We’re just coming to the end of the
third year, and when we launched we got that quote from Auberon
Waugh in the Literary Review. It just was – I mean there
were other quotes that we got as well, there was an unexpected
level of interest in the English press, because it did seem to
symbolise what was happening in the industry, that it sort of
filled a certain gap if you like, and the work that we turned
over in the first year is almost threefold in the third year.
It’s hundreds and hundreds (of manuscripts) that we get
annually. We have a steady flow now of about ten readers who
are pretty much at full stretch, reading five or six works
monthly. But I make sure that they don’t get overburdened
because there’s no point in a slack read. I mean the
quality of the read seems to me to be everything.
Another source of very good readers was the
University of East Anglia in England which does a MA and PhD in
Creative Writing, where they have to study the novel for three
years and produce a novel and write a thesis about the novel
and their own work. And the people who enter the PhD or the MA
already have to be published writers, even if it’s in a
small form. But these people are amazing readers. I mean, in
some ways, their strengths are better than the people
who’ve worked in publishing only. The people in
publishing know the market slightly better, but the young
writers who have also had their faculties trained, who then may
have done a bit of reviewing, a little bit of work in a
publishing house, they are fabulous, because they also identify
with a writer and they’re very detached; they can provide
some extremely useful editorial assessments for people.
One of the joys of the job for me is that
we have the most amazing variety and range of people come to
us. I mean they’re largely based in the UK but we have
had clients from Australia, from South Africa, from Hong Kong,
anywhere where there’s a prevalence of English speaking,
because we run ads in the Literary Review, the London Review of
Books, and now The Author, and they go – I don’t
know where they go exactly, but they go overseas, maybe some of
you in the room get those papers. And we have a little advert
in there. I think that’s a source of a lot of it.
Another one is word of mouth. I mean we
have client from a tiny village in Venezuela. If you’re
writing your great Venezuelan/English novel in a tiny village,
and you might have spent two or three years doing it, and
you’re also a development worker or whatever else you
might be, you know, the task of sending cold to an agent or a
publisher or getting friends to negotiate their way through
this absolute minefield is very daunting, and if you can raise
a certain amount of funds: at the lower end 75-pounds for an
assessment of a synopsis and extract; a full-length read is
more, you know it seems to me that 75-pounds is something that
most people, if they put their minds to it, can come up with
and get an awful lot of feedback back from, even if they
can’t get a full read. He can send that to me, and if his
work is good, I can hook him up to an agent or a publisher in
the UK, that’s the other part that I need to mention.
Part of my job is to establish links with
agents in the UK and to try to keep abreast of what’s
happening in the publishing industry, which no-one could ever
pretend to do. Really, it changes every day. But if you have
enough people with enough variety that you can approach,
it’s like a filtering service as well. So we might get
those people. And in England we get everything, from a tailor
who rings me up and says, ‘I have had this incredible
inspiration’ and I say, ‘Oh what?’ and she
goes, because a story came to her about the end of the world
and Iraq and a butterfly and all these characters came to her.
And you know, I get very engaged in these conversations. I mean
if you’re in the UK obviously the client rings and we
have a sort of preamble chat which if I were a lawyer I suppose
I should charge for, but I haven’t quite got that
together, and it seems to me part of the job to try. If
I’m going to be setting up a consultancy where I’m
asking people to come to me with a fee to be read, you know,
they’ve got to trust the service they’re coming to,
so a lot of my job is about trying to persuade the people that
their work is in trustworthy hands.
So we’ll get her work. So all sorts.
And from Prue Leith recently, the cookery writer whose agent
came to us for some help. And Prue Leith came and had a read
from one of our readers and it was rather miraculous, because
we didn’t hear from her again and I kept thinking,
‘When are we going to get that enormous novel
back?’ and it didn’t come back, and suddenly we
were invited to her launch party. And Julia Bell, a very good
reader at home, was invited along and Prue Leith then gave us a
big acknowledgment in her introduction, which was absolutely
fabulous of her. So at the other end of the scale we see
well-known clients whose books are likely to be bought if they
can just get it into reasonable shape to people with wild
inspirations in the middle of nowhere, to people living in
Venezuelan villages. I love it.
Jill Kitson: Rebecca
Swift, of The Literary Consultancy in London.
The address is:
The Literary Consultancy,
2nd Floor,
Diorama Arts,
34 Osnaburgh Street,
London NW1 3ND.
Tel: 020 7813 4330
Rebecca Swift’s e-mail address is:
info@literaryconsultancy.co.uk
And that’s all for this edition of
Lingua Franca.