But the longer I waited for her to get back to me, the more I realised that I wanted the answer to be ‘Sorry, no’. I’d sent the agent the manuscript for my next novel, and she didn’t think she could do much with that, either. I realised that I’d come to value the opportunity that self-publishing gave me to do my own thing – and at my own pace. Perhaps more interestingly, it was a huge relief. We’d talked, when we met, about how very few books like Speak Its Name there were out there, how it seemed to be too gay for the Christian market and too Christian for everything else. What she said was that her agency wasn’t able to take it up because the foreign rights were insufficiently promising. That was the conclusion I came to when the one firm in the UK (that I knew of, at least) that published novels like mine, about LGBT characters and Christian politics, came back to me to say they weren’t interested.Īnd that was what an agent told me after I’d self-published that novel and after I’d become the first self-published author ever to be shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize. The Upsides of Being Unpublishable: How I learned to love going it aloneĪt least, that was what I began to suspect after a year of sending my manuscript out to agents and publishers.
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