A DRAFT OF THEAKSTONS

 

It’s been a while.

How are you?

Has the cream worked?

Excellent.

So, I’ve had a bit of a blogging hiatus whilst I’ve been up to my hiatus in the first draft of book two in the Eddie Flynn series.

It’s good. I think it could be my best yet. No-one has seen it but me. No-one will see it until it’s ready. It’s a bit like Grolsch, really. Remember Grolsch? “we only let you drink it when it’s ready.”

It was a difficult birth, though, that first draft. Took a little longer than expected (7 months) but it’s done and I have loads of time to redraft until my heart’s content.

So there.

Whilst we’re on the subject of beer, since my last post I’ve been to the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. Met loads of really friendly, funny people who were incredibly warm and welcoming. I had a ball, and I even went to some panels. On the Thursday I had dinner with the good people of Orion Books, met some great authors I hadn’t met before, met some other really cool folk, and enjoyed lots of beer, wine, food and craic. The good people I met at that dinner really made the night special. Graeme Williams, Helen Giltrow and I, kept the spirit of the previous evening going through Friday afternoon. 

I also met some of my twitter pals, which is fantastic and really gives you a renewed sense of how amazing social media is when its powers are used as intended. Too many good people to name, but I had a great time with you all, and I’ve hopefully already mentioned on twitter, how brilliant it was to meet everyone. And meeting lots of new people, great. 

On Friday I had dinner with my agent, Euan, along with Jennifer and Victoria from AM Heath, and we were joined by the lovely and talented Martie Villiers and the fascinating, Parker Bilal. Superb night. 

Some of my other highlights from the festival were Mari Hannah’s single digit salute during her panel (it was amazing), SJ Watson in conversation with Sophie Hannah, meeting my Dutch publisher (he’s a very nice and extremely knowledgeable man), the New Blood Panel, meeting up with fellow Northern Ireland authors Stuart Neville (legend) and Anthony Quinn (legend in the making), the Keeping it Real Panel (probably the best panel I saw) and the extremely talented Luca Veste’s story about his part in the worst play ever performed on British soil.

I’ll take that one to my grave, Luca.

What was it like and what have I learned from my first Harrogate experience?

1)    There’s a beer tent.

2)    It gets hot. Sometimes it rains. None of this matters as I’m safely in the beer tent.

3)    Harrogate is a beautiful, old English town. None of this matters as I’m safely in the beer tent.

4)    Everyone, and I mean everyone, is really friendly, approachable and passionate about crime novels. Especially in the beer tent.

5)    Don’t order Guinness in the bar. It comes from a tin, it’s poured into a glass, placed on some form of unholy vibrating plate, shaken, then left to settle. This is a clear breach of the Geneva Convention. Stick to Theakston’s, they have it on tap in the beer tent.

6)    Oli Munson is indestructible. His powers are particularly strong in the beer tent.

7)    WH Smith run a brilliant book shop right on the festival lawn. It’s next to the beer tent.

8)    The organisers, the programming committee, Steve Mosby in particular, and all the festival staff did an amazing job. The Old Swann staff were great too, and, if I may say so, they performed out of their boots in the beer tent.

9)    Did I mention there’s a beer tent?

10)                       If you log on to crimefictionlover’s web domain  right here you might see a picture of me talking to Stav Sherez and Martyn Waites. Guess where I am?

11)                       I didn’t make it to the Robert Galbraith event. My whereabouts at the time are yet to be established.  

12)                       On a more serious note, it’s the first big writing festival I’ve been to, and it was great to stop being a lawyer, and be somewhere because I’m a reader, a fan, and a writer.

I left the festival with a new sense of purpose, a new vigour, and ever so slightly hung over.

Thanks Steve Mosby, for a brilliant first Harrogate. The first of many, for me.   Get more reactions over at Steve Mosby's excellent blog here at theleftroom.

Steve Cavanagh

PS – There will be a beer tent next year, right Steve?



From Disaster to a Dream Come True Part 2 - Getting a Publisher

In Part 1 I talked about what it was like to be accepted by a leading literary agent and the waiting, hoping and nail-biting inevitably involved when you’re searching for a literary agent. I know what it’s like to be on that search, to have that goal. Once I’d achieved it I thought I’d got it made and the worrying would be over.

I was wrong.

The fear doesn’t go away. If anything the anxious anticipation just gets worse.  

Before your book goes out on submission to publishers your agent will probably want you to do some work on it. For me there wasn’t that much. I was really just tidying up. How much or how little you do is up to you but invariably most of the advice you get at this stage from your agent is probably spot on. The advice I received certainly hit the mark. So after you’ve revised the book, proof read again and again and you send it off, you feel pretty good about the book. For me this feeling lasted right up until the book went out on submission. Then I felt about as confident as an MP submitting his Parliamentary expenses. However much you’ve sweated, lost sleep and swept from the peaks of blissful optimism to the crushing reality of rejection during your search for literary representation – trust me, this is nothing, absolutely nothing compared to the near constant nerve-shredding anxiety that you will go through when you know that your agent has sent your book out on submission to publishers. What if they hate it? What if it doesn’t sell? What if all those rejections I received were right and my agent is wrong? Will my agent drop me? Will they find out I claimed seventy-five thousand pounds for toilet roll and digestive biscuits? (sorry, getting confused with the MP.)

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m aware that a lot of writers have said that this stage was by far the worst and I can only suppose that it very much depends on what type of person you are and how you deal with it. If you do an internet search you won’t find nearly as much out there on what it’s like to have a book on submission. I suspect that the  reason you don’t read so much about this stage of the process is down to one very simple truth - Sadly, most aspiring writers will not get a literary agent. If you blog or write about how nervous you are whilst your book is out on submission to publishers you will not only sound ungrateful for what’ve you’ve already achieved but you will garner no sympathy from the host of aspiring writers who would sell their grandmother to be in your shoes. So you don’t complain, you don’t bitch about it – you can’t because you are so lucky to have an agent that loves your book enough to put their name and their reputation behind it.

The only thing to do is suck it up.

The best advice I’ve read about how to deal with this agonizing waiting game is to simply write something else. I didn’t want to do that. My novel, The Defence, is the first in a series and I knew that the next book I wanted to write was the next book in that series. I didn’t want to do that in case I couldn’t sell the first book. Incidentally, even though my books are a series, you will be able to read them in any order. So I couldn’t write something else. Instead I would have to resign myself to checking my email every five minutes.

So how long does this process last? It can take years. It can take months. It can take re-writes and re-submissions. There are plenty of fabulous writers that have taken a long time to get accepted by a publishing house and some very talented writers (people with a lot more talent than me) that never get their work through the traditional publishing model. I was one of the lucky ones – for me it took about a week.

It took all the will power I had not to phone my agent, or email him to ask what was going on. He’d told me that he would let me know. Of course he would. On the Friday of that week, about 6.30pm I got an email from my agent. I was standing in my hall. I saw the little email icon on my phone. It was an email from Euan. My first thought was that this is an email to tell me not to worry, that there had been no offers but he would be trying the next round of publishers.

Again, I was wrong. The email thanked me for being so patient. Then it said there had been an offer for The Defence. In fact, four publishers wanted the book. Each of the four publishers were from respected publishing houses. Each of the publishers not only wanted The Defence, they wanted the next two books in the series. I had plenty of ideas for the series but at that stage hadn’t managed a single word of prose for any of them. Euan was going to hold an auction. The sums of money involved were life-changing. I almost dropped the phone. My wife was ecstatic. What did I feel? I can’t really describe it. I still feel it. Relief is one part of it.

You see, I didn’t write The Defence for money. I wrote it because I had to write it. Now that might sound a little strange and quite pretentious. I’m not saying that I was compelled, through the sheer power of my own genius to write this book. No, nothing like it.

I wrote this book for my mother, knowing that she would never read it.

The only reason I’m a writer today is because of her. When I was a kid my Dad would take us to Harry Hall’s second-hand book shop on Gresham Street in the heart of Belfast. My Mum and I would pass a morning choosing our 5p paperbacks. When we didn’t have enough money for the bookshop, we went to the Library. When I started to write in my teens she was the person who gave me encouragement. I stopped writing before I turned twenty. At that stage I was writing screenplays, I’d gotten an agent but I could never sell anything. So I decided I was never going to make it as a writer and I stopped writing for the next 15 years.

In 2011 my Mum passed away, suddenly, after a quick and devastating illness. She was the one person in my life who had told me I should write. So I decided that life was too short, I was going to give this another shot and this time it would work. This time, I would write a book and I would get it published. I did this for her. To show her that I wasn’t a failure. I suppose, losing myself in my book helped me push away the pain for a few hours while I worked away on a small, Compaq notebook that I used to write my first draft. While writing the book I was escaping into a different world, a world that I could control.

At that moment in September 2013, standing in my hallway, with the knowledge that my book would be published, I felt massive relief.

The next days and weeks went by in a blur. I would have been lucky and honoured to sign with any of the four publishers that offered and I eventually signed with Jemima Forrester and Jon Wood of Orion. Two great professionals and two thoroughly warm, generous and funny people who have been a joy to work with. I landed on my feet there.  Following a German auction, a pre-empt for Dutch Rights within hours of submission and a pre-empt for Italian Rights at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I felt like a lottery winner.

And it just gets more and more surreal – well known Hollywood Production companies are interested in the film rights, the book will be going out to more and more territories.

I’ve been very lucky so far.  

I hope you will be too.

Steve.

 

Rules of Writing via Nazis, Kafka and Peter Sellers

 

If anyone reading this post has not read Elmore Leonard’s rules of writing, stop now, do a Google search (other search engines are available but they’re not as good and the FBI won’t get to read your history – seems a shame to keep them out in the cold) and enjoy. Oh, and do come back won’t you. I’ll be here…

 

I’m not a great believer in rules when it comes to most things. Testing boundaries, stretching them even, produces the best from everyone.  There are of course some of Elmore Leonard’s rules that should not be broken, ever. For me, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘cutting out the parts that readers skip,’ is an absolute. Quite a few of the other rules can be bent. ‘Don’t open with the weather,’ - lots of books open with the weather and some great books at that. Before we go any further, I would like to state that Elmore Leonard didn’t mean to have his rules be hard and fast deal breakers. He meant it more as a guide, to be used or not, as the case may be, however, a lot of what he says is good advice. Then you have the vast amount on the internet that is concerned with ‘rules’ of writing.

 If you read enough ‘advice’ articles on the net you feel as though there’s a rule book of writing. I’ve read a number of these articles and they all seem to have a common theme.

(1) Your protagonist (hero) has to be likeable. I’ve no idea where this came from but you see it time and again.

(2) The antagonist (villain) has to be in direct opposition to the protagonist.

(3) The protagonist has to have a strong moral motivation that the reader can really get behind i.e. the protagonist’s goal should be a noble one.

Bear these three in mind.

Because it’s possible to have an incredible story by breaking all three of these rules which come up often in writing advice articles.

To illustrate, for a moment, let’s pretend that the world is a darker and lonelier place. We are imagining a world without the movie ‘The Producers.’ For the next part of this blog post, strike that movie from your mind; it does not exist.

Now imagine a young writer is calling his agent, today, January 2014, to pitch him an idea for a movie. I stress, this is not my agent – who is a very nice man indeed.

Agent: So what’s this great movie idea you want to pitch? I can’t wait to hear it.

Writer: Okay, so the movie opens in a run-down apartment building where we find the office of Max Bialystock, Broadway Producer. He’s fending off a sex-crazed octogenarian. Max leeches money from this little old lady to finance his terrible plays. In exchange for cash Max indulges in sex games with the old lady…

Agent: Wow! Great villain.

Writer: Villain? No, no, no… you don’t understand, he’s one of the heroes.

Agent: What? So who’s the villain?

Writer: There isn’t one. Not really.  

Agent: No villain? So Max is a hero, okay, who’s the other hero?

Writer: Well the other hero is about to enter the story. Leo Bloom is a neurotic accountant who has just arrived to inspect Max’s books.

Agent: Hang on…so there are two heroes in this movie: Max - a pervert who exploits the elderly, and Leo, a neurotic accountant?

Writer: Yeah. So, while doing the books Leo notices that the last play Max put on was over financed. He’d raised more money than it cost to produce. But the play closed after a week and didn’t make any money. The IRS won’t audit that play. Nobody is interested in a flop so Max could keep the extra money that he didn’t use to stage the play. That’s when Leo has an idea – technically it would be possible for a Broadway producer to make more money with a flop than a hit. They would just need to raise a lot more money than they needed to produce the play. Max thinks this is genius and persuades Leo to join him in a scam.  

Agent: Tax fraud? This is a movie about a sex maniac and an accountant defaulting on their taxes?

Writer: No, not at all. The fraud is on the little old ladies that Max persuades to finance the play with their life savings by promising them sexual favours in return for the cash.

Agent: That might be…problematic. Let’s move on - why do they need the money? What’s their real motivation? Does a kid need a life-saving operation? Or maybe they’re raising the money to save the local orphanage?

Writer: No, nothing like that. They want to go to Rio.

Agent: Rio. So the two heroes in this movie are on a quest to scam a whole bunch of little old ladies out of their life savings so they can move to Rio?

Writer: Yeah, well, actually no. The move is really about gay Nazis.

Telephone falls to the floor.

Agent: Sorry, what? I dropped the damn phone. For a second there I thought you said the movie was really about gay Nazis.

Writer: (pause) it is really about gay Nazis, well super-camp Nazis. You see, Leo and Max have to put on a play that is a sure-fire stinker, a guaranteed loser that will close on opening night because it’s so bad. So they find this play which is basically a love letter to Hitler.

Agent: Hitler, as in Adolf Hitler?

Writer: You know another Hitler?

Agent: I’m not sure this is such a good…

Writer: So they find this awful, offensive play and they hire the worst director in the county who’s going to turn it into a fabulously camp musical. Then they employ this permanently-stoned actor to play Hitler…

Agent: A drug addict Hitler?

Writer: Sure. The play has beautiful women in SS uniforms dancing in swastika formations and tanks and the lead tenor is dressed as a member of the Gestapo. It’s just spectacular and the actor playing Hitler is so bombed and the songs about invading Europe are so camp and gay that the audience actually thinks it’s a satire. So instead of the audience hating it, the play becomes a surprise hit. Of course, the Nazi playwright isn't happy and he tries to blow up the theatre...

Agent: So in the finale, how do they get away with the money and fly to Rio?

Writer: They don’t. They all get caught and end up in prison. I’m going to call the movie ‘Springtime for Hitler: A Gay romp with Adolf and Eva,’ or ‘The Producers.’ I haven’t quite decided yet.  

Silence.

Writer: Hello? Hello…you still there?

If I pitched the same project to my agent, he’d tell me it was a great idea, superb, wonderful. He’d hang up the phone and call my wife and tell her that I’d had some kind of mental breakdown and she should call the doctor (I told you he was a nice man).

What astounds me is that The Producers ever got made. I’m not sure if it were to be pitched as an original idea today that it would stand a chance of getting the green light. It’s amazing that this movie went into production just 15 years after the end of the Second World War.  Upon release the critics hated it but it went on to win an Oscar for Mel Brooks for his screenplay and has since been recognised by the American Film institute along with the Library of Congress preserving the film in its archives due to its cultural significance. That brilliant screenplay and the performances were the key to the film’s success. It’s funny, it’s original and despite Leo and Max’s motivations, you’re with them all the way. You want them to get the money and fly away to Rio but you’re not sure why – you just fall in love with them. If you analyse the film, it’s easy to see that the play within the movie actually serves as a metaphor for the film as a whole; in the film, the play ‘Springtime for Hitler’, shouldn't work, but, in spite of everything, it does work and it’s genius. Same with the film itself – on paper it should not work, it should in fact be one of the worst films ever made. Instead, it’s amazing.

As an aside here's a couple of little facts: 1) The character of Max Bialystock is based on a real Broadway producer that Mel Brooks worked with but has stoically refused to name (2) Peter Sellers was supposed to play the part of Leo Bloom (3) Dustin Hoffman was cast as the Nazi playwright Liebkind, but begged Mel Brooks for permission to audition for a lead part in another movie. Mel knew this part was a lead alongside his then partner Anne Bancroft and didn't think Hoffman stood a chance of getting the role so he let him audition. Against all odds Hoffman got the lead role opposite Bancroft in The Graduate and pulled out of the Producers.

This film breaks all the rules of taste, commercial appeal and story arc together with every one of those basic 3 rules of writing quoted above.

 

Lots of other artistic works broke all the rules.

When Leo and Max are sifting through scripts looking for the worst play ever written, Max reads aloud a first line – “I woke up one morning to discover I had transformed into a giant cockroach. No, too good.”

That’s a line from Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’. An existential story that also broke the rules. Kafka didn’t have any real success as a writer during his lifetime but is now thought of as one of the most influential writers of the last hundred years. Interestingly, while doing a little research on Kafka I found out that he never managed to become a full time writer. His day job was practicing as a personal injury lawyer. I knew he was a lawyer but I didn’t know that he devoted most of his working life to representing employees in accident at work claims. He went on to open an Asbestos factory. Somebody reading this who is smarter than me can probably tell if that is merely ironic or veritably Kafkaesque.

Anyway, even though the critics hated The Producers and it didn’t do great business in the US, it is now regarded as a classic. One of the great endorsements it received at the time was from Peter Sellers, who took out a full page ad in Variety and called The Producers the greatest comedy ever made.

I suppose the real lesson here is not to stick too closely to the rules. If we all wrote according to what we thought agents or publishers or the market was looking for, or if we listened to every single advice article and shaped our characters to a demographic, we wouldn’t have great pieces of art like The Producers. And the world would be a darker place for it.

By all means, write something commercial, write something that everyone will love. It can still be original. Break the rules or stick to them. The trick is believing in what you write. If you want to write a love story between a golden retriever and a hooker with an artificial leg who enters a bowling tournament in order to win a lifetime’s supply of hair gel, then go right ahead. As long as you have talent you might be able to pull it off. And that is the one thing that agents and publishers are looking for – talent. Not badly written, but likeable characters on a noble quest that they’ve read hundreds of times before.

A great character doesn’t have to be a likeable character. In reality, there are no rules. Write whatever you want. Sometimes crazy can be good; if it’s good-crazy.

To illustrate good-crazy, and for one final little joke, we return to Peter Sellers.

It’s the early Seventies, Peter Sellers is one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. It’s three o’clock in the morning and Seller’s best friend, Spike Milligan, is awakened by a loud and insistent knocking on his front door. A bleary-eyed Spike puts on his robe, goes downstairs and opens the door to his London home. Standing before him is a completely naked Peter Sellers who simply says, ‘Do you know a good tailor?’

To me, that’s crazy, but isn’t it good crazy?

Steve.

If you’ve enjoyed this irreverent piece, please RT, share, post a comment or follow this blog.

Be good.

 

  

From Disaster to a Dream Come True - Part 1 Getting an Agent

 Getting an Agent – Never Give Up.

There is one absolute irrefutable fact that I can tell you about the process of trying to obtain literary representation. It is also the single best piece of advice I can give to anyone who is trying to land a literary agent. As some of you know, there’s a lot on the internet about the querying process and a lot of it is accurate, there’s a lot of good advice too, but there is one thing for sure that I’ve learned through my own experience that is 100% true and either I didn’t know it or didn’t appreciate it enough at the time.
This is it.
Are you ready?
Here we go – if an agent rejects your book that has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the book itself. A ‘no,’ even if it’s a ‘hey-your-book-stinks kind of ‘no’’ doesn’t actually mean that the book stinks. It’s just one opinion, from one agent, on one particular day.
And I can prove it.
However, before we go any further, I do feel that I have to add a small caveat here – if you’ve written a serious novel in a hard-boiled/experimental-literary-fiction style, and the story revolves around a ninety-six year old detective/itinerant farmer from the future named Fred Kneegobbler who is on the trail of a sadistic, one-legged serial-shoplifter and the identity of the villain is eventually revealed by the protagonist forcibly inserting a miniature ukulele into a parrot’s rectum whilst humming the theme tune from ‘Cagney and Lacey,’ you might legitimately struggle to find both an agent and publisher. 
 Call me an optimist, but I’m operating here on the basis that those of you who are reading this are…well…reasonably sane.
 I’ll always remember 2013 as a fantastic year for me. It was a year of incredible highs; being accepted as client of one of London’s top literary agencies, my debut novel achieving a plethora of international publishing deals either through auctions or pre-empts (from some of the top publishing houses across the world), flying to London to meet my agent and my publisher, meeting some of my favourite authors and enjoying a huge last minute surprise in December. A total dream of a year.
But 2013 didn’t get off to a good start. In fact, I began the year with the belief that my book would never be published.
Like most aspiring authors, I’d decided that getting an agent was the best way to go about landing a publishing deal. This at least I know to be true. Most if not all of the Big Five Publishers won’t even look at your novel unless it comes via an agent; it may be an incredible work, a novel that redefines the genre, a novel with a heady mix of beautiful prose, expert characterization and deft plotting, but unless there is a reputable agent pushing the book then the Publisher won’t care. That is the reality.
It took me around six months to get an agent and like all writers I had my fair share of rejection.
When I began my search I decided that I would try to focus on small and medium-size literary agencies with a decent track record. Looking back at that decision, I must’ve thought that none of the big agencies would be interested and that I would be incredibly lucky to be taken on by just about anyone.
So I began querying – I used querytracker (not religiously) and tried to keep a record of the agencies that I’d queried. At the time I didn’t know about Agent Hunter and I firmly believe that having more information on agents so that you are better able to accurately target your queries is essential.
I did lots of things wrong in the process, but here is what I got right.
         

(a)  I looked for agents that actively represented authors in my field (thrillers).

(b) I managed to keep to each agency’s specific guidelines.

(c)  As far as I know, if an agent was considering my submission, I didn’t harangue them for a decision. Patience pays off.

(d) If I got a rejection, I moved on, politely.   

There is a lot of waiting involved in this process. You send off a query letter, a synopsis and a sample of the work and hope for the best. And hope, and hope, and wait and worry. You worry that your email hasn’t been received, that you’ve somehow sent it to the wrong address or that your email got lost in spam (that did happen to me). I sent my submission to agencies in the UK and the US (my novel is set in New York) and I waited.
Some agencies responded within two weeks, some within three months, some have never responded to this day. I’ve read a good deal of articles about this process from successful and struggling writers and I believe that those response times are pretty much average for most queries. What were the responses? Well, very encouraging – more than half of the agencies I’d queried said they really enjoyed the sample and wanted to see the rest of the novel.
Now, as statistics go on queries, I was pretty pleased with that and it got me thinking; if most of the agents I’d queried liked the novel, maybe I should try some of the bigger agencies. As I’d no offers yet, I thought why not. It is common amongst struggling writers to feel that their work is substandard. I felt like this (actually, I still do) but at some stage you have to have a little faith in your own abilities. So, I sent the manuscript off to what I felt were the two oldest and most respected literary agencies in London. I did this not in any hope that they might be interested. In truth I did it on a whim, just to be able to say that I’d had a go.
Then a very encouraging email from a small, but well respected, boutique agency that wanted the full manuscript right away. Wow, from the tone of the email I felt assured that this was the one for me. This was a two-agent operation and I’d met one of the agents at an event and the agent had come across as passionate and knowledgeable. An email came straight back saying that this agent had received my full manuscript and would pass it on their partner who was the expert in crime/thriller fiction.
Within days of sending off the full manuscript to the boutique agency, BOTH of the big London based agencies got back to me requesting the full manuscript. I was over the moon but, at the same time, incredibly nervous as I’d been in this position before.
The anxiety that I felt was surprisingly fierce – I was so close now.
March arrived and with it came disaster. The boutique agency, that was so encouraging initially, came back with a big fat horrible rejection. The tone was – you have skill, you can write, but this book will never be published so write something else and we’ll gladly take a look at it.
To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. I had listened to these agents speak knowledgeably about the business and I felt that what they said was gospel and that it was only a matter of time before the rest of the rejections came flooding in. If I wanted to get published I would have to write another book. I’d failed.
I was wrong.
I got their rejection on the Monday. On the Wednesday I had an offer of representation from one of the best literary agencies in the UK. They loved the book, they knew editors who would go crazy for it (and they were proved right) and they wanted to sign me, now. I accepted on the spot.
And I could not have imagined the incredible response that the book received from the publishers, but more of that in Part 2.
What I learned from the process was that literary agents are just like you and me, they have different tastes, they fall in love with different novels for different reasons. For instance, there are some thrillers that I love, some I think are ok, some I think are pretty poor and some I wonder how they got published at all. Now, your list might be the exact opposite of mine. You might go crazy for book A and hate book B, I could think the reverse and that doesn’t mean that (a) either of the books are less than perfect or (b) that neither of us knows what we’re talking about.
It’s just an opinion given on the day. That’s all it is.
So don’t give up. Ever.
Never give up, unless on page 987 of your manuscript you’ve written a scene where your protagonist greases up a small stringed-instrument whilst a bird of paradise looks on nervously. In that case, put that baby away and try something new.
And then, never give up.