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Finding a Literary Agent

May 25th, 2008

Congratulations! You’ve written your manuscript, and it is as good as you can possibly make it. Perhaps you’ve written a suspenseful thriller or a book about marketing techniques; maybe you’ve even written your memoirs.

Next step: Publication!

Unfortunately, you can’t just point a magic wand at your manuscript and transform it into a perfectly bound book or novel. Instead, you’ll have to find a literary agent to represent your novel and shop it to publishers. But where do you find a literary agent? And how do you ensure that your book is properly represented?

As with all industries, there are legitimate agents and agents that just want to scam you. Some have great contacts with top publishing houses, while others haven’t sold a single book. Performing an adequate amount of research is essential to getting your book on the market, and if you don’t submit to agents whose reputations are in tact, you might end up with no book contract and no money.

For example, we wrote a romance novel for a woman last year, and she was extremely pleased with it. The ideas, characters, plot and setting were all her idea; we just molded those components into a cohesive, commercially viable manuscript. As soon as she received it, she started sending out query letters with a novel synopsis and an author biography. Less than a week later, she received an e mail from Sherry Fine, the V.P. of Acquisitions at the New York
Literary Agency, offering to represent her.

We had never worked with that agency before, and we urged our client to look into the background of Sherry Fine to determine the number of books sold and their rating at the BBB. She insisted that they were legitimate - their e-mail was so professional! - and didn’t do the research that we advised.

By the time everything was said and done, our client had paid $97.00 for a “literary critique”, $140 for an “editorial review”, and her book was going nowhere. She called us and asked that we look into it, so we did some research online. Typing in the name “New York Literary Agency Reviews” in Google brought up pages of message boards in which scorned writers had worked with this agency and been scammed.

That said, it is imperative that you work only with an agent or agency that follows the following guidelines:

1. No Up-Front Payments. A respectable literary agent (or authors’ representative) will not charge fees for reading or representing your manuscript. An agent only gets paid when your
book sells, which is their motivation for shopping it to publishers. They will receive a percentage of the royalties (typically 10-15%) when your book goes to print.

2. List of Books Sold. On their websites, agents usually give a list of the books they have sold, arranged by month and year. Go to Amazon.com and make sure that those books are actually titles, and choose an agent with a long list.

3. References. When an agent agrees to represent you, they should be able to supply you with a list of references. Call them. Make sure that other people who have used their services haven’t been scammed or misrepresented in any way.

4. Membership. Most legitimate agents belong to the Association of Authors’ Representatives. The AAR doesn’t admit agents who charge fees for readings or who have been given negative feedback. This is a great place to start. You can search for representatives by location, genre, acceptance of new writers and other criteria.

If you follow the above guidelines, you will be well on your way to finding a great agent.

Next, you’ll have to find a list of possible agents who routinely represent the type of manuscript you’ve written. For example, you won’t want to submit a query to an agent who only represents Harlequin Romance novels when you’ve written a psychological thriller.

You will also want to find an agent who expressly states that he or she is accepting queries from new authors. Some agents choose to work only with writers who have been previously published to cut down on their lists of submissions. The average agent receives more than 500 queries each week; imagine the workload! So save time and aggravation by submitting only to agents who will potentially represent your work.

Finally, remember that you will probably receive several rejection letters. We had one client for whom we wrote a mystery novel. He submitted to two hundred agents before he found one who agreed to represent him. For that novel - his first - he received a $150,000 advance and the book sold nearly 800,000 copies.

Agents don’t always decline a manuscript because they think it’s terrible work. Often, they reject books because they don’t cater to that particular style or because it doesn’t fit with their repertoire. Most agents are very choosy; they only want to represent manuscripts that they know they can sell. They don’t want to waste time with something from which they will never generate money.

Laura J. College is a professional ghostwriter with more than ten years’ experience writing fiction and non-fiction manuscripts. Her work can be found all over the Internet, and she is currently accepting ghostwriting clients. Check out her website at http://www.laurajcollege.com.

Tags: book, book agent, manuscript, literary agent, novel agent, novel

Tags: book, book agent, literary agent, manuscript, novel, novel agentbook, book agent, literary agent, manuscript, novel, novel agent

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