David Weller Author Blogspot

I submitted the first 50 pages of Truthseeker to a 'reputable' literary agent in London last October. In early December I received a request for the full manuscript. Great, I thought. Progress! Three months passed without any response. I gave them a polite nudge and waited patiently. Still no response. Might have been filtered out as spam, I thought so I sent another polite email. Guess what? No response. Whilst I can understand that no response equals no interest for unsolicited queries, I do believe an inquiry regarding a full manuscript deserves some form of reply. To completely ignore an author's request for information is, quite frankly, rude. Mind you, I shouldn't have been surprised. A thread on Absolute Write regarding this agent is filled with complaints of this nature. The sad thing is that this kind of behaviour appears to be fairly widespread. I submitted material to an an agent in the US in February 2015 and received a request for the full manus...

It's now three calendar months since I sent off the full manuscript for Truthseeker. I gave a polite nudge after 12 weeks but still haven't received a reply. Of course this could be nothing to worry about. On the other hand it might be a case of no response equals no further interest. Sadly, this kind of scenario seems to be fairly common when dealing with literary agents and I've come across numerous complaints of this nature. I recently read an article by a reputable agent who condemns this kind of behaviour and cautions against working with people who engage in it. As she points out, this might be a sign of problems further down the road. I'm inclined to agree and would not be comfortable working with any agent who is unable to treat me with even a basic level of courtesy. Agents might be busy people, but not so busy that they are unable to respond to an author whose work they have requested. A part of me says give them the benefit of the doubt. They might be...

When I began the editing process I had little trouble finding things that required improvement. Four major rewrites, and hundreds of editing hours, later I was beginning to struggle. After I received a request for the full manuscript, in December, I put it aside for three months. Over the past couple of weeks I've read it again and found things which my tired eyes missed on previous passes. Although minor in nature it's still irritating that I missed such glaring errors. Most were to do with punctuation and I found a missing full stop in one chapter, an unnecessary question mark in another and a few commas which I really had to think about. I also found a few phrases in the narrative which needed tweaking. Having been through the whole manuscript, and rectified these things, I'm left wondering what else I've missed. I'm also left wondering how many more times I'll need to go through it again.

It was sad to hear that Samhain publishing is closing its doors after just over a decade in operation. Established in 2005 it had some 600 authors and 3000 books in print. In its heyday it was turning over some respectable numbers. However, according to the article I read, e-book sales have dropped dramatically over the past two years and Amazon wouldn't give them a higher profile on their site. Consequently the business is no longer viable. So what implications does this hold for the multitude of digital first publishers springing up everywhere? Only time will tell, I suppose. My gut feeling is that the bubble on this particular kind of enterprise has burst and most new start ups will disappear very quickly.

Querying a literary agent can be a daunting prospect, but it needn't be if you keep things in perspective. The fact of the matter is, there are a great many agents looking for suitable manuscripts and an author only needs to get lucky once. This, I suppose, is the reason why I never sweat on any submission at the initial query stage. Rejection is a fact of life and, for the reasons outlined below, an inevitable part of the process. A great many agents, particularly those based in the United States, ask a prospective client to submit just a query letter. This is the most problematic as they will make a decision on whether to request further material based solely on this. You may have written a potential best seller but if the query letter doesn't grab them that won't count for anything. A lot of first time authors shoot themselves in the foot by not researching agents throroughly enough or submitting query letters which don't conform to an accepted format. If an auth...

It's been a couple of weeks since my last update and I'm still waiting to hear back from a prospective agent on my full MS. As it's still less than three months since I sent it off I'm not that concerned by the lack of response. In the meantime I've been trying to keep my mind occupied with other things. None of them, I might add, writing related.

It's just over nine weeks since I sent off the full of my latest completed MS. Seems like a long time, but in the publishing industry that's just the blink of an eye. How much longer will I need to wait to get an answer? I might as well ask 'How long is a piece of string?' There was a time when I used to fret over such things. These days I take a much more relaxed approach to the issue. The agent concerned obviously enjoyed reading the first 20% to make a request. If they like the remaining 80%, they might make an offer. If they don't it isn't the end of the world. When I set out on this little journey I did so with the intention of self publishing. I could have done so long ago but was held back by self doubt. When I compare the latest version with the draft I had a year ago I'm glad I did. This time last year I received a request from another agent based on a fifteen page sample. To cut a long story short, I increased the word count by 20K, at their ...