This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Caroline Hogg has worked in publishing for almost ten years, at Little, Brown Book Group and more recently at Avon, HarperCollins. She's currently at Pan Macmillan as Senior Commissioning Editor for Commercial Women's Fiction. She knows her stuff!
Today's question comes from a Novelicious reader who asks:
Caroline, do you think books get turned down by agents more often
because of poor writing or because the timing is not right?
Caroline says: That’s tricky for me
to answer, as I’m not an agent. But my best guess is that for something to be
taken on by an agent it has to be brilliantly written AND timely in terms of
what’s happening in the bestseller charts or where gaps in the market are.
That’s not to say every book written should jump on a bandwagon, far from it.
If you’re writing something that would fit into a genre that’s doing very well
(like erotica or psychological suspense) then your book has to be a cut above to
stand out amongst so many established authors. And if you’re writing something
in an emerging genre, your writing has to be just as brilliant to convince
people to try something new.
Have a writing or publishing related question for Caroline? Just email a question to kirsty@writingtipsoasis.com, ask on our Facebook or Twitter or just leave a comment below!