My experiences with literary agents over 20 years of writing.

Agents...can’t live with them, can’t live without them...
I’ve been writing professionally for around twenty years now and over that time, the perceived wisdom has been that an agent is a necessary evil. You simply can’t get anywhere without one. Because of this belief, I’ve been involved with four very different agents. It’s a general rule of thumb that a writer falls out with his or her agent every five years or so.
I remember my first agent with great fondness. It was the mid seventies and I was living in a crummy shared house in London, scratching a living from a series of menial jobs and dreaming of having some kind of literary career. After a year of pounding away at a manual typewriter I had my first attempt at a novel, which naturally I thought was the best thing ever written. (I was still only in my twenties.) I’d heard that the thing to do was to find an agent and a friend who worked as a wardrobe assistant at Thames TV came across with the address of one. What did I have to lose except the tube fare into town?
My introduction to the agent was unorthodox to say the least. Overcome with shyness, I ran into the woman’s office, dumped the manuscript on her receptionist’s desk and promptly ran out again. I’d left a note of my address and phone number attached to the manuscript and the agent was good enough to get back to me, if only to tell me that the story wasn’t quite as brilliant as I thought it was. I felt crushed, but was cheered a little when she said, ‘It’s got something though. Come up for a chat!’
A couple of nights later, I sat in the Roebuck in Tottenham Court Road, drinking lager and listening enthralled as the agent told me that her husband, a cinematographer, was searching for a project to direct and had looked favourably upon my humble scribblings. ‘As soon as we get the book deal, he’ll option the film rights,’ she told me. My head span and it wasn’t the alcohol I was drinking. I was thrilled. Sitting there in that smoky, dinghy pub, I decided I had just taken my first steps on the way to the top. This was the start of something big...
Except of course, that the book didn’t sell to anybody, the film rights didn’t get purchased and the agent could only advise me to ‘write something else, only better this time.’ I was an obedient lad, so I did as she advised. That book didn’t sell either and despondency began to set in. The agent asked me if I would give it one more try...
The result was a book called The Sins Of Rachel Ellis and this one, she sold, within a week of me delivering it to her. I thought I was on my way, that my career would open up before me like a four lane highway, but it wasn’t going to be anything like as easy as that. Getting a follow up novel proved elusive and the publishers didn’t seem to like any of my ideas. Then, out of the blue, the agent announced that she was relocating back to her native Canada, so it was back to square one and...
Agent number two, who took over my last agent’s old clients and rather liked my next manuscript, a thing called Tiger, Tiger.
‘I think I can sell this,’ he told me, confidently and he did, within a matter of weeks. A bit later, he got me a lucrative Reader’s Digest condensation too. I was extremely pleased with him, but rather less pleased when he suggested that for my next book, I should write ‘Leopard, Leopard,’ then ‘Puma, Puma’ and so forth. Instead I did a book called ‘The Tarantula Stone,’ which he sold readily enough; but the editor who had purchased the previous book left suddenly to join another company and the editor who inherited me was far less enthusiastic about my work. Disappointing sales meant I lost the deal with the publisher and after a couple more years of unsuccessfully hawking projects around, agent number two told me it was probably time we parted company...
Agent number three liked the thriller I sent him which at that time was called ‘Black Dog.’ He asked me to do a rewrite on it first, which I agreed to and when I had done that he suggested that I turn it into the first person, which I also did and finally he announced he was ready to show it to somebody. Who did he show it to? As far as I’m aware, nobody. In the two years I was with him, I never saw a letter from a single publisher passing judgement on the work. Frustrated, I terminated the agreement and sent the manuscript out myself. The first publisher I approached, Headline, loved it and offered to publish it (a last minute name change to Speak No Evil did no harm at all.) I continued to sell books to the same publisher off my own bat.
Black Wolf, Strip Jack Naked, Slayground and Skin Flicks all followed at six monthly intervals. The ball finally seemed to be rolling in the right direction but then my editor announced that he was moving to another company and I began to get a horrible feeling of deja vu. Maybe, I thought, I should get an agent to move it on from here.
Agent number four broke all tradition by actually contacting me. He’d read about me in the Crime Writers Association newsletter and was horrified to see that I wasn’t using an agent. Did I realise what I was missing out on? He could get me a deal in the States, he could handle translation rights, he could negotiate film deals... I gave in and took him on. The first thing he negotiated with my publisher was a pay decrease. Seriously. No American deal materialised, no translation rights appeared apart from the one’s I’d already negotiated myself and though I published another three books with Headline, it was to an increasingly apathetic response. Eventually, the inevitable happened and Headline and I decided to go our separate ways. Agent number four tried to find a new publisher for my next manuscript, (which he thought was excellent) to no avail. When I presented him with my next manuscript, he told me it was the best thing I’d ever written, but added that he didn’t think it would sell. We split up and I immediately threw myself into the task of finding a replacement. Force of habit I suppose. I had this new manuscript ready, a kind of contemporary vampiric thing called Love Bites, which was kind of scary and kind of funny and in a weird, twisted way, a bit of a love story.
But the agents I contacted were sniffy. ‘You can’t do this,’ they told me. ‘This crosses genres. Besides, nobody’s interested in vampire stories....’
‘Er...well, what about Buffy?’ I asked them.
‘That’s different,’ they told me. ‘That’s television.’
I was unconvinced and I went on phoning people, writing inquiry letters, convinced that somebody out there would see what I was trying to do with this story.
And then one day it hit me. Why was I knocking myself out like this? What did I have to prove? I had published 11 novels (more if you count the three teen romances I wrote under a female pseudonym) and here I was, still knocking on doors, cap in hand, trying to get somebody I didn’t know to take an interest in one of my ideas. And lately, I’d been reading about the latest advances in E.publishing, how the concept was empowering writers, giving them the opportunity to put their work in from of a worldwide audience, so....
Love Bites is due out soon, available as a traditional paperback or as an electronic download. There’s no publisher in the conventional sense of the word and, even more liberating, no agent to take a 10% rake-off. And you know what? It feels strangely liberating to be out on my own like this . Scary but satisfying. And maybe I will take a bath over this, but if I do, it will be on my own terms...

For more information on the author contact his website on
www. purefiction.com/ philipcaveney