A Brief Interaction with Agents

By Eric Chevalier – Head of Southern Europe – TDT Capital.

So more than 3.5 years after the first sentence was drafted we had our final script.

I had published my own book on option pricing a little while ago and Alexander had got in touch with me about the process, though obviously my book was non-fiction and distributed only in France.

Alexander seemed set on the self-publishing route. Though accepting that an agent would probably considerably improve his draft, he was concerned, after his structural edit experience, that an agent may demand too many changes – he wanted it to be his book. He had also Googled that there were over 400 agents in the UK and that only 1 in 6000 books were actually taken on – the low probability of success didn’t seem to warrant the time.

I pointed out that if he went alone he wouldn’t have either the time or the connections to do the marketing legwork. I also mentioned that I’d read the vast majority of self-published book sold less than a 100 copies, but I’m not sure how bothered Alexander was about that then.

Anyway, his beta readers and I encouraged him to at least give the agent route a go, and the structured edit agency gave him a dozen names who may have been interested in his genre.

The submissions processes all followed a similar pattern: select an agent from the organisation and send a cover letter, a synopsis and first three chapters, but there are enough variations in format and requirements to take an additional couple of extra hours each. There is, unsurprisingly, an industry of experts available to help you with the process.

Once submitted, you wait. Up to 16 weeks! About half the agents sent an automated acknowledgment – for the others, you wondered if things had just rerouted to the junk box via somewhere in the ether.

Alexander was most irked by the synopsis – describing the key characters, the plot, the premise, and with no cliffhangers, all in 1-2 pages. How can I get across the colour, recreate the tension and capture the shock of the final reveal in two pages? he would chunter.

So, we waited. The first rejection came almost immediately but over the next 6 weeks, Alexander got a couple of encouraging emails along of the lines of I liked it but can’t take it as part of their portfolio right now. But for the rest – nothing.

Nearly all the agents promise to review each submission, and they must get hundreds, maybe thousands, and simply reading the three chapters plus cover notes would take at least an hour each. To cut and paste a polite standard email saying, thank you but not for us, and good luck, would, I think, take a few extra seconds. So why not just do it – no one is looking for a full critique. If one of my team in La Defence didn’t reply to a client, a prospective client, a potential hire, a supplier etc. they’d be on thin ice, and we get hundreds of them.

We waited for the whole 16 weeks, for nothing, and, in the end, slightly put out by the lack of responsiveness, we went for a hybrid approach with the freedom of self-publishing but with much professional input as with the traditional model.

But perhaps I’m doing the industry a disservice – maybe we should look at it from an agent’s perspective. It is their livelihoods – they are there to make money. And they make money by selling books, in fact by selling one of the few blockbusters. Somewhere I read that only 2% of published books sell more than 5000 copies. So, the agent's priority, understandably, is to take care of their portfolio of established writers, and to seek new talent from their pipeline of network recommendations, as well as the aspiring author celebrities with a ready following. They need books that they can get the wholesale buyers to be interested in for their shops.

They want books like other best sellers, they want to know who’s the likely audience, how to sell the book and, frankly, they tell you so – if an unknown just turns up with a different story, well, despite a good intentioned desire to uncover the next great literary voice, it’s unlikely to be jumped on.

Let’s say 300,000 books are written in the UK each year and if each author sends a submission to an average of 20 of the 400 agents, each agent would receive around 15,000 per year. If 5,999 in each 6000 are rejected, that’s a lot of rejection emails – even if each took 15 seconds to cut and paste each one, that’s maybe just over an hour a week; so, OK, our agents could be forgiven for thinking that the hour is better spent elsewhere.

But what about the promised review? At an hour each, that would be over 15,000 hours spent looking at new submissions each year, over 60 hours for one person each working week. Even with a team of supporting junior assistants the promised review must be fairly superficial – any creative discovery would come with a heavy dose of luck, presumably at the cost of thousands of unheard-of gems!

Maybe an agent reading this will let us know, in case Alexander has a Book 2, but they are unlikely to have the time!