The Word Cloud

There's a blog I sort of follow by name of Catherine, Caffeinated wherein our perky blogger gives amusing but useful views on self publishing, marketing, promotion, etc. Her latest post gives the results of a survey of self published authors and, bearing in mind there are many Cloudies contemplating the self-publish route, it may be worth posting the link here. See what you think...
http://catherineryanhoward.com/2012/05/24/wait-until-you-hear-this-the-taleist-self-publishing-survey/  

Peter Buckman, Ampersand Agency
Peter Buckman was on the editorial board of Penguin Books, and moved to New York to be a commissioning editor with the New American Library. He then became a full-time writer, producing books, films, plays, and scripts for tv and radio. Agenting has always been part of his life. The Ampersand Agency Handle literary and commercial fiction and non-fiction. Contemporary and historical novels, crime, thrillers, women’s fiction, memoirs, history, biography, cookery – anything as long as it’s well written. No fantasy / sci-fi / horror though.

• When did you come into agenting? What did you do before? And why agenting?

I was a publisher and then a full-time writer before becoming an agent in 2003, so I know the pleasures and pain involved in all aspects of the creative process.

• Have you ever opened a new manuscript, read a single page, and thought ‘I’m going to end up making an offer on this’? What was it about that page which excited you?

Yes. The opening sentence of “Q&A”, which turned into “Slumdog Millionaire”

• What’s your pet peeve on covering letters?

Packages or envelopes so plastered in sticky tape that I have to get a carving knife to open them. Anything addressed “Dear Sir/Madam” or “To whom it may concern”

• Do you need good personal chemistry with your authors?

Not necessarily, though agenting is a very personal thing – like having a lover, without the sex. You need to respect and be generous to one another, as well as being capable of surprise.

• The grim stats: how many submissions do you get per week (or year)? And how many new authors do you take on?

Around 100 a week, say 5000 a year, and in nine years we’ve got maybe 60 authors. You can figure out the stats.

• Do you like your authors to tweet & blog & Facebook … or do you really not care?

Don’t care

• Which is most important: the editor, the publisher or the advance?

The most important thing is that the author is happy and well-served

• Do you secretly have a book in you? And if so, tell us more …

I’ve published seven books, all out of print, and some of them so boring not even my wife has read them

Peter is one of the agents appearing at this year’s Festival of Writing. Each year we invite literary agents who are hungry for new talent and who represent some of the biggest and best agencies in the business. Don’t miss your chance to book a one-to-one session with an agent of your choice.

We are thrilled, delighted & tickled every shade of pink to announce that the Greenhouse Literary Agency, in conjunction with the Festival of Writing, has created the Greenhouse Funny Prize for children’s writers. Greenhouse’s Julia Churchill loves every kind and flavour of children’s writing, but she doesn’t get enough submissions that make her laugh. So help her out. Enter the prize. You could win representation from her and a ticket to the Festival of Writing besides. What’s not to like? Here’s Julia:

ANNOUNCING THE GREENHOUSE FUNNY PRIZE – OPEN TO UK/IRISH WRITERS

I’m excited about something. The UK side of the Greenhouse is running a prize in conjunction with this year’s Writers’ Workshop Festival of Writing. It will be called the Greenhouse Funny Prize.

At Greenhouse we love all sorts of writing. We love edgy, wincingly close-to-the-bone YA fiction, we love thrilling, commercial concepts with big surprises, and beautiful and heartfelt younger stories. I could keep going, but in short, we love quality. And there’s something that Sarah and I agree that we don’t see enough of: Funny.

I had the idea for a prize because every time I sit down with an editor and ask what they’re looking for, they generally say, ‘Funny. We need humour’. When I was little, half of my reading was humour – Dahl, the Ahlbergs, JUST WILLIAM, MR MAJEIKA, WHAT-A-MESS, FUDGE, ASTERIX. And there is loads of great humour on the market today – WIMPY KID, Andy Stanton, Lauren Child, Dave Pilkey, David Walliams. Funny is selling in the shops, publishers are wide open to it, and yet we don’t see that represented in our submissions inbox. We want more laughs.

The Greenhouse Funny prize is open to un-agented writers who are currently resident in the UK and Ireland. Entries will be judged by me and guest judge Leah Thaxton, Publisher of Egmont Children’s Books (and discoverer of Andy Stanton).

The winner will get an offer of representation from the Greenhouse and a full weekend ticket to the wonderful Festival of Writing that runs 7-9 September ’12 (worth £525). The winner will also be presented with a bottle of champagne at the Festival’s gala dinner on the Saturday night. The runners up will each get five of my favourite funny books, and maybe even a comedy mug.

Our judging criteria is very simple. Funny, and we are wide open to all ages. The winner may be a picture book like OLIVIA or DON’T LET THE PIGEON DRIVE THE BUS, or a young series à la HORRID HENRY, FLAT STANLEY, THE GREAT HAMSTER MASSACRE or UNDEAD PETS, or for 8-12 year olds like Lemony Snicket or RAMONA. It could even be for teen readers, like Louise Rennison, DOES MY HEAD LOOK BIG IN THIS? or THE PRINCESS DIARIES. It’s going to be the person with funny in their DNA.

Funny is subjective, of course. Perhaps the winner will have a slow-burning, sly wit. Perhaps a Python-esque sense of the absurd. Or maybe the concept, and the freshness and immediacy of it, will do much of the heavy lifting.

Entry guidelines:

To get a good sense of the voice and where the character is headed, we’d like to see the first 5,000 words PLUS a short description (a few lines) of the book AND a one page outline that shows the spine of the plot.

If you are submitting a picture book (or shorter fiction that comes in under 5,000 words), then send the complete text.

Please send your entries to funny@greenhouseliterary.com

The deadline for submissions is Monday 30 July.

You must be resident in the UK or Ireland.

The shortlist will be announced Monday 6 August. We anticipate that 6 writers will be shortlisted.

The winner will be announced Monday 13 August. If we get two or more outstanding entries, we may offer representation to more than one writer.

Entrants will not be acknowledged on receipt, but all entrants will be emailed when the shortlist is announced.

In the meantime, if you want to book a place at the Festival of Writing, please go ahead and do so. If the winner of the Greenhouse Funny Prize has already booked for the Festival, the Writers’ Workshop will refund your money and (if needed) upgrade your ticket.

Penny Holroyde, Caroline Sheldon Literary Agency Ltd.
Interested in children’s books for all ages – She particularly like’s laugh-out-loud books aimed at middle grade children but also loves books with emotional depth and strong plots for older children. For her adult portfolio, She’s very interested in memoirs. Historical settings and again, a really compelling voice that works in whatever world the author has created are key likes. The Caroline Sheldon Literary Agency is one of the UK’s leading literary agencies representing a bestselling roster of authors and illustrators. Our particular areas of interest include fiction, non-fiction—especially human interest stories and memoirs—and all types of children’s books.

• When did you come into agenting? What did you do before? And why agenting?

I came into agenting seven years ago. Prior to that I was working in the USA as Director of Rights and Licensing for Candlewick Press. As I had worked for Candlewick’s sister company in the UK, Walker Books, I was quite often asked to comment very early on whether a project would have worldwide appeal and I think it’s helpful to have that hat on as an agent. More than that though, in my previous job, authors would call for help when they couldn’t understand their royalty statements or if a film producer had been in touch. As more and more authors got representation, that side of my job got less frequent and I realised that being at the coal face was a place I could be very happy, and I am.

• What sort of books do you love?

Have you ever opened a new manuscript, read a single page, and thought ‘I’m going to end up making an offer on this’? What was it about that page which excited you? Yes, I have. I started reading the manuscript at my desk and knew I had to get away from the phone and email and read it all. It was the writing and voice. Stunning. I went to a café and devoured it. When I finished, I mopped up my tears, stroked the manuscript and swore I would make the author mine.

•  What’s your pet peeve on covering letters?

‘Dear Sir/Madam’ or ‘Hi there’ usually gets me heading for the delete button. We are (we think!) open and welcoming on our website and provide a picture and an email address. Unless one of us needs a makeover badly, I think it’s quite clear there are no ‘Sirs’ working here. It bothers me when authors don’t bother.

• Of the authors who are not on your list, who would you most love to represent?

(You can pick a few names.) I’ll plead the fifth on that question!

• Where do most of your authors come from? The slushpile? Personal recommendation? Or what?

As you get more established as an agent, authors come via recommendations from other authors and from acknowledgements pages. Publisher recommendations have also brought me some good talent. I’ve got a slushpile (hate that word!) author publishing her first books this May which is very exciting but has happened to me only once!

• Do you need good personal chemistry with your authors?

I think you need a certain transparency with your authors. It’s a very close relationship so there certainly needs to be a lot of trust and the author needs to feel safe in telling me exactly what they think about something  but I don’t think that needs to extend to going on holiday with each other!

• Do you get involved in shaping an author’s career?

I like to give advice about new directions and of course I feed back to authors when publishers are asking for projects in certain areas of the market, but at the end of the day, it’s the author’s call.

•  If you had one bit of advice to give to new writers, what would it be?

Read more books and join a very critical writer’s group.

• Are e-books going to bring about fundamental changes to the publishing industry? What would you say if one of your authors wanted to e-publish their next book, cutting out conventional publishers altogether?

I think most published authors would prefer to be published by their publisher and if an author suggested direct-to- e pub, I might suspect there was a problem with the relationship; but it could also be that there was something about the project that better suited it to e pub.

• Have you enjoyed reading more since becoming an agent? Or are there times it feels like a chore?

Before becoming an agent, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to read Richard and Judy selections for example, but they were so powerful in the first place I thought I can’t really work as an agent and say ‘no, I haven’t read We Need to Talk About Kevin’ and also because I read almost exclusively books for young people for work, I’ve started to read a lot of crime in my spare time, ie something that I would never, ever take on in the course of my job.

• The grim stats: how many submissions do you get per week (or year)? And how many new authors do you take on?

We get over 10,000 submissions a year which can feel quite onerous but we work hard to respond to every one. I’ve had a bit of a bumper 12 months and taken on about five new authors but the year before that, it might only have been one.

• Do you like your authors to tweet & blog & Facebook … or do you really not care?

It’s important to publishers that authors are active in the digital space but I have also had publishers rap my knuckles for what authors are saying there!! I’m careful to tell authors exactly when something is safe to Tweet or blog – if we’ve just done a film deal for example, we wouldn’t want the producer’s press release scooped by the author’s tweet.

• Do you secretly have a book in you? And if so, tell us more …

Blimey, no way!

Penny is one of the agents appearing at this year’s Festival of Writing. Each year we invite literary agents who are hungry for new talent and who represent some of the biggest and best agencies in the business. Don’t miss your chance to book a one-to-one session with an agent of your choice.

Sam Copeland, Rogers, Coleridge & White
Sam is an agent at Rogers, Coleridge & White. Sam’s first job in publishing was at Curtis Brown, where he started in 2001.  He left in 2006 to help create the Robinson Literary Agency, and joined Rogers, Coleridge and White in 2009 when the two companies merged.   He is building an extremely diverse list, representing writers of both literary and commercial fiction, science fiction, children’s (11+), serious and not-so-serious non-fiction.  In fact, he is happy to look at anything but self-help and business books.

• When did you come into agenting? What did you do before? And why agenting?

My first job in agenting was ten years ago, when I started at Curtis Brown. After 5 years, I moved to Rogers, Coleridge and White. Before that I was a  bookseller, cleaner, market trader, door to door salesman, bar man etc etc etc… And why agenting? Because on it’s day, it’s the best job in the world.

• Have you ever opened a new manuscript, read a single page, and thought ‘I’m going to end up making an offer on this’? What was it about that page which excited you?

Yes. Recently actually. It was original, brilliantly written and completely startling.

• What’s your pet peeve on covering letters?

Pet peeve on covering letters? All the usual. To be honest, there’s a lot of focus placed on covering letters by writers (and agents) BUT REALLY, IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. Couple of lines on who you are, a few lines about the book. Don’t fret about it too much, don’t try too much (the more you try the more you’re likely to mess up..). And pick the right agent. It’s all in the writing of the book at the end of the day.

• Do you need good personal chemistry with your authors?

You don’t need good chemistry, but it certainly helps. Many of my authors have become close friends.

• If you weren’t an agent, what else would you be?

I am utterly unqualified to do anything apart from being a literary agent. Oh – actually – maybe an astronaut.

Sam is one of the agents appearing at this year’s Festival of Writing. Each year we invite literary agents who are hungry for new talent and who represent some of the biggest and best agencies in the business. Don’t miss your chance to book a one-to-one session with an agent

So, I went to an amazing school and my English teacher is a published childrens author, who was recently nominated for an award for his latest book. He was like my montor and helped my creative writing grow. 

And like all cloudies, at some point, I would like to have my work published. I decided to get back in touch with him. He is very pleased to hear that I am writing my first novel. 

Although, he is up to his neck in his own writing and cannot offer me any editorial adivce, he has offered to give me some advice on how to get published and all things related to writing a novel.

I stare at the blank page saying 'new email' with his email address at the top, and think, what can I ask him? What advice can I gleen from him that I cannot find on pages about getting published. I want to ask questions that aren't so obvious, or where I can find the answer from a book.

In my activity stream, EmmaD has suggested that I ask about the writing process. How does my former English teacher start and finish a book. What things would he like to have known when he was in an unpublished author's shoes. How did he attract his agent - even though I don't know whether he has an agent.

So my question is, what would you ask? What burning questions do you have? Respond, and I'll ask him.

David Headley, DHH Literary Agency
DHH was founded by David Headley in 2008, based in London, they represent an eclectic range of best-selling and award-winning authors, including novelists, historians, short-story writers and children’s authors. David created the D. H. H. Literary Agency—an agency whose main objective is to provide a more attentive and individual representation for our authors. They wish to help re-launch established writers as well as nurturing debut authors. They are currently only looking to represent fiction writers.

•  When did you come into agenting? What did you do before? And why agenting?

I became an agent in 2008 when I took on my first client. I decided to become an agent because I felt I was in a unique position to help unpublished writers.  As the owner of Goldsboro Books, a much admired independent bookshop, with a good relationship with many editors in all the major publishing houses, and with a commercial eye for great writing, it was an obvious step for me.

•  What sort of books do you love?

I love books that are written well but are a little bit different. I have been accused of liking books with a visceral voice and I am sure that I do but I like a unique voice.

•  Have you ever opened a new manuscript, read a single page, and thought ‘I’m going to end up making an offer on this’? What was it about that page which excited you?

Honestly, no I haven’t but I have read a page and thought there is real promise here. I do like manuscripts with amazing first lines and the fact that the author has clearly thought about how to grab the reader from the very beginning.

•  What’s your pet peeve on covering letters?

I’m quite forgiving so I don’t get too annoyed with silly mistakes on covering letters although I’d wish for a perfect one. I really dislike my name being someone else’s i.e. Dear Ms Smith..  I also don’t wish to read the synopsis in the covering letter if it is also attached.

•  Of the authors who are not on your list, who would you most love to represent? (You can pick a few names.)

There are a number of authors that I wish I represented but I won’t mention names because I see them often in my bookshop and don’t want to embarrass them. They are great writers and I am always looking forward to reading their new books.

•  Are you most drawn to beautiful writing? Or a wonderful plot? Or a stunning premise? Or what?

I am drawn by all of those. Mostly, I would say that I am drawn by the voice or narrative. I just want to be told a wonderful story that I don’t want to stop reading.

•  Have you ever surprised yourself by representing an author whose work you had assumed you wouldn’t like?

I only represent authors whose work I like so this would never happen to me. I would never represent an author if I were in any doubt about their writing.

•  Tell us how you like writers to submit work to you. And how you’d like them not to submit work.

If you mean submissions, I make that quite clear on my website. I like a covering letter, which tells me about the person submitting, a brief synopsis (one page) and the first three chapters. Some people choose not to read my guidelines and in that case they are showing to me that they can’t follow simple instructions which is a concern.

•  Where do most of your authors come from? The slushpile? Personal recommendation? Or what?

I really dislike the term slushpile. I have taken on a couple of authors from submissions to the agency. Mostly, authors I represent are either recommendations or those who I have met at writing courses /conferences.

•  Do you need good personal chemistry with your authors?

It obviously helps if there is personal chemistry and I have found that good friendships can be formed. Ultimately, there has to be trust on both sides from the very beginning and from that foundation a good working relationship is formed.

•  What’s the most important part of your job? Is it editing/shaping the manuscript? Selling the manuscript? Or supervising the publication process?

All of those are most important to me and I can’t say one is more important than the other. All of those processes affect my author and their career and as such I feel I must do all to the best of my ability.

•  Do you get involved in shaping an author’s career?

Of course. Without my author’s I don’t have a job so I do my best to nurture and support all of my authors.

•   If you had one bit of advice to give to new writers, what would it be?

Write the best book you can. It is as simple as that.

•  Are e-books going to bring about fundamental changes to the publishing industry? What would you say if one of your authors wanted to e-publish their next book, cutting out conventional publishers altogether?

E-books have already brought about fundamental change. There are more self-published authors than there has ever been. There would have to be a very good reason to by-pass conventional publishers for me to agree with my author’s decision. I still have a large amount of faith in conventional publishers.

•  Have you enjoyed reading more since becoming an agent? Or are there times it feels like a chore?

Reading is never a chore and I have always been a voracious reader but, obviously, some writing is better than others and I find it difficult to read badly written books.

•  The grim stats: how many submissions do you get per week (or year)? And how many new authors do you take on?

On average we receive about 40 manuscripts a week and we take on less than one percent. It doesn’t mean that the majority of books submitted aren’t good enough to be published but that they just didn’t grab us enough to want to represent it.

•  What Unique Selling Points do you have as an agent or agency?

We are a new agency with a passion for our authors. Our objective is to provide a more attentive and individual representation. With my background in bookselling I feel I have a far better commercial understanding of what readers are buying.

•  Do you like your authors to tweet & blog & Facebook … or do you really not care?

Yes, I care more than ever that my authors do all of those because it is more important than ever that authors find their readers. With more and more books being published, publishers having smaller marketing budgets, less books being promoted in the media, these are ways an author can reach a wider audience.

•  Which is most important: the editor, the publisher or the advance?

All are incredibly important but for me it is the editor that makes the difference. A good editor will offer a good advance and champion the writer within the publisher.

•  If you weren’t an agent, what else would you be?

I’d continue to be a bookseller. I couldn’t do anything other than work with books.

•  Do you secretly have a book in you? And if so, tell us more …

No. I have no desire to write.

 

David is one of the agents appearing at this year’s Festival of Writing. Each year we invite literary agents who are hungry for new talent and who represent some of the biggest and best agencies in the business. Don’t miss your chance to book a one-to-one session with an agent of your choice.

This year bookings for the Festival are running at their highest ever levels and we’re expecting to have a sell-out crowd by the time it gets to September. So we want to do what we can to introduce our stellar agent cast list to you, the Festival goers – and indeed to the thousands of WW clients who would love to come to the Festival but can’t. So we’re going to be running a series of ‘Meet the Agents’ blogs giving you the chance to learn about the agents we’ve got coming to the event.

This is your chance to learn about individual agents – their likes, dislikes and their take on the industry.

We’ll be running these blogs in a loose interview format and plan to post a few a month until the event. So keep your eyes peeled!

After a, quite frankly, crappy few days running up to going back to work, I was feeling a little down this evening. And then I received this email:

Dear Ms. Waller,
Congratulations, we would like to use your story, “When the Moon Hangs Fat” for an upcoming edition of either Dark Moon Digest, our horror quarterly, or Dark Eclipse, our monthly emag. If this works for you, I will get you an edited copy of your story here soon. Thank you for your submission to Dark Moon, and I look forward to your reply.

Can I squee? SQUEEEE!!!!!!!!

My first story, in print! Okay, so it's only a short story, but it's a start...

I can undertake my first proper day back at work (tomorrow - today I just prepared) with a smile on my face now!