In Search of a Literary Agent

I spent quite a bit of last week contacting literary agents in hope of finding one interested in representing our new book Gastric Steps. Here’s how that went.

I suppose first I should explain why I would want or need to connect with a literary agent in the first place. If you want to have your book published by a real publishing company (as opposed to self-publishing), you pretty much need to have an agent. I self-published both Commodork and Invading Spaces and while I don’t regret the decision, I feel like Gastric Steps appeals to a wider audience than those books did.

Agents serve many purposes, like helping you make your book more marketable and giving you advice, but the primary purpose they serve is negotiating a deal for you with a publishing house. For this they get a percentage of the deal — and that’s a good system because they then have a vested interest in getting you the best deal possible. So you get some money, they get some money, the publishing house kills some trees… everybody’s happy.

Believe it or not, writing a book is the easy part. The hard part is finding an agent interested in helping you get it published. Finding agents is simple enough: you can either use the current Guide to Literary Agents or you can use Google.

After finding a huge list of agents, your first goal will be to rule most of them out. Based on a list of conventional genres, Gastric Steps is a non-fiction health memoir. With that, I limited my search to agents who represent authors of non-fiction books, and ones interested in both memoirs and health-related titles.

Another criteria used to limit my search was whether or not the agent accepted submissions via e-mail. Some only accept submissions through snail mail and require a SASE if you want a response. I’m much more digitally-grounded and ruled those out, looking instead for ones who accept submissions via e-mail. Most agents that accept e-mail submissions state that they don’t contact authors whose works are rejected. Instead they post a time limit (“if we’re interested, we’ll contact you in 4-6 weeks”) and if you don’t hear anything by then, you can assume they’re not interested.

Based on all of those factors I narrowed my list to five potential agents.

The next step involves checking the agent’s website and carefully reading their submission requirements and guidelines. While all five of the ones I submitted to were similar, all of them had slightly different requirements and I suspect following the rules to the letter is a “test” — in fact, some of the agents’ websites state up front that submissions missing materials or sent in the wrong format will be discarded.

Some of the agents requested query letters while others require full proposals.

Query letters are formal letters asking agents if they might be interested in representing your book. For the most part they consist of three parts: a hook, a description of your book, and an author bio. They should fit on a single page. Here’s a link to 23 examples.

Proposals are much larger letters. This page says that you should include the following information in a proposal: Overview, Marketing , Promotion, Competing Books, About the Author, List of Chapters, Chapter-by-Chapter Summary, and Sample Chapters. This is your one shot to convince a potential agent that your book will be successful and that they should want to represent it, so the more detailed the proposal is, the better.

For what it’s worth, none of the five agents I submitted to asked for the exact same things. One asked for a query letter, one asked for a proposal, one asked for a query letter and a proposal, one asked for a query letter and a proposal in a different format, and the last one had their own e-mail submission form. Based off of that experience I split my submission application into modular parts and used them to create what each agent was specifically looking for. Unfortunately these minor differences in submission formats prevents any attempts at further streamlining this process.

The next step appears to be… wait. Based on my records, the soonest any of the potential agents might respond might be in two weeks, with most of them requesting “up to a month” to review submissions. And again, if my work is rejected, they have already told me they won’t respond. I’ll let these five proposals expire before sending out another five or ten.

I’m not really sure how many times I should send the book out before deciding to self-publish it. Ten? Twenty? Fifty? I’m not sure. With an almost finished product in hand I am ready to get it out the door and the legacy publishing world simply doesn’t work that quickly. For now, I’ll wait and see what happens.