It was a great day! A bit of a fleeting visit to London for me, as I only attended the morning Writers Day session, but well worth the time.
The morning started out with a moderated discussion between Tom Lloyd, Ben Aaronovitch and Joanne Harris. They discussed the idea of expanded universes, in particular what it’s like to write in the EU of a preexisting property, and also what they think about the concept of their being a true ’canon’ to a story. Joanne Harris had a particularly interesting take on this, as she deals a lot with Norse mythology. Amusingly, she described the ’original’ written versions of this mythology as Christian fanfic!
Next, we heard from a literary agent named Juliet Mushens. She gave us a fascinating insight into what the role of an agent is, what an author can expect from an agent and so on. She stressed the importance of drafting, saying that you should expect to do many drafts before querying an agent, but that a submission is quite straight forward: a one-page cover letter, two-page synopsis and the first three chapters of your book. She also said not to worry about submitting to multiple agents, as they expect you will contact many agents at the same time. Also, if you’re submitting a book that’s part of a trilogy, that’s okay; she expects most SF&F books to be part of a series. She did stress however that if you’re submitting part of a series, the publisher will want to have confidence that you know where the series is going.
Last, we did ’author speed dating’. We got 20 minutes per table of attendees (approx 4 people for table) with 4 of the authors in attendance. I got to speak to Alex Lamb, Joanne Harris, Ben Aaronovitch and Edward Cox. We spent a lot of this time discussing each authors approach to getting an agent, what they thought about writing outside of their own culture and how to combat writers block.
After these chats, there was plenty of time to get books signed. I bought a few books by authors I hadn’t tried so far, including Edward Cox’s The Relic Guild. Edward was so lovely and supportive! He asked me to let him know how the Inkshares fantasy contest was going from time to time.
It was great to meet and speak to so many authors - including the many dozens of attendees, most of whom were mid-way through writing fantasy books of their own. I also came away with a nice ’swag bag’ of book samplers and free Audible audiobooks!
