Catherine Drayton
Hello! I am new here but not to Catherine Drayton, and thought you might like to hear about my own experience with her, which began when Inkwell was still the Arthur Pine Agency. I was, at the time, partway though a huge historical fiction and was referred to the agency by one of their bestselling authors. With a copy of the letter of recommendation (the only way to approach the agency, at the time), I wrote a query about my project and received a very nice letter back from Catherine, inviting me to send a sample of my writing. I sent the eight-page Prologue to my book, then waited – things were slower in the world of snail mail and paper submissions.
On a visit to New York awhile later (she was still living there then), I called to see if she had received my sample, and was told she had it but hadn’t had time to read but would do so immediately. “Call me back in thirty minutes,” was her suggestion – so I sat in my hotel, watching the clock. The good news thirty minutes later was, “You’re a really good writer. Can you come by to meet me?” So off I went to the Fifth Avenue offices of Arthur Pine and met the very lovely Catherine Drayton. She asked me to send her a longer sample – say one-hundred pages, and asked me not to show it to anyone else for a month. I could have flown home without a plane! A real New York agent liked my writing, and for a month after sending the requested hundred pages, I could pretend I was a real author! But sadly, my one month of bliss ended one day after she received my sample, when she called asking for the rest of the book – which wasn’t yet in a presentable form. So I went quickly back to work to finish what was to be Part One of a very, very long novel, and sent that 450 pages along. Back came her answer, “It’s great!” with a request for me to send eleven copies of the manuscript for presentation to the top eleven publishers in New York. Wow!
Well, sort of wow. As the story was overly long and I only had Part One of four parts finished, Catherine had suggested publishing it as a series instead of one book – but none of the editors who read it wanted to tackle it as the proposed three or four books. So heeding my agent’s very good advice (“slash and burn!”), I went back to the keyboard and finished the whole saga, then cut it down to one novel of a more reasonable size. It’s taken years – long enough for the Arthur Pine Agency to become Inkwell Management and for my favorite agent to move to Australia. Would she even remember me if I sent her an email with the happy news that our ill-fated book was finally done?
On February 8th of this year I sent an equery to Inkwell’s main address, and received a very nice reply from Catherine the next day: “Victoria! How nice to hear from you!” She asked me to send the final manuscript along, which I did on February 18th, and now I join the rest of you in waiting to hear what she thinks about my work. Just because she loved it once doesn’t mean she will love it now – or that the publishers will be any more willing to take on a still very large book. Submitting, like writing, never gets easier! Best wishes to all of us!