But I guess it’s like most jobs; one needs to understand how things work. A salesman, for example, needs to not only know his product well, but he also needs to understand the procedures around booking meetings with clients, how to cold-call, how pushy he can be, etc. Unfortunately I think a lot of writers think that writing a sellable book is the only part of the craft. But, really, it’s only half of it. Being able to market oneself to the people that matter is a whole other art, and I reckon a lot of terribly good writers never get the coverage they should because they don’t learn that side of things.

Of course, everything is still subjective – based on an agent’s opinion which may have been influenced by other factors the writer can’t control. But hey, almost every aspect of life is like that to some degree – perhaps it’s just the intensely personal nature of trying to sell a novel one loves that highlights that even more so.

I have had two distinct phases in my relationship with agents. The first phase was long ago when I didn’t really know what I was doing, didn’t understand the craft of query writing, and didn’t know the value of personalising any communication to an agent. (But I did know enough only to deal with agents who said they handled my kind of material and to follow their query instructions.) For one work, I sent 54 queries to agents and got back just six, pro forma replies. The rest just ignored me.

The second phase is recent, and comes after I made a study of how to write a query letter and a synopsis. Now I get a response from (almost) every agent I query and most of them are even polite and personal.

It’s nice that I’ve now learned the secret handshakes and can get agents to talk to me. But it wasn’t my writing that improved so much in that time, just my knowledge of the procedures. It is a terrible shame that it has to be that way. What’s more, it makes me suspect that I haven’t yet learned that very special secret handshake that will get me represented.

One of the problems is that people don’t research a lot before they send, often. They’ll find a list of agents and start sending, without actually researching whether those agents deal with their type of fiction, what their response times are like, what sales they’ve made, whether they’re trustworthy etc. There’s plenty of places online where people can find that information out. Absolute Write is one good place.

At the agents’ end of the scale, they make a living off selling books to publishers, so obviously they want the best they can find. I’m sure some of them could improve their communication skills, but I honestly think those are among the minority and easily weeded out by a little research on the writer’s part.