Well, I'm forced again to post on this website. I've had three sleepless nights over the nature of the content here. Many other threads on this website have the same arrogant tone or worse, against hard-working people. My wife is disabled, and the arrogance of tone (and pack of lies) on this website has twice upset her. I never tell lies, so I told her the truth about why I'm so upset - the tone used by you lot, your un-researched un-polite filth. Just in case you don't believe me about my wife, our GP is Old Town Surgery, Swindon 616057. My wife, who's only 53, holds a nominal administrative role with my agency, and her hobby is looking after rescue cats, because it makes her happy. She has one full metal knee replacement, will need another in the foreseeable future, has a ruptured Achilles tendon (still weak following surgery), and arthritis (which is the general underlying problem) in one wrist. Her current mobility is limited. Her probable long-term prognosis is life in a wheelchair. I look after her. She knows how hard I work. If you book an appointment at my agency premises by emailing
[email protected] (and see 'Contact' under my website
http://sdsliteraryagency.azurewebsites.net/), I'll introduce you to her, and I'll take you up our local surgery, introduce you to the medical team up there (although the main players are surgeons and consultants at the local hospital), but you won't book an appointment for any reason, of course, because cowards hide behind machines, and don't reveal their home addresses (my contact details are on my website for all to see).
One point here is the 'SDS Finance doesn't exist in a British Government check' thing, therefore by inference the agency is some sort of fraud, or I am. I'm now forced to go to a low level of detail to answer that issue properly, and I shouldn't really have to. Someone has shown a print on here saying 'SDS Finance' was dissolved. Well, my 'SDS Finance' couldn't have possibly been dissolved, because as a self-proprietary business, I was never under any obligation to register it, and it was indeed never registered, so it cannot therefore have been dissolved. I owned a snooker club, which I sold before the recession began. The original purpose of 'SDS Finance' was to act as a holding company of sorts; to allow money generated by 8-ball pool tables, 9-ball pool tables and snooker tables to be represented in a particular way, offset by associated costs, so that those streams of revenue could subsequently be treated in a particular way within the accounts of the snooker club, which were created by my accountant, and subsequently accepted by the Inland Revenue. The 'offset' set-up meant that despite 'SDS Finance' having money continually flowing through its bank account, it could never make an annual penny of profit or an annual penny of loss, so I was never under any obligation to register the self-proprietary company, all revenues already shown through the accounts of the snooker club, so 'SDS Finance' was never registered. For the record, the person I sold the snooker club to quickly built up five-figure debts in the recession. The club closed in February 2010, and it's strongly rumoured he was forced to go bankrupt. So I turned a loss-making concern into a profitable one, and emerged with nice profit overall, showing excellent business judgement by selling just before the recession. The same excellent business judgement that previously saw me choose to retire from mainstream employment at age 42 after a running a glittering IT consultancy, me spending 12 years working as a contract PRINCE2 Project Manager in the public and private sectors. Anyway, 'SDS Finance' was never registered after its creation for use in connection with the snooker club. And still a self-proprietary business, it wasn't registered when I declared it to the Department of Work and Pensions as part of a business plan to secure a Government grant for the literary agency. But because I started making money straightaway on the literary agency, and because I chose to use 'SDS Finance' to govern the agency financially, there was all of a sudden a requirement to register it as a self-proprietary business by a certain deadline. My response was to instead make it into a Limited Company, and as you can see under 'Contact' on my website, 'SDS Finance Limited' is registered in England and Wales, Registration Number 8781922.
So to sum up on this point (although the set-up of my businesses is none of your concern), my SDS Finance was never registered as a business, so cannot have been dissolved. The 'dissolved' print shown on this website looks genuine, the same format as most company records at Companies House, so the only possible explanation is that someone other than me registered a business called 'SDS Finance', which they subsequently dissolved. The only point that matters is that the point raised on this website about 'after a check with the Government, the business doesn't exist, so is a fraud' is incorrect - my 'SDS Finance' couldn't possibly have been dissolved because it was never registered, the Limited Company standing proud from a point in the recent past. So the person who raised the point, showed the print on here got it wrong, just posted without researching, basing their spiteful and slanderous comments on a supposed name match. So to you, the person who got it wrong, the precise set up of my businesses is none of your concern, but I've answered your question anyway. Did you enjoy upsetting a disabled person? As you haven't Emailed me your home address, you are just a spineless coward that hides behind a machine, spouting your un-researched lies, which upsets my family and makes my honest business look bad. I'm bloody angry that you upset my wife, and that goes for all of you that upset her with your clever little sarcastic comments, or lies, or arrogant, pompous or bombastic tones. And you, the one who made a false and damaging statement about my business, a statement that upset a disabled person, I think you should retract (or have retracted) all posts on that subject. I think you should Email an apology to me, because you are proven wrong. Actually, under new internet laws in Britain, I could easily prosecute you or indeed any person on here that makes a slanderous or libellous or even offensive statement - the new laws aren't yet in America, but Obama agrees with Davis Cameron's stand against internet cowards, to the point that Obama didn't oppose the extradition of three people who are now in jail in Britain, along with quite a few similar offenders from the UK. Withy King (Swindon and Bath) are my solicitor, funny enough the same solicitor I used for the snooker club and the involvement of 'SDS Finance' there, and did you know that because your IP address is irrevocably associated with each and every post you make on the internet, your home address can now be derived from it under force of law, the unique signal of your IP address being track-able back through historical satellite data to reveal the precise location of your machine, including its movements if any?
Alright, let's move on. My website, which I pay for -
http://sdsliteraryagency.azurewebsites.net/. What's wrong with it? Where's any imperfectly edited material?
Editing. 69 edits now. Nice money, no complaints from any one-off or repeat client. The person who picked up the 'diffuse' versus 'defuse' point did so from the third novel in the series, so he must have ploughed through the material for that novel and the other two novels before picking up the error. A lot of checking to pick up one rather petty typo. But the person's inference that agency editing is only based on spellcheck is a lie - this error was picked up from the second novel, during the proofread of the series of three novels after editing. It was my stupid fault that I was so busy at the time, I didn't act on the pointer that the same error also existed at two points in the third novel. So I'll hold my hands up to that one. I agree, by the way, that the paragraph in question is a bit clunky, but editing isn't going to change writing style - if it did, it wouldn't be the author's work any more. As a matter of fact, the 'Intrepid' series has some interesting feedback from commissioning editors at publishing houses. Three instances of feedback were closely matched - the premise is interesting, the series is well written, but there's too much technical detail about the space shuttle in the first book, compromising mass market potential. Funny thing is, just over 5,000 words of technical detail was stripped out of the first novel before the series was sent to commissioning editors, but now a further 5,000 - 6,000 words of the first novel need to come out, taking it down to about 100,000 words, after the three commissioning editors concerned agreed to assess a rewrite without most of the technical stuff.
And finally, what's all this about me not understanding the publishing business? Where's the evidence for that? Is it just because I never worked in it before starting the agency? That's no reason, just a pompous opinion that someone new can't succeed, an opinion with no basis in fact or evidence. All unpublished writers (the very large majority of people on this website, including 11 I checked out who falsely claimed to be published) are aiming to succeed without having ever succeeded in the area before - should they all give up, then? Not having done it before didn't stop me from making a lossmaking town centre snooker club into a successful one, before I knew the oncoming recession meant it was time to sell. Not having done it before didn't stop me running or working on IT projects at 22 clients in 6 industrial sectors, every single project a success on time, budget and success criteria grounds. At the end of the day, a literary agency is just a procurement exercise, like the OJEU procurement I oversaw in IT, the G-CAT procurement I oversaw in IT, and all the other less formal procurements I oversaw or worked on; you get the material (the less than 1% of incoming writer submissions that are good enough or close to being good enough), you sell the material (books to paper publishing houses, screenplays to film production companies, helping a few authors to self-publish on Amazon on a paid commission basis if they want that), and if there's more than one taker, you hold an auction between them, there being no auction if there's one or no takers. You can read all about such auctions in the Bookseller, and the film industry magazines. Monetary sums changing hands are sometimes not disclosed, sometimes the deals themselves are not disclosed, not everybody wanting to bear their souls to be scrutinised by the likes of you lot. I've scoured internet listings (including five very lengthy ones), taking four years to build up a consolidated computerised database by genre and country of named and researched commissioning editors and film producers with personal contact details. The database even includes Brad Fuller's (Platinum Dunes) cell phone number, which he's used to reject three of my client scripts to date, with incredibly lovely, polite and detailed text messages. There are no generic company-level contacts ('info', etc.) in the database - they're generally a waste of time, never looked at, swamped with thousands of communications. Yes, I used my IT skills to reverse-engineer quite a few commissioning editor and film producer Email addresses; good business, and all done in a legal way. Email is the way forward - the world's two largest publishing houses now only accept Email submissions (I've got responsive contacts covering multiple genres at both), as do an ever-increasing number of publishing houses large and small. Most publishing houses that still accept paper submissions will accept Email submissions from agents, but very rarely writers. You'd be surprised at the very large number of commissioning editors that click through and look at my website, then talk to me about a client book, eventually in detail. Like most agents, I'll pick an average of 7-12 commissioning editors for each client book, although my commissioning editor lists would probably be more extensive than most, because of the reverse engineering. It's rare that I'd submit a book to less than 7 or more than 12 commissioning editors. I can assure you that in the unlikely event I choose to represent your book, it will make the desks of suitable paper publishing house commissioning editors. Your book will be submitted with a professional tagline and synopsis, which I would generally write (most writer efforts on both counts are pretty poor in terms of selling). I can also assure you that a commissioning editor that likes your book will start a process aimed at buying it, but more often than not, publication decisions are made by peer-based committees of commissioning editors, with sales force representative(s) that would have to be very positive about their perceived ability to sell a book to bookshop chains before the committee would proceed - and that's going to be difficult in the UK, as only six significant chains remain in the UK after the recession, two of which are in administration, Waterstones (the largest chain) now having closed its shelves permanently to first-time writers, because of badly-selling debut book after badly-selling debut book. Most of the knowledge I have was gained by meeting or otherwise communicating with a lot of commissioning editors in London - book an appointment at my premises to view the file of contacts and communications.
Okay, so having read this paragraph and the one above it, tell me why I don't understand the publishing industry.
Let's begin to wind this post up. But just to let you know, I did get some interesting feedback on unpublished (first-time writers) from one commissioning editor. He said (not verbatim) 'Don't ever bother listening to unpublished writers. They don't know what they're talking about. Their books almost certainly won't sell, that's why we want the filter of an agent before even briefly looking at their material.' So let's think about that for a moment. This website is full of unpublished writers looking for agents and publishers, right? You'll remember that I randomly checked out 11 writers on this website that claimed to be published. None had deals with paper publishing houses where they had advance payment on royalties, and distribution of physical copies of their books to physical bookshops, so none of them were truly published, many being 'vanity' or 'subsidy' published, where you pay them to publish your book; all 11 were all liars, pretending to be published when they weren't, some of their spiteful or arrogant commentary joining the rest of the cowards who hide behind their machines. And I can tell you that the commissioning editor I paraphrase above is by no means in a minority of one in thinking that unpublished writers aren't worth listening to, their material generally not worth the effort of looking at. Oh, and wait a minute; commissioning editors are the only gurus in the publishing industry that matter, the only ones that can offer a deal on your book, right? And those very editors say that unpublished writers aren't worth listening to. So as this website is a voice for unpublished writers who are looking for agents and publishers, it would appear that none of you are worth listening to, your opinions inconsequential to the only figures in the publishing industry that really count in success terms. Is that right? I wouldn't say it was the case for all of you on this website, but its certainly true for a lot of you. And should this website be closed down, because it allows unsubstantiated arrogant opinion that could potentially damage the businesses of hardworking and honest business people? Probably not, but I think the sponsors should be alerted to the libellous, scandalous and less than polite content that's scattered around far too many of the threads on this website. The libellous, slanderous and less than polite content levelled against my agency has actually pushed me to be less than polite.
So I'll tell you what. If you're a published or unpublished writer that wants representation, and a good tagline, synopsis and pitch placed in front of targeted commissioning editors that might buy your sort of book if its good enough, then I'd love to hear from you at my Email address above.
It costs nothing to be nice and polite. So if you're anything less than that, you can piss off, no one cares about you or what you're saying.
And if you're a troll, or someone that enjoys being arrogant, mickey-taking, sarcastic, pompous or offensive, you can piss off, no one cares about you or what you're saying.
You shouldn't post anything that's critical, or even a little less than polite, if you aren't willing to make your home address known, because if you don't want to do that, then you're a spineless, gutless coward who should piss off, because nobody cares about you or what you're saying.
And if you're someone who enjoys upsetting disabled people, you should piss off, because nobody cares about you or what you're saying.
Yes, the agency is small. But you're free to try elsewhere if you want to, although over 99% of manuscripts aren't good enough to have a realistic chance of publication through any agent, which is part of the reason for over two-thirds of agents going out of business during the recession.