“My Friends Love It.”

There’s nothing more guaranteed to turn an agent off than an unpublished writer saying of their new work, “My friends love it.” They don’t want to know, thank you very much. They’ll judge the work according to their own criteria and nothing will ultimately change that.

And that’s fair enough. Let’s face it, if your job depends on your finding successful writers, it’s probably a good idea not to trust the opinion of a whole bunch of people who quite possibly don’t exist anyway.

But friends and fellow bloggers are increasingly becoming an important part of the writing process for me, in addition to my existing readers. They (yes, you!) are helping me see more and more that I’m not deluded. Children of the Resolution is an important and potentially successful novel, and, yes, I’m doing a bloody fine job of writing it.

So I’m planning on gathering together all the comments I’ve received so far and putting them in one place. It will never convince an agent who doesn’t like my work, but if one who’s already interested drops by, who knows? It may just tip the balance in my favour.

Worth the effort, do you think?