Communication from JM Thurley, received 1st October 2003

Your website features us rather prominently, in an adverse light. This came as a surprise as we regularly receive letters and e-mails thanking us for taking the trouble to read submissions and to offer constructive criticism. A few facts about literary agents in general might afford subscribers an insight into what happens on the other side of the table and help to modify some apparently rather naive assumptions that appear to be extant.

Literary agents receive anything up to 200 unsolicited submissions per week by mail and e-mail. Unlike dentists, plumbers, electricians, solicitors, or accountants most don't charge for responding to such work. In other words they are asked - and accept - a situation in which they are providing a free service to complete strangers: a situation unique in a world where the cash nexus regulates all other dealings. Some agents use the standard rejection letter as the most efficient way of dealing with the tide of submissions: this has the merit of being relatively fast, but provides the writer with no insight into what they are doing wrong - or right. The second category of agents attempt to provide a personalised response: this is a much more labour intensive process and inevitably leads to complaints of delay. We have taken a further step: we provide a brief (free) critique of work submitted, and offer (not 'push') a paid service to those who feel they might benefit from a personal appraisal of their work. And yes, we often take a long time to provide an initial response. And yes, those initial responses are often not what writers who have toiled over their work for a long time want to hear. For your information during the past fifteen months the company has moved twice, and as a consequence unsolicited material has not been dealt with in the normal time scheme. We are currently in the process of tackling the backlog of writers submissions.

Writing is extremely personal and people who are rejected feel slighted and want to lash out at those they consider have let them down. This isn't a rational response. If the work is good enough, sufficiently dramatic, fresh and exciting one or other of us will take it on and it will be published, filmed, made into television, or appear on stage in The West End. But projected demographics suggest that in publishing alone only 0.5% of books submitted to publishers are accepted, and the percentages are even less favourable in other disciplines. The final arbiter governing acceptance or rejection is whether your work resonates with the ever moving market. As Margaret Thatcher observed 'you can't buck the market'.

We're all on the same side - that of getting good work published, filmed, performed. In the final analysis agents and writers are on the same side despite appearances to the contrary.