SCBWI's Agents Party ... How Nobody Was Bitten ... Plus Some Monster News

Last night was a big night for British SCBWI people, the Agents' Party is one of the truly packed events on the SCBWI calendar - an opportunity to look Rejection and/or Success in the eye.

But if there was trepidation in our hearts, we tried not to show it:


In fact some of us looked positively gleeful:


Indeed we were hilariously joyful despite the nerves fizzing all over the room!

On the panel were two artist's agents and two literary agents (there were supposed to be three but one had to drop out because of a personal emergency).

This was my fourth Agents Party - and yes, yes, I have an agent, but who else was going to take the pictures and write up the report ... okay, I admit it, I just love going to SCBWI events and getting together with all the people. Sad I know.

Anyway, though there were some people who didn't make it at the last minute, the pub was absolutely packed!

The agents very kindly didn't bite anybody, and the audience had the restraint not to offer the agents full body massages (yes, some of us are that desperate).

In attendance were:

Illustrator Agents - Edward Burns of Advocate Art and Mark Mills of Plum Pudding.
Author Agents - Daniel Neilson of PFD and Eve White, who is a solo agent.

Edward Burns (right) described his clients as "artists who can look after themselves" - "professionals who are sending their children through school".

Mark Mills (left), who is married to the art director at Little Tiger Press (cozy!), said his agency plan to set up in US and France.

The bad news for illustrators is that editors are becoming more choosy, "The price of oil affects the price of paper and the price of paper affects what publishers do," Mark said. "The net result is we have become more careful of the kind of artist that we take on."

Interesting though that the illustrators' agents take 30% commission while the author agents take 15%.

The author agents had some good news for picture book writers ... PB texts are selling again (hooray) - Daniel said: "PB texts are selling very, very well. We are looking for picture book texts that revolve around ethnic backgrounds such as African and Asian stories." How refreshing after the dire PB is Dead stuff we were hearing all of last year.

As it is every year, books for boys are much in demand - "For me, humour goes a long way," Daniel said.

Eve White (pictured below) tells the story of Andy Stanton who was working his way from A to Z in the Writers and Artists Yearbook with little success. After five or six rejections, he gave up on A to Z and started working his way through the list from Z to A, eventually finding Eve's agency.

"He phoned me and said what do you think of this book? I said it sounded wacky and probably very difficult to get published," Eve said. "But I loved it and he sent me the rest of the mansucritp and I said, don't talk to any other agents until I have finished it."

The result was the award-winning You're a Bad Man Mister Gum.

And that is definitely NOT You're a Bad Man Mister Gum, in the picture but From Where I Stand by Tabitha Suzuma.

There is more of course but I've got to rush through this blog post so I can bake a chicken. Sorry. Hopefully Anita Loughrey, who was spotted taking copious notes will blog about the rest! Sue Hyams blogged about it hours before I wrote this on her excellent new website - in a post interestingly titled 'Too Busy To Write' ... she should add: 'But Not Too Busy to Blog' ... Sue organised the Agents Party - thank you, Sue!

On another note, how serendipitous that last night's Agents' Party happened the night before the formal launch of Authonomy - Harper Collins' social networking site designed to spot the gems in the slushpile. It's been in beta for three months and now it's live ... it works on the basis of aspiring writers reviewing each other on the site and supposedly will save editors the need to actually read their slushpile.

Former slushpile reader Aida Edemariam wrote a piece in the Guardian with the cute title File it in the Bin (hollow laughter) and describes the business of spotting talent from a stack of submissions as a "deeply fallible system":

The slush pile is the great awkward albatross of the publishing industry. Writing must come from someone, and go to somewhere, and not everyone has a friend whose boyfriend happens to be editor of a literary imprint: every day someone decides that there's nothing for it but to post their precious manuscript to someone they've never met, at a company that is receiving stuff from people like them all the time. And even in the best-case scenario - where every word of every submission is read - it is a deeply fallible system.

Rebecca Swift of The Literary Consultancy pointed out that

I think to leave it completely to peer management might be fantastically chaotic.

Which pretty much evens out the score:

No less chaotic, some would argue, than taking pot luck with a student on work experience, or an overworked editor who might be having an off day. Publishing is, in the end, a triumph of hope over logistics.

And now, having done my duty and reported on the Agents' Party, I must bring you the incredible and much more important news that my friend, Fiona Dunbar (The Truth Cookie, Toonhead) has this summer been seen with the Loch Ness Monster!

What's In a Website?

a quick note: friends, please visit my Volcano Child blog (yes, yes, I know, obsessive compulsive me etc etc) - help me make a good impression with ahem! The Powers That Be ...

There is a bit of a discussion at the British SCBWI message board about author websites.

Do you need one?

Where do you start?

Can you cope?

When I first started trying to get published, I set up my homepage CandyGourlay.com. It was 2001, and I was only just beginning to get to grips with code. Blogs were not yet in flavour nor were connection speeds terribly good and Web 2.0 was a twinkle in someone's eye. So my website was really, just a leaflet about me, an online CV.

I started up this blog in 2004 after emerging from SCBWI's conference in Madrid with piles of notes and nowhere to publish them. At the time, I thought I would use my journalistic skills and dash off feature length reports on the writing events I attended.

Well, the blog evolved and developed a voice of its own, it's funnier now, more personal, more frequently updated. It probably helps that I've also acquired the skills and tools to work faster online.

Then the world started to spin a little bit faster. Publishing was changing before our very eyes. Technology was changing. Children were changing.


I heard Scott Westerfeld (Uglies) give the keynote at the SCBWI conference in Bologna in 2005 and I was struck at how with-it he was about technology, about his fans and visiting his website, I realised that his blog had engendered a kind of connectedness with his readership that other authors would do well to emulate.

I wrote a piece on why competition from the internet meant authors needed to become more web savvy.

Then I decided to take my own advice and began to blog about my manuscript in progress. I saw my blog VolcanoChild.co.uk not as a leaflet about my book but more like a behind the scenes magazine. I wanted it to evolve as my book evolved.

Knowing that I was still some way towards sellling the manuscript, I could take my time, blogging on themes that run through the novel, such as: Children who Work, Mothers who Have to Leave, Real Witches and Living with Calamity. (Pictured right is a child circus performer in Shanghai).

Instead of building a website from scratch, I used Blogger, changed the template using my Photoshop and coding skills, and used Blogger's powerful tagging tool which put posts of a similar theme together on one page.

The ultimate objective of a blog is to create a conversation between the writer and the reader. However, I also saw the website as an easy way to build a website of substance to support my book - if ever and whenever it gets taken on by a publisher ... a bit like the online production diary that director Peter Jackson kept while making King Kong. The website gets noticed now and then, but ultimately, I am building up a strong archive for the IF and WHEN.

I have started another blog on a theme that I intend to explore in a future novel about climate change, I haven't been blogging extensively because I don't want to fill it with off-the-cuff stuff but with pieces that will someday be the beef to my future novel's bone.


Last year, i kept a comic blog on the building of my writing shed.


Blogs are not just diaries - they are conversations with the outside world, extended essays, online magazines on themes that you would never find on a newstand!

We have at our fingertips these powerful tools to support our craft - and they're FREE.

Here are three bits of unsolicited advice to those who still resist the onward march of the internet:

1) Computers don't explode when you get something wrong.

2) Any mistakes can be undone by pressing Control-Z (for PCs) . You can restore the deletion by pressing Control-Y

3) If your blog looks like crap, delete it and try again.

A Long Wet Summer of Hannah Montana

So the Met Office informs us that September will be better than this long wet August we've been having - not an Indian summer, mind you, just a wee bit dryer.

Which is comforting. This past summer's wet weather drove my household into the arms of Hannah Montana and her other sitcom cohorts on the Disney Channel (courtesy of an ill-conceived cable TV upgrade).

Watching the Disney Channel (incessantly) has it's educational side to a wannabe children's writer. I suppose one could view Disney Channel content as competition.

I mean, the programme ideas are not far off the stuff we try to think up for our own books - the list reads like SCBWI story pitching competition:

Hannah Montana - superstar goes undercover as girl next door

That's So Raven - teenage psychic who always jumps to the wrong conclusions

The Suite Life - identical twins live in hotel where their mom works with a resident millionaire teenager thrown in

Wizards of Waverley Place - teenage wizards-in-training ... in New York

Camp Rock - High School Musical redux ... except it's rock not pop and it's a camp not a school.

Cory in the House - teenager moves into White House with his chef dad and must cope with life in the capitol plus the president's smart-aleck little daughter

I remember in my childhood that the Disney factory spun out film after film, using actors from the same stable in the same way that these sitcoms seem to swap actors back and forth.

Kurt Russell, now a proper actor, used to be in the Disney stable, starring in such badly made films as The Strongest Man in the World (1975), Superdad (1972), and Now You See Him Now You Don't (1972). I watched them all.

Now, Disney's doing the same thing using the internet and TV - my daughter is this minute watching Wendy Wu Homecoming Warrior - Wendy's destiny is to save the world but all Wendy wants is to become homecoming queen (nice idea!) - stars Brenda Song, who plays the airhead millionaire teenager from The Suite Life. Jeez, Disney works its actors hard ... I found out that Brenda Song also maintains this video blog on the Disney site.

School totally re-opens tomorrow. I haven't written a single word since the holidays began so though I will miss my little people, I CAN'T WAIT!

Meanwhile, here's a wistful look back at the summer that wasn't quite: