Abhijit Dasgupta, Executive Editor of India Today magazine, tells how he found an agent for his first novel.
Abhijit Dasgupta
There’s no greater fun than being born excitable. That’s me. You can never get me down. I get excited even with failure and I try, and I try, even at the cost of being laughed at. No worries; I would hate to behave like a happy, but serious and steady, frog anyway. Jump around, I say, and time will come when you will see yourself out of that godforsaken slushpit.
Right now, I have no story to tell. But something inside tells me that there is never ever any story in anybody’s mind, anyway. They just cook it up. But I won’t cook up anything; I will just try and make maybe ordinary facts sound interesting and, while I was never into charity or major spontaneous benevolent gestures, if it helps somebody along the way, then so be it.
To begin with, Merry Christmas and here’s wishing all of you a great publishing 2010. And even if you are not into writing, and may be, just happy being an agent, a happy new year to you too.
To begin with, (how many times do you have to say this to make your opening line work, I wonder), I have, I think, a good tale to tell you about agent-hunting. Which is why some of us are here, I guess.
I wrote my two-book 110,000-word Indian reincarnation-romance-historical novel, Three, in 2006 and went shopping for a literary agent in London.
I found one almost immediately. Mid-2007, Bigtime She was enthusiastic, nay, ecstatic, no, no, entranced, with the MS. I felt like an author and started behaving like one. Even when I was signing sundry cheques, I was looking around for a copy of my published book to hand over along with them.
Bigtime She submitted in late 2007 and I carried on being an author, smug in the confidence that she couldn’t fail. Middle 2008, she advised revision. I finished off rewriting another Book 2 (she had no complaints with Book 1) in two months and emailed the attachment renaming it Dying to Return. Revisions were part of the game, I told Jumping Jack, that is, me. They all wanted revisions, said Google. I had by then written around 200,000 words of that MS, 60,000 of which had been summarily turned into junk. Somebody told me the story of Herman Melville. I felt sad that Moby Dick had taken so long to publish but you see, times change and modern Moby Dicks (think my MS) require only one revision. Publication, as I clearly knew, was only a matter of a few months.
And anyway, writing was no great thing for me. I have been at it for various employers for three decades now and the only difference this time was that I was not getting paid for it. Ah, but the cheque would be coming in shortly, She was still most enthused (not entranced any longer, lest you miss a fine cut there).
Then November 2008 happened. It did not affect India much though potatoes started costing more, employers saw reason to sack pageboys and, we went without appraisals and annual increments. It did not matter, I told myself, I was earning enough anyway, and so how could a few thousands matter… the million was waiting out there with Bigtime She, wasn’t it? But She was, like the downturn, moving backwards with her regress meter. From entranced, She had slowly moved to being enthusiastic and finally, by September this year, She was clearly egg-on-the-face. Emails remained unanswered and it was evident, She could not sell.
No, I did not press the panic button. I merely jumped. And jumped and jumped while the sunlight filtering into the dark slushpit now suddenly started vanishing from sight with every movement. This was jumping done bad, jumping slowly going berserk. Eyesight blurred. The frog trying hard to remain focused. Getting glasses changed and stuff like that.
My peers told me that with what was happening in the West, India and China were soon to be world-publishing powers. I said good, thank you, searched the internet, found a few literary agents who had, I guess, upon similar foresight, opened shop. I mailed. They replied within a few weeks (in India, that is very quick, almost lightning speed, by the way) and asked for a look. Out went the attachments. I still haven’t heard from them.
But now I realized that I could do with some seriousness. I tried to remind myself of the endless research I had done for my tome, I saw in my mind’s eye the hours at the writing screen and I remembered of course how She had been entranced by the MS. I shot her email after email, asking what to do. There was just one reply to all of them, “Hang on there, mate…we are in bad times.”
Not me. Frogs are not bats and they don’t enjoy hanging out there, and definitely not upside down without a clue to what would happen next.
So I did the next best thing. Without even giving it any serious, downturn thought, I sacked She. There were too many sackings around anyway but hold, this was my career…someone had to take the flak, not me, if I could help it. In retrospect, I feel sad, traumatized is the word, that I could have acted in the way I did. Sacking She; the One who had believed in the MS turning from frog to prince. But anyway, why wasn’t She replying to my emails and how long would I have wait? No response; worse, not a phrase beyond the form note saying, “Wait, hang on, don’t panic.” Not even a mailed kiss assuring frog that prince was on the way!
But I was in an air crash, well almost, and when you see the ground hurrying up to meet you, you don’t listen to your pilot asking you to fasten your seat belts tighter.
I got rid of the pilot and saved my life, taking the shortest route out. I jumped out of the window. Suddenly, the ground hurried up towards me with decreased acceleration.
And then started a marathon of which I shall remain singularly proud of, regardless of whether this frog becomes prince or not.
Having known what it was like to be agent-hunting two years back, I knew the basic ropes. I Googled three words: historical, multicultural, romance. And sent the same query letter at random to around 600 agents whose names were thrown up by Google first and the various other tools later: Gerard Jones, Writers Yearbook, AAR, Agent Query, Query Tracker, 1000 US Literary Agents… I have lost count and do not remember specifics. If there was one agent who matched even one of the criteria, she or he would be queried. That was a promise I made to myself and I delivered spot on.
Between October and November, I do not remember anything else. Things became so bad that even when I was supposed to be enjoying the next best thing to the sheer pleasure of living itself, I was hunting for the Send button to let go. Lord, yes, it was that pathetic. Even proposed creation of the third kind (I am not talking of writing) became a big, frenetic orgasmic Send.
But let’s get one thing straight before I forget. I told all. I confessed. I made it clear to all those agents who would care to even read: Look, I am a walking, talking rejection slip. I don’t mind another but you send that rejection slip, please. Give me an answer.
They gave their answers (some are still coming in though). Mostly form rejections but some ventured to ask for Bigtime She’s submission lists over two years. All I had was a pathetic list of December 2008 which showed 12 rejections by top UK publishing houses to the original MS. There was nothing for me to show about editors’ responses for the revised novel, now again renamed to Heaven Can Wait.
I asked from Bigtime. No reply. I pleaded. No response. I threatened, albeit politely (if that is possible). It was met with a big ignore (so much for all of you who swear by agent-author contracts and something called law. Let me tell you that those contracts do not mean a thing if at least one party feels that way. They just make you feel good and wanted. Period. The only thing which matters is the 15 per cent but that is only if you are published. If you are not, just forget that signature you signed with Dear Agent and which you thought you would replicate during the elaborate book-signing later. Ask me).
Lauren Abramo of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management was clear that she would definitely love to look at the MS but to be fair to everybody, she wanted to be sure whether I had terminated my relationship with Bigtime. I told her I was Terminator, no confusion about that, and sent her the copy of the contract cancellation mail. She offered to look. Next, she wanted submission lists by Bigtime. Mail to London again. Met with by-now-rock-like Stonehenge, sorry, Stone Hell. I told Lauren that. She may have relaxed her rules there one bit because I did not hear from her then. I took it she was reading. She was. And later, passed with some very sound advice.
I take Lauren’s name only because she the first of a very long line who asked the same questions, requested patience, sobered me up and then read.
Yes, 33 of them requested partials and fulls. I was overwhelmed. Not by the rejections which swamped my computer every hour but by the requests for reads: big names in the US and UK. I could not believe that this was true; why would Karolina Sutton of Curtis Brown and Simon Trewin (both UK) even want to be near a rejected MS? And how did Ayesha Pande of Collins Literary even remember me from last time? And why on earth was Elise Capron of Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency want to read the same thing which she had passed two years back? The revisions, the revisions, I told myself; all of them wanted to see what Bigtime She had suggested and whether it was any better this time.
And something else dawned on me. This talk of the Downturn was exaggerated. Agents were, as they came, happy to read. Which also meant that there was still a market to go shopping to.
No, the waiting did not make me insane. Simply because I did not wait. I continued to query. I did not allow the fire to burn out. If there was one rejection, I sent out three more queries, this time to totally unrelated genre agents. And some actually wanted partials! And still are…
Then one night (always late, very late night, or early morning…I live in India, you see), there was a knock at the computer door. The midnight knock, as we call it. Its only immediate effect was a pause in the Hit Send Syndrome while after a long time, it made me sleep like a human is expected to. Have you ever heard a log snore? Yes, I slept like a log. My dog bitched later that I snored since after a very long interval, he had not got his quota of sleep.
You guessed it right. It was an offer of representation. Date? December 15. Time when it hit my computer? 3.32 a.m. Indian time. Sent from? London. Me doing what at that precise moment in history? Sending.
I will not go into the details of what followed this. A daze, if you wish, parts of which I can merely recall. Following that mail, I have got three more offers, two from the US and one more from the UK while a few of those Roundtable of 33 just stepped aside when I told them listen, I am in a spot of a hurry and do you mind getting alongwith it, please, since I have to take a call fast?
Some like Ayesha, Lauren, Jill Hughes (Maggie Noach Literary Agency, UK), Wendy Goldman Rohm, Laura Susijn, Claudia Young of Greene & Heaton, David Smith (Annette Green Author Agency), Elise Capron, Emily Forland, Janet Silver, Felicity Bryan, Mollie Glick, Irene Goodman Agency, Natasha Fairweather, Heacock Agency, Laura Morris, Sandy Lu, Jamie Coleman of Toby Eady Associates, Yasmin Standen, John Parker, Al Longden, Maggie McKernan Agency, Marc Parent of France, Elaine English, Manie Barron, Jeff Gerecke, Brie Burkeman and Darley Anderson wanted some more time. Ah, wasn’t I a generous man now? Take your time but you see, the first guy among all of you who rings the bell gets it. This was jumping at its confident best. All of them were eventually to pass.
There was so much of the sun at the top of the well now. I actually hummed Lennon.
Four offers of representation stuck. Almost everybody whom I have mentioned passed (some like David Smith finished his read overnight, thanks mate) with very personalized, well-meaning advice, saying that they did not finally “connect” or that they could not rush but my moment of realization was different.
I was, believe me, relieved, yes, thankful with all those rejections. I did not want my offers of representation to grow. I had four too many.
Finally, I fell for Patricia.
Patricia Moosbrugger from Colorado. Doesn’t speak much, if at all, and allows me to jump as much as I want to. Best, she loves historicals, my genre. Also, Google and all those trackers tell you she does not accept email queries. She does. She accepted mine and is now “thrilled” to represent my magnum so-many-times-rejected opus.
I signed with her on December 21.
And just so you know, addiction is such a darned vice that I sent out a query last night too, shortly after mailing my signed contract to Patty.
Call it cheating if you will. But my novel is about an alcoholic widow and a jumpy editor.
The protagonist has to rub off on the author at some point. A lived life fully Life imitating unrequited, unpublished Art.
Yes, make querying an addiction. Break the goddamned rules. Send 1000 queries. One will stick. Or at least, if you are pretty unlucky with a problem of plenty, four will.
But that’s better than nothing. And even better, it’s so much more entertaining.
And, I haven’t told you nothing yet. There remains so much more in those gems of rejections, those asking for time, those finetuning in querying, that long dialogue with Patty before we said yes and of course, those sloppy thank-you-but-I-can’t-you-see to those three others who wanted me but didn’t quite make it…Write in if you want the full story.
It’s an exciting creature, that story, it is.
Visit Abhijit Dasgupta’s blog in India Today, the subcontinent’s biggest English weekly.
Read our Abhijit Dasgupta interview, and visit our Abhijit Dasgupta page.
It is also the most expensive movie ever. With its adoption of modern 3D techniques, Avatar is arguably the most spectacular film of all time.
Published by Punked Books in paperback on 1st December 2009 priced £6.99
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