RE-APPROACH YOUR NOVEL #1 (Upmarket Fiction)

Bookends 📚

The original release of Bookends included this poster, which Columbia chairman Clive Davis used to justify increasing the price of the LP.

Good evening Writer, Ivan speaking.

Today I’m thinking about beginnings and endings.

Twenty years ago (early in my new career as a literary agent) I had a meeting with a senior publisher. Her expertise was publishing Upmarket Fiction (also called Book Club Fiction which is Commercial Fiction with elements of Literary Fiction.)

It became obvious to me from the way she spoke that she could have taken the career path into top management. That’s a choice talented publishers have. Stay working with authors, building a list of the best and the biggest, or move up into senior management. The top jobs in any corporation are about growing and defending the business: strategy, team development, fresh revenue hunting and cost containment. Clearly, this publisher would have eaten up that work but clearer still was how much she loved the books. The writer interactions. The huge challenge of making a bestseller. The high when it all comes off. (Neophyte me still had much to learn.)

There was one thing which really stuck with me from that meeting.

I asked about her approach to new novels sent by literary agents.

She said this:

“First I read the first chapter. Then, if I love it, I read the last chapter. This shows me whether the novelist knows how to brilliantly deliver on that questioning hook they’ve thrown at the beginning.”

Naturally, I was traumatised. I hate a spoiler. I need the lure of plot to be pulled into a book. Even with literary novels which I suspect won’t resolve tidily, I at least like to enjoy the vague hope they might.

Two things to consider in light of this:

1. Please don’t tell me the ending of your novel when you send it (here). I want to be sucked into your story. I want to yearn for it to turn out all right. I’m as silly as Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde’s greatest work The Importance of Being Earnest when she asserts a notion that accidentally tells us more about real life than she intended. Prism says: “the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”

2. Consider this as a new way through which to approach your novel this week/month/year. What happens to your manuscript when you imagine the literary agent or the editor at the publishing house only reading the first and the last chapter? Does it cast? Do you deliver?

Wishing you a good one.

As ever,

Ivan

---

If you’re receiving this you’re subscribed to the Upmarket Fiction section of My Agent Secret newsletter. Amend your subscription here.