JURI GABRIEL, 35
CAMBERWELL GROVE,
Telephone & Fax +44 (020) 7703 6186 E-mail: JuriGabriel@compuserve.com
Dear
Thank you for your letter of
Please forgive me for sending you a form letter in response, but I receive hundreds of book, film, tv and radio scripts each year, and there is only one of me.
I’m afraid I have decided not to accept your proposal. This does not necessarily mean that it is unsellable. All it means is that I do not think I can sell it – or that it does not make commercial sense from the agent’s (10%) perspective.
Having said which, I feel I ought to make a few general points, which you may or may not find helpful:
1) From the hundreds of people of all kinds who write to me each year, I probably take on 2-4 new clients. (For most major publishers, broadcast and film companies, the figures for unsolicited manuscripts are even worse: between zero and two out of literally thousands. Indeed, increasing numbers of them will only look at submissions made through established agents.)
2) However, the overwhelming majority (over 95%) of submissions are so hopelessly bad that one shouldn’t really include them in any ‘significant’ statistics.
3) Last year getting on to 140,000 new titles (fiction and non-fiction and including new editions of previously published works) were published.
That there is a vast amount of undiscovered talent out there is a delusion. If you have genuine ability, persist; the real odds are less fearsome than they might first appear.
Good Luck!
Yours sincerely,
Juri Gabriel