The Agent Treasure Hunt Begins
Photo by Suhash Villuri on Unsplash
After being able to say “I have an agent” for the last two years, I’m now back in the hunt for a literary agent. Looking for an agent is kind of like a treasure hunt for me. Lots of clues to decode about their interests and how my work might fit their list.
Where I look for info on agents
To develop the list of agents I want to query, I use multiple sources of information:
Publishers Marketplace. The free version lets you see individual agents’ pages where they list book sales. Some agents use their page as manuscript wishlit and include querying info. For the first time, I’m using a paid subscription to get access to information about recent deals. I’m also using the “who represents” search that lets me put in an author’s name and find out who their agent is now and in the past.
Manuscript Wish List. Some agents are extremely detailed about what they’re looking for—like mermaids, bookstore murders, or pie-baking contests. Some include what they’re not looking for—like animal protagonists. (Good for me to know since I have a raven protagonist.)
X (formerly known as Twitter). Some agents post on X about their wish lists or that they’re open or closed to queries. With some reluctance, I signed up. I haven’t posted, however, and don’t have any plans to. I’m just there to find and follow agents as part of my research.
Literary Rambles. This site focuses on agents and authors for kid lit. Each “spotlighted” agent has a page with links to interviews and other background info to help round out my research.
Agency websites and individual agents’ personal websites. This is where I collect info about what they want to see in a query, how they prefer to receive a query, plus names of clients and their books.
This info gets condensed into a spreadsheet.
My spreadsheet for agent research
To start populating my new spreadsheet, I went first to Manuscript Wish List. I started with the “genre/name search” and sorted by agents who represent middle grade fiction. I added anyone who sounded like they were interested in MG mysteries and who didn’t object to animal protagonists.
My spreadsheet includes
The agent’s name
The name of their agency and a link to the agency site or the agent’s personal site
How they like to be queried—their Query Manager link or email address
What to include with a query, e.g., 10 pages and a synopsis
Date sent
Agent’s response time
Their interests, e.g., “a middle grade mystery series featuring a spunky female protagonist”
Notes—this is a catch-all category where I put authors they represent, especially if I know the author or their work; books they mention that may be comp titles; if they’re currently closed to queries
I organized my spreadsheet by literary agency. That way I can see at a glance when one agency has more than one potential agent for my work and I can choose who to query first in that agency.
Next time I’ll get into my query process.