There are five literary agents in Australia who will look at submissions or accept queries from new authors.
Currently I have four novels for sale.
One, “The Flooding of Adaminaby” is set in Australia in 2001, and cannot be anything but an Australian novel. So I’m querying it to three of five Australian agents at the moment, and will send to the other two on Wednesday 1 February.
Another novel, “Harris in Underland” is set in London in 1895. The MC is a historical Irish-American man called Frank Harris. So it’s not in any sense an Australian novel, and I’m querying it in the US and UK.
Another Frank Harris novel, “Harris and the Assassins”, set mostly in Persia in 1878, is finished, edited, beta-read and polished. It’s done; it’s good. But I’m not querying it at all, because it’s the second novel in a series and I have to place the first one, first.
Finally, the novel with the long name, “The Death of Kai Kawiti and Other Stories: A Novel”, is set in Aotearoa/New Zealand now, and most of the characters are New Zealanders, Maori and Pakeha.
But there’s only one literary agent in New Zealand. An American company has also joined the New Zealand Literary Agents’ Association, but I doubt their commitment to New Zealand in particular. So I’ll count it as one and a half New Zealand literary agents.
Statistically, that puts the odds very much against my getting representation for a New Zealand novel.
So what I’m doing now is changing it. I’m turning it into a novel in which two English guys who don’t know each other both go to New Zealand, meet and bond with New Zealanders and get involved in inter-tribal Maori politics. Then one stays in New Zealand while the other returns to the UK. Meanwhile a third character stays in the UK throughout and looks after some of the characters from a distance.
So I’m turning it into a UK novel. Purely so I have a better chance of finding representation.
I regret having to do that, as I’d rather be a New Zealand voice. But that doesn’t seem to be a viable option.