Writer’s Club: How I got my literary agent and her advice for aspiring authors
Rowan Lawton from The Soho Agency shares her top do's and don'ts
There are two periods when I tried to find a literary agent: one disastrous and one successful. The first was in my 20s, when I had aspirations to be the next female Salman Rushdie/Haruki Murakami and wrote a partial manuscript for fiction. If I remember correctly, it was a book about a woman getting lost inside an Indian forest that comes alive and tries to eat her. I’ll pause for laughter.
The prose was awful, but what I remember most clearly was the process of trying to find an agent which seemed daunting and overwhelming. I should add this was in the early noughties, when self-publishing was barely a thing, and if you wanted to publish a book, you had to go through the route of getting an agent, who would then sell your book to a publisher.
I bought the Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook to find said agents, and they didn’t accept email submissions back then. Printing and sending them manuscripts was expensive and time-consuming. I received back a handful of rejections, and shortly after, I abandoned my dream of writing books and focussed on journalism. It seemed too impossible, too hard.
As you will read in Rowan’s advice below, I hadn’t realised there were things I had gotten wrong during the whole process from not having a finished manuscript (only relevant for fiction, as non-fiction almost always tends to be the first three chapters or first 50 pages only) to not tailoring my pitches to the agent I was approaching.
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