Slush

With no contacts in the industry I have to send my stuff, unsolicited, to agents where it will sit on their slush pile and hopefully, eventually, get read. Some agents receive more than 200 submissions a week.

I get the Writer’s Handbook 2005 and start counting. There are 162 agents/agencies in the UK and of those, 67 don’t deal with commercial fiction, leaving 95 places I can approach. Most agents want you to send them your work exclusively or they won’t read it. So if I wait for each agent to reply before I send another script out, and if they take an average of 6 weeks to reply, the whole process could take 10 years and 11 months. Bugger that, I think, and decide to send three out at a time. See how it goes.

I make a list of agents who represent thriller writers and writers I admire. I choose 3 and send off letter, synopsis, biography and first three chapters. Kiss each envelope in the Post Office and work out that if I have to approach all 95 agents it’s going to cost me £201.02 in postage (second class), paper, toner and envelopes. That’s a weekend in Berlin.