Julia Churchill, A.M Heath
Julia Churchill joined AM Heath in 2013 as Children’s Agent, after four years building up the UK side of the Greenhouse Literary Agency, and six years at the Darley Anderson Agency where she grew the children’s list. She represents some fabulous writers, but is always on the treasure hunt for new writing talent. She’s looking for debut and established authors with storytelling magic, from picture book texts right up to YA fiction.

When did you come into agenting? What did you do before? And why agenting?
I started as Darley Anderson’s PA about twelve years ago. Darley is an agenting legend, so typing his emails for two years was a great way in to the business. I became Agency Manager after a couple of years, then was charged with building up the children’s side of the business. Agenting is creative, tough, exciting. What’s not to love?!

What’s your pet peeve on covering letters?
Aggression and hyperbole. Normal things to be peeved about.

Are you most drawn to beautiful writing? Or a wonderful plot? Or a stunning premise? Or what?
When considering a submission I’m looking for a voice, an idea, a story, a character, and a book that’s trying to say something to me. Every book I’ve taken on has delivered on those fronts.

Tell us how you like writers to submit work to you. And how you’d like them not to submit work.
It’s all here. If you’re writing a children’s book or YA, I’d love to see it when it’s ready to share.

Where do most of your authors come from? The slushpile? Personal recommendation? Or what?
Mostly from slushpile. 90%. The slushpile is the best place in the world. Very democratic.

Do you need good personal chemistry with your authors?
You need trust and respect coming from both sides, yes.

What’s the most important part of your job?
For every author, and for every deal, I’m a slightly different agent depending on the needs of the client and the situation.
Ultimately an author has an agent to make an easier professional life and to make more money. It’s my job to take care of both those ends.

Do you get involved in shaping an author’s career?
Absolutely. That’s one of the crucial roles of an agent.

If you had one bit of advice to give to new writers, what would it be?
Read. Be a reader. Be a fan. Also if you’ve sent your book out to everyone, and you’re only getting form rejections, that’s feedback in itself. Look hard at the book, and try and work out what isn’t connecting. Then read some more books. Be a reader. Be a fan.

Are e-books going to bring about fundamental changes to the publishing industry? What would you say if one of your authors wanted to e-publish their next book, cutting out conventional publishers altogether?
It entirely depends on the reason. An exciting thing about now is there are lots of ways to do things. The landscape is different. But traditional publishing is still dominant. Over an international career, an author needs the passion and push of hundreds of experts. I want my clients to benefit from the talent of editors and publicists and marketeers and sales people and designers: and the list goes on and on.

Have you enjoyed reading more since becoming an agent? Or are there times it feels like a chore?
Good books and good manuscripts never feel like a chore. And it’s important in my job to keep reading really great books to re-calibrate. If you only read submissions, you get a new idea of what’s good. I want my idea of what is ‘good’ to be ‘superb’, rather than just ‘publishable’.

The grim stats: how many submissions do you get per week (or year)? And how many new authors do you take on?
About 100 a week. I think I take on about one in a thousand, but the stats don’t feel grim to me. Most people don’t make it because they aren’t good enough. Ouch, but it’s the truth. I like playing the guitar, but I’ll never make any money from it. I play because it makes me happy.

What Unique Selling Points do you have as an agent or agency?
A track record for spotting and developing debut talent and doing really great deals. And AM Heath has one of the best rights departments in the country.

Do you like your authors to tweet & blog & Facebook … or do you really not care?
More than anything, I like them to write and to have good lives. But yes, once published, social networking can be really helpful if done well.

Which is most important: the editor, the publisher or the advance?
There’s few things as impressive as a talented publishing team who’ve decided to put their hands on a project. It’s got to be the first two.

If you weren’t an agent, what else would you be?
A dog walker or a chef.

Do you secretly have a book in you? And if so, tell us more …
God no, it’s much too hard.

Julia is one of the agents appearing at this year’s Festival of Writing. Each year we invite important agents who are hungry for new talent and who look after some of the best authors in the business. Don’t miss your chance to book a one-to-one session with an agent of your choice.

There was a debate by an organisation called Intelligence Squared at the Royal Institution last Tuesday 23rd April where the motion was ‘pornography is good for us: without it we would be a far more repressed society.’ I didn’t attend the debate itself, but apparently at the outset 60% of the audience supported this motion, and by the end this had only reduced to 50%. Germaine Greer opposed it, arguing that pornography doesn’t rescue us from repression, it actually feeds off it, because without some form of repression there would be no pornography. Either way, it looks as if we – or at least the intelligentsia sitting in a debating chamber – are still pretty equally divided in our opinions. I wonder how such a debate would go if it was enacted by parents, teachers, therapists, criminologists…?

We live in a society where we are lucky to have access to whatever literature or images we choose, but as an adult I choose to avoid going anywhere near the troubling modern day, dead-eyed porn in all its blatant, fleshy, garishly-lit, visual crudity. It’s starting to make Emmanuelle look like Mary Poppins and it terrifies the life out of most parents. So had I been debating this issue I would have gone further and suggested that even the word ‘repression’ is surely outmoded in this day and age in which case so should porn be, that is, why do we apparently still ‘need’ it? Far from liberating us or taking us away into fantasies, it merely takes sex, something that is beautiful, if basic, and turns it something ugly, brutish or even violent at best, and at worst is starting to damage and frighten the young, evolving minds that watch it.

Some might say this is rich coming from a writer of erotica, but the two prime words I have just used are ‘watch’ and ‘writer’. One of the many tags that irritated me about the 50 Shades phenomenon was its description as ‘mummy porn’, which, without getting too heavy, seemed to link two opposing words in an extremely unpleasant way. The writer of it happened to be a mother, and the readers were often mothers, but the only mother in the narrative is an abusive, drug-taking prostitute in the hero’s back story. Similarly the ‘porn’ involved in the story relates to the use of domination, punishment and sex toys (albeit in a consensual relationship), but then the book is also described as erotica. So, which is it? Erotica, or porn? In my view, it can’t be both.

I am not a natural debater – I tend to get heated, emotional and as you can see from this piece, opinionated – but if I am challenged on the basis that I’ve written some pretty experimental sexual practices in some of my earlier work, I prefer to simplify matters for myself and for my audience by making a stark distinction. To me, porn is immediate, unimaginative, visual, and predominantly male-orientated. Erotica seeks to arouse through the written word and imagination, and is primarily by women, for women. It’s the difference between brutality and sensuality. Insult and compliment. Relationship and encounter. Consent and imposition. Porn seeks to lower, erotica to elevate. Porn is imposed, violent, debasing. Erotica celebrates sex within an adult, and with the genre of ‘erotica romance’ catching on, increasingly intense, romantic relationships.

An unlikely champion of this viewpoint was D H Lawrence. Recently, preparing for my erotica workshop, I re-read parts of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and realised that the ‘obscenity’ in it relates more to the context, the language used, and the times in which it was written, rather than the explicit yet tender descriptions of the sex itself.
I suppose in conclusion that if I was going to put my money where my mouth was, I’d have to imagine my teenage son’s reaction if he read one of my books. Mostly he’d snap the book shut as soon as he realised what was going on, but if he did read it more closely he would see that everything happening was part of an intense, loving journey between consenting adults. The worst that could happen is that he’d be deeply embarrassed, not deeply damaged.

Anastasia Parkes has an MA in English Literature from Oxford and has lived in London and Cairo. She presently works as a secretary for criminal defence lawyers and as a portrait photographer. She also writes freelance features for publications such as The Times, The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, The Lady and You And Your Baby magazine. Under the pseudonym Primula Bond, she has written three erotic novels (Country Pleasures, Club Crème and Behind the Curtain) and numerous short stories for Virgin Books, a novella (Out of Focus) and solo collection of short stories for Xcite Books, and a further novella (Sisters in Sin) and numerous short stories for the HarperCollins imprint Avon. When she’s not also working on completing a literary novel, she works as a book editor for aspiring erotic, romatic and literary writers.

Anastasia is running a number of workshops at our upcoming Festival of Writing, including one on  Writing Erotica: ‘Behind closed doors’ More details can be found here: http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/Festival-2013-workshops.html

As I write this, I am in limbo. I’ve just sent back my notes on the first proofs of my next book Crap Towns Returns: Back By Unpopular demand, and although there’s another proofing stage to go, I’m starting to realise that there’s very little more I can do for the book.

A few weeks ago, when I was in the thick of writing, wondering if I was really going to finish on time, desperately trying to find out new facts about Bury St Edmunds, to trim down my (then) ridiculously long history of the City of London, to find that killer fact about Gateshead, not to mention when I was schlepping round the M25 to grab last minute photographs of Jaywick, Camberley and Southampton – back then I would have told you I couldn’t wait for this moment.

But, as I imagine every writer knows, getting to the end isn’t entirely delightful. I feel, instead, bereft. It isn’t just that writing can be such a peculiar and intense joy. (And I mean joy. Coming up with the right picture caption or one-liner sets me dancing round my study in delight.) It’s that it gives you a sense of purpose and meaning. Even writing a book as daft as Crap Towns is wonderfully validating. The feeling must be extraordinary for novelists – but the come down must also be correspondingly hard. Where do you go after having such a good outlet for your pet obsessions such a long time? What do you do?

It isn’t just that I suddenly have far less to do with my time, and a pressing need to find a new project. It’s also that my book is leaving my hands – and that soon I’ve got to hope it lands in as many other hands as possible. This thought is terrifying. Especially right at this minute, when there’s very little I can do about it. Launch isn’t until September. There are a few things I can do before then to help build interest, but my main job is to wait. And try to resist the urge to email my publisher’s PR people every ten minutes to ask why I’m not on the front page of The Times, who they’ve phoned about my book in the last, I don’t know TEN SECONDS, what they’re planning… I also have to try to remember that while the book is the centre of my universe, it’s just one in a huge constellation for everyone else along the line. The PR people, booksellers, journalists I’m going to need so much nearer to launch time probably don’t even know I’m there. I don’t exist. Oh God! I told you I was in limbo. There must be something I can do…

No, actually, there isn’t much, and that’s really quite disconcerting. The truth is that I’ve also got to start letting go of my book. Every writer must do the same. And I’m sure every writer will tell you it isn’t easy. But I know I shouldn’t complain. The thing to remember is that 12 months ago, when I was putting the finishing touches to my pitch, I’d have been delighted to be in this position. Overjoyed. Two years ago, I’d have been amazed. When you bring a book into the world, it often feels like the goalposts are forever moving backwards. As soon as your proposal is accepted you have to write and edit the thing. Then you have to help proof it. Then help publicise it. Then come up with the next idea. Then get a proposal in… But even if the back of the net always seems to be frustratingly far away, it’s fun at least to be on the pitch.

Sam was born in Alnwick Northumberland and now lives in Norfolk.

After studying Classics at Cambridge he spent some time in the Ardeche region of France where he was a goatherd. He has been earning a living as a writer since the year 2000. He is the author of five books (including the best-selling Crap Towns and Sod That!: 103 Things Not To Do Before You Die ).

He also writes features and articles regularly for the Guardian – and has written for most other national papers in the UK. He is also a part-time film reviewer.

He is currently interested in the middle classes and has a website investigating their strange habits at organicpeasandorderlyqueues.com He is quite middle class himself and lives in Norwich with his partner, who is also a writer.