One of the activities I’ve most enjoyed since becoming a published author, is giving talks to book-reading groups. Many hundreds of new novels will have made their appearance in the bookshops since my publication date of October 2005, so it was a nice surprise to be invited by Gail at the Sutton Coldfield Waterstones to join the group that meets there once a month on Wednesday mornings, because they’d been reading my book.

It was a lively group with lots of interesting comments and questions, and I’m hoping that I didn’t rattle on a bit too much - once I get started on talking about writing novels and all the other stuff that comes with it (getting published, and then the marketing side of things) there’s no stopping me!. So it was probably just as well that I had to leave them early and get back to work.

This morning at Waterstones, I was asked if I’d approached publishers directly, or went through an agent.

Even before I’d received the definite rejection from Orion, I knew that I had to start hunting for an agent again – so I went out and bought the 2003 version of The Writers & Artists Year Book.

Apart from the addition of a few new literary agents, the most useful development was the occasional invitation to make a first submission via email. Hurray!! I thought, that’ll cut down on postage costs (high) ,and the length of wait for any response (long). It was certainly encouraging to get swift responses from the ones I approached, most of which were encouraging - ‘your book sounds unusual and thought-provoking’ and ‘interesting and original’ (phrases like these are food and drink for a struggling author).

Equally encouraging were requests to see the synopsis and first 3 chapters, and even more encouraging, the few who took things to the next stage and asked for the whole manuscript to be sent. (Yes, sent. By post. Freshly printed pages packed into large jiffy bags with return postage.)

In spite of several encouraging ‘starts’, I was no nearer to persuading an agent to take me on. The nearest I came to that happy situation was a useful correspondence with Leigh Pollinger from Pollinger Ltd. Before that, I thought that I’d cut it as ruthlessly as possible, from 120,000 to 114,00 words.

But when I followed Leigh’s advice to remove one extraneous story-thread and try to reduce the word count to 80,000, I went though the whole manuscript again, removing any paragraph, sentence, phrase or word that wasn’t making an essential contribution to the novel. eventually, I managed to get the word-count down to 87,000, and I know that the book is much stronger than it would have been without this useful advice.

My first contact with Pollinger’s was made in early June 03, and it wasn’t until early February 04, after he’d seen a couple of re-writes, that I was given his final conclusion: this was either ‘the right book, with the wrong title, or the wrong book, with the right title.’ Although I was grateful for the time he’d spent on reading through and commenting on my work, I was beginning to lose heart.

If I wasn’t ever going to find an agent, then I’d need to approach a publisher without one.