Hello everyone and welcome to my first blog on the site.Â
Apart from a fake blog site I once set-up to rip into a fake literary agent (now sadly removed – the site, not the agent), this is my first attempt at blogging.Â
I’m at a loss where to start since I’m determined that my blogs won’t suck to the same degree that the vast majority of on-line diaries do. There won’t be any pictures of my pets, rants about lines at the bank or that sort of thing here. No cute stories about my kids (I only have one so far anyway) anywhere near or my personal interpretation of professional sports - as if you’d want to read that instead of poking needles into your eyes!Â
One thing that has been on my mind is the thick stack of rejection letters I’ve collected from publishers and literary agents over the years. If you don’t know the process on how to get a book published, it goes something like this: you write it, you find an agent, they find a publisher and it gets published. In theory, at least this is how it works. In real life, most books are crap. Getting back to blog sites, you’ve no doubt noticed that nearly anyone tempted to shove their ideas down your throat believes they can do so with the very minimum on what’s required of the English language. Now imagine this for a good few thousand words…
Writing isn’t easy. You need to practice and be embarrassed as you develop; I can’t read my earlier attempts at writing without cringing. The whole learning curve has given me a new respect for high school English teachers who are paid very little to wade through about forty attempts at essay writing to banal titles (usually things like ‘A dream deferred’ – when it should have been ‘A nightmare encountered’), by kids whose command of language might make it difficult for them to follow the subtitles on a Jerry Springer episode.
Next comes the agent. There are some very good agents apparently (I can’t speak first hand since the only time I ever dealt with them was when they were rejecting my work), lots of very bad agents (who demand cash to read your manuscript) and a lot more crooks (who demand money and do nothing else after this). Agents take a commission from what they get published for you. Under no circumstances should money flow from you to the agent.Â
Unsurprisingly, agents look for the sorts of things that match what publishers have been publishing already seeing as how they’re more likely to get published again. As the effective gatekeepers to what’s likely to end up in book form on your lap or TV screen, it seems almost ironic that these in-effect literary bouncers at the door to what becomes popular culture are not risk takers. Unless you’re very lucky to find a publisher directly or an agent who broke the mould, you’re unlikely to ever get published. And that’s assuming your work isn’t edited and manipulated into something that you won’t recognise as your original manuscript to start off with!
I’d thought I’d share some comments from some of the more honest rejection letters. Devil’s Island is apparently ‘sick’, ‘offensive’ and ‘glorifies violence’. It may well be if all you read is Disney but the TV news is more often than not also all of those things. Devil’s Island was described by another as an ‘orgy’ (just because literary agents deal with ‘literature’ does not make them immune to the use of clichés!) of ‘blood letting’ that upset her as much as The Boondock Saints (I was chuffed by this and still can’t see why it might be a bad thing!). It reminded her of A Clockwork Orange (I wanted to fly to England and kiss her at this point, even though she was telling me that my book was no good). Another said – no doubt with a straight face – that the publishing industry did not want anything new in terms of genre! Tarrantino must be so happy that he chose to make films instead of write books!
A few agents thought I was a Catholic-bigot. Please read Devil’s Island and let me know if you think I am. Let me go on record as saying that I think this is an unjustified criticism that says more about the person making it than myself or my book.Â
South African agents (all two or three of you) are still apparently haunted from having watched The Exorcist and automatically turn off when anything printed using the word ‘exorcism’ is mentioned and believe that they may become dirty from reading anything not adding to the general mediocrity of South African fiction (South African writers like to change their themes as often as Lenin changed his facial expression). Don’t waste your time trying to get published in South Africa unless all you can write about are race relations, apartheid, guilt, romance and so on. I would say more but I have a lot to do today and can’t afford a nap right now.
American and British agents are better in my experience. They generally understand that the Internet is changing the rules.
Luckily, I’ve escaped all that. If there is any justice in the world, I should be buying the staff at Margins Press beer for the rest of their lives.