Does anyone actually bother to send stuff to them any more? Just the thought of printing stuff off and putting it in an envelope and finding a stamp and taking it to the Post Office puts me right off.

I don't understand it really, unless it's a cunning ploy to actually discourage submissions. In which case, I'll bet it's working.

I didn't submit to anyone who wouldn't take email subs. It's really off-putting.

An even more interesting question: does anyone insist on this for novels that will be published as e-books?

It originated around the time when the online sales first began to take off and the postal service was losing market share to package delivery specialists. Posties began to get nervous and agents, as I am sure you all know, are inveterate gamblers.

Over the course of a long night, in which cigars were smoken whiskey drunken, biscuits dunken, a core of influential agents lost heavily in a game of team poker.

With the agents unable to pay, and the posties considerably better at holding their drink, a prolonged negotiation ensued resulting in:
1. A gargantuan fry-up (including fried bread and black pudding)
2. A protectionist job-creation scheme that guaranteed work for the posties as nobody, not even a desperate wannabe author, would pay UPS et al commercial rates to ship a series of thirty-fifty page packages to a near certain rejection
3. A blocked sewer at the junction of three main pipes, two doors down the road (thirty-feet below Mrs Murgatroyd-George's rose garden)

As that area of London is especially well served for sewers, the blockage remained undetected for some months until the winter in 1998 when the sewers became so blocked that they flooded a secret, underground power supply unit installed during the cold war.

Unfortunately, the unit wasn't all _that_ secret and the publishing industry as a whole had been using it to power their presses for decades. Desperate to get their books out, but unable to afford fullprice electricity, they contracted a group of software experts to invent the e-book. Their hope, obviously, was to sell books at a huge mark-up without paying for paper, except they also forgot that software developers are _really_ bad at keeping secrets.

When a code-monkey had too many shandies on a night-out in Bethnal Green, he let slip the secret formula for arranging words on a page. Worse, he did so in the company of a Mr Jester Conraddich (who subsequently changed his name, can't remember what to...).

What had begun as a metaphorical finger in the dyke morphed into a crowbar into a rusty orifice and e-publishing levered open the doors to paper-publishing hell.

Only then did the consortium of gambling agents recognise their masterstroke as the stockpiled paper from their combined slushpiles had not only earned them the willing support of an army of burly postal workers (with astonishingly well muscled backs from hauling sackloads of manuscripts up and down stairs) who had survived not just one, but three recessions and a double-dip without once fearing for their jobs, but also the mountains of paper provided a formiddable building material to reinforce their walls against the wrath of the dying overlords of publishing _and_ provided a convenient source of fuel to warm their (now very well insulated and so thermo-efficient offices) during the long winter months of siege that ensued.

So why, I hear you ask, did any agents ever move away from snail mail submissions?

Simply; the piles were getting too big and neighbours were complaining about the lack of parking around central London as a result.

I write stories for women's mags and feel the same way about those magazines who still want postal submissions.

It's just so idiotic in today's world!

Subbing by email is so much better because it's immediate, easier and you know it's got there okay - you can always send an email to ask if they've received it if you are unsure.

With postal submissions, you just don't know if your story has got to its destination okay, and it's a real pain, not to mention costly - printing it off, finding a suitable envelope - it has to go in big A4 one - and the postage.

I know it's probably cutting off my nose etc, but I refuse to sub to those magazines who don't accept email submissions.

Kat x

lmao, Gaius - brilliant!

With you there, Kat. All snail-mail only agents are right at the very bottom of my list, for when I run out of all other options. Given that most writers probably feel the same way as us, I reckon those anachronistic agents risk only getting the mss that absolutely no one else wants. Idiotic.

I'll court disapproval here by advising caution. The crucial question is surely whether the agent concerned demonstrates success in your field.

There's a danger of jumping to conclusions when the facts are not to hand. Refusal to accept email submissions may well imply an anachronistic attitude. Equally, it may mean that the agent (like me) doesn't like reading stuff on-screen but also doesn't want the expense (ink and paper) and bother of printing every submission out for him/herself.

I'd say that, if the agent's record is right, go the extra mile and do what's asked for. They're the buyer, you're the seller, and the buyer usually holds the best cards. One of the fundamental rules of selling is: 'Find out what the customers want, then help them get it'. Imposing one's own views as to what they ought to be wanting can be less than productive.

On the other hand, they may be plonkers. The trick is to know who's what.

Chris

I would, Emma, if that's what they asked for. Yes, it's annoying (last time around i subbed mainly by email to start), but we all work in different ways.

One of the womag editors explains that she still likes snail mail, as that way the stories get passed around the office with various scribblings on from different readers, and eventually ends up on her desk where she can then easily read the views of several people at once. I can understand wanting to work like that.

I hate reading on-screen myself.

It would be a shame not to sub to a great agent, just for that reason.

Gaius

I tend to agree with chris2. Although email is convenient for the writer, and perhaps also for the agent/publisher for shorts, poetry and sample chapters, I can't imagine anyone wanting to print off the full ms of a novel, or to read it onscreen.

I'm close to sending mine out now, and quite honestly, I don't care - if an agent looks as though they might like my stuff, they can have it via pink spotted shetland pony!

LOL - Astrea

And if you're going to do that, I'll send the paint

<Added>

Remember to buy your stamps now though...