'How to approach an agent' and Allan Guthrie

Allan Guthrie flew in from Edinburgh for a talk to our creative writing students here at Plymouth University on Monday. His first novel Two Way Split is the current Theakston's crime novel of the year - and we managed our own two-way split with Alan. In the morning session he was giving our MA Creative Writing students the insider scoops on the industry and how to approach agents. In the afternoon we opened a session to the public and our undergraduate students, a Q&A with myself on Allan's writing side.
Allan's an agent with Jenny Brown Associates. He gave good detail on how to manage that increasingly vital relationship with a literary agent. Some material was off the record so I won't spoil the game and air it here (signing up for our MA brings many bonuses!), but I did manage to learn a few things myself. One was the term 'platform' ... that unique public role you have that gives authority to your book (so a detective writes a detective novel, for example). For some years now I've been aware of having to create such a 'platform' for myself without knowing the term. It's become a primary obsession in publishing marketing departments.
I did already work on the assumption that you don't try and sell a novel as the first in a series, you simply sell it as a novel. It was made clearer that you don't start writing the sequel until some success for the first one is guaranteed. That might be from sales figures, or from earlier enthusiasm in the publishing house. Having just sent out the first novel in a planned quartet, it's sage advice that I don't just ride the momentum and carry on with the second.
The final piece of advice was one I hadn't heard an agent give before. One glaring mistake many writers make, in Allan's opinion, is to start their book too soon. Begin the book when the action has already kicked in. That's especially important when you only have two chapters in which to grab the agent's attention. Once you've got the contract, Allan suggests, you can do what you like, but make sure you grab that attention at the beginning.
Allan's my own fiction agent. My new novel Playing Dead on Live TV is going out from him in the next week or two. He didn't ask for a lot of editing - but posed so many questions about the opening chapter I realized the simplest thing was to remove it. It was remarkable how well the book survived without all that early exposition.