More Treats than Tricks

Yesterday’s post was about how you get an agent and how there is no real trick involved—just write a great book and agents will want to work with you.

But then there’s the separate, yet related, question of how you find an agent—the person to whom you will show this great book once you have it.

This is a very fair question if you’re just staring out. And while I don’t think there’s a trick, there might be some treats, so I’ll share what I have seen and heard and read on about a hundred and fifty other sites.

So, let's make it 151.

How you find the names:

--Go to PublishersMarketplace.com. You can buy a membership for $20 a month that will allow you to search their database of literary sales, showing you
1. what’s selling
2. (generally) what they’re selling for (low five figures, high five figures, etc.)
3. what agents and editors are involved in those sales.

--Sign up for Publisher’s Lunch and Lunch Weekly. Publisher’s Lunch is an email that’s sent out Monday-Friday at about noon every day that lists some headlines from the publishing industry.

Lunch Weekly is an email that comes once a week that gives a highlight of the publishing deals made that week. It’s an edited version of what you will get for your $20/month, but it’s free and it comes to the inbox of all PubLunch subscribers.

(I let my PublishersMarketplace membership lapse years ago, but I still read Lunch Weekly religiously because it's good to know what's going on.)

--Read the acknowledgements and visit the websites of authors you admire. With a little work, you can usually find out who their agents are. Add them to the list.

--Attend conferences. If you can afford it, I think conferences are a good way to help make the transition from someone who wants to be a writer to someone who is a writer—even if an unagented/unpublished one.

Most conferences will feature agents who like writers—they enjoy meeting them, eating meals with them, hearing them pitch their projects at designated “pitch” sessions (not while in line for the bathroom).

But just going to a conference won’t guarantee you an agent—after all, it isn’t going to write your book for you; and there’s no guarantee that the agents at the conference will be a fit for you.

But, mentally, going to a conference was a good thing for me. It cost me $1,000 in airfare and hotels and registration, and when my neighbor on the plane asked whether I was traveling for business or pleasure I said “business”—maybe the first time I saw writing as such.

I didn’t meet my agent there, but it helped me get ready to meet my agent.

--Enter Contests—sometimes agents judge writing contests and will see manuscripts they like that way, but it’s rare. The real advantage of entering contests is that it helps get you ready for criticism and rejection. If you aren’t criticized or rejected then it gives you something you can put in your query letter.

After writing and rewriting for years I wanted to know if my book was ready, so I entered the “first chapter of a novel” division of my state’s writers’ association annual contest and (naively) said that if I won I’d take it as a sign I was ready.

Well, I did win, and received a lovely letter from the judge, the PS of which was a single line: Why hasn’t this been published?

I was officially ready.

--Get involved in writers’ groups. I participate in Backspace and the Chick Lit chapter of RWA, an online group for Teen Chick Lit writers and also a couple of groups at MySpace.

There are published and unpublished writers at all of these, and by hanging out there you get a sense of who is like you. Maybe those people’s agents would be a good fit.

This doesn’t mean you need a recommendation—that you need to know someone.

When people ask me who my agent is I say Kristin Nelson. When people ask me if I can pass their manuscript on to Kristin I let them know that Kristin’s submission guidelines are listed on her website and they should follow those because that’s how she finds clients.

You could put in your query letter that you know me from an online group or that you frequently read this blog or liked my books—that’s a plus. It shows you’ve done some homework—that Kristin isn’t just a name in a book of agents to you.

But, ultimately, an agent will either like the writing or she won’t. It’s all about the writing! Getting a “reference” from a current client isn’t going to change that.

This post has officially become way long (a term that is appropriate if not pretty). Therefore, I’ll be posting the second half, “After you have the list” tomorrow.

Happy reading (and writing)

Ally

PS...big thanks to big time authors Marianne Mancusi and Melissa de la Cruz for commenting yetserday and sharing their stories--so fun!