Lessons from the agents 3: Acceptance and beyond

• An agent’s role is to sell a novel to a publisher.
• Expect to be edited by both the agent and the publisher.
• The first payment is an advance, followed by royalties if the advance is earned out.
• If it does well in the UK, a novel will be sold again to overseas publishers.

(Alexandre Duret-Lutz [CC / Flickr]) This is a continuation from previous discussions of how to and how not to submit a novel to a literary agent. It’s what I learned when I put thirty eager debut novelists in a room with two long suffering literary agents, Hellie Ogden and Jessie Botterill of Janklow & Nesbit.

If you’ve done everything not only right but also really well, the agent will offer to represent you. There was some confusion about what that means. The agent won’t buy the novel, but they will undertake to sell it to a…