What’s worse than agent rejections? Agent silence! I’ve shared a lot of good news lately so today I’m going to tell you about my first agent ghosting & why I keep their initial email up on my office wall (right above my newly framed published book cover ) #writingcommunity

One of the selling points of my MA was at the end of the year, we compiled a booklet of our work and it was sent to agents as a ‘taster.’ This was fun at first but soon became like agent hunger games.

We were all in a WhatsApp group and as the days went by, more messages would come in from excited classmates saying OMG AN AGENT CONTACTED ME!

This was lovely of course, but as we’d all chosen three agents each for the master list, often your ‘dream’ agent choice wouldn’t contact you at all but you’d hear they’d instead contacted your classmate. Ouch.

Eventually though, my time came. I was sat in Croatia with my whole family on holiday, we were having a before dinner drink and I was flicking through my phone. An email came in...

Now, the subject should have given it away as it was the (then) title of my book. But it didn’t. I opened it casually then quickly read the two line email, then screamed. Loudly.

AN AGENT READ THE OPENING OF MY BOOK AND WANTS ME TO SUBMIT TO THEM, I shouted excitedly to my family. ‘Oh my god does that mean you’re getting published?’ My sister cried back. Errrrm... no. But it’s still good!

Anyway, I hadn’t finished the book yet so I carried on writing and editing and then six months later, I was finally ready to submit. Off my first 10k went with a cover and synopsis to this agent with my fingers tightly crossed.

She replied within 2 days! She liked my opening chapters, she would love to see the full MS. She warned me she was about to go away so wouldn’t read for 3 weeks, but asked me to let her know if I had any ‘developments’ elsewhere. All signs were good. It was a dream.

Off the full MS went. And the wait began. Three weeks passed. I was in Cornwall on the fourth week and I remember promising myself on the drive back I was only allowed to reload my email once every hour during the car journey.

(‘Updated Just Now’ is truly a message of horror during the submission process, isn’t it?)

8 weeks passed. I decided to follow it up with a polite ‘just wondering if you’d had chance to read?’ Silence. Now, I hadn’t stopped submitting elsewhere so eventually I got more full MS requests.

There was one day months later where I had FOUR full requests in one go (this still remains one of my favourite days) yet I couldn’t resist emailing the first agent again. So I chased a second time. More silence. At this point another agent joined in and started ghosting me too.

The end of this story? Neither agent ever replied again. Not even when I (probably embarrassingly at this point) emailed to say I’d got a book deal with S&S and was still looking for representation.

I can’t tell you why. Just that it happens. A LOT. Whenever I tell this story to writing friends, they tell their own agent ghosting story. But when it happens to you it feels weirdly embarrassing. Like it’s because your writing is so bad they can’t bear to reply. It’s not!

Agents are just people. They’re just busy and are trying their best like we all are. I don’t think it’s anything personal.

So, why despite all that did I and do I still keep the agent’s first email to me on my wall?

Well, my GOD I was excited when she first wrote to me. I remember that feeling of utter disbelief that someone whose opinion really mattered had read my work and deemed it good enough. The silence that came after never took that feeling away.

So I keep the email to remind myself of it. There’s a LOT of rejections in writing but if you can find a way to not let them get in the way of *that* feeling, I think you’ll be alright.

#rejection #amwriting #amsubmitting #writingcommunity

That was the world’s longest thread wasn’t it I’m sorry I really should be writing my next book