Nothing is as Good as They Say it Is.

Growing up as a teenager in the UK in the mid-seventies, you’d be hard-pressed not to notice the band Sparks lighting up your tube screens on the chart show, Top of the Pops, on a Thursday night (a weekly ritual in my house, much to my parent’s chagrin).

Sparks is like that colorful explosion of confetti that happens when you mix pure genius with unabashed theatricality.

Formed by LA-born brothers Russell and Ron and Mael, Sparks had a mysterious, other-worldly mystique about them. They tangoed a fine line between high camp, art pop, and satire; a combination sharply out of step with the glam rock, teeny-bopper acts of the era, not to mention the nascent punk movement poking a safety pin-sized hole in UK music and culture.

This band was something different; a cocktail of wit, charm and pop theatrics set to catchy pop melodies.

I don’t mind admitting back then, the sight of keyboard player, Ron Mael, with his perfectly groomed Hitler-style mustache and serial killer-fashioned blank stare disturbed the hell out of me. I think it probably left many people wondering what twisted, macabre schemes were going on in that man’s mind. As Tom Waits once grumbled: ‘What the Hell is He Building in There?’

Sparks might have been relegated to the scrap heap of 70s one-hit wonders if it wasn’t for this one thing: these siblings had mad, genius talent.

Their debut single, ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us’ - four to the floor disco mayhem by way of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, antsy Buzzcocks guitar riffs, and a Barry Gibb level falsetto, peaked at number two in the UK Charts in 1974.

Never seen it? Check it out here. I promise you, it’s worth the next three minutes and four seconds of your life.

Fifty years on, the Mael brothers are still making music as quirky, relevant, wry, and self aware as ever. Think Steely Dan meets Ennio Morricone on a weekend bender in Berlin where they end up clubbing with Kraftwerk and the BeeGees and you get the picture.

Twenty-six albums later, Sparks is still going strong, still casting a skeptical eye on society’s ills, which is what inspired the title of this post. ‘Nothing is as Good as they Say it Is.’

Released in May 2023, ‘Nothing is as Good as they Say it Is,’ is Spark’s latest single, and shows the brothers have lost none of their native wit and playfulness. And if you’re beginning to think, what the heck does a song by a couple of guys in their seventies have to do with my search for a literary agent...

Hang on in there. It has a lot to do with it, and specifically why getting an agent for your writing is sometimes just not as good as everyone says it is.

‘Nothing is as Good as they Say it Is,’ apparently written from the perspective of a 22-hour-old baby petitioning to be readmitted to the womb, is an utter truth bomb of a song that pretty much sums up my attitude to so many things in life right now, specifically that tiresome, endless, hustling and PT Barnum carnival barking that’s rife across all our social media feeds.

Truth is, none of what they’re selling you is as good as they say it is.

Specifics? Sure, here are a bunch of thought starters, all highly personal and subjective, of course.

Crytpo Currency. Thanks for all your shady shenanigans, Sam Bankman-Fried.

Those patches designed to give you a better night’s sleep. Don’t lose sleep thinking about buying them.

Over-hyped restaurants. Often over priced, uninspired menus, and an included 22% tip, which drives me nuts. Never as good as they said it was on Yelp.

Netflix Comedy Sketch Show, ‘I Think You Should Leave.’ I really don’t get the hype around Tim Robbins at all. If I wanted to listen to a man child shouting at me for twenty minutes, I’d go find a Twitter troll. Not half as funny as it thinks it is.

The company you work for. Despite their flimsy mission statement, they are not your family. (Families don’t kick your arse to the curb when times are tough).

Just about anything they try to sell you in Las Vegas.

Musicals. Never met one I didn’t want to put out of its misery before the first song was over.

Soup. Just a real personal one here. After the first spoonful, it all tastes the same.

I could go on, but before I start to sound like a fussy old git, and in the name of balance, here’s another very personal list of things that are as good as they say they are, if not better.

Blockchain. I’m no tech expert, but I’m a huge believer it will help democratize transactions for all.

Succession, the HBO series. Sheer TV genius.

Anything by the musician John Grant. Melodic poetry.

The Northern California Coastline. Sublime at sunset.

Hog Island Oysters. Shucking fantastic.

Anything written by the authors, Nick Herron and TC Boyle. Word weaving wizardry.

Taco Oscar, Oakland. $5 corkage fee, home made tortillas that blow your mind.

My dog (Chester). Again, a real personal one - here’s a photo just for kicks.

So, where is all this leading? Just to a very humble offering of advice to budding authors of every age:

Getting an agent is not as good as they say it is. I should know, I've had two.

I thought landing an agent would be the peak of my writerly ambition (along with making the New York Times best-sellers list, of course). It would validate my writing, validate me.

I landed my first agent pretty quickly for my debut, Anglesey Blue. I stayed with her for a year before I realized she had around three contacts in the publishing world and when she exhausted those, I was back to query square one.

What did I do? I stepped up my querying game, a task that sucked up precious writing time.

Several hundred query letters and a handful of replies (if I was lucky), later, and I was no further along. One time, the rote rejection made it to my inbox eight months after my initial query. Really? I know you’re busy people, but who the heck takes eight months to reply to an email?

Fast forward a few months, and I did manage to land a prestigious New York agent. Similar story, he hardly ever reached out; digital tumbleweeds floating in cyberspace. If I reached out to him, he’d respond with bulky attachments of email copies of rejections editors had sent him. No words of encouragement or inspiration, just sixteen rejection attachments I could read at my leisure. I guess I should have been happy he reached out to sixteen publishers. I wasn’t.

Bottom line, both of the two agents I signed with failed to sell my work anywhere, to anyone. And that sucked.

Now, if I wasn’t made of sterner stuff, I might have lost confidence at this point. Was my writing really so bad that no publisher would touch it? Would it ever find an audience? Was I completely delusional?

No, I wasn’t, because when I did finally get published through an independent publisher, I sold over 100,000 copies of my first book, which brought to mind that famous William Goldman quote about Hollywood:

“Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work.”

Just substitute ‘motion picture field’ with ‘book publishing,’ and the quote still stands

Okay, I may have made none of those agents’ fortune with 15% commission of 100,000 sales after the publisher and Amazon took their cut, but here I am four published books later, with another due out early next year.

I recently switched publishers, and all four of my backlist titles are being re-published, and the two newly released books are both hovering well towards the top charts in their genre, securing more loyal leaders and racking up the ratings.

No agent required. No 15% commission. No digital tumbleweeds.

Now, I’m sure there are a bunch of authors out there with different stories to tell, and that’s fine. But finding any degrees of success with an agent just wasn’t my experience.

Not to say there are some fantastic agents out there; I read the gushing respect heaped on them all the time in author’s acknowledgments and thank you sections of their books. Maybe I was unlucky, maybe the timing was off, maybe the universe was telling me something and it just took me a while to listen. I can be a little slow that way.

Bottom line, after four books I’m now signed with the UK’s top independent publisher, Joffe/Lume Books and couldn’t be happier.

If there’s one take away from my post, it’s this:

Don’t make getting an agent the holy grail of your writing ambitions

What do you do instead?

You focus on improving your writing. You write every day. You read every day. You all know this, it’s not rocket science.

Of course, you’re going to send your query letters out there, you’d be crazy not to. And if you do land an agent, I’ll be amongst the first to raise a glass to your success. Just don’t expect your world to change overnight.

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, keep on writing, don’t get disillusioned.

Think of it like this. Agents are gate keepers if you don’t land one, maybe it’s just not the right gate for you to walk through right now.

Thank you for reading.

BTW- Check out the awesome Sparks Brother's documentary by Edgar Wright. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8610436/

You can purchase my crime fiction books here.

https://tinyurl.com/dylanjonesauthor