I love agents. I wish I could stop eating them.

Literary agents: the catch-and-release method

This is a story about valuing yourself. About finding yourself a champion. Not someone adept at knocking beefcake unconscious, breasting the finish line tape or bamboozling the unwary with the Sicilian Defence. But someone who will champion you and your work (who isn’t your mum or your best friend). A sword-wielding knight/amazon (how annoying that a billionaire has stolen the word for warrior women) to slash you a path through the thorny battlements of traditional publishing and lower its drawbridge so you can enter its dreamy castle (even if sometimes you find yourself booted out the back door and into the moat).

A lot of words have been spent on self-publishing vs traditional publishing, with many laying the boot into trad publishing, and I understand: years ago, I wrote about how rubbish author pay rates are, and things are, at the moment, looking quite a bit worse. But if you hate marketing (hand rockets up like a total swot know-it-all) and your writing is of the ‘literary’ sort …