I refer to the blog of Nathan Bransford, literary agent, (http://nathanbransford.blogspot.com), which came to my attention by dint of being Blogger's Blog Of Note on Thursday. Don't jump to conclusions, please. He comes across as friendly, helpful, approachable - and he even suggests that he reads queries himself and replies personally. He suggests (practically demands) that aspiring authors contact him before anybody else. Clearly I do not take issue with any of that.
However (yes, obviously there was a big 'however' coming), he also enters the dangerous world of how to write your query, your synopsis and your sycophancy. Maybe I'm just being naive here (and maybe there's no maybe about it) but I always thought that authors wrote books, that advertisers wrote advertising and that editors wrote synopses. In other words, people should play to their strengths. Were Shakespeare's synopses any good? Did Douglas Adams research some personalised titbit about the literary agent he contacted? Does Zadie Smith have a great-uncle who runs a publishing house? Probably not - I presume that people read their work and formed an opinion accordingly. Otherwise, published authors will be those skilled at self-publicity which, to put it kindly, will be a subset of the great writers in the world.
In a world where there are far too many aspiring authors, separating the manuscripts that are read from those which are moved straight into their return envelopes by evaluating the author's skill at toadying is about as sensible as the (worryingly plausible) story of the popular law firm which threw all job applications down a flight of stairs and only read the ones that fell on every seventh step. They reasoned that anyone not sufficiently lucky to have a form which knew which step to land on was not lucky enough to work for them. Clearly, one hopes this firm has long since gone into bankruptcy - yet there is not any great difference between this approach and assuming that an ability to write a ground-breaking, record-breaking, sleep-stealing novel will naturally lead to an ability to sum up the hundred-thousand words or so into a pithy single page and write a letter both fawning and informative enough to get the attention of the agent.
"What do I suggest?" I hear you ask. (Or I would, if anyone ever bothered to put a comment on this blog.) "Well, thanks for asking", I say. (Or I would, if etc.) Nathan - as a friendly, helpful and, by all appearances, useful agent, you could lead the way. Invite unpublished authors to email you a chapter or two. Make it environmentally friendly by refusing paper copies. And (here comes the clever bit) absolutely forbid anything in the covering email apart from author's name, address and email address. Yes, it will open the flood gates but, as you well know, you can stop after the first sentence if it's rubbish, or after the first paragraph if it's dull, or after the first page if you don't care what happens next, or after the first chapter if it doesn't drive you across the divide to chapter two like a rocket unexpectedly fired out of your trousers. And if you get all the way through and can't wait to read the rest, then and only then ask for a synopsis so you know whether the overall story will satisfy you or leave you feeling empty and hollow (like when you go out for a meal at a fast food joint and start feeling a bit peckish in the time it takes to get up from the plastic chair, deposit your rubbish in the bin and push the door).
In short, evaluate the BOOK writing, not the letter writing, not the synopsis writing and not the advertising writing. These people want to be authors.
What have you got to lose? Worst case, you might need to get Curtis Brown to increase the mailbox size but, hey, storage is cheap these days. You can get a terrabyte hard drive for about ninety pounds so it's probably ninety bucks where you are which makes it cheaper than a full tank of petrol for a Hummer.
Give it a go - we can all win. How about you give me 1% of revenue for any new authors you find this way? No harm in asking...
Since my last post, I have started to read Nathan's blog and like it. The above is intended as helpful advice. That is the full extent of my work towards publication and, shockingly, I have not looked at Authonomy for a while. This is not a change of opinion, merely an expression of laziness, inertia and a few good programmes on the telly.
I have also watched the totally wonderful in every way "Mr Maker" on BBC2. Technically, N has watched it and I have watched her watching it but, in reality, I probably like it more than she does. As his name suggests, he makes stuff out of old bits of, er, stuff - and the old bits of stuff are all stuff that you might have lying around. Yesterday we made Mr Grass-Head from an old pair of tights, some grass seed, a paper cup, three elastic bands, cotton wool and a biro. Oh, and some water on the top. Hopefully, in a week's time, he'll be sporting a good head of grass-hair. And if it doesn't work, we can have another go because the smallest pack of grass seeds I could find would enable me to plant a medium-sized lawn.
For the first time on this blog, I now present a photograph, showing Mr Grass-Head in his bald but aspiring to hirsute phase. Ideally, I would have used flesh-coloured elastic bands but all I could find were discarded Royal Mail red ones. If the sunshine doesn't help the grass to germinate and grow, perhaps the radiation from the mobile phone masts on the building behind will help.
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