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Agents across the pond.

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Jake E

Jake E

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Hey all,

As some of you may be aware, I'm currently throwing my manuscript at agents and getting rejected pretty much wholesale.
I'm running out of agents... In Britain anyway.

So my question.
Can a Brit try American agents? Is that a thing?

all insights welcome.

J
 
I find that the agents who restrict their submissions say that on their website (or QueryTracker, Duotrope, MSWL, etc.) If it's not stated, then I think it's fair game. I personally have not found a difference in the query/cover letters. But usually the agent will specify what they want in the sub materials. Good luck! :)
 
Jake E said:
9 ha ha.
7 out of hand rejections. 2 pending
Click to expand...
Ah, lol! I don’t know how legit that advice is now after Covid, it seems like everybody wrote a book on 2020. But I was recently in a zoom call with Laura Zats from Headwater and she said something similar so I think that advice still stands.
 
Jake E said:
Query tracker only shows 40 for my genre in the UK :(.
Also. I forgot to add pop ups to that total. So its 10 lol.
Click to expand...
Have you had an opinion from an editor agent yet? Before you throw more mud at the wall you may want to get one. I've seen agents and editors begging writers to do this before sending their manuscript around. Other's say don't until the 3rd rewrite and there is not one comma out of place. I know that is exhausting but otherwise you are asking someone else to do that work for you. And they are probably even less well-paid and more exhausted than you are. That means 3rd RE WRITE. Not 3rd edit. I am preparing for the 3rd on my WIP and my brain wants to hide under the couch rather than face the work. But it has to be done. Realistically look at hybrid publishers and contests before you just try to sell in a new market. Reverse engineer this problem. You are that exhausted reader trawling the slush pile trying to find something to sell so you can feed yourself. You are applying to compulsive gamblers-not salaried office workers.
 
Pamela Jo said:
Have you had an opinion from an editor agent yet? Before you throw more mud at the wall you may want to get one. I've seen agents and editors begging writers to do this before sending their manuscript around. Other's say don't until the 3rd rewrite and there is not one comma out of place. I know that is exhausting but otherwise you are asking someone else to do that work for you. And they are probably even less well-paid and more exhausted than you are. That means 3rd RE WRITE. Not 3rd edit. I am preparing for the 3rd on my WIP and my brain wants to hide under the couch rather than face the work. But it has to be done. Realistically look at hybrid publishers and contests before you just try to sell in a new market. Reverse engineer this problem. You are that exhausted reader trawling the slush pile trying to find something to sell so you can feed yourself. You are applying to compulsive gamblers-not salaried office workers.
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What do you mean by third rewrite?
Do you mean starting from the beginning and writing it all again? Three times?
 
Jake E said:
What do you mean by third rewrite?
Do you mean starting from the beginning and writing it all again? Three times?
Click to expand...
Kinda. Yeah. And that's what I said the first time I read 'don't send in until 3 rewrites.' It turns out bit by bit that is what I am doing. On my first book. I am hoping the 2nd won't need quite so much. Have you had a developmental edit from anyone? I'd suggest bringing a working synopsis to the Huddle if you can. This is not a game of who is the most talented, or the most prolific, or the most persistent. The prize goes to the one who plays the game the best. Just a hint-American agents are even more ready to throw out a manuscript that reminds them of the last 32 manuscripts they had to look at.
 
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I’m on my third rewrite of my entire manuscript - from the beginning - and Bev just poked holes in a couple things for me that I thought were hole-proof.

How many people have beta read for you? I was asked to read for someone late last year, she was asking simply to look for typos and stuff. When I started reading I had lots of editorial stuff and decided to give it to her. Her first chapter was a mess and I knew it would get rejected immediately. It read like a first draft (not saying yours does). She came back with, my beta readers loved it! (It was her mom and sister) and oh I edited for grammar, I edited for clarity, etc. But there was no voice, I didn’t know where we were, it opened with a weird computer chat/ text and it was unclear what year we were in, etc…. It was a mess.

She posted about her querying journey in Facebook and how all agents are idiots. Um no, your book was just sent prematurely. You refused to take good advice. It needed to be rewritten completely.
 
ChantalS said:
I’m on my third rewrite of my entire manuscript - from the beginning - and Bev just poked holes in a couple things for me that I thought were hole-proof.

How many people have beta read for you? I was asked to read for someone late last year, she was asking simply to look for typos and stuff. When I started reading I had lots of editorial stuff and decided to give it to her. Her first chapter was a mess and I knew it would get rejected immediately. It read like a first draft (not saying yours does). She came back with, my beta readers loved it! (It was her mom and sister) and oh I edited for grammar, I edited for clarity, etc. But there was no voice, I didn’t know where we were, it opened with a weird computer chat/ text and it was unclear what year we were in, etc…. It was a mess.

She posted about her querying journey in Facebook and how all agents are idiots. Um no, your book was just sent prematurely. You refused to take good advice. It needed to be rewritten completely.
Click to expand...
If a person posts on facebook that all agents are idiots, they probably ought not to expect to acquire one.
 
ChantalS said:
Thanks for the reminder about queryshark! It’s so funny how the first example says to put the metadata at the bottom. Over and over I hear so many agents say to be sure to put it at the top. I suppose this is a preference thing?
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If the agent hasn't mentioned a preference and your MS is within the desirable range for your genre, I'd say it's fine to put it at the top. If your wordcount is over or under, I'd say intrigue them with the rest of your query so when they finally read it they won't care. They want to read your chapters.
 
Hannah F said:
If the agent hasn't mentioned a preference and your MS is within the desirable range for your genre, I'd say it's fine to put it at the top. If your wordcount is over or under, I'd say intrigue them with the rest of your query so when they finally read it they won't care. They want to read your chapters.
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I think you should try to stay within a reasonable amount of word count expectations. If you are over by too much that’s added costs and a harder sell to editors and then for editors to publishers. It is a product after all, and you have to think of it as such. A thousand words give or take is ok, a few hundred thousand is an automatic no.
 
Jake E said:
Query tracker only shows 40 for my genre in the UK :(.
Click to expand...
Go for the other 30.
I read a newspaper interview the other day with Dilly Court, whose romances are not my cup of tea and I'm sure they are not yours either. BUT point is, she is MADLY successful, (still writing in her 80s), made great lumps of money, and still has a further 6 contracted books to write. AND she happily admits she received 'more than 80' rejections at the start of her career.
 
ChantalS said:
I’m on my third rewrite of my entire manuscript - from the beginning - and Bev just poked holes in a couple things for me that I thought were hole-proof.

How many people have beta read for you? I was asked to read for someone late last year, she was asking simply to look for typos and stuff. When I started reading I had lots of editorial stuff and decided to give it to her. Her first chapter was a mess and I knew it would get rejected immediately. It read like a first draft (not saying yours does). She came back with, my beta readers loved it! (It was her mom and sister) and oh I edited for grammar, I edited for clarity, etc. But there was no voice, I didn’t know where we were, it opened with a weird computer chat/ text and it was unclear what year we were in, etc…. It was a mess.

She posted about her querying journey in Facebook and how all agents are idiots. Um no, your book was just sent prematurely. You refused to take good advice. It needed to be rewritten completely.
Click to expand...
Several litopians have beta read the whole thing and said they liked it.
I had some feedback for things to work on from them; Some characters that were weak, the second half wasn't as strong as the first, some niggles that needed unniggling...
I dealt with them as best i could.
Overall, it was deemed to be almost ready (once said niggles were dealt with).

Honestly, three rewrites seems like overkill to me. I am, however, reading that as rewriting from a blank page, from scratch; if that's incorrect, I apologise. I don't think i could stomach starting from scratch again even once.
I've been through the manuscript a dozen times for a variety of different issues. (Proof, development, structure...) And on the last few goes through, I didn't change anything. Just read it straight through and thought "ok. This is it. This is as good as it's going to get."

I think I've probably reached a skill ceiling. I'm simply not good enough.
 
Jake E said:
Several litopians have beta read the whole thing and said they liked it.
I had some feedback for things to work on from them; Some characters that were weak, the second half wasn't as strong as the first, some niggles that needed unniggling...
I dealt with them as best i could.
Overall, it was deemed to be almost ready (once said niggles were dealt with).

Honestly, three rewrites seems like overkill to me. I am, however, reading that as rewriting from a blank page, from scratch; if that's incorrect, I apologise. I don't think i could stomach starting from scratch again even once.
I've been through the manuscript a dozen times for a variety of different issues. (Proof, development, structure...) And on the last few goes through, I didn't change anything. Just read it straight through and thought "ok. This is it. This is as good as it's going to get."

I think I've probably reached a skill ceiling. I'm simply not good enough.
Click to expand...

I don't think it's a matter of not being good enough, more a matter of maybe needing some distance from it? I need to take breaks from my WIP regularly to stop me from throwing everything in a bonfire. When I approached Bev she thought I was sending her my first draft based on my confidence level alone, because I had beaten myself up so much over it.

And yes, I just started my third (well, maybe fourth official, at this point who knows) draft. From blank page. Now I am definitely using the old drafts as guides - quite often using whole passages just copy/pasted over. Sometimes rewriting complete sections. I am completely trashing my chapter two for the umpteenth time.

On this past Saturday I attended a seminar by American agent Maggie Cooper who suggested the book Refuse To Be Done by Matt Bell. I'm going to buy it today, but based on her overview of it he's got the three rewrite (at least) approach as well. I've got someone's comments open in another window, I'm sure they wouldn't mind if I copied them over here - it's from a discord chat. They used the book as a guide during their editing: “Rewrite instead of revise.” He strongly recommends rewriting everything, a daunting task for a novel. It’s ok to keep your first draft up in a window for reference, but you cannot cut and paste. It took me eleven months of hard work to complete. My manuscript has vastly improved as a result. I’m now following his advice for my third draft, which Matt Bell suggests could be my last.

I seriously hope he is right because honestly I don't know if I can take much more rewriting of my own book at this point, if I don't get close with my own draft soon I AM gonna start a bonfire and trash everything, lol. I really do think the magic happens in the edit and I think a lot of the edit is rewriting. When I look at what I had before and where I am now, it is SO much better and stronger and basically, just more tightly woven. In that same discord chat I was complaining about how I spent an entire afternoon rewriting one section and it went from around 600 words to 297. But I had basically said what it needed to say, I got a hook in that wasn't there before and suddenly there were stakes that didn't exist before. There was tension. I had cut the word count down. It was just better. It took me three years off and on to get to this point.
 
Jake E said:
I think I've probably reached a skill ceiling. I'm simply not good enough
Click to expand...
No way.

This is a money game. What's marketable right now? What's trending on TikTok? Writers pour their souls into stories, but at the end of it all, capitalism is still capitalism.

It's also an odds game. I went to the library today. Out of a good few thousand books, I found 1 I was interested in reading. Those are the taste odds we're playing.

So don't let the game get you down (as hard as it is to extricate rejection from self-worth!)
 
Hey, @Jake E. Is this your first book? If it is, I'd suggest you write the next one, and then the next one. Hopefully you're already doing that. Keep marketing in the background, if you can stand it, or take a break from that nonscence for while, but keep writing. That's the part that we love, the part that is worth while. The marketing is soul-sucking, and you just have to gird your loins. Stay strong. Keep it in perspective. Keep writing.
 
LJ Beck said:
Hey, @Jake E. Is this your first book? If it is, I'd suggest you write the next one, and then the next one. Hopefully you're already doing that. Keep marketing in the background, if you can stand it, or take a break from that nonscence for while, but keep writing. That's the part that we love, the part that is worth while. The marketing is soul-sucking, and you just have to gird your loins. Stay strong. Keep it in perspective. Keep writing.
Click to expand...
This is the sixth book I've finished (only the second I've seriously pursued publishing with). I'm already a quarter of the way through the seventh.
Writing is indeed the bit i live for. It's the fun bit. Even editing is fun up to a point.
Marketing ... I have no skills in that area, which is where an agent/publisher would be quite handy ha ha.
 
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