Sure, the Agent Can Eat off the First Fifty Pages...

I’m not sure how UK literary agents work, but I’m betting the guidelines are similar to those in North America: send the whole manuscript OR the first fifty or one hundred pages. From there, they decide if they want to engage further with the author.

On our recent holiday in Liverpool, we took a day trip to North Wales. I’m part Welsh (at least my great-grandmother used to say that of herself when she was in her cups), but I’d never been.

As is my habit everywhere I go, I went into a bookshop and asked the lovely young bookseller for a novel by a local writer. I won’t say who the author is or the name of the book. I’ve no wish to disparage anyone who’s jumped through all the hoops and has landed shelf space in the local bookshop. I’ve been there.

The book is a thriller/murder mystery involving a large cast of characters, an old house, and a Welsh dog.

I was enjoying myself for the first hundred pages. They were clean, well edited, and most of it made sense in terms of plot and character development. But then… something went awry. As soon as I passed the hundred-page mark, I noticed a drop in quality. The comma splices went on a rampage. They’re often used deliberately in literature, but this was a complete shift from almost none at all to at least one on every page. Sometimes there were several in one sentence, making the sentence nearly incomprehensible.

The dog is in the main character’s arms, shivering because of the thunderstorm. Two paragraphs later, the dog is waking up in his bed and trotting toward the door to be let out. The main character’s heart breaks in every chapter till the end of the book.

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At page 300, I said out loud, “This is a matter of honour now…” I finished it, just barely, occasionally mumbling, “if your heart is that broken, you should have been dead forty pages ago.” The author photo is of a young person (maybe thirty), and this is their first novel. I get it. My first book could stand to go through a car wash, but I trust who I was back then, half my lifetime ago.

What I think happened here is that an agency’s guidelines asked for the first hundred pages of the manuscript. On the strength of that, they asked for the whole thing.

The errors, typos, inconsistencies, and other troubles here are—I suspect—largely editorial failings. It’s possible an inexperienced editor had their hands on the book and these things got past eveyone. It’s possible the press has a skeleton crew and couldn’t provide the money/time/experience required to properly edit the book. It’s also possible that my editing brain is always on and I wish I could turn it OFF. Pretty sure it’s a combination of all three.

All of this to say: the first fifty or one hundred pages are important, no doubt. That’s often how we get our foot in the door at the agency or the publishing house. BUT. The rest of the manuscript has to measure up. I could eat gnocchi off the back of the first hundred pages of this Welsh novel. After that, the plate was not so clean.

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