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Brit Writers' Awards / Muslim Writers' Awards / America Writers' Awards

Old Hack

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We're beginning to hear reports from the writers who got involved in the Brit Writers publishing scheme, and it looks as though my concerns were well-founded.

Harry Bingham of the Writers' Workshop has blogged about it twice this month.

It's good to know that at least one of the writers concerned has received a refund.
 

Old Hack

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According to Companies House (you can search here: doing so doesn't produce a linkable result) Brit Writers Awards Ltd was dissolved on 15 May 2012.

Its American offshoot, America Writers Awards, has this statement on its website:

Thanks for visiting America Writers' Awards. Thank you to everyone who submitted to the AWA. Unfortunately our contest did not gain enough momentum to get enough applicants. We apologize and are refunding all applicants who did submit. Please follow us as we are going to work on a contest that is better suited for writers. We will bring you weekly blog posts to let you know the direction we will be going and the progress we are making. Until then we hope to be a resource for writers. Thank you again.​
If you need to get in touch with America Writers, please feel free to call, or email us.

Phone: 1(347)926-7111

Email: [email protected]
I'll be interested to see what they come up with next.
 

JudasFm

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APRS

Not sure about the contests, but in case Brit Writers are still doing or looking to restart the APRS (Agent Publisher Referral Scheme), I'll post my experiences of that here for all those who are interested :)

After entering the BWA (didn't get to London) I got a phone call from them a few weeks after the closing date asking if I would be interested in the APRS scheme. In other words, send us your stuff, we'll arrange a meeting to discuss it...at a cost, naturally. I can't remember the exact price; I think it was around the £400-500 mark. I should probably mention that this was for the meeting; the initial submission and feedback either didn't cost anything or cost a very small amount; I really can't remember.

After a bit of back and forth discussion, I duly sent the requested stuff and got the feedback. On the whole, it was pretty good (as in useful, not OMG ur work is TEH B0MB!!1!). They missed out a lot of things that others later picked up on, but what they had to say was fair and accurate. So I figured we could discuss it further and I booked a meeting with Imran.

On the Big Day, I drove up to Nottingham (several hours' journey; believe me, I didn't pick the place) to meet with Imran at a Holiday Inn. He'd had the full MS and had apparently read it through. I was nervous but excited.

We discussed it for two and a half hours. I won't bore you with everything we said about the novel itself. The idea behind APRS was that we should come up with a blurb, bio, synopsis and query letter together, then he'd send it out to his contacts in the literary world and I'd query other agents that I found. A few key things he said about the plan and publishing world have lodged in my mind:

First of all, he claimed that the 'no unsolicited MS' rule that the majority of publishers have is a lie to keep out substandard writing. He said they do look at all MS/queries that come in, and if one's really good, they'll take it on even if it hasn't come via an agent. So in other words, I should go ahead and submit to whoever I wanted.

Secondly, he wanted me to mention three interesting things about myself in the query letter since that would 'make it stand out from the others'. Of course, spraying it with skunk stink could also make it stand out, but I digress. Imran seemed to fixate on the fact that I live in the Canary Islands. Due to my pack-rat instincts, I actually found a dusty copy of the query letter, bio and synopsis that we put together at the meeting (sent to him as attachments for his approval). This is the first paragraph he came up with and insisted would do the trick:

Dear Editor/Agent, (In both mine and Imran's defense, this WAS always replaced with the name of the editor/agent in question ;))

I have a real passion for writing (and languages; I speak three besides English) and live in Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands. I also trained in acting and self-defense and used to work as an assistant in the latter classes, which basically means I was the person the instructor used to demonstrate all the moves on! I recently finished a sci-fi YA novel called Nemesis: The Journey Home which I would like to submit for your consideration.


Feel free to point and shriek. I mean, seriously, unless my book happens to be about a multilingual actress in the Canary Islands who moonlights as a self-defense instructor, who's going to care, right? No need to tell me how badly it sucks: believe me, I know :flag: The pitch I made was also pretty dire. Imran's response?

Hi Jude,
I like! :)
Kind regards
Imran


Notice he doesn't mention the lack of word count at any point. Gives you some idea of his level of expertise.

He then talks about who he's going to pitch it to. The name Eve White features rather prominently in this, along with a guy called James McSill. There were a couple of others (Mary someone and I forget the other person) who rapidly faded out of the equation in the days to come. Eve White lingered a little longer; Imran was always going to pitch to her and "Yes, I'm seeing her next Saturday/next week/insert-random-time-here!"

Any attempt on my part to gain more information was put off. Imran became difficult to get hold of (although in fairness, as another poster said, he was ill over the summer). When I asked him about Eve White and other agents (again and again) this is part of the email I received in return:

Although Eve White themselves dont normally take on books like yours, I have sent her a copy and am waiting to hear back. It could take a couple of weeks.

When I finally got hold of him again, it's all about James McSill and how he (Imran) thinks Nemesis should be translated for sale in Brazil. Eve White was now very firmly a distant memory, so we're concentrating on James. This is the email I got from Imran, minus the usual greetings and pleasantries:

I met James and we discussed your work. He is flying around the world (Portugal and then Spain)and will be in back in Brazil on Monday. He has asked me to send it to him then so that it doesn't get lost in his inbox.
I'll send him it to him on Monday and will copy you into the email (This never happened) so that you can communicate directly with him.


Okay. While I was waiting, I decided to do a little digging and checked out James McSill's website. Here's what I said to Imran:

On the phone you mentioned that James McSill was a literary agent, yet from his website he looks more like a freelance editor. Does he actually represent books himself in the Brazilian market?

The response?

James is a publishing consultant and works with many Brazilian publishers. He is asked by publishers to find the right book as per their brief and then he gives it to them. He is highly respected and has many million book sales in his portfolio.

Right. So despite his words, NOT a literary agent, although Imran seemed to want to convince me that James does the same job as a literary agent.

Monday came and went with no word. As did my many emails. To give some idea of the timeframe, I had the meeting in the middle of June and this was now the beginning of October. Exasperated at never getting any replies, at the end of October I decided to cut out the middleman and contacted James McSill directly asking what was happening. This is what he said:

I came back from Portugal today, but some 10 days ago or so I sent your MS to my agency in Sao Paulo.
The agency will FOR SURE get in contact, when Imran recommends an author he/she is automatically agented.
I will be having a meeting with the agency next week and will try to speed up the process.


At the end of next week, I contacted him again to ask what was going on and got this back (unlike Imran, James was very good about answering emails):

The agency is in contact with Imran.
But I dont run the agency. Please contact Imran, howver I cant see anything happening during the Brazilian summer.


Imran refused to answer any of my emails on this subject, so I got in touch with James again, not least because I wanted to know about the 'Brazilian summer' thing: do all Brazilian literary agencies/publishers close for the summer vacation or something?

James answered:

Yes, the agency, during summer, only deals with our best-selling authors (120K copies or more) or for 'services' (like career management, PR etc). The reason why it is not profitable to work o new author during summer: the agency gets only 10 to 20% off book royalties that are between 8 to 10%. Lets say, if a book sold 10K copies at R$20 (about 5 pounds), the author will get 50p per book, the agency will get 5p out of those 5p. Off those 5p, the agency will have to pay 8 to 17% taxes, plus an emplyee to deal with enquiries etc. Unless the volume justifies it, during these months publishers hardly ever take in new authors so its not worth it keep that sector open for aspiring or new authors.

I'll let the bored pick out the typos. He then went on to say:

I contacted the agent this afternoon on your/Imrans behalf to see what happened regarding your MS. The agent informs me, that the agency has agreed to give priority to ANY book referred to her via Imran, and yours was no exception. She has rushed it through the system to send a reply before the end of this month, which was well above service levels. (You guessed it: I never received a thing) The ticket of the reply is reproduced below.

TICKET: (ticket number)
from:McSill Literary (email address) to:McSill Literary Agency (eerily similar email address; one was "agency", one was "agencyagency")
to:Imran Akram (email address)
date:5 November subject:Jude Austin - Nemesis:Important mainly because of the people in the conversation.


Sooo...first he DOESN'T run the agency and now it's got his name on it. Bit of a coincidence. I couldn't help wondering about the number of McSills in Brazil; there can't be that many of them. No way to retrieve the ticket or read what was said, by the way. This was all the 'reply' I was to expect.

The agreement of the agency is exclusive with Imran/BWA and (I repeat) the agency HAS read your MS and sent a reply.

I am glad you have other agents that might be interested.

McSill Agency encourages authors to try and find as many channels they can to get their MS published. Even after an agreement is signed, the agency reserves the right and gives the author the right to cancel the deal at any point. This policy is best for both parties, as the author may find a better deal else where, or the agency may find a better author who wrote a similar story or a better story about the same theme.


In other words, if I do get an agent, they're likely to give me the boot as soon as a new query on a similar theme comes in if they think the new writer's better than me. Dear me, I had no idea they could be so ruthless! And after all that work they put in too, gone to waste as they get rid of me and start over with a new author!</sarcasm>

The rest was much of a muchness. I never contacted James again, never heard from his agency or received any contract (so much for "automatically agented"!) The last I heard from Imran was on Feb 11 of the following year after many, many attempts to get in touch again:

Hope you're well. I have followed up and I think we need to wait to hear back from them. In the meantime, lets continue to send it out to others. Let me know if you've sent it to anyone else too?

So if they do restart the APRS in another country (or are still running it in this one) this is what people have to look forward to. The weird thing is, I really do think they had good intentions, or at the very least that they started out with them.

I'm sure those more experienced than I am can pick out a whole lot more discrepancies and problems, but I'm tired so I'll stop here ;) I hope someone finds it useful, or at least interesting.
 
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