Adam's Apple Pie

Nine - About Me

That evening, I logged on for an online seminar I had signed up for the day before. My search for an agent had hit a brick wall and I was quickly running out of options. I saw an advert for this seminar on Facespace that promised to give the 'Best advice to get an agent', at least that's what they said. It was run by a so called 'Agent Expert' that was there to help us and quash some 'urban legends' around agent searches. If I was honest, I was kinda doubtful. After all, if anything looks too good to be true, it usually was. But then again it was free, so the only thing that I would lose would be my time. I had to use my noise cancelling headphones for this one, due to the usual drunken wankers in the street outside. I double checked to make sure the curtains were closed; last thing I wanted to do was attract the attention of some pissed up knobhead that might throw his glass at me!

My suspicions were confirmed – it was the biggest waste of time ever! That was an hour that I was never going to get back. Even though I didn't pay anything, I still felt like asking for a refund! I won't go into detail as to all the crap they spouted, but it was crap I can assure you.

The woman who ran it looked like one of those hipster grandmas that you saw on all the trendy movies these days – pink hair, piercings, flowers in her hair; the type that you often saw at protest rallies. She claimed to have years of experience in this field, having worked for one of the top agencies – I noted that she didn't mention what agency; someone asked her in the comment section, but she avoided answering it. That's a red flag right there for me if they can't even name who they work for! But it was this one particular fact that triggered me.

Remember how I said that they were here to clear up some urban legends about getting an agent, saying that on;y a few get signed in a year? Well, at the beginning, they stated that, in the last year in the US, eighteen thousand new authors were signed. Sounded like an encouraging statistic, right? I mean, hearing this, any new author would think they're in with a chance.

That's until you realise that there are about three hundred and thirty-one million people or so in the US, according to a quick search I did online afterwards. I did a further calculation, and from what I could see that didn't even come close to 1% of the population of that country alone. Ok, I know not everyone in the US wanted to be an author, but I imagine a good million people are trying that.

But let's just say that we applied that to the UK, which had about sixty-six million according to a quick search. Again, eighteen thousand doesn't even come CLOSE to 1%, so those numbers don't even mean shit!

And as far as their 'top tips' for finding an agent – they were things that anyone that did even the slightest bit of research would know that to do. Find the agent for your book, write a good letter, sell yourself, keep to the point – everything I had already done! Hell, I had learned more from watching a 10-minute MyScreen video from a published author than I did watching this bollocks! I had done everything this seminar had talked about even before I logged on. I did my research, followed all the rules, tidied up my queries, searched for all the right agents that would do well for my book. I even changed my main heroine to a BAME just to be on the safe side...

And I STILL failed!

You can play by all the rules and still lose. There was only one thing you really needed.

Luck.

Despite everything, it all came down to luck in the end.

But then again, luck didn't help sell courses, did it? Which funnily enough, I found out that the reason for this seminar was to encourage you to sign up for a course and spent hundreds of dollars to try and get you published. Money I could easy take to self-publish if I wanted to.