From the OTHE SIDE OF THE DESK
PITCH PERFECT
Too many queries make themselves easy to discard. Make sure yours isn’t one of them by taking note of what Piers Blofeld has to say on attracting agent attention for the right reasons
Piers Blofeld
Ihave a rather brilliant, somewhat lazy writer friend, who, many years ago was sacked from his job editing a small magazine in Los Angeles. In a moment of desperation in the weeks that followed he had a very clever idea for a novel. Being the clever chap that he is, he pitched it by writing a lengthy, New York Review of Books-style review of the novel he had not yet written a word of and sent that to an agent he knew. Within a month, that 5,000-word tongue in cheek review had netted him over half a million pounds in advances from around the world.