Engagement

Occasionally an agent seems very much to want what you can offer, so your covering letter is a bit more personal, a little more enthusiastic than usual.  Of course this is totally wrong - people only want a professional letter.  So this afternoon I sent off a submission (3rd this week!) to a new agency - with two fairly young agents and a not very published client list.  My instinct was to leave them as a last resort - but somehow I thought one of them might have time for my ideas.  So I sent this letter which contained more warmth than was strictly professional.   And then I wondered why it all felt so odd.   It occurred to me that while I am feeling all warm and engaging - they won't even have looked at their inboxes - and they won't get to it for a couple of weeks, and by the time they respond, I will probably have forgotten that I even wrote to them.

New Agents
Carole Blake - the doyenne - writing about 15 years ago, says that "people were being made redundant by publishing houses and setting up as agents the following week".  Well why not?  A year or so ago I was only aware of the agents one can find in the directory - and the on line directory - and many of them seemed to be hopeless for my purposes. Now, having begun to follow things on the internet more attentively I have found a whole new wellspring of agents - new ones are setting up all the time - and they all seem a great deal more receptive to the sort of thing I'm writing.

Is this a good thing? It could be that more people are writing YA and Commercial fiction - too much they say - but maybe more of it is getting published because there are so many agents for it... or that there are so many agents because there are so many writers out here in the howling darkness - trying to force the doors open.  I just hope when I get an agent it will be a good one...