Getting a literary agent is easy. People think it isn’t, but it truly is.
If you want to find a literary agent, do as follows.
- Step one: write a wonderful book.
- Step two: draw up a shortlist of a dozen literary agents active in your area.
- Step three: send them a query letter including (if they ask for it and not otherwise) some sample material from your book. Step four: await those phone calls.
I kid you not, that’s all you need to do. Needless to say, though, step one is a toughie. If you’ve written a book that’s good but not yet wonderful, you can forget about getting an agent. If you’ve written a book that has some tremendously important things to say, but you are not wonderfully fluent and engaging in the way you say those things, you can forget about getting an agent.
The grim stats are these.
Literary agents aren’t looking for potential. They’re looking for strong, saleable manuscripts. They’ll receive 1,998 submissions a year that have potential. They’ll only get 2 that are ready for the market.
A typical literary agent receives about 2,000 submissions a year.
They may pick up just two of those as clients. Those odds can feel dispiriting, until you remember that it’s not about odds at all. It’s about quality. If your book is strong enough, it will be picked up. Not by the very first agent maybe – that’s why you need to send out about a dozen queries – but quality will be noticed. There are, of course, exceptions – JK Rowling was rejected many times before Bloosmbury picked her up – but you can’t navigate by exceptions. The simple rule is that quality sells. That’s why step one of the above list matters so much. Write a wonderful book, a dazzling one, one that echoes in the memory. Do that, and the sales process will mostly look after itself.
That said, you may as well make sure your approach to agents is as professional as possible and you will need as many literary agents names as possible to send your work to. You need to make sure that you only query agents who are active in your field. So if, let’s say, you write paranormal romance for young adults, there’s no point in querying agents who only deal in non-fiction.
At the same time, you need to realise that relatively few agents operate only in narrow niches. My own agent handles literary fiction, commercial women’s fiction, crime, highbrow non-fiction and popular non-fiction. In other words, he takes pretty much anything. Most agents are the same. They’re just looking for a book that (A) they think they can sell and (B) they genuinely love. If your book checks those boxes, you’ve got an agent.
The query letter can be pretty simple. Keep your letter reasonably short and make sure that you write decently. You are seeking to sell your skill with words so a poorly written query letter marks you out instantly as a writer to reject. Don’t fall at the first hurdle.
The thing that causes most pain to writers is the synopsis, but you can relax. Writing a synopsis is easy and it’s also by far the least important part of what you send agents. Many agents hardly even read them. Few agents will reject a book on the basis of your written synopsis alone if they love everything else about your submission. Again, the key is brevity and good writing. A one page synopsis is perfect. Most writers need two. Don’t ever use more than three.
And that’s it. Get your query letters out there and see what happens. If you’ve handled step one properly – writing a wonderful book, I mean – the rest of it will be plain sailing. If you find yourself being rejected, you might want to approach more agents (not more than 20 in total, though), but really you should start to reconsider the book itself. Is it really strong enough? Remember, literary agents aren’t looking for potential. They’re looking for strong, saleable manuscripts. They’ll receive 1,998 submissions a year that have potential. They’ll only get 2 that are ready for the market.
If you think your book might not yet be strong enough to sell, you almost certainly need to get tough professional feedback on your writing. You need to get your work looked at by a professional editor (ie: one who has worked for a major publisher) or a professional author (ie: someone in your approximate genre who has sold work to a major publisher). You need to get feedback that is totally honest and holds your writing up to the same standards that will be applied by agents. There’s no question that can be a bruising process – I’m a grizzled old pro with more than ten books under my belt, but I still get anxious when I send my work off to my agent or editor for comments. All the same, your writing won’t get better any other way. Then when you’ve got the feedback, you need to be honest with yourself: making sure that you are as perfectionist as possible in reworking your book. Nothing else will do. Good luck!
Harry Bingham is a bestselling author of fiction and non-fiction. His consultancy firm, The Writers’ Workshop, helps new writers improve their writing and find literary agents.