I used the agent's direct email because I figured it had been so long that I was within polite rights to do that.
Very nice letter. Nicest rejection.
Although the internet can feel like the Wild West at times it's here to stay. I get quite weary of people who have a phobia about it.
But I suppose when electric lighting and the horseless carriage arrived it was the same. People are still getting electrocuted and run over but we wouldn't want to be without electricity and cars.

Good news that the following up worked - sounds like you've had a very tiresome time with the tech. Sometimes it's as disastrous as it's useful.

I do know some excellent agencies which still don't take email unsolicited submissions - they work with email MS for everything else, after all, so I wouldn't necessarily take it as their being terrified of the internet.

In my experience it's a) that they hate reading on a PC, as do we all, and also do much of their slushpile reading in the bath and on the bus and b) that a hard-copy-only policy chokes off the mass-submitters who can't be arsed to do their homework about who's interested in what, and at least a few of the nutters.

But, as you say, it's changing. No agent doesn't deal in email for all the rest of their traffic, and the e-reader has made the business of reading electronically on the bus much easier. Though it was a hundred years after Caxton before the scrivening industry finally died, so we've got a while yet, perhaps.

That's very useful to know. Some agents I see are saying email submissions but also want to charge you for paper printing.

I'm a recent member of Authonomy which is quite a terrifying place, basically an interactive slush pile.
A few good writers and good people, a lot of deluded and/or angry people. But it's very interesting experience reading & interacting with people on there because it gives you a good idea of what agents are dealing with at the other end.

As a TV producer there are two questions I hate being asked:
One is 'why is there nothing good on telly anymore? (when there is. Looking forward to first EP of The Fall on BBC2).

The other is 'how do I get into telly'. The answer is more about committment and attitude first & talent second. But no one wants to be told the amount of work, the long hours, the heart ache & the lifelong sacrifices you make.
I'm beginning to see publishing is exactly the same.

I'm also a member of Authonomy and I agree it's a terrifying place. Those forums are something else!

The forums on Authonomy currently have been horrific.
I read but stay out of it.
A lot of very arrogant, nasty types doing a lot of muscle flexing and a lot of cliqueness too from old lags who've been on there for years and seem strangely proud of it.

Some of the critiques have been good, most have been either gushingly nice so you will back their book so they can go to the editor's desk regardless of quality or else they savage you in the name of tough-love honesty.

If you try to start a thread of your own, the usual suspects seem to jump in and shanghai it into another slanging match.
Writewords feels much kinder and more useful.

For others who may be thinking of submitting to Curtis Brown -

In the end I sent a follow-up email directly to the agent's assistant, as I hadn't heard anything from them. She very promptly sent a reply to say that a rejection email had been sent on the 8th. I didn't receive this and it didn't go in my spam/junk mail boxes either.

So, there seems to be a few problems with their system. If you do submit, you may need to follow up.

I'm happy to have an answer.

Some agents I see are saying email submissions but also want to charge you for paper printing.

No agent should charge you for anything when you're submitting to them. No reading fee, no nothing.

Nor should they charge you anything when you are a client, until they've got you a deal. It's a huge red flag against them, if an agent tries to charge you for editing or copying or anything anything else. Yes, it costs them money, and I do sympathise with small agents who can ill-afford the time to give, for example, editorial help on a so-nearly-there manuscript that might sell if it got that help. But that's a risk of time and money that they have to decide about.

Once they've got you a deal, they're entitled to take commission from that deal, obviously, but it's quite likely to be in your agreement with them that they can deduct the cost of things like photocopying manuscripts, extra ARCs that they want to use to sell foreign rights, and things like that: fixed costs which they have to pay out in order to do deals on your behalf.

Can anyone tell me - for the online Curtis Brown submission, did you use Word or pdf?

I am in the process of subbing now, and in the TEXT box, my novel extract is losing the format?!

Thanks much.



<Added>

oops! Just realised I can't send as pdf because it's going into a text box!!

The Word format seems to be lost. Italics, line spacing. I'm finding it hard to press send...

I can't remember if mine lost the formatting - if it did I must have thought that was the way they wanted it. Oops, probably a mistake on my part.
I copy and pasted from Word.

@Emma. This business is expensive enough without paying an agent to read a manuscript, even under the guise of copying charges. I'd steer well clear.

<Added>

Looks like I'm telling you to stay clear, when I was talking about me!

I can't remember if mine lost the formatting - if it did I must have thought that was the way they wanted it. Oops, probably a mistake on my part. I copy and pasted from Word.

Thanks for your quick response, Pen and Ink.

I was wondering if maybe there's some html code that will be lifting it into the right format at the other end?

It's horrible to see the format splayed and skewed like this That's why I am hesitating to press SEND.

Sounds like you had frustration with it too.

Good luck with the rest of your subs.

I stuffed up the online submission (sent 1 chapter instead of 3) but got a form rejection anyway after 6 weeks.

Didn't like the process, though, and yes, I copied and pasted - I had a lot of italics and formatting got totally trashed. Pretty sure it didn't make any difference to the result, though

I think there's a lot of scope to cock it up with an online process. Lol. And I find it difficult not being able to go back into it to see whether I did something wrong. One press of a button and it's gone into the ether and you are left with no record of having sent it.

I'm afraid when I submitted to Curtis Brown all the formatting on my document went awol. So it must have looked awful at the other end. I tried online to at least sort out the paragraphs, took ages. Still looked awful.

Really they should change the way they get online submissions so you can send a word document or a pdf.
Perhaps this is something they might revise to in the future.

I'm going to have a look back and see which agent it was that wanted to charge to print out your manuscript. I think it was someone quite well known.

I know agents say they are desperate to find new talent but they also DO give the impression that they are looking for any tiny mistake with which to reject you. A non-formatted document would certainly not help your case.
Bit annoying when they chant the endless mantra of times roman & 12 point and double spacing & all the rest. I know this is to stop idiots submitting in copperplate to get their attention but...

A non-formatted document would certainly not help your case.

I've heard agents (and, indeed, the organisers of competitions) at conferences etc., when someone, as always, gets up and complains about their preference for hard-copy submissions, put this as one of the big advantages: that with hard copy it always looks as it should. Never goes wrong. I certainly prefer to enter competitions with hard copy, because I'm extremely particular about layout, italics, headings etc. etc. (nothing fancy, I just know what I want) and want to know that transmits at the other end.

Sometimes even Word docs go awry, I know from doing all my Open University marking electronically, and don't get me started on what can happen to docs in the supposedly "universal" .rtf format. .pdfs are reliable for layout, but most of us can't annotate them, and they get gloriously chewed up if you convert them to docs in order to do so.

<Added>

And it's not so relevant for novels, but it matters hugely for competitions and assignments that different WP programs count words slightly differently so you might be over the limit in one and not in others.

Layout of a story is very important. For pace and for emphasis.
Is this taught on writing courses I wonder? There isn't much mention of it in 'how to' books.
If the author gets it right it feels like a key element for readability and comprehension.

If you took any novel and took away all the paragraph indents & even speech marks etc. it would be really hard work to read.

Mmm starting to reconsider the hard copy submission side of the argument.

I had forgotten that my formatting went haywire when I submitted to Curtis Brown I even apologised for it in my letter! Though it was their system that made it happen.