Secret Agents

Having finished the novel (see previous stream of blether in blogs), I have to get it out on the streets. I've trawled through the red book, and the yellow one, for agent names, and have checked the updated lists on the web.

My first agent attempt has been to one who seems friendly, and who accepts, unusually, initial submissions (synopsis, letter and first three chapters) by email as attachments.

Strangely, the major problem was that I'd written the book using LaTeX, a magnificent text formatting system, which will knock beautifully finished output straight into pdf. The real pain is picking my way through the text and taking out all the formatting commands so that it can go into Word. Having tried that and given up in disgust, I tried the Acrobat to Word converter. Beware--it doesn't work.

Finally, I sent the agent a pdf in the hope that this will be acceptable. Fingers crossed, or whatever a hedgehog has instead.

The Novel is Finished!

Yahoo, yo, wahey, whoopee, and jolly spiffing good! The novel was finished at the weekend. At last, I can look back over the 74000 or 84000 words, depending on whether you use a word processor count or Michael Legat's estimation technique for printers.

It's been an unnecessarily long haul, but we're here at last. What I'm doing now is going over the text repeatedly, looking for inconsistencies, imperfect phrasings and general mistakes.

It's at this stage that the really awkward part begins. I need an agent. A nice, kind, agent who likes the book and has a desperate, all-consuming urge to help get it into print. I've trawled through the UK agents' lists, and picked mostly only those who are in the society of whatsits, which cuts it down a bit. The ones who seem to have a friendly approach have been picked out, and I now need to start writing letters to them one by one.

The synopsis seems to be the really difficult part. Should it be one page, or twenty? What do you put in, and what do you leave out? Hedgehog is cogitating...