New Substack post: Find the Right Agent
Once your novel is done, here are five lessons it took me 20 years to learn.
I’ve been submitting work to agents since college, which was a very long time ago. In my first post, “The Victory Lap that Wasn’t,” I told the story of getting an agent only to have the novel not sell. It was back to Step 1: Write a Novel. Five years later, I was ready to search for agents again—this time with a new project, during a pandemic. After twenty-four submissions and two maybes, I changed my query letter a fourth time and made a last big revision to the manuscript, addressing concerns raised in the rejections. Adam Schear of DeFiore & Company read my submission in ten days and offered representation.
Getting two agents in five years is a lot better than getting zero agents ever, so does that make me good at this? I’m a freelance editor who helped a lot of writers with their query letters, but writing and querying my own project was hard. And every project has different needs.
Here are some lessons learned—about querying, and generally.
1. Agents are people too.
I’ve been congratulated on “bagging an agent.” A competition mentality makes writers stop thinking like full human beings, which makes them stop seeing other people as full human beings too. Forget about competing. Focus on making your book ready for your audience, and then on identifying agents who work with editors who publish in that genre. Publishers Marketplace is a useful site for discovering these connections. You can read a detailed how-to on my editing website.
Empathy is also useful. Imagine receiving 50 queries a week (or more) when you are already behind on things and you’re just trying to do your day. What kind of behavior helps an internet stranger seem like someone you want to collaborate with for years, who you’ll trust not just for your 15% commission but also to work well with your friends and colleagues?
The process of finding representation is burdened with a lot of mystique. Establishing this relationship is important if you’re a prose writer and want a traditional deal with a large publisher (one option among several), BUT it will go better and feel healthier if you treat it like reaching out to any other person about a shared interest.