7 Steps to Finding the Right Agent
Today’s blog post comes to us from Author Accelerator CEO Jennie Nash. If you enjoy today’s content, you can sign up for Jennie's weekly newsletter here.
When it comes to looking for an agent, writers who are intentional, strategic, and grounded about every other aspect of their writing life often start making irrational and unproductive choices. They do this because they fall into the trap of thinking that finding an agent is an all-or-nothing, win-or-go-home, make-my-mark-or-die moment, and that binary thinking leads them astray.
Finding the right agent match is not a lottery or a game. Sure, luck and timing are involved, but luck and timing play a role in every aspect of our lives. Finding an agent to represent your work is a business decision. It’s a series of careful decisions made in the bright light of day, often over many years.
Here is a list of seven core steps to finding the right agent:
Own your ambition
If your intention is to land an agent and a traditional book deal, you are aiming for a very high bar of excellence. Owning your ambition means being clear about this intention, and then doing what it takes to give yourself the best possible chance of success at every part of the journey.
Lyn Christian a writer who was in our Nonfiction Incubator in the inaugural session and whose book on creating a map to your true self is going to be published in 2023 by Innovator Press. She is also an elite athlete who has the ambition of winning a national title in fencing. Her Instagram feed is full of videos of her doing squats and lifting weights and running sprints and buying training shoes and taking direction from her trainers – because that level of commitment is what it is going to take to win. What writers have to do isn’t quite so visually interesting – we sit and we think and we write – but it’s the same idea. It takes the same level of dedication and sacrifice.
Are you ready, willing, and able to own your ambition? What are you willing to give up for it?
As my friend KJ Dell’Antonia put it the other day, “Would you give up Netflix for three years in order to write a book?”
Most people wouldn’t make that deal. But that might well be what it takes to do the work you need to do to attract the kind of agent you want.
Write a book that’s commercially viable
This may seem obvious, but it is staggering to me how many writers don’t think about the marketplace. They write a book that doesn’t fit into a category when books are bought and sold according to category. They write a novel that is 180,000 words when no one would publish (let alone read) a book that long. They write a memoir that doesn’t have a point and when I ask about recent memoirs they have read (to try to get them to see the work they have to do), they say, “Oh, well I haven’t read many memoirs.”
You have to pay attention to the market you want to enter – to study it, to learn its quirks, and to master its demands.
You have to pay attention to your readers so you know what they are looking for, what else they are reading, what might thrill or delight them.
I recently had the chance to listen to twenty-two-time USA bestselling author Sarina Bowen talk about storytelling, and was blown away by the nuanced way she thinks about her reader and what that reader is looking for in a given genre. Sarina knows her customer, inside and out – what she wants, why she wants it, when she wants it – and she makes it her business to stay on top of that data.
Prove that you know how to connect with your future readers
You can’t expect the publisher to do all the selling. They are, in fact, expecting you to do most of the selling. This is why they want writers who have already built a platform: They want to know you have a proven path to selling your book.
A proven path is not a plan or a wish or a dream. It’s a track record that shows you are engaged with the kinds of readers who will buy your book. It’s more important for nonfiction than it is for fiction, to be sure, but there are very few writers who can come to the publishing table with an “I shall do nothing but write” attitude.
We can bemoan the fact that writers are responsible for marketing their own work and yell into the void about it, but at the end of the day, it’s our current reality. If you want to write books, you need to find a way to embrace it.
You will be more attractive to an agent if you can show that you know how to sell your own book – and that you are excited to do so.
Understand what agents do
Most writers know that the primary role of an agent is to secure a book deal, but agents do far more than that.
They help shape and guide your project selection, give guidance on marketing and platform-building, offer editorial advice (and sometimes actual editorial assistance), negotiate contracts, manage the communication between the writer and the publisher, intervene if things go sour, sell foreign, movie and TV rights, and many other tasks related to the management of a literary career.
You will be paying your agent 15% of whatever your book makes over its entire lifetime. You, therefore, want an agent who can be a long-term business partner, which means you want an agent who shares your vision.
That means you need to have a vision that is more than just a wish to be discovered, and be able to have a conversation with potential agents about that vision.
Twitter is filled with agents who share their thoughts and their philosophies. Follow some of them to see what they are doing and recommending and railing against.
The goal is not to zero in on one agent who is your “dream” agent – because that kind of labeling negates the hard work you have done and will be doing. The goal is to learn about the industry, to get smart, and to pay attention to the world you want to be part of.
Start by following Carly Watters from PS Literary. She is one of the hosts of the podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing. She’s out there trying to educate people about what agents do and how publishing works. Be one of the people who is listening.
Janet Reid, also known as the Query Shark, has been working to educate and entertain writers for years with her incisive analysis.
Ditto for Nathan Bransford. I have always appreciated his insights about the publishing industry.
Research who represents the kind of books you write
There are many hundreds of agents who could help you sell your book and who could champion your work and help guide your career, so selecting which ones to pitch, and why, takes some effort.
Agent research is part fact-finding mission and part soul-searching. It is more art than science, but the key to the whole thing is to be clear about what you are writing and the vision you have for your career (see Steps 1 and 2).
If you can articulate these things to yourself, you will be able to recognize when agents are aligned with your work, your values, and your vision.
You will be less likely to “fall in love” with any given agent, and more likely to understand which agents might be smart business partners for the work you want to do.
Try the following sites as you build your agent list:
Prepare a professional pitch
The foundation of successful pitching is the development of professional pitch materials. For novels and memoirs, this means a compelling query letter that sells your story, a synopsis that shows the whole sweep of it, and sample chapters that sing.
What do I mean by professional?
You articulate the vision you have for your book in a compelling way
You follow the conventions of query letter writing in terms of letter length
You write in a tone that is respectful – both of your effort and of the agent’s time
You include the elements agents need to see – genre, category, page count
You follow the requirements of the agent in terms of attaching or pasting or using online forms or putting particular things in the subject line
You follow the conventions of synopsis writing in terms of overall length
You make sure that your sample chapters are excellent, and indicative of the quality of the entire book – in other words, you don’t pitch until you know you are pitching something that is commercially viable (see Step 2).
Seem obvious? The vast number of writers don’t do these things and write themselves out of contention for reasons that have little to do with the actual project they are pitching.
Test and tweak
Sending out 50 query letters to see what sticks means that you are burning a lot of bridges.
I recommend pitching in small batches so you can test your pitch and tweak if needed.
Is your query letter getting no attention? Something must be off in it. Perhaps it’s the title, the opening lines, the comps? You can tweak these elements, send to different agents, try again, and see if the changes elicit requests.
Are you getting page requests but no full manuscript requests? Something in your sample chapters must not be compelling. Go back and look at the voice, the narrative drive, the pacing and flow.
Are you getting full manuscript requests then form rejections? The book is failing to deliver on its promise.
Are you getting full manuscript requests then detailed, personal rejections? It may be that your work is strong but you haven’t yet found the right agent to champion your work – in which case, you can confidently continue to pitch.
The test and tweak method of pitching allows you to proceed through pitching with patience and control over the process. It tends to reduce the number of form rejection letters you get and often leads to meaningful connections with agents.