Meet Pippa Masson; she works for Curtis Brown literary agents. Here she tells us what goes on behind the scenes in the attempt to get a book published. It’s not an easy job, filled with exciting highs and desperate lows.

Thanks for joining us Pippa!

Pippa: What is the life of an agent like? Well, in a nutshell, the life of an agent is an interesting one, an exciting one, and at times, a disappointing one.

Interesting because we work in many varied ways; I have clients that write adult fiction, some who write children’s books, others who illustrate picture books and some who are chefs’ creating cookbooks. Of course, I also have people writing non-fiction, in all its many and varied forms, as well as writers who ghost write other people’s books. Every time I send out a project or do a deal for one of these clients, it’s a different experience with different issues to get your head around and different types of contracts to negotiate!  Life as an agent is particularly interesting right now because of the huge changes underway in our industry: e-Books, digital marketing, print on demand, enhanced e-Books, electronic book serials, apps, you name it, it’s changing. With all these changes, of course, comes the excitement/headache of working out the rights issues surrounding the various new developments, trying to keep on top of the almost daily changes and a litany of other curly tasks.

The best part of the job, the excitement, happens because of various reasons. It can be reading a book that sends chills up your spine, or makes you laugh uncontrollably, having that incredible and privileged access to someone’s soul on a page, and then going ahead and doing a deal for that book. Realizing people’s dreams, and your own, and being a part of something that will touch and/or affect many people’s lives. Selling rights internationally for one of your babies, always exciting! As you can see, a big part of the job is exciting. Lucky me!

Disappointment, of course, comes with the territory and it’s something we have to accept. Rejection of our client’s books always fills us with a terrible sense of disappointment, or having to accept that no-one quite gets and believes in the book as much as you and your client. Seeing royalty statements that you’re never quite sure whether or not to pass on to your client, as in the excruciatingly bad ones, are always disappointing as invariably that author has worked hard and now has nothing to show for it. These are the things that disappoint.

The back story: here’s the nuts and bolts back story to a book.

1. We read a manuscript, either by an existing client or someone we’ve been talking to about their work, and then if we think it’s ready, we draw up a list of the best publishers to send it to. This will depend on who the writer is, whether they’ve been published before, and what style their writing is.
2. Once we have our list (or just one publisher if that’s the case) we send it off to them and specify a date for them to get back to us (which often doesn’t happen on time, c’est la vie!).
3. We wait, and wait, and wait. And answer emails/calls from our client who is also waiting the same hideous wait.
4. Finally, someone gets back to us. It might be a no, but then it might be a yes. Sometimes they’ll want to meet the author, other times they’re happy to offer without meeting. Generally speaking, it’s never a $1 million offer. Shame.
5. Once we have the offer/offers we discuss them with our client and he/she makes a decision based on the publisher and their company, money, rights, royalties, pub dates and other such things. It’s also integral that they feel they can get on with that person: they’re going to be co-parenting their baby.
6. Once a deal is decided, we’ll draft contracts and then when everyone is happy with them, they’ll sign!
7. From here, our job covers a multitude of roles but that’s a different story for another day.

READING/BUYING, why you must do both!

Given the publishing industry has taken a bit of a bashing the last year for a variety of reasons, it’s important YOU support it and buy people books for Christmas presents (Fleur told me to say that, but its true, please buy books for Christmas!). You can buy one for every member of the family (see and follow on Twitter @Booktopia’s gift guide), it’s that easy. I will, of course, be buying books for my family. My starter list includes:

1. Life, Keith Richards, for my dear ₤10 Pom Dad;
2. How To Make Gravy, memoir and A-Z music set, Paul Kelly, for my PK obsessed husband;
3. Pork & Sons, Stephane Reynaud, for my step-father who wants a pig to keep on his farm;
4. A selection of Penguin classics, various authors, for my thespian brother;
5. Things Bogans Like, for my less thespian brother;
6. At Home with the Templetons, Monica McInerney, for my step-mother who has many a family saga in her own family;
7. Sunday’s Kitchen, Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan, for my eclectic very clever mother;
8. The Happiest Refugee, Anh Do, for my aunt who was a refugee to Australia

I am sure to tack more on to the end of that but in the meantime the books piled up next to my bed for Christmas reading include:

1. Brooklyn, Colm Tobin
2. Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
3. At Home With The Templetons, Monica McInerney
4. What Alice Forgot, Liane Moriarty
5. Medium Raw, Anthony Bourdain
6. Plus, PLENTY of my client’s manuscripts all loaded up on my Kindle!

I haven’t been captivated by a book for a long time, but as soon as I picked up Wildflower Hill, by Kimberley Freeman, I was completely lost amongst its pages.

Kimberley Freeman, is actually, Kim Wilkins, who writes fantasy/speculative fiction. These books, as well as her lecturing, are legendary in the writing world. She has degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing. Her book The Infernal won the 1997 Aurealis Awards for Best Horror Novel and Best Fantasy Novel. In 2000 The Resurrectionists won the Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel, while Angel of Ruin won this award in 2001. She’s actively involved in the Queensland Writers Centre/Hachette Manuscript Development Program and her talents as a writer, span most genres including children and Young Adult Fiction (read more about her books here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Wilkins).

Kim has started to move her writing talents out of the speculative fiction genre and focusing on commercial women s fiction – hence Wildflower Hill. She published DUET in 2007 and GOLD DUST in 2008.

You can visit Kim’s website or friend her on Facebook.

Here she talks about writing Wildflower Hill:

Writing Wildflower Hill was a huge challenge for me, because part of it is set in the 1930s in Tasmania, which isn’t a place and time a great deal is written about. In many ways, it would have been much easier to set a book during the Regency period in England, because we’re all so familiar with what it looks like, what people wore, and so on. But I wasn’t even sure if the places I was writing about had electricity and gas. I wrote the whole story assuming they did not, but then a chance sighting of a 1930s photograph in a Hamilton pub had me rewriting the whole thing (there were visible power lines). In fact, the whole book was researched backwards for reasons beyond my control.

I’d been to Tasmania a few times, and had planned a long trip to the area the book is set in for easter of 2009. This was timed so I would be researching that part of the story directly before writing it; but then two days before we were due to leave (I was taking the whole family) my then 2-year-old daughter came down with a violent gastro bug. It was round the clock vomiting and diarrhoea for the poor thing, and it became apparent we couldn’t travel. She ended up being seriously ill for nearly a week, but when she was well again and I could turn my mind once more to the book, I realised I had done NO research and my deadline wasn’t going anywhere. We couldn’t rebook until July. The book was due in August.

So I wrote anyway. I put square brackets in every time I hit a place where I’d need a detail, and I just kept going, writing furiously, to get a first draft completed before the trip. A blog entry from about two weeks after the aborted trip reads: “Some of the writing is horrendous, I must confess, but just yesterday as I was telling my mum about the story, I got a real sense of what the book is all about… Put simply, it’s a story about a girl who thought her grandmother was a nice old lady, and discovers–when she inherits her grandmother’s old house in Tasmania–that Gran was a lot more complex than originally thought.” The story gathered momentum, and I finished the first draft in a white heat:  ”Some people compare writing a novel to giving birth. I usually roll my eyes when this happens, especially when men say it, because unless you’re squeezing a hardcover out your left nostril the comparison is flawed. But this close to the end of the process, there is the same kind of awful momentum, the same irresistible compulsion to get something outside yourself that has been growing within for a long time. I have lost the world; there is only the story. My family talk to me and all I hear is ‘bwah bwah bwah’ like the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons. My brain is finding the ends of threads and pulling them together, tying them, untying them, retying them different ways. I shouldn’t be allowed to drive.”

Then I printed it out and took it to Tassie with me. We stayed on a working sheep farm in the midlands, and it was the middle of winter so utterly freezing. But beautiful and still and quiet. I duly wrote down bird and tree names, wove in descriptions of frost or the way the clouds made shadows on the rolling hills, and secured a key detail (about eucalypts!) that made a special thread of the book sing. I can’t imagine having written the book any other way now. I can procrastinate a lot in research, so doing it backwards worked beautifully (on this occasion anyway).