that there were 'so many similar stories out there'. That was not long before the Russian invasion. Since my grandfather was born in what is now Ukraine, in a sleigh, grew up to look like a younger version of Olivier's Maxim de Winter, was a cavalryman who drove a Chrysler and died at the age of 38, at Bukhara on the Silk Road, I suspect that there aren't all that many similar stories out there, but what do I know?

All the same, if I ever again publicly express a desire to find an agent, you will know that it's code for 'I've been kidnapped. Send help immediately.'

Meanwhile, Saraband were at the London Book Fair. I'd have thought the Last Lancer might have been a good candidate for translation into Polish and publication in that country. Poles certainly keep telling me so. And I just got a heartening and glowing testimonial from my hero Neal Ascherson. But my publisher reported no interest in it. 'All the focus is now on Ukraine,' they said. Which is, of course, where the book is set, exploring the troubled history of that region through the history of one family.

Pardon me while I go away and scream.

Before I do though, you can download the Amber Heart as an eBook for the bargain price of 99p, from May 12th to May 19th. It's available in paperback as well. And if you want to know where the idea for the love story at the heart of that novel came from, you might like to read The Last Lancer as well. 








Agents and Publishing - Some Further Thoughts


That last post about my disappearing agents was so popular, that I thought a few more random reflections  might be helpful. 

1: I would never want to deter new writers from going down the traditional route, or trying to. Once you've got a good portfolio of work under your belt, there's no harm in sending out query letters if that's what you want to do. Just don't be persuaded that an agent is the only way to publication. I've known people with fantastic agents, who have been instrumental in their success. I've known people who have got onboard with agents in the wake of success. And I've known plenty of people who have secured the services of an agent, only to realise that they spend too much time writing to the demands of their agent, who is often looking to predicate the next big success in terms of the last big success.

2: In the interests of balance, remember that agents and publishers all get horrible submissions all the time. Not just bad writing, but badly presented bad writing. Cobwebby documents that have sat in folders for years. Manuscripts printed out on two sides of pink paper, with single line spacing and coffee rings all over them. Entitled authors who want an immediate response and don't like it when they get it. So DO have a little patience and respect and - above all things - professionalism. 

3: Back when I was starting out on this long hard road, a good agent didn't expect to edit. That was the job of the publisher. If the manuscript was good enough, then the donkey work would be done between writer and publisher's editor, with some payment changing hands in advance, facilitated by the agent. This is not the way it works now. 

4: Now, the publisher expects the agent to submit an 'oven ready product' so in general, your agent is going to keep telling you to go back to the drawing board, in an effort to second guess the publisher and the 'market'. But those requirements will change over the course of the time it takes you to do rewrites. Also, many big publishers seem to have an informal 'three strikes and you're out' policy, so if an agent has three (possibly fewer now) projects by the same author turned down, they won't look at a fourth. To prevent this, the agent may keep sending you back to the drawing board. And this may mean that you finish up with several projects that you like and can self publish. (Like the nicely reviewed Ice Dancing above!) On the other hand, it can mean that you get stuck rewriting the same book over and over again. 

5: Finally, read Stephen King's On Writing. Best 'how to' book ever, although it's more of a memoir than anything else. Briefly, his advice is to read a lot and write a lot. I couldn't agree more. 

Disappearing Agents

 
'Just an old man, telling his story.'

As I've posted on here before, I've given up looking for an agent. I've done better without one over the past decade or more since last I had one. Although if somebody came along asking if they might try to sell my foreign and/or translation rights for me, I'd give it a go. 

It pains me when I see writers just starting out on their careers, firmly believing that once they've secured an agent, success will be practically guaranteed. The only people I know who continue to propagate this myth are agents. And in the immortal words of Mandy Rice Davies, they would, wouldn't they? 

However, a recent online conversation with a friend prompted me to remember my 'disappearing agents'. Because I had three of them. I had more agents than that, and a couple of them were good. But I changed what and how I wrote over a long career, which meant that a change of agent wasn't entirely out of the question. 

Disappearing Agent Number One

My first disappearing agent head-hunted me from a previous agency, by promising me the earth. Actually, not quite the earth. But she did promise to kick start my career as a playwright all over again. I was doing rather well with stage plays at the time and with some television and plenty of radio thrown in for good measure. My previous agent, although very efficient in terms of increasing my rates of pay, was London based (as are most agencies). This new one had travelled from London to open an office in Glasgow, and promised to liaise with various theatres south of the border, facilitate introductions, find opportunities and so on. 

I liked my previous agent a lot, but the relationship seemed to have grown a bit stale. I think the tipping point was when I spent the best part of a year working on a proposal for and with a large Scottish media company, only to have them reject the project entirely. This wasn't an unsolicited submission. I had worked for them before, they had expressed interest in it, and had me working with a (paid) script editor for months on end. But they had paid me no development money at all, not a bean, and no kill fee either. It struck me quite forcefully that a new agent might at least widen my horizons. So I left my old agent, amicably enough, and waited.

She disappeared. So did the office. She wrote to me later to apologise. I sometimes think I have had more apologies for incompetence than rejection slips.

Disappearing Agent Number Two 

This involves a situation far too complicated and boring to go into in a blog post. In short, there was a great schism in the agenting world and a plaintive request to stick with her personally as she moved on. So I did. Unfortunately, within months, her situation changed to the extent that she inherited a number of starry (and lucrative) clients and guess who fell off the bottom of her list? My last submission to her was The Physic Garden, which an intern read and dismissed out of hand as 'just an old man, telling his story'. After that, as the saying goes here in Scotland, my bum was well and truly 'oot the windae'. 

Disappearing Agent Number Three

This one really did disappear. I signed up to a reputable small agency where he worked, only to have him leave to set up on his own account within the year. Nobody asked me if I wanted to leave with him. They just assumed I would. Eventually, he set up an office in Glasgow (Is Glasgow a sort of black hole for agencies, I wonder?) and I went along to a laughably named launch event, which involved a plastic cup of warm white wine in a chaotic little room, with one other person. Soon after that, he went completely incommunicado. There was no response to phonecalls or emails. Since the office was part of a complex of offices for rent, I eventually managed to call the main desk where somebody confirmed that nobody had been in for weeks, and the mail was piling up. I still have no idea what became of him. 

Going It Alone

After that, I decided to go it alone, and guess what? With a mixture of traditional and self publishing, I started to do rather well. The excellent Saraband published the 'old man telling his story' aka the Physic Garden, and went on to publish more of my fiction and non-fiction. 

Surprisingly enough, I have very occasionally thought it might be nice to have an agent. I even went so far as to send a couple of query letters. I got one or two nibbles, but nothing more. I'm too old for them now - they don't think they'll make enough money out of me and that's understandable. But in any case, perhaps because I am so much older and wiser, I'd want a different kind of relationship. A business partnership which doesn't cast me in the role of humble supplicant. Which is why I still think it might be good to find somebody who would undertake the specialised business of trying to sell the foreign and translation rights to the work I already have out there. I'm not holding my breath. 

Finally - why am I writing this? 

I remember chatting to another client of one of these disappearing agents, a new, young writer, whose hopes had been raised by all the promises, only to have them dashed by the grim reality. What really bugged me was that she was strung along for a couple of years. I was in touch with her and advised her to cut her losses, send a formal letter dispensing with the agent's (non existent) services,  and get on with writing something new. I don't know if she ever did it, but I do remember her disappointment. I was fine. I had a body of work, and options. But she had been counting on promises that were never going to be fulfilled. 

I only hope she picked herself up, dusted herself off, and carried on writing. 

The Amber Heart: The Long, Long Story of a Story


I've blogged about my Polish novel The Amber Heart on and off over the years, but I don't think I've ever told the full unredacted story  - and now seems like as good a time as any, with a brand new, edited version out on Kindle, and a paperback and other eBook versions planned for early in 2021.

Lucky me.
Once upon a time, when I was young and optimistic, my first full length adult novel, titled The Golden Apple, was accepted for publication by The Bodley Head, an old and distinguished publisher. To be clear, this wasn't my very first novel. There were others, tucked away in folders, never to see the light of day. Practice novels. And there was a young adult novel, published in Scotland, before young adult was even a thing. But this was my first grown up novel that was fit to be seen. 

I considered myself very lucky. My agent for fiction at the time was Pat Kavanagh, and she was a fine agent with a wonderful reputation. Among other things, and unlike almost all agents now, who will tell you that publishers are looking for an 'oven ready book' (and that's a direct quote from one of my subsequent agents) she didn't consider it her job to edit. That was the publisher's job. If a book was good enough, she would sell it. Beyond that, the editorial relationship was with the publisher.

Not so lucky after all.
Half way through the publishing process, the Bodley Head was taken over by what was then Century, an imprint of mega conglomerate Random House. What had been a thoughtful Bodley Head style novel, about a cross cultural marriage, was published as a beach bonkbuster and sank without trace. It was an early lesson in the power of branding. And the disaster of the wrong branding. My editor at the time, with whom I had no quarrel, wrote to me later to say that she felt guilty about what had happened to my novel, and the knock on effect on my career. 

Still, with Pat's encouragement, I embarked on a new project. 

Back on cloud nine.
That novel was - in essence - The Amber Heart. It wasn't titled that back then. I think it was called Noon Ghosts. It was an epic and passionate love story, a family saga, very loosely inspired by what I knew of episodes from my own family history, not least a somewhat scandalous liaison between an aristocratic forebear and her estate manager. 

To my relief, Pat loved it. She quickly sent it out and the response was wonderful. She related some of the reader and editor comments to me. 'I literally could not put this book down,' one of them said. 'I read it through the night and wept buckets at the end.'

There were lots in the same vein. They loved it and said so. Cloud nine loomed.

Pat couldn't sell it. 

Too foreign.
You know what the stumbling block was? 
It was the Polish setting. 
It always fell at the last editorial hurdle. The consensus in every publishing house she tried (and there were already diminishing numbers of possibilities what with all the corporate takeovers) was that nobody would want to read a piece of historical fiction set in Poland, especially one that was aimed at a largely female readership, never mind that some of those same readers had compared it to a Polish Gone with the Wind, never mind that it was a big, sexy, enticing love story.  It was too foreign and that was that.

Years later, Pat told me how frustrated she had been that she couldn't sell the novel. For her too, it was the 'one that got away'. 

Sadly, she died far too young. I put the manuscript away, stored all the research in a big box under the bed, and got on with other writing. 

A compulsive teller of tales.
I forged a pretty successful career as a playwright. But simultaneously, I was working on more novels, finding the pull of fiction irresistible. Many have now been published - beautifully - by Saraband. But I'm a compulsive teller of tales, so I finished up with more novels than Saraband could ever reasonably publish. 

Three in particular fell through the cracks in the publishing business: Ice Dancing, Bird of Passage (of which more in another post) and The Amber Heart. 

Curiously, and rather sadly, I think these three are among the best things I've ever written, and I don't say that lightly. Other people have told me so too. But of these, Bird of Passage and The Amber Heart are big novels and not just in terms of length. Of everything I've written, these three books have never been close to being published in traditional form. Bird of Passage and Ice Dancing haven't even been read by traditional publishers. 

Meanwhile, I had retyped the manuscript of The Amber Heart. You can tell how long this has been going on by the fact that its first faded incarnation was on that old fashioned perforated computer paper that ancient printers spat out in long reams. I expanded it, wondering if it would make a trilogy. Didn't like it at all as a trilogy. Filed it away on the computer, instead of in the box under the bed. Lost the file. Found it. Opened it up. Cut and edited it. A lot.

Pruning and shaping.
Throughout this time, I had several agents and lost them through no fault of my own. Two, at least, just left the business. All of them read The Amber Heart in its various incarnations, liked it very much, but still pointed out that nobody wanted to read a piece of fiction set in Poland. Two of them read it, praised it and told me that it needed pruning. They were right about that, at least, but the problem was that they recommended cutting quite different parts of the novel: one wanted me to lose the first third, while another wanted me to lose the last third. My very last agent was madly enthusiastic about it, but disappeared into the scenery before he could even send it out. 

I published it as an eBook with Amazon. That was about 2012. 
A few years later, I decided that it was indeed much too long. Unpublished it. Let it lie fallow while I wrote other things.

Most writers will have at least one book like this. I have several very early novels. I look at them from time to time and find them an interesting stage in my development, but - in the conventional words of the standard rejection letter these days - I don't love them. So why didn't I give up with this one? 

I've asked myself this more than once over the years. I suppose the answer came to me when, over this pandemic year, spent mostly at my desk, I realised that Pat and all those readers had been right. It is a good book. But the others were right too. It was much too long. Stodgy in places. Going back to it, years later, and with a lot more experience as a writer, I could see clearly enough that it needed pruning and rewriting. Just not the kind of pruning that destroys the whole tree. I took about fifteen thousand words out of it. Here, there and everywhere. I was drastic in places, but always careful not to destroy it completely. I killed a few darlings. I think now it's tighter, more readable, less verbose. More accessible. A better book.

I'm still in love with my main characters. Still love the story. And I'm still quite proud of some of the writing in it. Especially the bit about the dangerous birth ...

Moving on.
My other reason for re-publishing this now is that I'm currently working on a piece of narrative non-fiction, in a similar vein to A Proper Person to be Detained, but this time about my Polish grandfather, his life and milieu. I'm deep into research and planning for a new book called The Last Lancer. And it seems relevant. I got the big box of pre-internet papers and letters and pictures out from under the bed. Pandora's box, in a way because this all feels very personal.

My last, my very, very last enquiry to an agent referencing this proposed new book (why on earth did I do it?) elicited the faintly bored response that there were so many similar stories out there. Since my grandfather was born in Poland in a sleigh, grew up to look like a bit like a younger version of Olivier's Maxim de Winter, was a cavalryman who drove a Lagonda and died young at Bukhara on the silk road, I suspect that there aren't all that many similar stories out there, but who knows? Maybe there are.

All the same, if I ever again publicly express a desire to find an agent, you will know that it's code for 'I've been kidnapped. Send help immediately.'

So there we are. And here it is. While I'm hard at work on the Last Lancer, if you like deeply romantic historical tales of love and loss (and cake. There's quite a lot of cake in this book), you could do worse than give The Amber Heart a try. 

It will be reduced to 99p here in the UK and also in the US from 21st December till 28th December, so grab a bargain, and escape into another time and place for a while!


















The Great Silence

Wormwood.
Last week, a good friend in a different area of creativity asked me why I had given up writing plays.

I suppose the answer is that I haven't, not completely, and if somebody asked me to write a play again I would certainly consider it, especially if it involved dramatising one of my own books. Still, the question gave me pause for thought.

Why did I give up?

Well, one of the main reasons was that I wanted to write fiction, and in fact I was writing fiction, lots of it. But because I was learning my craft, I didn't want to go back to dividing my time between the two. I wanted to live in the world of whatever book I was working on. So in a way, abandoning plays wasn't so much a conscious decision as a refocusing. And that was fine.


But there were other factors. Lots of women who were writing plays at the same time as me seem to have abandoned theatre as well, especially here in Scotland. Somebody speaking about women in theatre on a radio programme only the other week pointed out what a difficult place theatre was for women to get so much as a toehold in, back in the 1980s. Listening to her, I thought 'not just me then.'

It struck me that one of the other reasons why I gave up on theatre was that my life had changed significantly. I was living in the countryside, I had a child - and I couldn't any longer lurk in theatre bars making sure that those doing the commissioning remembered my existence. This may sound like a lame excuse - and the truth is that had I wanted it badly enough, I might well have done it - but the fact remains that I fell off their radar and at the time, I really didn't miss it.

Quartz
Back in the 80s, after writing 100+ hours of radio drama, some TV, community theatre, and a production at Edinburgh's Lyceum, I had two major and very well reviewed productions at the Traverse in Edinburgh: Wormwood (all about the Chernobyl disaster) and Quartz. I remember Michael Billington's complimentary review of Quartz and his hope that the theatre would go on to 'nurture' me.

Nurturing was never going to be on the agenda.

I had a brief resurgence with the wonderful David McLennan at Glasgow's Oran Mor, who produced three of my short plays, at least one of which - the Price of a Fish Supper - has gone on to have an excellent and successful life beyond its first production. But after David's sadly early death, I again entered what I have come to think of as The Great Silence.

I would send ideas, scripts, proposals to various theatre companies. Most of the time, they simply weren't acknowledged at all, although there was the occasional standard rejection. From that point on, nobody - except David, for that short time - treated me like a professional.

I was reminded of this recently, when I decided to explore the possibility of finding an agent. I have had agents in the past, including the late, great (but scary) Pat Kavanagh, who sold my first full length adult novel. It was sold to the Bodley Head, which was instantly taken over by one of the big publishing beasts and they tried to transform it into the fashionable beach bonkbuster it wasn't. My next novel had a Polish background. Pat loved it but couldn't sell it, and if she couldn't sell it, nobody could. We got a string of rejections saying that editors loved it but nobody was remotely interested in Poland. Nevertheless the single best piece of advice I have ever had about writing came from Pat.
'Only write something if you can't bear NOT to write it,' she told me.

My last agent disappeared without trace. I have no idea, not the foggiest notion, what became of him. He went AWOL and incommunicado and I've never heard from him since. Perhaps he too entered the Great Silence. Over the past year, with nine published novels under my belt, four of them still very much in print, and a brand new and well reviewed non-fiction book published in the summer, I contacted various agents who said they were looking for new clients, and who seemed like a good fit.

One responded pleasantly and personally. She was understandably too busy and told me so quite quickly, while also praising the work.
One turned me down immediately with a formal rejection letter. I doubt very much if my enquiry got beyond the intern employed to sift them.
One asked to see a PDF of a book and then - nothing.
The rest didn't respond at all. I had again entered the Great Silence.

Well -  I'm fine. I have an excellent publisher and exciting work to do, and I've given up on the notion of representation. In fact I've probably got enough interesting writing work to keep me busy for the next few years: work that I can't bear NOT to do. And that's a blessing in anybody's book.

But it does make me wonder about people just starting out. Apart from the lucky few, how do they get themselves noticed? How do they ever stand out from the crowd? And what about that old maxim that if you're 'good enough' you'll make it? So you just have to persevere? Because the successful people I know have persevered with the actual writing, for sure, but I suspect most of them have also taken matters into their own hands in some way.

I don't have any easy answers to this, but I do wonder what other writers, experienced or emerging, think about it.
How did you do it?
How do you plan to do it?












Who Doesn't Really Love You, Baby? - A Writer's Rant For The New Year

Loving and liking.
As most aspiring novelists will know, the rejection letter from a publisher or agent will often include the statement 'I liked your book, but I didn't fall in love with it.'

It happened to me more times than I can remember before I found my present publisher, Saraband, whom, I have to say, I do kind of love or at least like very much. No other publisher in my entire career - and I've been writing for a very long time - has been quite so proactive or willing to treat me as though we were professional partners in some mutual enterprise.

Rejection letters, mostly from men.
I often wish I'd kept all my rejection letters, including the one from the elderly male agent who not only didn't 'fall in love with' my book but went on to tell me it was a 'library novel fit only for housewives.' But at least he was honest about his feelings. And while I'm on the subject, is it only women, young, old and everything in between, who have their wrists routinely slapped by older men in a professional capacity? But I digress.

Falling in love is a kind of madness.
I don't know when this loving/liking thing started to be used, but let's come clean here. It's a way of letting people down gently. If you look up 'falling in love' in the OED it will tell you that it means 'A strong feeling of affection and sexual attraction for somebody.' People very seldom fall in love with novels or plays or collections of poems. They fall in love with each other. And sometimes with their dogs or cats. Since words are my business, I should also point out that there is a big distinction between falling in love and loving. Falling in love is a kind of madness. Love persists through thick and thin. As does friendship.

Mind you, there are exceptions!
I'm willing to admit that I've been in love with - and loved - Wuthering Heights since the age of about twelve when I first read it, but there are exceptions to every rule. Some books are special.

All the same, we're grown-ups, and publishing is a difficult business. We need all the friends we can get. I like my current publisher very much indeed and trust her and would hope that even if she wasn't publishing me, we could be friends. I think she's talented, efficient and immensely hard working. One of the good guys. I don't have an agent at the moment. If I had one, I would expect him or her to be one of the good guys too.

But I'm not at all sure that I want a publisher to fall in love with my novels. Apart from anything else, they are going to have to do a whole lot of loving if they fall in love with every single book they publish. Literary promiscuity? Not sure about that one.

Partnerships are the key.
On the other hand, I want them to like the work very much indeed, perhaps even to love it, to be on the same wavelength as me, to appreciate the hard work and - as my publisher does - to make a brilliant job of the actual physical book and its publication. I want them to be realistic with me as well and to do their best for me, if I try hard to do my best for them. It's a partnership, and there's a whole lot of mutual respect going on, but it's not a love affair, because love affairs, in my experience, tend to cloud your judgement.   

Not only is love blind, but you can fall out of it as swiftly as you fall in. And that kind of rejection is probably the worst rejection of all.







Writing a Synopsis Part 2 - Here's One I Wrote Earlier!

Sometimes it's easier to see how you might do something by looking at a familiar example. So just for fun, I wrote a brief but detailed synopsis of Pride and Prejudice, a novel I love. For a different take on it, you could always try this one, here!

Of course your own project will dictate how your synopsis goes - but you can see that you don't need to be too formal. Nor so complicated that you confuse your potential publisher or agent. You're aiming for clarity and entertainment and you're trying to persuade the recipient that they will want to read on. I'd go so far as to say that when you send 'three chapters and a synopsis' most writers imagine the recipient reading the three chapters first. The truth, however, is that most people will read the synopsis first and if it's rambling and confused, they might not go on. If you're submitting to a competition, the judge will, of course, give you the benefit of the doubt and read everything, but if you're submitting to an agent and a publisher, you have to realise the sheer volume of submissions. Get your synopsis right, and you've given yourself a head start. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that I've always been quite bad at writing synopses, although it helps when you have a fully revised novel already written.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

The novel is set in England, around the year 1800. Mr and Mrs Bennet of Longbourne have five daughters and Mrs Bennet is desperate for them to marry well. Jane, the eldest, is beautiful and sweet natured. Lizzie is clever, witty and sharp. Mary is self consciously studious, Kitty is not very bright and Lydia is incorrigible and selfish. There is a certain urgency about the need to find good husbands, because the house is entailed on a remote cousin, a clergyman called Mr Collins, and the girls will not inherit. Mrs Bennet worries that if her husband dies, she will lose house and home.

A pleasant single gentleman, Mr Bingley, rents the nearby manor house, Netherfield, and sets local hearts a-flutter. At a village dance, Mr Bingley is obviously attracted to Jane, but his proud friend, Mr Darcy, refuses to dance with Lizzie and insults her within her hearing. She laughs it off, but it stings.

Mrs Bennet’s attempt to throw Bingley and Jane together results in Jane catching a bad cold while on the way to Netherfield in the rain, and having to stay there for a few days. Lizzie visits and is insulted by Mr Bingley’s snobbish sisters. But Mr Darcy has changed his mind about Lizzie and seems to be falling for her.

Mr Collins, the remote and, as it turns out, unbearably pompous cousin, visits and proposes to Lizzie who refuses him, much to her mother’s rage and her father’s joy. Lizzie is alarmed to discover that her best friend, Charlotte, has accepted him. Charlotte explains that this may be the only chance she has of obtaining an ‘establishment’ – a home of her own.

Mr Wickham, single and attractive, arrives and bad-mouths Darcy to Lizzie who believes him, because she is predisposed to despise him– (the prejudice of the title.) Mr Bingley and Darcy leave for London, breaking Jane’s heart in the process.

Lizzie goes to stay with Charlotte and Mr Collins after Charlotte’s marriage. She meets his appalling ‘patron’, Lady Catherine, who lives nearby, with her pallid daughter, at Rosings. She is surprised to find Darcy there because Lady Catherine is his aunt. One of Darcy’s friends confides in Lizzie that Darcy recently saved Bingley from an unwise marriage. Lizzie realises that he is unknowingly talking about Bingley’s attachment to her own sister. Much against his better judgement, Mr Darcy proposes to Lizzie. He makes it clear that he loathes her family but loves her! She refuses him, furiously accusing him of ungentlemanly behaviour to herself and to Mr Wickham and of ruining Jane’s life.

Shocked, he leaves, but also sends her a long letter, explaining that his conduct towards Wickham was exemplary but Wickham is a bounder who almost persuaded Darcy’s innocent little sister to elope with him.

Confused and unhappy, Lizzie goes on a trip to the north of England with her charming and respectable Uncle and Aunt Gardiner. They visit Darcy’s massive house, Pemberley, as tourists, and she realises just what she has turned down. She also begins to understand how well his staff, especially his housekeeper, think of him, and what a loving brother he is. He arrives home unexpectedly and is kindness itself to all of them. Will he propose again?

Then – disaster! News comes that Lydia has eloped with Wickham. If he won’t marry her (and she has no money to tempt him) she’ll be ruined, and the whole family – socially - with her. Much angst ensues, but then Lydia and Wickham arrive home, married. Lydia lets slip Darcy’s secret role in the whole affair. Lizzie is mortified to realise that he has pursued the couple and paid Wickham to marry Lydia. She now realises the true nature of her feelings for Darcy.

Prompted by his friend, Mr Bingley comes back and proposes to Jane, who accepts.

Lady Catherine arrives in a towering rage. She has heard rumours of an engagement between Lizzie and Darcy and asks Lizzie to deny it. Lizzie admits it is not true, but won’t make any promises for the future. Then Darcy proposes to Lizzie and she accepts. Cue deep joy all round: riches, secure futures, Mrs Bennett overwhelmed with happiness - and they all live happily ever after.

The tale is told in the third person and the author herself sees all and knows all, but it focuses very much on Lizzie, her feelings, her perceptions. She is very clearly our heroine. The tale is deeply unsentimental, with realistic dialogue. It is a surprisingly passionate love story (lots of sexual tension between Darcy and Lizzie) with some sharp observations on Georgian society and the ‘marriage market’ as well.





Writing a Synopsis for a Novel Submission

Are you budding or blooming? 
I realised recently how few new writers, or even not-so-new writers (I hate that overused word 'budding'. People have started using 'emergent' but I'm not sure that's any better) know very much about writing a synopsis of a novel for a submission to an agent or publisher. I'm not surprised, because it's something I didn't know much about either when I was starting out, and even when I had been writing for some time.

Part of the problem for me, anyway, is that I'm what is known as a 'pantser'. I write by the seat of my pants. I often know the beginning and the end of a novel, but am not certain how I'll get there. I write to find out. If I do know in too much detail, I tend to get a bit bored. Not everyone works this way. I know writers who plot in great detail and writers who even work through a series of ever more complex synopses until the novel takes shape. There is no right or wrong way. Whatever works for you is right for you.

However, if you're intending to make a submission to an agency or a publisher, or even to a competition, you may be asked for a synopsis and the first three chapters of your novel. Sometimes it's a synopsis and a certain number of words. But they will always want the synopsis. So you're going to have to work out the characters, the overall shape of your book, the story you want to tell before you do the submission. Now you may think this is a tall order - and it is. But of course as a new writer, before you actually submit anything to an agency or publisher, you should have finished the novel itself, so it shouldn't be impossible to summarise your 80,000 words into a page or two at the most. The media are very fond of running tales of writers who submitted three chapters to an agency, were quickly inundated with offers to publish, and had to write the whole book in a hurry, but this is as rare as finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's more helpful to assume that you won't be inundated with offers, but you may be asked for a full submission.

The biggest mistake people make is to confuse a synopsis with a blurb.

A blurb is a teaser. It is intended to whet the reader's appetite, to give just a taste of the tale on offer, but no more. To suggest that all will be revealed later on. It's what you get on the back of a book: maybe the start of the story, a brief but enticing summary of what it's about, maybe a suggestion of a cliff hanger if it's that sort of book, often accompanied by a 'cover quote', either about the book or about previous work. Essentially, it's a tool for selling the book to the reader. The cover may make them pick it up, or click on it - the blurb may help to make them buy it.

A synopsis, on the other hand, is a tool for selling the book to the agent or the publisher, and in it, you need to summarise the whole story, who and what it's about and what the story is, as briefly and as clearly as you possibly can. You don't need to go into too much intimate detail. What we're looking for is the main cut and thrust of the story accompanied by tiny character sketches along the way.  If the plot gets complicated, simplify it, but not to the point where the thread is lost. Clarity is important. Remember that you probably know all about these characters now, but the reader, coming to it cold, doesn't. Try to avoid confusion. But above all, don't hold back. Now is not the time for mystery. Don't hesitate to tell all. If there's a twist in the tail, reveal it. You are aiming to make it lively and involving, but it has to make sense. Imagine a good friend asks you to tell him or her about your novel, not just 'what is it about?' which is a difficult question to answer, but 'tell me the story as vividly as you can.'

So there you are. Next week, I'm going to give you an example. Just for fun, I summarised Pride and Prejudice. I did it from memory, and I did it as though I was planning to submit it to a publisher. Watch this space!

Bad Advice

A room with a view.
I'm at an age where - although not even considering retiring  - I've been looking back and taking stock of my career so far, wondering how and why I got here, what I'm planning to do next (that's easy - write a lot more novels) and what advice I might give to younger writers.

I do a lot of reflecting as I sit up here in my room-with-a-view, indulging in a certain amount of displacement activity before I get on with the next project. But regrets come when you wake up at four in the morning and can't get back to sleep, and fret over roads not travelled, decisions made or not made. Well, we do the best we can, and we forge on. I'm an optimist at heart.

But just sometimes, I think that I ought to try to pass on a little of my own experience because the internet is awash with advice for writers and so much of it seems to come from people with not as much wisdom, to quote my beloved Robert Burns, as 'a midge could rest its elbow on.'

Bad advice. My biggest regret is that over the years, I've heeded too much of what turned out to be bad or inadequate advice, even when my heart was telling me to ignore it. Often, it came from professionals. Often, they were wrong and my instincts were right. I should have taken the leap of faith and done what my impulses told me to do.

So what do I mean by 'bad advice'?
I mean situations where I trusted a fellow professional, but didn't pause to examine their motives and didn't give enough weight to my own instincts, the small voice inside me that told me to think again.
Examples?
Plenty, and not just about writing. But that's what this post is about. So:
Being advised not to go along with a request to adapt a piece of work for the stage because of the sensitive subject matter. I agreed with the advice, but it was the wrong decision.
Being saddled with the director from hell for a major stage production and being advised not to talk to the press and not to take my script and leave. Weeping in the loo was not a helpful option but it was the one I chose.
Was advised to stick my head above the metaphorical parapet on behalf of a certain organisation. Got shot down in flames. Said organisation decided there was nothing they could do about it.
Was advised by my then agent, producer and script editor, to work without any payment on a detailed proposal for a television serial because 'something' would come of it, it was such an original idea. Wasted the best part of a year on treatment, episode breakdown, pilot episodes. The whole thing was kicked into touch - then I saw the very same idea emerge as a successful movie for somebody else, years later.
Worked on another television idea, this time suggested by a large commercial organisation, again with no development money, revising it many times to suit their changing requirements, attended endless meetings, only to have it kicked into touch again. Unpaid because another adviser had told me that it would be worth it in the end.
I could go on.

Was I culpably foolish? You bet I was. Especially since in all these cases, the various organisations had approached me. I was still quite young. Very hopeful. Are writers doing exactly the same thing right now? Of course they are.  A career in writing is always the triumph of hope over reality. The only way to avoid some of the pitfalls (you'll never avoid all of them) is to step back and assess everything on its merits for you, personally. Even then, you'll make mistakes, but perhaps not quite so many as I did.

The reality is that you'll always have to do some work up front. Every creative entrepreneur does. Small companies go in for competitive tendering. Writers and artists work on proposals. Novelists write whole novels on spec. I know I do. Now that self publishing is an option, even if you're trad published, or hybrid, there's no real reason not to. But you need to know the limits, know when the game isn't worth the candle. If - for example - a large commercial media company wants a significant amount of work from you beyond that first detailed proposal or first draft, work that you can't really take anywhere else, then they should pay development money. If they aren't prepared to pay something, they don't want you enough and you've lost nothing by politely walking away.

The single most important thing you can do in all areas of writing, is to take charge of your own career, and make decisions based on what feels best for you. Expect to be a partner in any enterprise that involves your work. But remember that being a business partner involves significant responsibilities as well as rights: keeping to deadlines, keeping promises, not throwing toys out of the pram when you can't have everything your own way. In other words, you should be as professional as you can be.

Finally, take all advice with the largest pinch of salt possible. Including - I might add - this post!







Do you really need an agent? Six things for writers to think about before writing a hundred query letters.


The Society of Authors will NOT do this to you! 

I’ve blogged about agents before, but it seems worth revisiting, since things seem to have moved on in the intervening period. I’ve had good agents and not so good agents but now I’m not looking for one. To be fair, my ex-agency – the one that actually did a lot of good work for me - still remits my share of royalties and residual payments for past work with great promptness and efficiency. But for some time now, I think that the relationship between writers and agents has been skewed. For a start, there are too many potential clients chasing too few agents and this is partly because of the myth still being perpetuated by most creative writing courses, that you need an agent to find a publisher. The other fiction is that if you get an agent, you will find a publisher. Neither is strictly true.

So here are some things to think about.

1 What, realistically, are you expecting your agent to do for you? Do you want somebody to nurture you, or do you want a productive business partnership? If the former, consider that you will always be a humble supplicant, sending in your latest manuscript and nervously waiting for the response. Bit like Scheherezade, really, and that’s an unenviable, not to say unnecessary position to find yourself in. If the latter – and your putative agent agrees – you might have the basis of a decent working relationship. But really, nurturing is for babies.

2 Your agent is meant to be working for you. Too many agents have lists of requirements for submissions that sound like job specifications. I’ve even seen people advising writers to ‘treat your query letter like any other job application’. But it isn’t, is it? Nobody is going to be paying you a regular salary. This is, of course, a result of the imbalance in the market: too many writers with too little experience, chasing too few agents. But it’s worth bearing in mind that you’re looking at a partnership, and that you have every right to expect a modicum of efficiency, courtesy and commitment. Just as your agent has every right to expect the same from you. Do I have some sympathy with agents? Sure I do. They have to cope with a lot of submissions, including the bottom drawer manuscripts typed in single spacing on both sides of sheets of vibrant pink paper. But this is their job and they're volunteers. Actually, some of them really are volunteers. I just saw an ad for an unpaid graduate internship with a big literary agency and found myself wondering how many of those hopeful aspiring novelists know that they are being summarily rejected by a 21 year old recent graduate with almost no experience of what mature readers might want.

3 Whose side will the agent really be on? They’re meant to be fighting for you, the client. But the reality is that corporate publishers wield a vast amount of power, and an agent will be cultivating good relationships with a certain number of ‘acquisitions’ editors. These editors will, in turn, have to answer to ‘the team’ and a lot of decisions will be dictated by buyers at the big chains. It used to be the case that if one of these major editors loved a book, the company would take a chance with a new writer. Now, an editor may love a book but if it doesn’t have the potential to be mega successful that may be as far as it goes. Everyone is afraid of getting it wrong, and in their shoes, you would probably feel the same. The agent will almost never want to damage the relationship with the editor. So you’ll be told to try again, write something else. But you may also be warned that an informal ‘three strikes and you’re out’ situation exists. By the time you get to your third novel, the editor may decide that she doesn't even want to look at anything from you again. This doesn’t happen so much with small-to-medium independent publishers, which is why so many popular mid-list novels of recent years – and the occasional bestseller - have emerged from micro publishers. But the sad truth is that many agents don’t much like submitting to small publishers. Advances are not high enough to make it worthwhile even though the resulting deal may be worthwhile for you as an author.

4 Who is telling you that you need an agent? You can’t believe everything you’re told. Are agents telling you that you need them? Well, they would, wouldn’t they? If you’re studying for a creative writing degree, have a good look at your lecturers’ back stories. They may be very fine writers, and they may be truly excellent teachers, but do they know anything about the business side of writing? Have they been happily and successfully agented for years, in which case, do they know anything about the downside? Are they bringing in agents to ‘cherry pick’ the top students in any one year, leaving you struggling with a multitude of query letters? And if they are lecturing full time in creative writing, consider that they may well be employed rather than mainly self employed, and may be reiterating the conventional wisdom of writing and publishing as it was twenty years ago. If your creative writing course doesn’t include a sizeable module or part module on the changing business of writing, taught by people who are brought in from the world outside, ask yourself and your university why not.

5 What are the benefits? There are some valid reasons to have an agent, among which might be: access to Big Publishing, (but as we’ve already seen, publication doesn’t always follow) better deals, (maybe) vetting of contracts, (but a good IP lawyer or the Society of Authors will do that for you, and sometimes they will do it more efficiently) and foreign sales. This last is important, and might well be a good enough reason for seeking an agent. But in all my years of being agented, nobody did anything for me with foreign sales. Now that could be entirely down to me. Maybe my books don't appeal to foreign buyers. But I'm unconvinced and if I could find an agent to sell books and plays to foreign countries for me, I might consider signing with them – but for that purpose only. Or perhaps an agent to capitalise on a particular book – a flexible project-by-project arrangement. Do such agents exist? Possibly, but I suspect this is an area that is ripe for expansion. And yes, that would be an interesting development and one I’d be happy to consider. I'm all for a 'horses for courses' approach to writing and publishing. It works in other areas of creativity so why not writing? But I also suspect there would be resistance to it in some quarters.

6 What other options do you have? That question used to be simple to answer, if depressing. None, except for spending a small fortune on some vanity publisher. Now, there are lots of options, but all of them demand a certain amount of application on your part.
You can submit to the many and varied small and micro publishers that accept unagented submissions. You have to be careful. You must have contracts vetted by somebody who knows what to look for before you sign them. The Society of Authors will do this for you in the UK if you are prepared to join, but you can also pay an Intellectual Property lawyer. You may think this is expensive, but it’s not half as expensive as signing away all kinds of rights you never thought about. The truth is that there are a great many good small publishers out there, and many of their contracts are much simpler and far less onerous than those imposed by Big Publishing – so making sure you’ve got it right shouldn’t cost a fortune.
You can self publish with Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon and elsewhere, onto various other worldwide platforms, via Smashwords or D2D. You can publish Print on Demand paperbacks. You can even go the whole hog and set up your own small publishing business and make a deal with a local printer for short runs of books and pamphlets. You will have to deal with covers and editing and formatting but it isn’t as difficult as you think and there are lots of freelancers out there so you can do what other businesses do and outsource the work you don't want to do yourself. You will have to do some publicity and promotion, but you’ll have to do a lot of that anyway, whoever you publish with. The big campaigns are reserved for the very big names these days.
Or you can do a mixture of both self and traditional publishing. Or you can publish with several small publishers at once.  Even though, in order to do this, you will need what my Canadian friend calls 'inventory'. So you need to get your head down and get writing. But since you might spend two or three years writing query letters to agents, or rewriting your single finely wrought novel to the demands of various agents and editors - you could instead decide to spend those years honing your craft, working on a couple of novels, a small collection of stories, a series of novellas ...and give yourself some options. 

Decisions, decisions.
If you are wildly successful, you will have agents beating a path to your door. If you are moderately successful, you will get a small but steady income and will realise that a book nowadays has a much longer shelf life online than you have been led to believe. A book that might have quietly fallen out of print after a year in the old system can go on selling for many years in the new. You may well realise that you enjoy this whole process and that you don’t want an agent at all. If you are not successful, what have you lost? Nothing is forever. You can take a book off line, rewrite it, republish it. You can work on something else, instead of wasting years of good writing time on rewrites to somebody else’s requirements. You can self publish your first two ‘competent’ novels (as opposed to the novels that should probably never see the light of day) and then you can write something quite new and submit it to an agent if you decide that’s what you want to do.

But the interesting truth is that many people who reach that point are often so comfortable with running their own affairs that they think twice before relinquishing control. Some writers may decide otherwise, and that’s fine too. I'm not here to dictate to anyone. What suits one may not suit another. The point is that the power is in your hands. Think about what you want.

Your choice, your business.

And finally – one other thing you might like to consider, if you’re female: you might want to think about changing your name!

If you've found this remotely helpful, have a look at my Amazon Author Page because the books there reflect my own experience pretty accurately. I'm the same writer that I ever was - perhaps a bit more competent and confident - but I'm both traditionally and self published and very happy to continue trimming my sails to the prevailing wind.

The Amber Heart and Bird of Passage - the Novels I Feared No-One Would Ever Read


If you just happen to be reading this post on Wednesday 13th or Thursday 14th June 2012, you'll find that you can go to Amazon's Kindle Store and download my two newest novels for nothing. If you've missed the giveaway then you can still download them for the price of a couple of lattes - or a latte and a half, depending upon your cafe of choice. (I'm a Cafe Nero addict, here in the UK - an Italian style chain with cool, stylish interiors, friendly staff, good coffee and good music - and no, they aren't paying me to say as much!)

If you fancy an epic love story in the Dr Zhivago mode (I'm thinking of the movie, rather than the book)  - or a sort of Polish Gone With The Wind - you'll find it here if you're in the UK and here if you're in the USA.

One thing I've learned from the various reviews of this book over the past few weeks, as well as direct messages from readers, is that they have sometimes been uncertain as to whether they'll like the Polish historical background.

One enthusiastic reader remarked honestly that she thought it might be out of her comfort zone, but then got thoroughly swept up in the story and setting, found that she loved it and wanted to tell other people about it. Another calls it a 'rollercoaster of events and emotions' and I hope it's all of that. It's certainly what I intended it to be when I was writing it. And it's certainly what I myself felt about it as a story.



However, I can completely understand why readers might be a bit reluctant. For many of us here in the west, we have a vision of the Poland of the cold war years firmly lodged in our brains - part of that great unknown empire beyond the 'iron curtain.' When I was a little girl, growing up in post-war Leeds with my lovely Polish father and Irish mother, I used to hear them talking about the iron curtain and imagine it as a real barrier, a huge hanging made of shining metal, sweeping across the countryside.

But for me, there was another Poland and that was the one my father told me about, as magical and unattainable as a place in a fairytale.

I was quite a sickly child, with severe asthma, and dad would sit beside my bed and patiently weave his own lost past into fabulous stories for me, describing his family, most of whom had died in the war or in the various skirmishes that preceded it, especially in the east.

But he also told me tales of a time long before that: the superstitions and beliefs, the songs and poems, the eighteenth and nineteenth century history which he had absorbed when he was just a little boy himself.

His tales were full of that long-lost world of the Austro Hungarian Empire, where privileged people drank tea out of silver samovars, ate preserves from porcelain dishes with tiny silver spoons, and sometimes visited Vienna where they would eat cake ... and dance.

Of course it wasn't all like that. This was in so many ways a savagely dangerous world. Human life was cheap  and as well as the cake and the dancing, there was abject poverty and prejudice, bloodshed, misery and disease. All of these things have found their way into The Amber Heart, as well as an equivocal but attractive hero in Piotro, a heroine whose faults match her virtues in Maryanna, and a setting which I still find myself revisiting in my mind's eye from time to time - the big, beautiful, pancake yellow house of Lisko.

Give it a try. You might find yourself swept along too!




The only thing I ask is that if you do download this and enjoy it, you'll snatch a few moments from your busy day to tell other people what you liked about the book - and maybe tell me too. (Even if it's only the Viennese chocolate cakes and pastries, which I certainly had a lot of fun writing about...)


At the same time, you can download my contemporary novel, Bird of Passage. Here in the UK and here in the USA. Although the settings for these two novels are quite different, there are some similarities between them. Both owe something to my passion for Wuthering Heights, although of the two, Bird of Passage is by far the more intentional homage to that book. Even there, the references are quite subtle.

There are other similarities between The Amber Heart and Bird of Passage which I only noticed after I had finished writing and revising both novels. Both are love stories, both are big books in the sense that they are reasonably long and span a great many years.

I realised quite quickly  that I needed the elbow room to tell the whole story in each case.

Bird of Passage, which begins and ends in the present, has something of the 'family saga' about it. Mainly though, it's a haunting tale of obsessive love, betrayal, loss and institutionalised cruelty, set in Ireland and Scotland. I found some parts of this very distressing to write. It took me a long time to realise what had made Finn, my central character, into the person he was. I resisted exploring it. The book felt stuck and stupid for a while. But once I found out what had happened to Finn - and that's exactly what it felt like - finding it out - everything came together for me, even though exploring it was still a painful process. By then, I cared for Finn quite as much as Kirsty in the novel.

Both of these books have something else in common and I'll own up to it here. It was almost impossible for me to find a conventional publisher for these two novels  although I and my agent(s) spent long and frustrating years searching. I'll let you into a secret. One of the many editors who said of Bird of Passage that she 'loved it but didn't think she could sell it' told me that it was 'too well written to be popular but not experimental enough to be literary'. Even back then, when eBooks were just beginning to loom on the horizon, I despaired at the judgement and thought it was a serious indictment of the way in which conventional publishing views its potential readers. The books I loved to read myself were accessible, well written stories that drew me into a world created by the writer. That was what I wanted to write. I couldn't imagine (and I can imagine a lot of things - it's what I do after all!) that I was alone in this.

I don't think I was.
I don't think I am.

The Scottish island setting of Bird of Passage

But really, this is not a complaint. I used to have a few chips on my shoulder, I'll admit. I had too many years of agents and editors raving about work which they could neither sell nor publish. Even the sympathy of friends was unbearable. But now, thanks to Amazon, and Kindle, I'm as happy in my work as I have ever been in my life. And I have more stories to tell, more novels to finish and new books to start. So watch this space.

For those who are still not quite sure about eBooks, or just don't like the medium, I'll definitely be getting both of these out as Print On Demand paperbacks, early next year. Sooner, if I can manage my time just a little more efficiently.

Meanwhile, if you want to know more about me, visit my website at www.wordarts.co.uk and if you want to know a bit more about the Polish background to the Amber Heart, visit my other blog at http://theamberheart.blogspot.com