Submissions
As a small agency we're sorry to say we no longer have time to respond to submissions or to offer critical feedback, unless, that is, we're so completely smitten by one that we think it could, and should, find a publisher. Because we're such a small agency we have to be extremely picky: over the course of a year we may take on just one or two clients from the many unpublished authors who submit their work to us each week. This sounds like terrible odds, and there are indeed an awful lot of people out there who have children or can remember being children, and who find themselves inventing stories for those children, and wondering whether their stories could have another life in the great wide world. Nonetheless, if a writer has a real talent and the determination to develop it (along with the capacity to accept and learn from editorial criticism), then in time the quality of his or her work can, and almost certainly will, stand out from the crowd.
For that reason we maintain this email address –
catchpolesubmissions@googlemail.com – for unsolicited manuscripts from new writers, whose work has reached a professional level and might therefore be considered for representation and publication. If you have a finished piece of writing or a portfolio of artwork that represents your best work, then do please email it to the above address, and we’ll be glad to take a look. Submissions should consist of a brief letter of introduction and, pasted into the email directly below, a representative sample of the work itself, of a length just sufficient to persuade us of its genius. (At the rate we have to work through this inbox, attachments just take too long to open, though we'll always take the time to open attachments of illustrative work as long as they're not encrypted in a program indecipherable to our only averagely-intelligent computers.)
Finally, in the case of those awkwardly-almost submissions that suggest a writer of genuine promise who nevertheless has further to go in finding their own, distinctive voice, we will do our best to reply, to offer a little encouragement and criticism, and to nudge them in the direction of Cornerstones (www.cornerstones.co.uk), an editorial agency adept at helping unpublished authors to reach their next level, be that a further, more focussed draft of a relatively raw piece of work, or the proud, polished submission that no publisher or agent can afford to overlook.