An agent-less journey to being published

Contrary to what many writers are told, it is possible to be published without an agent. To celebrate my own agent-free book being published, I thought I would share the simple process of how to do it. It involves four agents.

I was introduced to the first agent by a colleague at Arena magazine whose book was already published. The nice agent kindly agreed to meet me, we discussed my non-fiction idea about a bank, I sent him a proposal, and that was the end of that.

The second agent (again, very nice) contacted me after reading a feature I’d written for Men’s Health. He suggested I do a book on it. I said I wanted to write a book about Raoul Moat, which he said was a bad subject for a debut writer. He said I could earn a big advance with a book about his subject. Wow! I researched, found an interviewee for a sample chapter, and never wrote the proposal.

I still regret never having followed through with that one. He was a really good agent, and I would have loved the money (obviously), but I didn’t want to write that book; I wanted to write about Raoul Moat. So I submitted a sample of my Raoul Moat idea to the Northern Writers Awards, won, talked to agents, really liked one, she liked what I’d written, and I wrote a full proposal. She didn’t like it. I rewrote it. She didn’t like it. It was obvious early on that she wanted a different book from the one I wanted to write, but, as a writer, you go along, hoping. She dropped me.

So I wrote the proposal as I wanted it to be, found another agent, he sent it to very good publishers, forwarded me nice rejections, then nothing. I emailed to ask if it was going to any other publishers. Nothing. I waited, I emailed, I waited. I realised I might have to get it to smaller publishers myself, so I emailed to say we should go our separate ways, and he replied, politely and helpfully.

I now had a proposal and no agent. A former magazine colleague, Justin Quirk, asked to read it, then showed it to publishers he knew. One was Philip Gwyn Jones at Scribe. Philip liked it and offered me a deal. The Society of Authors looked through the contract. I asked Philip for changes and signed up.

Simple. Maybe an agent could have negotiated a better deal, but where I felt I needed one was in understanding the process – what is an ARC? what is it for? etc. Thankfully, Scribe was very helpful. In fact, I suspect it would most have benefitted from me having an agent; an ignorant author can’t be fun. So next time, for a second book and hopefully TV work, I really hope I don't have to do it alone.

Andrew Hankinson is a Newcastle-based journalist and the author of the forthcoming book You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life (You Are Raoul Moat), published by Scribe on 11th February.