Not surprisingly, I suppose, at my time of life I feel more confident about tackling publishers with a proposal than I have before. I know more about the publishers out there and the books they are producing, I understand better how publishers work, and I know more people who actually work in publishing. By and large, publishers’ websites and the Web enable one to hone a proposal for a particular publisher better than ever. It is also appreciably easier to express myself to a publisher now that the book exists, than in 1998 when I could only present ‘structures’ for two books about the Calderons, and 2013 when I had less than a quarter of the text to show people.
But there are still unpleasant surprises. For instance, the other day I suddenly realised that one of my top priority publishers has a reader who is a notoriously competitive, aggressive, counter-suggestible Russianist who would probably not only rubbish my book on ‘principle’, but ransack it for material! Too risky to approach that publisher, then… Another problem is very reputable ‘academic’ publishers who I have been published by before but who would assume I was writing an academic book and find I hadn’t succeeded. If they cannot think without footnotes, they are not for me.
The biggest stumbling block, however, is the phrase ‘no unsolicited submissions’. You know a publisher’s recent books, you admire them, you think your book could be right for them, you think they could be right for you, you investigate them in the handbooks and on the Web, you identify who to write to, you investigate the person on the Web, then you are dealt this ‘no unsolicited submissions’ card.
What is so frustrating is that you literally do not know what it means. Obviously, you would never dream of sending them even a chapter ‘unsolicited’, let alone the whole manuscript (‘no unsolicited MSS’ is a variant), but can’t you even send them a one-page proposal? I have known a one-page proposal get through this armour and elicit an invitation to submit a sample, but usually it doesn’t even earn a reply. You see, the publisher wants to deal only with an ‘agent’, not with you.
I was self-employed for nearly forty years, ran three businesses, and unfortunately never found a wholly competent agent, accountant or solicitor in all that time. I felt justified, therefore, in pounding out the following to a distinguished publisher the other day:
Dear Mr X
You may, or may not, be aware that [your] website contains the following:
How to get your book published
You need a literary agent. Like most publishers, we’re unable to accept direct submissions from authors, as we don’t have the resources to evaluate them. We work with many great agents. Here are our tips for finding the right one for you: [Etc.]
The tips you give following the above are sensible, but the above itself is grossly offensive to any original writer and guaranteed to put him/her off approaching you, for these reasons:
Even one of the ‘greatest’ literary agents can take up to five years to find a publisher. The writer him/herself can do better than that, provided he/she can make direct contact with publishers.
‘Submissions’ is vague, but if you mean a one-page approach-letter or a brief synopsis, your claim not to have the resources to evaluate them is ridiculous. In the theatre one person can evaluate a dozen scripts a day and respond the same day to their authors.
Your statement implies that you have no critical or aesthetic values of your own.
‘We work with many great agents’…but not with any great authors, is the implication, because you don’t work with authors at all! How insulting is that? It invites me, as an author, to say ‘I work with many great agents’…but with no great publishers. That is like saying: ‘Wellington rode a great horse’.
I don’t say I am a ‘great’ biographer, but I have certainly written an innovative one, Edwardian Genius: The Case of George Calderon, and have fifty years experience of working with publishers. Unfortunately, although your entry in Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2017 (which your own website recommends using) says that you publish ‘biography’, I find no trace of any on your website.
Yours &c
Yes, it probably comes over as arrogant and Meldrewish, but every twenty years or so you have to give it to people straight — for your own mental health, you understand. I am also comforted by the excellent article ‘How to get an agent’ by Philippa Milnes-Smith in this year’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, which asks seven questions of an author and says ‘if you can answer a confident “yes” to them all […] you might not need an agent’. (I can.) Nevertheless, I don’t entirely rule one out if all my own approaches fail. A certain non-fiction agent is repeatedly recommended to me, but when I wrote to him less than two years ago I never got a reply…
I have so far tackled twenty-six publishers, received six rejections, been invited to submit material by six others, and not heard yet from the remaining fourteen. I probably have thirteen more to approach. The most hilarious thing is the number of rejecting publishers who are ‘confident your book will find a good home soon’!
Related
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Captain of the 11
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George Calderon c.1901
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon, 1912
Letter to a publisher
Not surprisingly, I suppose, at my time of life I feel more confident about tackling publishers with a proposal than I have before. I know more about the publishers out there and the books they are producing, I understand better how publishers work, and I know more people who actually work in publishing. By and large, publishers’ websites and the Web enable one to hone a proposal for a particular publisher better than ever. It is also appreciably easier to express myself to a publisher now that the book exists, than in 1998 when I could only present ‘structures’ for two books about the Calderons, and 2013 when I had less than a quarter of the text to show people.
But there are still unpleasant surprises. For instance, the other day I suddenly realised that one of my top priority publishers has a reader who is a notoriously competitive, aggressive, counter-suggestible Russianist who would probably not only rubbish my book on ‘principle’, but ransack it for material! Too risky to approach that publisher, then… Another problem is very reputable ‘academic’ publishers who I have been published by before but who would assume I was writing an academic book and find I hadn’t succeeded. If they cannot think without footnotes, they are not for me.
The biggest stumbling block, however, is the phrase ‘no unsolicited submissions’. You know a publisher’s recent books, you admire them, you think your book could be right for them, you think they could be right for you, you investigate them in the handbooks and on the Web, you identify who to write to, you investigate the person on the Web, then you are dealt this ‘no unsolicited submissions’ card.
What is so frustrating is that you literally do not know what it means. Obviously, you would never dream of sending them even a chapter ‘unsolicited’, let alone the whole manuscript (‘no unsolicited MSS’ is a variant), but can’t you even send them a one-page proposal? I have known a one-page proposal get through this armour and elicit an invitation to submit a sample, but usually it doesn’t even earn a reply. You see, the publisher wants to deal only with an ‘agent’, not with you.
I was self-employed for nearly forty years, ran three businesses, and unfortunately never found a wholly competent agent, accountant or solicitor in all that time. I felt justified, therefore, in pounding out the following to a distinguished publisher the other day:
Yes, it probably comes over as arrogant and Meldrewish, but every twenty years or so you have to give it to people straight — for your own mental health, you understand. I am also comforted by the excellent article ‘How to get an agent’ by Philippa Milnes-Smith in this year’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, which asks seven questions of an author and says ‘if you can answer a confident “yes” to them all […] you might not need an agent’. (I can.) Nevertheless, I don’t entirely rule one out if all my own approaches fail. A certain non-fiction agent is repeatedly recommended to me, but when I wrote to him less than two years ago I never got a reply…
I have so far tackled twenty-six publishers, received six rejections, been invited to submit material by six others, and not heard yet from the remaining fourteen. I probably have thirteen more to approach. The most hilarious thing is the number of rejecting publishers who are ‘confident your book will find a good home soon’!
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