Sending the novel to the first agent

Well, I have submitted a cover letter, synopsis, and excerpt from the book to the first agent! I haven’t yet decided if I am excited or terrified about having done this. It turns out that writing the novel was actually the easy part. It took about 8 months or so to get the story on paper, then about 3 or 4 months to get through the first and second edit, then about 3 months of procrastination and freaking out about how I condense my 300 page masterpiece (in my mind…) into a 1 to 2 page synopsis. I definitely think the synopsis was harder to write than the novel, but handy to have now completed, now all I have to do is memorize it so that when people ask me “what’s it about?” I might actually have an answer!

The cover letter was a difficult step as well, I read everything I could get my hands on about how to write a cover letter, and the things agents do and don’t want to hear. I found an excellent little book called …. By …. , and after reading it I realised that the draft of the cover letter I had put together was complete and utter rubbish and I had to start again from scratch. So once I finally had all the paperwork together, and had scoured the website of the first agent (I have a few lined up…though I intend to go through them one at a time.) it was time to call them. I wanted to be able to address it to someone, and I had to check whether or not they were currently accepting unsolicited manuscripts (because at this point I am still a no-body who has never been published). The phone call was a little nerve wracking but had nothing on actually putting the stuff in an envelope and the envelope in the post-box. For some reason the physical act of sending it out there into the world to be reviewed and criticized made me feel a little weak at the knees.

Now, I am definitely feeling positive, in the sense that I feel I have produced a good section of my work, and I am happy with the synopsis and cover letter etc. But, I am also trying really hard not to hold my breath, most of my favourite writers were rejected at least once, if not half a dozen times! So I have a list of agents to look at, and I will slowly work down the list in order of preference (eg. I like the writers they represent etc), and if I don’t have any luck there I will try some publishers, and if I still don’t have any luck it will get placed on the bookshelf to be re-written at a later date while I write something else!

So wish me luck – it’s out there in the world now and I just have to be patient!