How to find an agent
When I ask my clients what their long-term writing goals are, about 95% of them mention publishing of some kind.
When I probe further, we tend to discuss “traditional” publishing, or publishing through a publishing house instead of self-publishing on Amazon or hiring a company to print and distribute for you.
I’d say I don’t know why that is, but I think I do. Because when I started writing 10 years ago, my desires were the same. My main reasoning was that I didn’t want to do the heavy lifting myself (marketing, budgeting, creating a PR plan, getting my book in bookstores). But another reason was that I knew the chances of becoming a bestseller were far more rare (if not impossible at the time) if I were to go the self-publishing route.
I was disappointed in my first publishing deal, which is an entirely different story I can tell you one of these days, but there was a whole part of the process I was able to skip that first time around…
Securing a literary agent.
Because I’d made a personal connection with someone who knew a publisher, they offered to connect us through email and get the ball rolling, thus skipping the necessity for an agent.
Most publishing houses don’t accept “unsolicited” manuscripts. Which means you, and me, and anyone who doesn’t have an agent with a relationship with that publisher.
Before this point, I’d been querying (just a fancy word for emailing agents) for a few years, adding my pitch to the “slush pile” of countless agents’ inboxes.
Responses varied. I got everything from “you don’t have enough Twitter followers” to “cool story, not for me” to no response at all. Any querying author will tell you this is to be expected.
After a few rejections, I learned to pivot my expectations when it came to this process.
My best friend Kristen was querying too, and she came up with a fun way to classify rejections as small wins. Every time one of us got a “No” from an agent or publisher, the other owed us a dollar in a virtual piggy bank. When one of us actually got published, the other would take us out to dinner using the money acquired from all the rejections.
If you can tell, my facial expression is one of shock with a smattering of exhaustion. After 4 years of effort, it seemed I’d won the lottery. It was life-changing. It was everything I never knew I wanted after quitting my first career as a high school teacher.
So where is this rockstar today, you ask?
She’s querying for agents!
Celebrities. They’re just like us, amiright?
Just kidding about that celebrity part…
Because despite the huge win of getting my first memoir published without an agent…it turns out I have much higher aspirations than that publisher can provide with a 1,000-copy print run.
If you’re not in the publishing world, 1,000 copies might sound like a lot. And I just Googled it and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter first printing was only about 1,000 copies. But most books slotted for mainstream success get anywhere up to 50-75,000 copies at the jump.
So how do you or I get those numbers?
We get a literary agent.
Here’s everything I know (and some things I don’t) about securing an agent for your/my next book…
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