SITTING BY THE PHONE

An agent has been alerted - will she call?

After the terrifying ordeal of simply visiting literary agent websites, I asked Belinda, the lovely children’s publisher at the ABC if she could recommend an agent. I knew generally she was no fan so if there was one she liked, it might be OK. She came up with one she had really enjoyed working with, “she’s so supportive of her authors and I find her a dream to work with”. Her name was Selwa Anthony.

Refreshing Change

I took a look at her website and really liked what I saw. It was immediately all about her authors and their books. The home page was all their latest releases. Then there was information about the acheivement awards for her authors. Right at the bottom was a line saying unfortunately she couldn’t receive unsolicited manuscripts and couldn’t give out contact details. That’s all you need, not pages of rules about strict submissions and what not to do.

Have a look for yourself.

Belinda said she’d call her and make an introduction. Surely, I thought it would help being introduced by a publishers who is actually publishing my work. Got an email after a couple of days saying Selwa would contact me in ‘about a week’s time’. Such agony in such a short phrase. How much can I read into that???

Possible ways  Selwa  responded to Belinda that we can eliminate right now:

• ‘OMG Bruno Bouchet, he’s one of my favourite authors, I’d LOVE to represent him!’
  
• ‘Piss off Belinda, you’ve already fobbed off enough losers onto me, I’m not taking on any more.
  
• ‘I’ll get onto when I get back from the Bahamas in July.’
  
• ‘Give me a week to stitch up some film deals for his existing books so I can really impress him.’
  

Responses that might have actually happened:

• ‘Look I can’t take anyone else on now, but I’m happy to have a chat with him.’
  
• ‘Mmm, sounds interesting, I can’t see him this week, but next week’s a possibility.’
  
• ‘If I call him will you finally send me the contract for [insert Selwa author name here]. Fine I’ll do it’
  

I’m hoping for option 2 and so sitting by the phone. However I am holding no hope out. I’m into zero expectations mode on this one and anything other than getting a call in three weeks saying ‘I’m really too busy is a bonus’.

Nervous Nelly

In the emails with Belinda I totally betrayed my ridiculous nervous nelly current condition. The manuscript for Lab Rats 2 is with her (submitted on time in March). It’s about 3000 words more than verbally agreed, but I was hoping she might say not to hack back further. The contract was also supposed to be somewhere in the ABC system.  In emails above, Belinda mentioned she was handing it over to an editor, Mark McLeod ‘so you’ll get an answer soon’.

I slammed on the panic button and screamed. ‘An answer’ what does she mean by that? I emailed back and she said she meant in terms of ‘how’ we go ahead, meaning the length, the title.

Good grief I know words are important to me, but I need to learn not to throw myself out of the nearest window on just two words, ‘an answer’.