Trends, Faith and Hope

There is a tendency I am becoming aware of from reading literary agents’ notes about what they are looking for. There seems to be a preponderance of aims to find women’s literature, complex thrillers or the humour in modern life. This is propelled by the other bias that the significant majority of book readers are women. This manifests itself in the marketing assumptions that agents are making about what will be successful and what is a riskier. All perfectly natural. However this speaks of market followers rather than market makers. The other ‘safe bet’ that many agents and publishers follow faithfully is the ghosted celebrity opus. Public recognition of someone is far more important than merit or originality. Tabloid publishing!

Literature and publishing has many fables about what could have been. Missed chances, work rejected that later out-performed all expectations. Markets are fickle just as people are. Tastes are many and varied rather than predictable and consistent. For the unpublished writer this presents much bigger obstacles than simply the merit of the submission. Agents are making marketing decisions rather than evaluations. I have to have sympathy with their position but it does risk rote like behaviour and limits more enterprising projects.

This leaves me in slack water out of the stream for not compromising on my ambition. I do not fit the current hegemony apparent in the publishing industry. I have had minimal encouragement a 22% direct rejection rate and a 50% ‘no interest’ including rejections, to sixty submissions to date. I was warned to expect this, that writing is personal foolhardiness with no rewards and demonstrates a particularly stubborn stupidity for thinking that anyone would want to support and promote you. Gambling that you will be holding a winning lottery ticket when you are struck by lightening.

Richard Dawkins is renowned for remarking that ‘faith’ in something or someone is illogical compared to the evidence to the contrary. ‘Hope’ is a better banner to proceed under and closer to people’s life experience.

Carry On, carrying On

After another rejection from an agent I was a little more hopeful for – she had been the agent for a writer I had referenced in my pitch letter – I have had to do a little soul searching. All the advice says expect rejection and keep going until someone recognises what you offer and wants to represent you.

However, the reality of rejection is not pleasant. The self-doubt and sense of inadequacy. It’s like one of those childhood moments when some other children you thought might be friends because you are in the same class, turn their back on you. Not fitting in, not being part of the clique, a sense of difference. This is the super strength of every writer for having the gall to actually believe they can write a book and then do so. You ‘put your head above the parapet’ when you submit work and welcome the world’s volley of ‘slingshots and arrows’. The sort of situation that most people spend much of their life avoiding rather than inviting.

I have now submitted to about fifty literary agencies since October and I am still working my way through the lists. I have re-edited the manuscript fully, three times and added a final chapter ending that I realised was missing after using the passage as the opening for the next volume but recognised it belonged to the timeline and story I thought I had completed. I am not in complete despair though. I have a logical genie sitting on my shoulder telling me: ‘This was to be expected and it may well be their loss not yours. If it’s not right for them, it’s not right for you’.

There are many more agents to submit to and I have more story to tell. My focus, and that of the genie, is don’t worry about it and carry on with what you started these are little bumps in the road not terminating disasters. The more you do the more you can do. Carry on carrying on.

Rejection

The unavoidable aspect of submitting (10,000 words/first 3 chapters/50 pages and the variations therein of different literary agents and whether they want a synopsis to be one page/full synopsis/chapter by chapter and how much personal information they want, if any) is the, so far, inevitable rejection, short polite and unhelpful.

It sees to be that the agents are more interested in marketing and trend. No definitive evidence for this opinion but looking at the books being promoted by Bloomsbury or Waterstones there is a preponderance of women writers and modern settings exploring daily experiences. I sit at the other end of the spectrum from this trend and the ‘romantasy’ trend both aimed principally at female readers. Another trend, heavily promoted and typically ‘ghost written’, is the celebrity autobiographies after that cookbooks and other self-help volumes on any and every topic!

It feels like an uphill struggle on a rarely travelled path – trying to reach the agent who can see the potential and audience for my writing. I have picked an unfamiliar niche with the Romano-British setting at the time the Roman Empire abandons Brittania and withdraws what little resources and administration still remains leaving the British to fend for themselves against the increasing incursions from the Scotties of Hibernia (Ireland) on South West and Welsh coasts, the Picts and other warring tribes in the North and from the near continent in the East and South East.

It’s a fascinating period with increasing archaeological evidence that it wasn’t a ‘dark age’ but that life continued arguably with little difference to the day to day lives of the majority of people in the same way that changes of Government make little if any marginal difference to most people today. I’m telling the story of how Brittania responded to the challenges before the ‘English’ (Brythonic Celtic for’ foreigner’ or ‘stranger’) arrived and then the impact they had and what has become identified as

‘The Age of Arthur’ during their expansion and colonisation of much of Britain.

It’s a good read!

Looking back

Looking Back

Whilst waiting to hear from the flurry of literary agents I have contacted so far with my first novel ‘Carrick and Trispen’, I have been reviewing old writings and more recent shorts and poetry. I have been surprised at the things I have forgotten about. Bold, profane, obscene sometimes, but always honest. I have the makings of a small volume of poetry.

I have also been editing my father’s poetry. He left a collection in various forms, some of it on the reverse of pieces of old Admiralty drawing papers marked ‘Top Secret’ – he was an electrical engineer working in the Admiralty drawing offices in Bath. He always had an interest in poetry and read and collected poetry until his death in 2024. His is mostly verses, or snippets, themes that re-appear in longer pieces that he had been developing. If I put a volume together I will include his works as a Coda to my own.

I will compile and order my ideas and think of thematic ways of presenting them so there is some coherence that I at least could recognise. I used to say that I wrote ‘bad poetry’ in prose form and still do in my journals. But the actual poems are better conceived and balanced. Undoubtably not to all tastes and probably owe more to Walt Whitman’s approach than typical English poetry. I have always been influenced by modern American Literature and rate Henry Miller, Alex Baldwin and Hunter S Thompson as the influences for my casual writing. That writing will never see the light of publishing in my lifetime but, vainly, I would hope that some poor editor would have the unenviable task of trying to make sense of all the undated papers and journals which are dated but intermittent plus dozens of notebooks full of observations and rants.

It is reassuring to find that earlier work has some merit to my older and wiser eye. It all gives hope to the venture into writing full time.