Publishing Your Novel Part 3 - Researching Literary Agents
Part 1 of this series - The Publishing Process
Part 2 of this series - Preparing a Proposal
Getting the attention of the right agent is hard. Many good books languish in purgatory because their author can’t get an agent to even glance at it. As the days tick by waiting for an agent to respond don’t be surprised if you lose some hair or can’t resist eating an entire box of chocolates in 5 minutes. Don’t get down on yourself, waiting for a stranger to tell you if your baby is cute or ugly is truly maddening.
You can increase your chances of landing an agent by getting to know the agent before introducing your work to them. Agents divide themselves into groups, the most obvious being fiction and non-fiction. Look for agents that love the kind of work you are writing. If you are writing a the History of Harvard don’t send it to an agent that has only represented romance novels with a western twist.
Get a copy or the Guide to Literary Agents by Chuck Sambuchino to help you get to know some agents. Use this book, or another one like it, to find out what books agents have represented in the past and what each agent expects in a query letter. Work smart and work hard and you will eventually get an agent to seriously consider your novel.
Do you want to discover what your peers think of your novel? Upload a chapter and let us critique it for you.
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Tags: Agents, Getting Published, Novel, Query Letter
June 16th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
[...] the publishing world use them to get your work in front of an agent. If don’t have a contact then make a list of the top 10 agents you want to work with and send each one a customized query [...]