Page 2 of 3

Recently, I drafted an ad for the situations wanted columns: Novelist for hire; more than willing to work as an anonymous hack for peanuts; any genre sycophantically accepted.

And to think I once set myself the target of winning the Booker Prize.

Here's a genuine Catch 22. In the main - certainly in the mainstream, publishers only consider work submitted via an agent. Typically though, agents will only consider taking on a published writer as a client.

Ah, you may be thinking, but what about those newcomers who do get published: talent will out.

Very faintly possible. But I'm willing to bet that for every one who gets that far another god-know-how-many - just as talented - have perished in despondency or thrown away their quills and decided to reclaim real lives.

Trends:
Sally Plotter and the Philosopher's Gallstone or Bridget Clones' Dairy are not good ideas if you want to avoid rejection. Actually, perhaps they are.

Because you never know. Get one popular pseudo-science book becoming a best-seller and you'll get a whole chemistry set. But beware, you'll never write Hotzinger's Red-hot Helium Hypothesis in time: the bubble will burst.

Write about what you know, the rejection letter will read. So, you'll write about the trials of being a writer. Nothing doing, the next letter reads, there are far too many books about writers! Note, though, that such subject matter is still good enough to win the - my - Booker Prize.

I have a performance piece, puningly entitled Bleeding Between the Lines.

Originally, it focused on poets - perhaps the most rejected of us all; it goes with the turf, maybe even helps to generate the requisite melancholic outpourings, eventual alcoholism and suicide. (More people write poetry than read it.)

Next page...