If it's riches you're after, perhaps it would be wise to question whether writing literary fiction is, after all, an ideal career. Authors don't make much money and, as we've seen, some make none at all.
A little anecdote. You’re sitting reading the newspaper one sunny morning, faithful hound at your feet. The phone rings. It is your agent.
“You’d better sit down,” he says.
“I already am.”
“Okay, here’s the story. I just sold your story.”
“You’ve repeated the word story. That’s inelegant.”
“Shut up and hang onto your hat.”
“I’m not wearing one and, by the way, agents should avoid cliché – I expected better.”
“This will console you. Megapub International just bought your story for $400,000. You need never work again.”
“I don’t count that as a reasonable ambition, but thank you for the news.”
Yes, I too have read Mr King’s excellent book on writing. It’s well worth reading, by the way, even if a little cruel to adverbs. And it will certainly cheer you up. But don’t get carried away.
For one thing, you notice it was an agent who called? What’s more, I seemed to be on very friendly terms – indeed, right up there to the threshold of harmless badinage. How did all that stuff happen? I hear you saying: How do I get one like that for myself? You are not alone.
In fact, how do I get an agent? is the most common question posed by the debutante writer. Which is puzzling because it is often posed before that first book has even been finished.
The short answer is: You don’t get an agent – an agent gets you.
A literary agent makes her money by taking a proportion of the earnings from sales of your book. Before you have any earnings at all, she will have had to sell your book to a publisher. That will take a great deal of unpaid effort. So the question you should have asked is: Why should she do this?
The standard answer is she found such merit in the work (the voice, the subject, the plot, the dialogue, and so forth) that she was willing to slog away on the author’s behalf gratis until a publisher took the book on and the royalties began rolling in.
Put that way, it doesn’t sound very probable, does it?
It follows, that with some very significant exceptions (I’ll come back to these some other time) you will not find someone offering to represent an unknown author on the basis of their first book. I agree, it does happen, but then so does winning the lottery.
My advice is to skip this stage altogether and publish the book yourself! If there is enough interest (that is, enough people buy it) you will, soon enough, find an agent knocking your door.
So what about the heading “Submissions” on all those countless websites? The ones asking for synopsis, initial chapters and so on. The ones asking you to comply with assorted rules (e.g. for length - no more than 5000 words, no more than 3000 words, no more than one A4 page and so on, presumably all the way to “no more”).
Forget all that! It is a waste of your time. And even if you had the time, you could be spending it more profitably on your next book. In any case, beware of hawking your book to any enterprise that appears to consider reading as a bit too much trouble.
Now a little relevant psychology.
This occupation that I think of as “ritual submission” is far from being a cost-free activity. Unless, that is, you have a psyche of steel. Each bulky envelope, each email attachment, once despatched, demands mental space. These missives are tasks as yet uncompleted – they are bread on the water. Completion will take the form of a reply asking to read more; but meanwhile you must wait.
Agents (and publishers) receiving unsolicited letters can take a long time to reply. Sometimes they don’t reply at all, suggesting that if you’ve not heard back in six months they’re probably not interested. Your life returns to that unhappy state when you annoyed your parents mooning about, waiting for the telephone to ring.
As long ago as 1927, the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik demonstrated that we remember unfinished tasks far better than finished ones. There is a reason for this and it not Good News. In fact, the Zeigarnik Effect is a perfect illustration of the critical need for closure in our mental life. There are times when even bad news is better than no news at all: better than placing your life into a perpetual state of suspended animation.
Put simply, we remember unfinished tasks because the damn things won’t leave us alone! You see what you’ve done to yourself posting all those letters, filling in all those absurd forms? You’ve turned yourself into the unwitting “subject” in a demonstration of the Zeigarnik Effect.
Not a particularly good idea.