So You’re Ready to Send a Query…But to Who?
You’ve polished up your query letter, your synopsis is done, and your sample pages are dynamite. You’re ready to query agents!
Now...how do you find agents?
When I made my initial list of agents to query, it had 103 agents on it. I ended up querying my top 60 before signing with my agent. I sometimes get clients who worry that they’ve over queried their book, when they’ve only queried 10-20 agents—you’ll likely need to have a list in the 70-100 agent range, depending on your age range and genre.
Querying is hard. Rejection is really common. You’re going to need persistence, and a big list.
Steps to Making a Perfect Agent List:
1) Get familiar with the big agencies
I researched literary agencies online. I found this list to be helpful (although I do not endorse this website in any way - it was just the list I used when starting out my search). I went to the websites of each agency. I looked at the books they represented, and made a note when they were books and authors I recognized. Publisher’s Marketplace (see step 6) is the best way to verify that an agency has sales and is therefore legit, but it’s a pricey paid service - so some good old-fashioned sleuthing works too.
2) Look through a lot of agent bios
I made a list of agencies that I wanted to query. Then, I looked through every single agent’s bio on those agencies’ websites. I made a list of the ones who repped my genre and age range.
3) Figure out who represents comparable authors
Another thing that was super helpful in building my agent list was to research who represented comparable authors. I took my comps, and books in the genre that I admired, and I looked up who represented those authors (which you can usually find on author websites, or in the book’s acknowledgements).
4) Sift through maunscriptwishlist.com and twitter
Manuscript wishlist is a very helpful website where agents post their “wishlist” - and often, they get really specific. This won’t help you vet agents, because any agent can post on manuscriptwishlist.com, but it can help you determine who represents your age range and genre, but is also interested in specific elements that your story has.
Likewise, twitter is really helpful in this regard. Many agents are on twitter, and looking at their profiles and tweets can help you determine what they’re looking for.
5) Look at Query Tracker
We’ll cover Query Tracker as a tool in a later blog post, but it’s a free website where you can search for agents by age range and genre. Again, this won’t help you vet agents, but it does provide a long list of agents that you can research on your own.
Bonus: If you want to pay, go for Publisher’s Marketplace
The most helpful thing for me in creating an agent list was Publisher’s Marketplace (PM). This is a very pricey ($25/month) subscription service used by a lot of industry professionals. It gives you access to an agent’s past deals (and roughly how much those deals were worth), the top agents and agencies in deal categories, and daily deal announcements going back years.
A lot of people I know signed up for PM for a single month and used that month to build their agent lists, research agents who represented similar books, and vet agencies by their sales history. If you can afford it, it’s a great option. If you can’t, though, don’t worry - the information PM has is out there on the internet, but you just have to go and search for it on your own.