From 2018 to 2019 I approached twenty-one agents for my novel “Honeysuckle Rage and the Everlasting Tree.” I got eleven rejections. The rest didn’t respond at all. Disheartened, I left it for a year. Then I gave in to internal pressure and relabelled the genre as YA.
I’d never thought of it as YA. The heroine and narrator is fifteen but that doesn’t necessarily make it YA. And anyway, the next in the series was going to be narrated by her mother. I didn’t think that would necessarily work in a YA series. But ultimately, I didn’t think the book (or the series) was hard-ass enough to qualify as YA. This is no Hunger Games. There are no apocalypses, no modern day issues, not much about being a teenager. It isn’t geared towards teenage-ness.
Genre for me has always been a problem. So has topic, theme and Writing What People Want. The Honeysuckle Rage series is about relationships between oddball characters, mostly women. It’s lightweight but is grounded in the serious business of a war developing in a portal world that will affect Earth. It’s set in a fictional village in England that is gorgeous. The portal world is more gorgeous than anything you can imagine – every time you go there, it’s like entering your best ever dream.
How do I sell this?
I know agents really want Dark Themes. They want Teenage Crises (for YA). They want GOT (for fantasy). They want violence. They want suffering. They want people being horrible to each other. As a result, they’re never going to want my book. And yes, I could self-publish it, as I’ve self-published everything else. But everything else has sunk without a trace. I have not-bad books out there that no one has ever read. I have created worlds no one has ever entered. I don’t have the money or common sense to promote these books. There is a lack in me, an inability, a terror of the world. It’s this that makes me a not-bad writer, I think, my hidden strangeness. But it also renders me utterly unknown.
So. A literary agent it is, then. But how to get their attention? I’ve once again started looking for an agent for this particular book. Six agents in six weeks. Three rejections, three no-responses. This is not the first time I’ve looked for an agent. This is not the first book I’ve tried to get published the traditional way. There was a time that there was no other option but trad-publishing. Those were the days when I could barely afford to feed myself, let alone spend money on stamps to send a hard copy to someone AND pay for return postage. Those were the days when I’d have to TYPE the package (cover letter, synopsis, first three chapters) manually. One agent invited me around to his house and told me he’d just spent £50 on flowers (about £186 today). This was the mid-eighties. £50, to me, was two weeks dole. Another agent only agreed to see me because her mother attended an art class where I was the artist’s model. This same agent then lost my one and only manuscript. The novel was lost forever. I’d spent years on it and it was gone. 100k words thrown in the trash.
It’s a lot easier sending your proposal to agents by email these days. It’s also a lot easier for them to hit that rejection button. The last rejection email I got arrived less than 24 hours after I’d submitted my package. They’re not even reading them. They have secretaries or assistants or slaves or whatever who spend their lives just sending out rejection notes. Or perhaps it’s on auto-reply. They tell people to put the word “submission” in the subject line and then the algorithm knows to hurl back an instant rejection.
I don’t really know where to go with this. People are forever telling me, rather patronisingly, that I must persist. I mustn’t give up. But the humiliation of being an unknown, unread, unloved author just goes on and on and on. At what point does one break? At what point does one give up? I’ve been trying for decades and I STILL don’t know whether my work gets rejected because it’s crap or because I’m just unlucky. It can’t be both because crap is published every day. Clearly I’m writing the wrong kind of crap. And if it’s actually brilliant, then no one has noticed!
Is it any wonder I’ve turned into a some kind of nutcase that can barely leave the house? I’m ashamed of my failure, yet I go on. This weekend I’ll send out three more submission to be ignored or hurled back in my face and spend the rest of the week trying not to slide into the pit of despair.
I wish I could end this on a more positive note but I really want to make it quite clear that for every fabulous success story, there is someone like me. I don’t believe I’m the only one. Or perhaps I am. Perhaps all the other “only ones” have already made it. Success comes to writers younger and younger and younger. I’m too old to be interesting anymore. It’s nigh on impossible to remain cheerily positive about finding success when you’ve hunted for it for nearly 40 years.
Pardon me while I go and drink another bitter cup of self-pity.
