Your agent submission was rejected?

One thing you should be prepared for though; agents are absolutely inundated with submissions. They probably will take a while to look at what you wrote and may very well return your submission. Few are accepted. If that happens – don’t give up, try a different agent. I've seen reports that an average agent accepts just 2% of authors who approach.

The chances are that sooner or later you’ll probably get discouraged by rejections. At that point you should take a serious look at what you've submitted.

Five points you need to check:

• Does it have that ‘hook’ to catch interest? In other words does it catch your interest in the very beginning? Think of how you browse for books in a bookstore. Would you buy your book based on the content of the first three pages?
  Here’s the opening paragraphs from ‘The Power Trip’ by Jackie Collins as an example:
  The couple on the bed had sex as if it was their final act. And for one of them it was.
  Neither of them heard the door slowly open.
  Would that make you want to keep reading?
• Get someone else to read the synopsis you include. Do they find it interesting?
• Does it have a prologue? If so get rid of it. For many agents a prologue is an instant turn-off. Oh – before someone points out that those Jackie Collins lines come from the start of a prologue, it seems a very short prologue – more like a very short chapter which Jackie didn't dare call ‘Chapter 1’.
• Is the story the right length? It should be 60,000 -120,000 words. Any shorter and publishers will be reluctant to publish it because setting it up will be too expensive. Any longer and it will be too expensive to edit and they’ll be reluctant to invest so much in an untried author.
• Is your accompanying letter good enough? Try including in your cover letter a one paragraph story synopsis starting with 'When..' and using this formula. 
  [Protagonist] who finds himself/herself in [situation] from which he/she tries to free himself/herself by [goal]. However, the [antagonist] wants to stop [protagonist] from this, and if successful, will cause the [protagonist] to experience [disastrous result].
  Here’s an example of its use:
  When a young girl moves to live with her father in a small town in Washington, she meets the boy of her dreams. He has a dark secret which she discovers. In doing so, she finds herself at risk of death from people like him. She is rescued by her new boyfriend, but still is at risk from others like him who want to kill her. She knows that all will be solved if she shares her boyfriend’s secret, but he is reluctant to allow this since he fears it will turn her into a monster.
  Recognize the story? Twilight?

If you are confident that you have met all these requirements, continue making multiple submissions to agents at the same time rather than one at a time. Agents don’t really like you doing this but often it’s the only way to cut submission times from years to months.

The one thing you shouldn't do is to allow yourself to be discouraged to the point where your book is never published ‘because it isn't any good’. Repeated rejections are quite normal. Few authors ever find success immediately. I know of one successful author who bound all her rejection letters into a long roll and when she’s asked to speak about the process dramatically allows it to unroll across the room.

By the time you've had 30 rejections it's time to consider going down the self-publishing route. Maybe you should have done that first?

How long should a book chapter be?

Who cares?

Before I started writing professionally I really didn't care how long a chapter should be. For non fiction, the answer was simple - a chapter should cover a topic completely. Imagine a world guide to travelling where you visit fifty countries. You would expect each country would have it's own chapter. That seems pretty logical to me.

Fiction is entirely different though. What makes up a chapter? How long should it be? Does the length matter? The more I looked into it, the more I realised that it may be important.

Consider how and when people read.

In the BBC sitcom 'My Family' Ben Harper (Robert Lindsay)
 read Tom  Clancy books in bed, appearing to take a year
to finish each book.

• Some sit down for an extended period of time and read a book all in one sitting because they are totally engrossed by it. (Please - Powers that be, send me more readers like that!)
• Some read in bed before they go to sleep
• Some read in those quiet times of the day
• Some snatch a few minutes at various times while they are busy
• Some read to relax and wind down
• Some read paper books
• Some read ebooks on an e-reader or their phone
• Some read ebooks on a computer

Next consider how fast they read. It seems an average reader, reading fiction has a reading speed of about 200-240 words per minute or a little less than a page. This reading speed drops when reading non-fiction, where comprehension and retention is more important. It also drops when reading on a computer screen - e-readers don't appear to suffer from this effect.

If you want to measure your reading speed and comprehension I found a page at http://

bit.ly/OENAKs which allows you to test your reading speed.

So let's take the scenario of a reader reading a paper novel in a break at work.

• They have perhaps 10 minutes
• They read at 200 words per minute
• It's not vital that they remember everything
• They don't have a bookmark with them
• They don't want to spend five minutes finding their place

Under such a situation you need to keep a chapter to 2,000 words or about  eight pages. Less is probably better.

Ebooks have changed the game. They remember your place in a book so there is no searching for your place. There is still that "I'll just finish this chapter," effect though. A good author needs to finish the chapter with a 'hook' to make sure the reader comes back and reads the next one rather than put the book down and forget it.

...and that means

Keep your chapters short - maybe five pages.

Try to finish each chapter with enough of a cliffhanger to make your reader want to continue.

Now the question is am I right? Do you think shorter chapters are better? We've certainly tried to do this in the later books of the A Vested Interest series.