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Comment from the book world in December 2016

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December 2016

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'An agent wanting to see the complete book'

19 December 2016

I wrote just three chapters to start with and sent them to ten agents. I received nine rejection letter in quick succession, but then the tenth letter arrived and it was an agent wanting to see the complete book.

That changed everything. I moved in with my boyfriend to save on rent, took a part-time job and began writing two-and-a-half days a week. A friend in Australia read my daily output and cheered me on and, by the end of 1996, I'd written the first draft. I'd been too embarrassed to tell the interested agent that I'd only actually written three chapters, so she was taken somewhat by surprise by a young woman in a furry coat clutching a jiffy bag on her doorstep nearly 12 months after writing to me.

She snatched the packet from me and said: ‘I hope there's return postage in there?' before closing the door firmly in my face.

Three days later she phoned me at work. She'd read it, her assistant had read it and it was ‘really rather good'...

Ralph's Party, my first novel, sold 250,000 copies in its first year of publication and was the highest selling debut novel of 1998.

There are fewer fairy tales in publishing these days, but there's still some magic left and dreams can come true.

Don't write for the publishers and don't try to second guess the market; it's elusive and impossible to pin down.

Just write what's in your head and what's in your heart and give the reader a reason to keep turning the pages, whether it's love for your characters or a need to find out what happened ten years ago or what happens next.

Lisa Jewell, author of Ralph's Party, I Found You and ten other novels http://www.lisa-jewell.co.uk/

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'The agent works for the writer'

12 December 2016

‘When I began, I had very little idea about what being an agent involved. All I knew was that I wanted to read and represent writers I admired. I wanted the job not to be about money, but about the quality of the work I represented.

The bestseller list was dominated by commercial trash. Literary writers had been left out in the cold and were starving for decent representation, but it was their backlist that provided publishers with a reliable base. The works of Borges, Nabokov and Camus, etcetera, remained in print and sold steadily and the situation had to be addressed. And that was our role.

The agent works for the writer. He's the writer's interpreter, business adviser, and ideally the stable element in the writer's life - always available at the end of the phone, always ready to read and respond. The agent is the gardener on an author's estate.

A writer is like a convict, spending a good part of their time in solitary confinement. So the writer is idiosyncratic, a-socialized, isolated, insecure.

A writer sits alone in his room. It's like a prison cell. But outside the window there's a garden. It's planted as he wished it to be. And in the corner, with a rake and a hoe, the agent is planting the flowers that the author has accumulated.'

Andrew Wylie, aka ‘The Jackal', of The Wylie Agency, speaking at the Guadalajara International Book Fair

 

'Perseverance is key to making it as a writer'

5 December 2016

‘I wrote my first mystery novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, when I was 26. It was turned down by, I don't know, thirty or more publishers. Then it was bought and went on to win the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

Obviously, and I know this from experience, perseverance is key to making it as a writer. You have to be able to accept rejection and keep going. If you know that it's what you want to do, then you need to make it happen. No one else will make it happen for you.

In my novels it's all about the story. I don't try to be a great prose stylist; I try to be a great storyteller. I like to imagine the reader is sitting opposite me and I'm telling the story directly to them. I don't want that person to get up until I'm finished. I want to keep their attention with continual surprises and twists so they're not bored for a single moment.

For me the hardest part of writing a novel is the ending. You've invested your time and energy into building suspense, getting the reader emotionally involved with the characters and with the story itself, so if the ending is unsatisfactory it's massively disappointing. Expectation has been built up through the course of the novel and you need to deliver a conclusion that fulfils it. If you can do that, you'll have a satisfied reader.'

James Patterson, author of Cross the Line and many other novels, whose sales amount to 350 million+ books