Diary of a Debut Novelist

Find out how taking part in writing competitions has helped me and other authors secure publishing deals. Join us on Wednesday 24th February at 7pm. 

The Literary Consultancy Online Writers’ Day

Hear my reading of Kololo Hill as part of this fab Writers’ Day on 13th March. This event has a special significance because I won the The Literary Consultancy Pen Factor Live competition in 2017 after pitching and reading from Kololo Hill!

Jericho Writers Getting Published Month

Jericho Writers offer a range of help and support for unpublished writers. I was lucky enough to go to their York Festival of Writing in 2018 where I cam runner-up in the Best Opening Chapter competition. It’s such a thrill to take part in their Success Stories event on Saturday 27th March at 7pm!

Kololo Hill launch!

Last week was the launch of Kololo Hill. I cannot describe how wonderful it’s been and the publication day itself on 18th February was one of the best days of my life. I’ve had so many lovely messages from readers, writing community and book community, I’m overwhelmed! I spent most of the day on social media but managed to celebrate later with afternoon tea followed by a virtual party with writing friends. The night before, I had an amazing launch event hosted by Sarah Shaffi and organised by Picador. Sarah was brilliant and made me feel totally at ease. Despite the challenges of lockdown, I’ve had the most wonderful week!

Where to find me…

I’ve enjoyed to some lovely people about Kololo Hill. You can read and listen to my interviews below.

Babble Show video

An interview with Pamela Power

The Literary Sofa including a piece I wrote on my research trip to Uganda and a wonderful review for Kololo Hill!

A radio interview with Ellie Kumar

An interview with the SWWJ

The post Kololo Hill launch and Spring literary events – join me! appeared first on Neema Shah Author.

1. The Third Magpie is accessible literature but when querying, at a little over 500 pages long (137K words) it is too long for many publishers to consider as a debut novel. They take on a book assessing the financial risks as well as the literary merits. It is expensive to print and market books, so I had a choice, reduce the word count by a third or self-publish.
2. Self-publishing isn’t an easy options and it isn’t the natural territory for literary novels. Most successful self-publishers are based in one or two particular genres. But once I found out how hard it is to sell literary through the traditional publishing, I thought, ‘What have I got to lose?’ I knew I had both the time and the support to deal with all the other aspects of self-publishing that is usually handled by an agent and/or publisher.
3. Most of the early days were spent on research, what needs to be done and in what order. Things like, buying and registering an ISBN, comparing printing options and costs, learning how to typeset both for digital and physical copies, employing an editor and a cover designer; only once this had been done, did we set about producing the book.
4. When you traditionally publish you hand over control and some of the rewards to the publisher and they take on the promotion of your novel. It is in their interests to sell as many as possible as quickly as possible, in order to cover the outlay. In self-publishing, it is all down to you. You keep control and the rewards, but, you finance it all and bear all the risks.
5. Unlike the traditional publishers, who need to see a quick return on an investment, when you self-publish you may not see any profits for a long time. Go in with your eyes open and understand, this is a marathon not a sprint. Allow yourself the right to make some mistakes, learn from them. Take advice from those who have gone before you but be wary of those who offer you instant success, at a price. Reviews may be limited, you may even face some hostility for self-publishing, but keep in mind the concept of self-publishing – or at least taking on board the financial risk of your novel – was commonplace before the 20th century.
6. As things stand, a traditional publishing deal can offer many advantages, but given the technologies available to all, the coming century will inevitably see changes on how people read and most of all, how writers publish. Kindle Direct Publishing has been a game changer, but there are other options appearing too; raise funds for a print run via a Kickstarter event, publish chapters at a time on WattPad or become an Instagram writers/poets and gather a fan base, By it’s very nature, self-publishing opens doors to those for whom the traditional option is a difficult option to crack. A computer has no interest in the colour of your skin, your educational background, you age or sexual orientation. It can be a freeing experience to know you get to publish exactly what you imagined when sitting at a desk for the first time. Maybe not everyone will read it, but it will always be your book baby.

About The Third Magpie

Caring teacher and loving husband, Finn tolerates daily humiliation to be with Sophie, the woman he loves. Fragile & naturally compliant he must summon all his courage to survive the system. Despite the injustice, they dream of a normal life, where liberty and identity are not subverted by ever tightening restrictions.When a powerful politician requests that Finn tutor his daughter, it seems like a change of fortune, but in New Albany, every opportunity comes at price.

How far must Sophie go to save the man she loves?

For fans of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, ‘VOX’, ‘1984’, and other speculative fiction, ‘The Third Magpie takes the reader into a terrifyingly plausible world where a wristband identifies you as different, restricting your job opportunities, your movement, and even who you can marry. It is a society where propaganda masks extremism that threatens your very existence.

About M.S. Clements

Of Anglo-Spanish heritage, M.S. Clements grew up in Exeter, Devon. After gaining a degree in Economics and Spanish, Clements moved to London and trained for a PGCE at The Institute of Education.  She continues to run a Spanish club for primary aged girls at a local school and tutors privately. M.S. Clements has published short stories and poetry both online and in print, and is a founding member of @Virtwriting, an online writers’ group. Her debut novel The Third Magpie was published in 2020.

Thank you so much for sharing your tips M!

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The waiting game

There will be waiting. Lots of it. Weeks, months and possibly even years. From the writers I’ve sent, there are some who’ve sent out submissions and received offers within a week or two but they are most likely the exception rather than the rule. So keep busy and keep away from the ‘Refresh email’ button. (Also why hasn’t someone invented an app that sounds an alarm every time a writer hits refresh on their emails during submission and tells them to step away from the inbox)? Start a new writing project or catch up on all the great films, TV and books you’ve not had the time to watch/read.

Getting a request for a full manuscript

If you get a request for a full manuscript, make sure your novel is ready to send out straight away. Make sure you’ve checked all the spelling and grammar before you even send your submission out, so that the agent isn’t kept waiting. I also let all the agents who had my submission know when I had a request for the full. This is because if you get an offer of representation, things can move very fast and they’ll want to be kept in the loop on developments.

At this point, I’ll be honest, I thought ‘Well, they’ve requested the full, they’ll probably come back very quickly now’. And sometimes they do. I’ve heard of agents reading manuscripts overnight, in fact. But the more likely scenario is that they’ll take some time to come back to you. If we think about the full manuscripts agents read as well as responding to initial submissions, not to mention the work they do with their existing clients, imagine how long an agent might need to read a full manuscript. I wished I’d realised this upfront, it would have made things a lot less stressful. So I’d suggest that you don’t chase a full request for at least 2-3 months, unless you’ve had an offer in the meantime.

Dealing with rejection

It’s almost a certainty that you’ll get at least one rejection (if not, you should probably write a book about your secret, so that you can retire a millionaire from all of us writers who’d happily buy it). This is part and parcel of submitting and it can be down to all sorts of things from the fact the agent has something similar on their books to not being sure about how to edit the novel to get it to the place they think it needs to be. An agent needs to love your novel, they’ve got to sell it to other people and if they reject your novel, it’s worth remembering that. You need someone who is going to champion your book as if it was his or her own work. So it’s important to be in the right mindset when submitting.

I actually found not hearing from agents for ages as difficult as the rejections to be honest. At least with a rejection you know either way. But try not to give up hope. It only takes one person to say yes and change everything.

Sending more submissions

One thing you can definitely do when you get a rejection is move straight onto the next agent on your list and send out a new submission. It’ll keep you busy and make you feel like you have some control.

Feedback from agents

Sometimes with rejections, agents will still give some feedback (although more often than not, it’ll be a standard or ‘form’ rejection). Consider whether you want to take it on board or not before you send out to more agents. Similarly, you may get a ‘revise and resubmit’. This is a big deal! It means the agent sees potential in your novel and cares enough to write you some feedback. Again, decide whether you want to take the feedback on board. It’s tempting to think that the agent, as an industry professional, must be ‘right’. But it’s only one take on your novel. You may want to take it in that direction or decide it’s not right for you. That said, if two or more agents give the same specific feedback, it might be worth considering.

And there you have it. I hope these blog posts have been helpful. Do get in touch if you have any other questions and I’ll try my best to answer. I’ll also have more blog posts soon, including one on what to do when you get an offer of representation. Subscribe to my blog to get the latest.

The post Advice on finding a new agent – part 3 appeared first on Neema Shah Author.

How do I keep track of agent submissions?

I created a spreadsheet (yes, it was every bit as exciting as that sounds) with the following columns:

• Agent and contact details
• Agency name
• Key details about them (including whether they covered different rights, how many agents they had etc.)
• Who they represented, genres covered, anything else I could include in the letter that I’d learnt from my research such as event appearances or online interviews
• Date letter was sent
• How long to wait before following up (usually on their website)
• Date of rejection (there were a few of these…)
• Date of any full manuscript requests
• Date of follow up chases/responses

How many agents should I submit to?

It’s best not to send your submission to every agent on your list at once. The number of agents you write to in your first round will depend on how much feedback you’ve had previously. I submitted to 10 agents initially (and a whole lot more after the rejections started coming in…) because I’d already had some early feedback on my submissions through festival one-to-ones. If you’ve not had any kind of feedback from those in the industry before submitting (such as agents, publishers, editors or competition judges), then it may be worth starting with 5-8 max and testing the water.

What do I include in an agent submission?

Most of the time, your agent submission will consist of three things:

• Cover letter
• First chapters/extract from your novel
• Synopsis

The agent’s website will usually tell you how to format and what to send for the chapters and synopsis. I’m going to focus on the cover letter in this post but you can also find info on formatting online, such as Jericho Writers.

Your letter should be formally written (so no ‘Yo, Agent X, how are you?’, sorry) but also give a hint of what you’re like as a person and a writer. That means, write in a way that feels comfortable for you and that best showcases your work. This is the structure I used for my letters:

Salutation (para 1): ‘Dear First Name’ (not Dear Agent, personalise wherever possible)

Brief intro (para 2): ‘I’m sending you the first three chapters/10,000 words and synopsis of my novel Kololo Hill’, followed by a one line elevator pitch.

Some people don’t think that the first line is necessary, but I think it helps to show that you’ve done your homework about exactly what they want. The elevator pitch is the short 1 line pitch of your novel, including key character, situation/setting and conflict/hook. You can see mine on my novel page and I’ll try and write more about these in future too.

Longer description (para 3): This is where you can go into a bit more detail about the novel, similar to the blurb you see on the back of novels. To give the agent a quick understanding of your novel, you could also add a line or two including the following:

• Word count (rounded up to the nearest ‘000)
• Genre (this one can be tricky to define, but most agents like to get a feel for how you think the book would be marketed)
• Key themes (this isn’t essential)
• Why I wrote the novel – where I included details about my East –African Asian background, because they were relevant to the novel. You don’t have to include this section, and in fact, many agents won’t be interested unless it’s clearly an angle that could be used in pitching to publishers and marketing later down the line, so only include it where it’s useful.

Why I’m writing to the agent (para 4): Make the agent feel special and make yourself stand out. Why this agent? Is it because they’ve recently sold books that are similar to yours? Perhaps you read an interview or heard them speak at an event. Include a line or two about this (but don’t make it sound like you’ve stalked them, I’m guessing agents don’t like that)!

Here are a few more things to consider:

Your letter should be shorter than War and Peace

3-4 paragraphs max e.g. the sort of thing you could fit on an A4 page without reducing the font size to 2!

The primary focus should be on your novel

I’m sure there will be plenty of people who would be fascinated about the time I tripped over a dog in the school playground and got concussion, but an agent isn’t one of them. Some agents like to know a little bit about you, such as where you’re from, your interests etc., but you’ll know whether this is the case from all that research you’ve done. So unless your background is linked to your novel in some way, it’s usually not necessary to include anything else.

Personalise, personalise, personalise

No, this doesn’t mean adding jpegs of glittery stars (unfortunately), but it’s worth including at least one line on why you’ve chosen this particular agent. Some agents will get thousands of submissions each month, so think about how you can help your letter stand out (for the right reasons).

I hope this is useful. There’s a lot to take into consideration and it’ll take a while to put it all together concisely but I think it all helps to get you that one bit closer to landing an agent.

I’m going to write more blog posts on finding an agent including how not to go stir crazy whilst waiting for responses and what to do if you get an offer of representation so why not subscribe to receive notifications whenever my blog is updated? In the meantime, good luck!

The post Advice on finding an agent – part 2 appeared first on Neema Shah Author.

Where to start your agent search

A great place to start is the acknowledgement sections of books you like. I wouldn’t worry about the genre too much because agents change their preferences from time to time. At this stage, you’re just making a shortlist.

The Bookseller lets you look at a selected number of articles for free when you register as a guest or you might be able to access it through a library. Look out for recent book deals.

If you’re active on social media already, then you can usually see authors’ agents from their bios. It’s not possible for everyone but you might be able to attend events to learn more about different agents. I found the Words Away salon, London Writers’ Café and the London Writers’ Club useful for this as they often have agents as guest speakers, there may be something similar in your area. Writing events are also a good place to try. Attending the York Festival of Writing 2017 helped me learn more about different agents and I had a 1-2-1 with an agent there.

Underrepresented writers can also try organisations such as Spread the Word – I was able to get early feedback on my submission package from an agent through them. The Literary Consultancy has a host of useful links to the partner organisations that might be useful.

Some people look at the Writers and Artists Yearbook but I know that the print version of this can get out of date quite quickly as agents move or change their preferences. There are some online services where agent and agency information is collated and updated. I used a paid one for a month or so but it’s no longer available. I do think it’s important to take responsibility for your own information on agents though, things move very fast in the industry so double check everything.

What to look for in an agent

There are some questions you’ll want to consider, which will depend on your personal circumstances and preferences. Here are some things to think about before you start:

• Do you want to be part of a bigger agency or a small independent agency?
• Do they have writers and genres that are similar to yours? How many clients do they have?
• Do they handle rights directly (this includes film, TV, foreign and translation rights amongst other things, but they may work with a partner or subsidiary rather than managing them in-house)?
• Is the agent high-profile and well established in the industry? If so, are they going to be busy with their bigger clients?
• Are they up-and-coming agents and if so, how much experience do they have so far?
• Do they work editorially with their clients and is this important to you?
• Do they represent genres that you might be interested in writing in later down the line (I think this one’s less important because hell, there’s enough work involved in getting an agent and getting a book or two out there before you contemplate switching things up)!
• In addition, it was important for me to choose an agent who represented people like me – that is underrepresented writers. There were a few agents who only seemed to represent a very particular type of author and I knew I wanted someone with a diverse list.
• At a basic level, you’ll need to look for agencies and agents who are currently open to submissions, which you can check on their websites. Sometimes agents temporarily close their lists for various reasons such as taking time off or attending book fairs. You can find out key information from agency websites.

Research beyond agency websites

Don’t rely on agency websites alone. Now there’s probably a thin line between thorough research and stalking here but try to find a few online interviews, social media posts and videos where agents talk about what kind of authors they’re looking for (did I mention the need to double-check their requirements in case they’ve changed recently?) and also what they like to see in submission letters. As I said above, I attended agent talks too but even if this isn’t possible for you, there’s so much info online now that you should be able to get everything you need through the Internet.

All of this enabled me to understand what the agent was like as a person and whether we’d get on at a basic level. It also highlighted that all agents are different. For example, agents understand that you’re submitting to other agents at the same time so you don’t have to mention it in the letter but there were at least two agents who wanted to be told in the covering letter whether the writer was submitting exclusively to them or not. One of the agents mentioned it on their agency website, the other only mentioned it in passing in an interview, so it pays to check a couple of different places to get a feel for what they like.

I hope this is useful for your first step in finding an agent. I know that all of this sounds like a lot of work and well, let’s just say that there was a lot of swearing and biscuit-eating and hair-pulling (mine, don’t worry). But if you’re serious about your writing – and call me Detective Inspector Shah but I’m guessing you are because you’re here reading this blog – then I think it’s worth spending time on this part. It certainly worked for me as I signed with my lovely agent in 2018. You never know, it could lead to a life-changing decision and one which you need to make quite quickly.

Look out soon for part 2 of my series on finding an agent including writing query letters to agents without more hair-pulling than is absolutely necessary. Sign up to my blog and you’ll be (one of) the first to know!

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