Find the Right Agent

 I know that one thing you should never, ever do on your blog is talk about your dream agent. After all, what happens if you query an agent other than her, who then reads your blog and realizes that you’d actually much rather have someone else? For that reason, I’m not going to talk about dream agents. I just want to talk about agents in general to get at the big question: what do you look for in an agent?

I know for unagented authors, sometimes it can seem like just getting any agent at all is a huge thing, so you don’t really care which one. Some days I feel like this: I just really want an agent. But on other days, when I’m being sensible, I realize that I’m young, and finding the right agent who’ll work with me for the rest of my career is going to be really important.

Here are a couple things that I really want in an agent:

- They should be hands-on. I want an editorial agent. I want them to care about helping me make my book as good as it can possibly be.

- They should share my values. This means that I don’t want an agent who reps erotica, or who mainly reps paranormal, or who wants me to amp up the sexual content in my stories. They don’t need to be Christian, but I want them to accept the religious views in my stories.

- I want to get to know their other clients. I want some of their other clients to be ones who I respect; I’ve read their stories and I’ll be proud to be connected to them through the agency.

- They should sell to big presses. Now, I don’t mean exclusively or anything, but it’s my dream to sell to one of the big six, so even if I don’t get there right away, I want that possibility.

Those are all of them that I can think of off the top of my head. Now, how do I find out whether an agent fits these criteria?

- Follow them on twitter. If an agent is hands-on, they’ll mention stuff about editing client manuscripts, or they might outright call themselves editorial in a twitter chat.

- Follow their blog. Their values will come out that way; I probably don’t want an agent who swears a lot. Also, someone who has a lot of sketchy book covers at the side of their page… nuh uh.

- Read the acknowledgements sections of my favourite books and see who their agents are. Look at the lists of authors on the website; if I don’t recognize any, I’ll normally forget about the agency.

- Go to their website and look at the list of books to see if I recognize any (I mainly read books from big presses). Check out their recent sales and look up the books to find a publisher.

These four suggestions are great ways to get to know agents to see if you really want them to represent you. There are lots of great agents out there who are amazing at what they do, but just not right for me. I’m not saying you should be too choosy, but it does pay to do your research.

Over to you, my readers. How is your Great Agent Hunt going? Any tips for finding agents to query? What do you look for in an agent? 

How to Get Published 5: Selling Your Story

Step five in my really quick guide to getting published is titled ‘The Agent Sells Your Book.’ This seems to be a pretty straightforward step where you need to do virtually nothing. From what I’ve heard, this is where the agent really steps in and the author takes a breather. However, this doesn’t mean it’s easy for the author.

First off, you have to realize that even if you get an agent, your first book might not sell. No matter how much an agent loves it, a publisher just might not. Kiersten White, author of the bestselling Paranormalcy, snagged her agent with a totally different story which never sold. While she was on sub (the term for her manuscript being out with editors) she wrote Paranormalcy just for fun. This is good advice for anyone; when you’ve got your agent don’t just sit back and relax. Keep writing. Even supposing your book does sell, what about sequels? Or a new series?

Most of the time, however, your book will sell. Agents don’t take on new clients unless they’re pretty certain. I’d love to give you an average time period between signing with an agent and getting an editor, but the truth is… there isn’t one. Some books can sell within a week. Others may take months. It all depends.

A quick sneak peak into what your agent does: They send your book off to editors, just like you when you queried the agent. Agents will have contacts with editors at publishing houses, so they’ll know who to contact, how to contact them and what they’re looking for at the time. This all sounds like something you could do yourself, since it’s basically just a repeat of the query process, but the publishing industry is all about who you know, and an agent will know many more editors than you do.

At last publishing houses will start offering, and you (with the help of your agent) will choose which one to accept. You could take the one that offers the most money, or the one whose editor you would prefer to work with. After all, this is just like choosing an agent; an editor is another partner for life. This is also the person you’re going to spend the next months with, slaving over your story and perfecting it. Then ARCs will start coming out, and the reviews will start rolling in… and you’ll start working on your next book, if you haven’t already.

This is the end of my How-To-Get-Published Series, and I hope it shed some light on the process for you guys. Please note that I have no personal experience with any of this; I just read a lot of blogs. If there’s anything you’d like me to clear up, then just ask. What do you think my new series should be on?

How to Get Published 4: Querying

Supposing you’ve followed the first three steps, writing a brilliant novel, obtaining feedback and revising according to that feedback, you should now be ready to query. Simply put, a query is a short letter, no more than 500 words, that makes an agent want to read your manuscript. Like anything in the writing business, there’s a whole list of rules for query writing. These rules can occasionally be broken, but unless you’re absolutely brilliant, following the format is by far the best way to snag an agent.

Firstly, you’ll need to find agents. Agentquery is a great place, and you can search by genre and whether or not they’re open to queries at the time. It’s also a good idea to look in books that you liked and read the acknowledgements. The author will almost always thank their agent. It’s always good to mention in your query that you’ve read and enjoyed other books the agent has represented.

Then you need to get to know the agent. Do you actually want this agent representing you? An author/agent partnership will affect the rest of your career, so chose wisely. Look at the sort of books the agent sells. I want an agent with tastes similar to mine, so I wouldn’t pick one who sells a lot of paranormal romance or erotica. As an unpublished author, it sometimes feels like just getting any agent would be amazing, but honestly, no agent is better than a bad agent.

Once you have a list of agents you would like representing you, you need to send out your query. I’m not going to tell you how to write a query; Nathan Bransford, Query Shark and Elana Johnson can teach you that much better than I can. Once you have the query, send it out to a couple agents, perhaps ten at a time. Make sure you follow the individual agent’s guidelines. Some will just want a query, others will want the first couple pages of manuscript and a synopsis (though it's almost always a good idea to paste the first chapter or two in the email unless the agent specifically requests that you don't. Agents always like to get a feel for your writing style. But whatever you do, DON'T send an attachment!). Always address your query to the agent by name; nothing kills a query faster than ‘Dear Mister/Madam.’ These may seem like little things, but your first impression is so important.

And then… prepare for rejections, because you will get them. I’ve only heard of one author who got their agent first time. Everyone else had to go through many, many rejections. Leigh Fallon, the first inkpopper to get published by HarperTeen, didn’t get an agent the first time around. Don’t respond to the rejections; just delete them or store them away somewhere, and move on.

At last, at some point, you should hopefully get a request for a partial or full. You’ll send this off to the agent formatted as they request, and then prepare for another rejection. If you’re amazingly lucky, this is where you get an offer of representation. The agent will call, you’ll talk, and if you think this agent would be a good fit for you… Ta da! You’ve got an agent! 

How to Get Published 3: Revisions

Step Three on the road to getting published is… *drum roll please* the dreaded revision. Every author has to revise their work. This could be tiny things like putting ‘ambled’ instead of ‘walked’ or huge changes to the plot or characters. Whichever it is, you have to expect revisions and be willing to completely re-write your manuscript if needed.

There is no way I can cover the topic of revisions in just one blog post—entire books could be written on the subject. I just want to quickly talk a bit about revisions in direct connection with publishing.

Before you start querying (which I’ll talk about next time) you have to have the absolute best book you can write by yourself. Chances are you’ll still have to revise more for your agent/editor, but that doesn’t mean you can be lazy at this stage. Make it as good as it can possibly be. (And just so you know, the manuscript has to be finished before querying. Established authors can sometimes sell a book based just on a proposal, but for debut authors, you should have a finished manuscript that’s already as amazing as possible.)

Sometimes when you start querying agents, one will ask you to do some revisions before offering representation. This means that you’ll put a lot of work into changing the story for them, and they still might not take you as a client. This is a bit of a risk, especially if the agent wants exclusive revisions, so it’s your decision whether to do them or not. I personally think I would make the changes, assuming I thought their ideas were good, but I’ve never been in that situation.

Even after you have an agent, the work doesn’t stop. They’ll almost certainly ask you to do more revisions. And then when they sell your manuscript to an editor, they’ll be an awful lot more, well… editing. This may sound kind of awful—after all, you’ve already slaved over this book for years by yourself—but I’ve heard of many authors who actually enjoyed this step. After all, what could be better than working to perfect your story with an agent/editor who loves your novel as much as you do?

I suppose the crucial thing about revisions is that you have to learn to expect them, if not to love them. Get used to editing everything you write. Get as much feedback as you possibly can, and then use it. Make this novel as good as you possibly can. If you truly love your story, it shouldn’t be that hard to spend hours perfecting it. 

How to Get Published

Now that I'm immersed in blogging and tweeting and chatting with authors on inkpop and all that stuff that authors do, it's hard to remember a time when I didn't know any of this. Just five years ago, I had no idea how to get published. It almost seems laughable now, but I didn’t know what an agent was, or how to query, or what an ARC was, or pretty much anything about publishing. The thing is, all this information is hidden away on book blogs or in sneaky places on publisher’s websites. 12-year-old me was absolutely clueless.

I remember asking my mom how to get published and she went and asked on a Yahoo group. I excitedly waited for their answers, but when the responses came in, they were all the same: ‘It’s hard.’

That was all. There was no information about how to get published (other than the suggestion that I should try to get short stories published in magazines first). They only told me it was hard.

True. Getting published is hard. It’s been five years since I decided I wanted to get published, and I’m just as un-published as I ever was. The only thing that’s changed is that now I do know how to get published. Now, this information I’m going to share is fairly basic so most of you will already know it all, but in each case I’ll share a couple links to helpful websites so you can go farther than just my blogposts.

Step to getting published:

1.       Write a REALLY good story

2.       Get feedback
3.    Revisions

4.       Query Agents

5.       The Agent sells your book

For the next three weeks I’ll concentrate on steps 2-5. As for step one… I’ll spend a little bit more time on that. According to the poll in the sidebar, writing tips were the favourite kind of post on this blog, so they’ll be a lot more of those coming up. Any post on writing is going to have something to do with step one: Write a REALLY good story. That can’t be emphasized enough. Without a good story, you’ll never receive helpful feedback. No matter how good your query, you’ll never get an agent. Even supposing you got an agent, it won’t sell to publishers.

For next week, let’s assume you’ve already got a fairly good story. Then you need to get your story out there, and be willing to accept feedback.