An Interview with Carole Blake

Royal Purple

An Interview with Carole Blake

“Oooh, your coat is lovely, my favourite colour!”

These are first words that Carole Blake, senior agent at Blake Friedmann Literary Agency, greets me with when I’m shown through to her office. I like her immediately. How can you not like someone who compliments your bright purple mac within seconds of meeting you, and then offers you biscuits and a cup of tea? Oh, and who is wearing a lovely amethyst necklace that you want to steal, not to mention the really rather lovely shoes. I am in love with her book-lined office, and indulging a pleasant daydream about how nice it must be to work in this environment.
On the other hand, I’m staring at an alarmingly tall pile of papers that are stacked at the end of her desk.

“Is that the slush pile?” I ask.

“Yes. At least, that is last week’s slush pile. I haven’t gotten to it yet.”

Suddenly, I understand why some agencies take months to consider your work. There are over a hundred manuscripts and query letters in that pile. I stood next to it, and the top manuscript was level with my knee. And that was just the submissions for a normal week. It’s a sobering thought.

Carole is one of the more open and approachable agents in the industry, although she has a bit of a reputation for being fierce. At the risk of upsetting MissDaisyFrost, I’d even go so far as to suggest that she’s the twitter queen of the literary world. Tweeting as @caroleagent, she is helpful, insightful, funny and scary all at the same time. If you’re looking for an agent, then I suggest you follow her tweet stream. You’ll learn a lot about the industry from the links she posts and advice she doles out. She’s also very kindly agreed to be interviewed by the project to help shed a little light on the life of an agent, and even share a little bit of advice as to how to snare one.

Thank you for taking some time out to answer my questions. Can you tell me what a literary agent is, and what being one involves?

A Literary Agent is there to represent an author, but also to help them. There are an enormous number of female agents – maybe because it is quite a maternal role, as you are helping people to nurture their careers. Not just to maximise their earnings, but also things like workload, career management and marketing. I do a lot of editorial work with my clients – not all agencies do that, although I do. There are an enormous amount of things to consider, but I like that variation. You need to have a butterfly mind.

You need a business brain, you need to know about contracts. You need to be able to negotiate, which personally I find great fun. It’s a job where you are looking after people’s income. At the most pretentious, you are helping people make a living from their art. It’s an exciting job to do.

I’ve followed you on twitter for a while, and noticed that you can be working at all manner of times. How long is your average day?

Being a Literary Agent seeps into every part of what is jokingly known as your private life. I work Saturdays and Sundays. I work evenings. Someone recently said to me “you sent me an email at two o’clock in the morning!” Well, yes. That’s when I finished.

But you can’t switch off. With blackberries, twitter and email, et cetera, you can just never get away at all! We’re all so connected these days. Even though I’ve cut my client base down to around 20 clients, it doesn’t mean less work. All those clients are published in 20, 30 or 40 languages, and they all need to be managed.

This isn’t a nine to five job. I get three to four hundred emails a day, as well as the phone calls, can be something different on behalf of someone different. At the end of the day when the phones go quiet – which they don’t, because America wakes up – that’s when the real work begins, which is reading and editing, or thinking and planning. An eighteen hour day is normal.

What would you say are your favourite parts of your job as an agent?

I like the diversity. Going home and sitting with a fat manuscript for the evening reading it is deeply pleasurable if it is from someone that you can rely on and love, but can be deeply worrying if you think it is going wrong!

Negotiating a deal for a new author is fabulous. But re-negotiating a contract for an existing author with their current publisher – not changing publishers, that is the cheat’s way of getting more money for them – that is deeply satisfying.

Other than the long hours, what else could you do without?

I suppose I don’t really like doing the nitty gritty of contracts. For example, I ended up fighting over ebook royalties with a publisher for several years. Now, there is currently no money in ebooks, but there will be. So you waste dozens of hours traipsing back and forth to meetings, arguing over something that currently doesn’t make any money. It is important, though, because it will make money in the long term. That means we have to get it right, otherwise our authors are buggered, to use the technical term.

But to answer your question, there are very few parts of this job I don’t like. I’m lucky to do this job. I love coming into the office.

Literary Agents are fairly hidden from writers in the publishing industry, yet often the key to a successful career. How can a writer be sure that they have found not just a legitimate agent, but a good one?

Unfortunately you don’t need any qualifications to become an agent; anyone can call themselves an agent if they wish. When I was president of the Agent’s Association I did suggest that we have an examination that people would have to pass before they could join. It was treated with amusement at first, and then bemusement when they realised that I was quite serious. It was not implemented.

What we always say to writers is this: when you are looking for an agent make sure that they are members of the Agent’s Association. This is not a failsafe, but it means you have a body to go and complain to if something goes wrong. I also recommend that you join the Society of Authors, as they fight their corner for their members very well.

When aspiring writers start submitting to agents, one of the most frustrating experiences is to get a form rejection – or no acknowledgement at all. Could you explain why rejected submissions tend to get form letters?

We get between 20 and fifty submissions every day. Everything that comes in here is seen by one of the senior agents. Now, consider that my working day for my existing clients is already 18 to 20 hours. There just isn’t the time to write beautiful, personal letters to people that I basically don’t want to work with. I don’t get paid to respond. I have to work for my client first – which, if I was your agent, I’m sure you would prefer.

What people sometimes don’t realise is that this is a business. It isn’t enough to just be good unfortunately; you’ve got to good AND a bit lucky. You need to be offering your work to somebody who can see how to make money out of it. I mean I love what I do, but I don’t do it for nothing. I do it to pay the mortgage and, on occasion, buy new shoes.

You say that every submission to Blake Friedmann is seen by a senior agent. How does that work?

The agents take it in turns to be the recipients of a weeks worth of slush. The assistants do sift it first and may mark the manuscripts in pencil with an “R” for “rejection”, but nothing is officially rejected until a senior agent has seen and agreed with assessment. An awful lot of our clients started on the slush pile; Craig Russell and Elizabeth Chadwick, for example. I personally haven’t taken on a client for 3 years, and the one I did recently, David Hewson, wasn’t through the slush pile. That’s not for want of trying, though!

In that case, what would a submission have to do in order to tempt you into taking on a new client?

Firstly, I have very little time. If something is going to elbow its way to the front of the queue and shout “take me” I have to think that, potentially, it is as good as anything already on my list – if not even better. As well as that, I have to be convinced that I can sell them, and stay awake to sell them. It has to be good enough that I’m not going to mind sleeping even less if I take it on.
We pass the manuscripts around amongst ourselves as well, as an agency we work collaboratively. If I see something in a manuscript and think “that would suit Oli,” or “this fits Isobel’s list better than mine” then I pass it to them. There isn’t competition between agents here. We brief each other about our clients.

A lot of aspiring writers – myself included, here – get hung up on the cover letter, as there is so much conflicting advice as to what it should contain. Could you explain why the cover letter is important, and what we should include?

Well it proves you’re not bonkers for a start. We’ve had letters in green capitals. We have one bloke who sends in something every ten days, almost clichéd by sending letters that are cut out of newspapers and magazines. We keep a file of his stuff as it is quite disturbing, so if anything does ever happen we can prove it has been going on for some time. There is a degree of madness behind some of that, but it is an extreme example. Most are just boring.

My favourite submission letter that was absolutely perfect was from Julian Stockwin. I have no interest in the Napoleonic era, but I love his work. His letter was one page long. He said that he wanted to write the type of books he wanted to read, and specified how his books differed from those already on the market. It was a great hook, so I started to read it. He also told me he had been in the navy, so told me he had the right background, the right profile that he knew what he was talking about and, importantly, that he had read all the others. Not everyone can be that specific, but it was a brilliant. One or two pages for a letter is fine, but quite frankly, I don’t want your life story and I don’t need to know that your mother loved your book. I would hope that she would.

What is the most common mistake you see with aspiring writers?

Some people haven’t worked out their pitch. You ask them to sum up their book in two sentences and they look like a startled rabbit. Don’t submit until you know your work and your pitch is ready.

Have you ever been cornered at a party by an aspiring writer?

Yes! People get so desperate to have some sort of contact with literary agents that they seem to put general rules of politeness on hold. I’ve been approached while I’ve been eating my breakfast. Someone I know got cornered in the loos at a conference. In fact pretty much every bizarre situation you can think of has happened to an editor or agent. I know people desperately want to speak to an agent, but please, use basic manners and rules of decency.

That goes for twitter, too. Several people have pitched to me that way. One person was particularly insistent. It does not work with me. Twitter is NOT the platform for query letters. At the risk of looking a bit rude, all I am going to tell you is that Twitter is not the place to pitch. If you want to submit to me, do it through the office. As I said, everything that comes in will be looked at by a senior agent.

Do you think unpublished writers benefit from writing courses, or are they a waste or money? How can a writer decide which are the best quality?

Obviously some are good, but there are those that are just out to make money from those who want to be authors.

In order to pick the right one for you, you need to understand yourself. You need to know what you respond well to. Some people respond well to deadlines and assignments, others work better in a less formal environment. MAs are expensive, and time consuming, but some people respond terribly well to them. The course at UEA is a good example of that, and has a very good reputation for turning out published authors. But then I don’t think that it is an environment that suits everyone.

I think that the best thing to do, and unfortunately the hardest, is to find a really good writing group that contains people that are friendly and willing to criticise your work. Some writers say it is terribly difficult to take criticism. Well, yes, but without it, you won’t get published.

Another piece of advice often given to aspiring writers is that they should set up a website. Do you think it is important to have an internet presence as a writer?

It is more an American view, that. Very few British agents require an author to have a website BEFORE they sign. However I’d expect them to have one by the time their book is getting published. These days, I think writers need to take charge of their own destiny, gone are the days when you handed over your manuscript to the publisher then forgot a bout it. It is not essential before you have a contract, but I would expect it once you are published.

There is a feeling among some sectors of the writing world that agents and publishers are always out for the “next big thing”, and only by figuring that out could we hope to secure an agent. Is this the case?

No. We don’t look for “the next big thing”, you just can’t predict trends like that and it is dopey trying to jump on a bandwagon. Publishing works too slowly for that; by the time you’ve clambered up two years have passed and the world has changed. We want writers that are in this for a career, we don’t want someone for just one book.

Barbara Erskine has been with me for 26 years. I like to work over a long period with writers, so they become good friends. All my clients are career writers so they are not going to go “oh, my muse didn’t visit this morning.” They are all very professional. They treat writing as a job, so they sit down and do it. That’s what I want from future clients as well.

And finally, what are you looking for at the moment to add to your list?

It is easier to tell you what I don’t want, because it is almost impossible to pin down what I do want until I find it.

I don’t want children’s books and I don’t want science fiction or fantasy, because they are very specialised. I don’t do poetry, either, because I can’t add any value to it. I don’t do hard-line science, because I don’t know enough about it to do it justice. Other than that I’m fairly open. I have a butterfly mind, so I will consider most things.

I also don’t want writers that are too close to someone I already represent. There is this view among unpublished writers that if I represent a certain genre, then I must want lots more books in that vein. Actually, it’s the opposite. I don’t want to represent someone who may well be the main competition for my existing client – it is a conflict of interest and would be a disservice to all involved. For example, I represent the chef Ken Hom. I do not want to represent another chef; what would I do if a publisher approached me about commissioning a new cookery book in that case? That said, I do represent a number of thriller writers, but they are quite different from each other. Crime readers tend to read voraciously as well, so they aren’t in quite so much competition with each other. Not all agents share this view, but it is my personal preference.

If this interview has whetted your appetite for more publishing advice and wisdom from Carole, then go and check out her fantastic book, From Pitch to Publication – highly recommended. More information about Blake Friedmann can be found at their website, and you can learn more about the day-to-day life as a literary agent by following Carole on Twitter.

Many thanks to Carole for inviting me to her lovely office and answering my many questions.

She gave me tea, she likes purple as much as I do, and has significantly better shoes.

I just wish she represented Science Fiction & Fantasy, but then I guess no one can be perfect.