Literary Dragon's Den

In April this year, the London Book Fair opened its doors for the first time in its new home. Olympia is light and airy, much less enclosed than Earl's Court. It is also a maze of interconnecting halls in which it is only too easy to get lost. And a very long walk from the nearest Tube station.

The other first for this year was the institution of a 'Dragon's Den' style pitching opportunity for authors. For the last couple of years, it has been possible for authors to book a precious ten-minute slot at the Fair to pitch their book face-to-face with an agent. (WWJ reported on it back in 2013.) But this time, instead of a private session with an individual agent, authors were invited to make their pitch, in public, to a panel of agents.

Pitching your book is challenging in any circumstances. But doing it in front of an audience sounds downright terrifying. We asked Carol Cooper, who was in the audience, and Caroline Mawer, one of the brave souls making their pitch, to tell us what is was like.

Inside the Dragon's Den

Carol Cooper

by Carol Cooper

The London Book Fair (LBF2015 to the in-crowd) had a demob flavour on its final afternoon, but for 10 hopefuls the serious business was only just starting.

The Write Stuff was a session organized along Dragon’s Den lines. Ready to breathe fire on the aspiring authors were agents Mark Lucas, Toby Mundy and Lorella Belli, along with non-fiction publisher Alison Jones.

While they didn’t look too fierce, you had to admire the contestants for standing in front of the panel plus a packed Author HQ to sell themselves. Each had just one minute to say who they were, two minutes to pitch their book, and five minutes for questions and comments from the panel, who had already sampled the titles.

Dragons Alison Jones (left) & Lorella Belli 

Some might have been in the audience for fun, but the session provided insights into how agents think, and trenchant observations on things writers should know.

Lucy Brydon, a young Scottish film-maker, pitched a novel set in China where she had worked. While The Boy Who Died Comfortably was redolent of the culture and highly filmic, Toby Mundy wasn’t sure that, as a foreigner, the author had ‘a place to stand in this story.’

Characters came under scrutiny when Catherine Miller presented her novel Baby Number Two. The panel was clearly impressed with her perfect title, as well as her blurb, her writing, and her Katie Fforde bursary. Not so much with the motives behind her characters’ actions, however, and Alison Jones felt she had shoehorned in too many topical subjects.

Caroline James had also written primarily for women readers. Coffee, Tea, the Caribbean and Me was aimed more at women in their fifties, and drew on her background in the hospitality industry. ‘Highly relatable,’ thought Mark Lucas, relatable being the buzzword around LBF2015.

The authors received all comments with good grace, though Olga Levancuka seemed a tad combative. Dressed in a Guantanamo-orange coat, she looked every inch the Skinny Rich Coach (her alias). She responded feistily when the panel questioned her approach, even her authority. While she didn’t win that afternoon, she did subsequently land an agent.

Jaunty Mike Rothery spent decades in the Navy, and his novel The Waiting-Pool involves an ocean voyage. A good thriller, thought the panel, but it took too long to get started, and Alison Jones didn’t care enough about the characters. The protagonists began life in another book, so getting the amount of back-story right may have been an issue.

Italian satirist Vittorio Vandelli had an account of the dystopia of the Berlusconi period. It was, he explained, a dire warning to Western democracy. He soon digressed from his blurb and just gave us his tirade. As entertaining as it all was, Vittorio and his book came on a little strong. Mark Lucas felt that he was being smacked too regularly over the head with all the things he should be outraged about.

Caroline Mawer is a doctor, globe-trotter, and author of A Single Girl’s Guide to Rural Iran. The panel thought there wasn’t enough of herself in the work, the book was trying to do too many things, and the title didn’t quite match the text. Wouldn’t Skinny-Dipping in the Spring of Solomon have been more arresting? Maybe literally?

Up stepped Julia Suzuki, whose children’s book The Crystal Genie was, appropriately enough, all about dragons. The panel sat in rapt attention. Was it about them? They all claimed to love dragons. Alas, Suzuki’s characters were ‘a bit too black and white.’

Sanjiv Rana, receiving his award

Lenox Morrison, an award-winning journalist from Aberdeen, offered a collection of short stories. She writes ‘like a dream,’ but the consensus was that short stories are very difficult to sell on a grand scale.

The winner was another journalist, Sanjiv Rana, with his topical and controversial The Insignificance of Good Intentions. This first person novel is about a 33-year old virgin who’s sent to prison charged with rape. The panel agreed that Rana has a very original voice. But that didn’t stop them comparing him to other writers.

Nonetheless, Rana won a certificate and an appointment with Toby Mundy. I think Rana will be big news, and you’ll be hearing a lot more from the other contestants too.

Carol Cooper is a journalist and author from London. Her novel One Night at the Jacaranda was self-published after a string of traditionally published non-fiction. In her spare time she’s a doctor.

On twitter @DrCarolCooper

Blog Pills & Pillow-Talk

Better Than Pitching

by Caroline Mawer

Caroline in the Dragon's Den

This year, ten lucky authors win the chance to pitch Dragons Den-style at the London Book Fair. I was one of them. And I want to share some what I learnt: especially two things that are maybe even better than pitching. I sent in a 250 word summary for my book, and the judges liked that enough to ask for three chapters. Then they liked the sample enough to ask me to pitch. It was all very exciting. Actually, the email “we’d love to invite you …” was very very exciting. Although kind of weird that they then asked me to confirm I still wanted to take part.

Hold on a moment though! 250 words? To summarise my precious book? To include tempting morsels about myself as a person and a writer and how perfectly I’ll fit into a sensational book marketing campaign?

I’d already submitted to several agents. Spent what feels like innumerable lifetimes honing my elevator pitch, and buffing up my cover letter and synopsis.

But writing only 250 words that glide as elegantly as a swan, whilst simultaneously doing as much hard work as an army of labourers, forced me to focus on really understanding what Skinny Dipping with the Mullahs is trying to say, and who I’m trying to say it to. I thought about the weakest points in my book, as well as the strongest.

And all of that is something you need to do too. Whether you want to sell to an agent or  as an indie publisher - more directly to your readers. A 250 word summary is something you not only can do now, but I think should do now. At whatever stage you are in your book.

If you don't find any gaps, great. If you do, that’s also great. Since you can only solve problems you know about.

Then there was the pitching itself. I’m not scared of speaking in front of an audience, but I was allocated the final slot in a time-limited session, so it was difficult not to feel anxious that the time-keeping was initially so generous.

When my time eventually came, I was taken aback by the advice I was given.

I was told to focus more on my Unique Selling Point. No big deal there, you might think, except the judges told me that my USP is myself. Which I confess I hadn't understood.

Skinny Dipping in the Spring of Solomon (the pitching session also helped me finally decide on the title!) is a close-up view of daily life in modern Iran, written from the viewpoint of a single woman, travelling alone. I’m not Iranian, but I’m a Persian speaker. I have been to Iran many times and, to be honest, I don't feel special doing that. Personally, I’m fascinated by the historical and political context and the stories I share from and about Persian women. But, the LBF judges told me, the story that will resonate most with readers is about me, about why I would work so hard to visit some of the most hostile terrain in the world, even if I do get to swim naked in the Spring of Solomon along the way.

And I hope you may be able to learn from my surprise. Are you really thinking from your readers point of view? Or are you perhaps so close to your book that you can't appreciate what is so particularly special about it?

If you’ve got those two things sorted, though - if you can focus down on a 250 word summary, and also stand back to see through your readers’ eyes - then that, well that is better than pitching.

Caroline Mawer is a writer and photographer. You can find out more on her website: http://www.carolinemawer.com/ or follow her on Twitter @caromawer.

Face to Face: Pitching to an Agent at the London Book Fair

by Catriona Troth

Pitches, on the whole, are an author’s nightmare. Generally speaking, they require a synopsis, some opening chapters and a covering letter.  But just how long is a synopsis?  How many chapters, pages, words do you include in your opening material? What are you supposed to put in a covering letter?  And how on earth do you convey what makes your writing unique, when you have just squeezed eighty thousand words down to a few hundred?

To make matters worse, each agent has their own guidelines, so a synopsis package that is perfect for Agent A may be entirely inappropriate for Agent B - even if you have done your research and know that they are both supposedly interested in the kind of book you are writing.  And - trickiest hurdle of all - how does an author find out if a particular agent has just closed their submissions window for women’s commercial fiction, or is actively looking for Young Adult dystopian fiction?

LitFactor is a new, online service that aims to provide authors with all the information they need about literary agents , updated daily. New agents, agents moving, new lists opening.  Who’s accepting, who isn’t.  

As it says on the LitFactor website: “Writers send off endless submissions to a long list of agents, only to hear nothing but the deafening sound of silent rejection. They become frustrated by the lack of feedback and can remain utterly oblivious to the nuances of how literary agents actually operate. At the receiving end, literary agents are constantly inundated by a veritable deluge of irrelevant, poorly-judged submissions that they have neither the time nor the inclination to wade through.”

The service was launched at the London Book Fair 2013, with the LitFactor Pitch - an opportunity for authors to present their book proposal to a literary agent, face-to-face, and get feedback on their ideas and submission material.

If you’ve attended any previous London Book Fair, you’ll know that literary agents tend to be secreted away upstairs in the International Rights Centre, isolated from any accidental contact with importunate authors. So to bring agents downstairs, in amongst the milling hoards in the Author Lounge, was a radical step.

Altogether, thirteen agents and seventy authors took part over three days. And Words with Jam was on hand to interview some of those authors who were lucky enough to make their pitches. 

Of the small sample that we interviewed, none had approached their pitch with the expectation of landing a deal there and then.

“I did it for the experience, and to make a contact for when I’m ready to make a paper submission,” said Emma Chilcote, who pitched her psychological thriller to Ariella Feiner from United Agents. “I almost cancelled at the last minute because the book isn’t even finished yet.  I was incredibly nervous, but Ariella was very approachable.  It all felt very informal and she gave me some really good advice on preparing submission letters.”

How had she prepared in advance?

“I had my three chapters and a synopsis, and I’d spoken my pitch aloud. I was aware that my synopsis was just a recital of the plot. But she explained how even the pitch and the synopsis must show off your writing, and that you should try and include some of the atmosphere of the story.”

Her experience was echoed by that of Words with Jam fan, Rachel Featherstone, who pitched her women’s commercial novel to Lorella Belli.

“I didn’t want to have a finished book and the perfect agent, and not have any idea how to make a pitch. This seemed a great opportunity to polish my skills.”  She too had a synopsis and cover letter prepared.  “I asked the readers of my blog and they pointed me to some great sources of advice.  I worked at going from a single line, to two or three lines, to a paragraph.  In fact, Lorella put me so much at my ease, I went off my brief.  She advised me how to keep it sharp.”

Belli also advised Featherstone to relate the book to contemporary novels. "Someone had previously suggested I compare the book to Bridget Jones Diary.  But Lorella said that agents would find that ‘so ten years ago’.  You have to find your niche, she said, otherwise you are just like everyone other author trying to publish Women’s Commercial Fiction.”

Someone else wresting with the same dilemma was Maria Constantine, also pitching to Lorella Belli. Maria, a veteran of the London Book Fair, had prepared her first submission pack after attending LBF11 two years ago.  And after attending seminars over the previous two days, she had sharpened her pitch further to focus on the commercial viability of the book.

“I think you have to be very sure of who you are as a writer to make a pitch like this in person. We writers are used to putting things down in print, not articulating out loud.”

So what feedback had she received?

“She asked me how my voice and my book are going to stand out from the crowd.  But that's very hard unless you begin to read a few chapters.”

We hope to bring you a more extended article on LitFactor in a future issue of Words with Jam.

Catriona Troth grew up in two countries, uses two names, and has had two different careers. She tries always to remember who she is at any one time, but usually finds she has at least two opinions about everything. She is the latest member of the Triskele Books writers’ collective and the author of the novella, Gift of the Raven.