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Nathan Bransford

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How to Find a Literary Agent

How to research a literary agent

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So. You have a finished and polished manuscript for fiction or a finished and polished nonfiction book proposal for nonfiction. You want a book deal. You need an agent.

Now what?

It’s tough out there for an author. There are literally hundreds of agents. Some are incredibly powerful and can transform your destiny with a few emails. Some are scam artists (knowingly or unknowingly) who are worse than having no agent at all.

How can you tell the difference? How do you figure out who you can trust?

Here is how to go about researching agents and compiling a target list for querying. And veteran queriers, please supplement this post with your favorite tips in the comments section!

Before you start searching for literary agents

Before you start the search, make sure you know the goals of your research:

  • You need to create a list of reputable agents who represent your genre
  • You need to know their submission guidelines so you can then query them
  • You need to personalize your query, so keep track of tidbits you can use in your query.
    • (Think: “I chose to represent you because I’m a huge fan of [Author agent has represented]” or “Anyone who has trained their goldfish to do tricks is fine by me.”)

And I have a present for you. Here’s a Google Docs spreadsheet that you can copy and use as you go about your research.

Now then. On to the search!

Know (and be honest about) your genre

Agents specialize. While they have some flexibility and autonomy around what they represent, they almost all have certain genres they do and don’t represent.

Why do they specialize? The advantages include:

  • It allows agents to focus their networking on the editors and publishers that acquire certain genres.
  • It’s hard to keep track of genre conventions, trends, and personnel for every single genre out there.
  • Agents tend to have a better “eye” for certain genres than others. For instance, when I was an agent, I had a really hard time spotting good picture books so I didn’t represent them.
  • It’s more enjoyable to specialize in genres you like.

You should know the genre of your work before you begin.

“BUT BUT BUT…” some of you are sputtering. “How can I POSSIBLY classify my unicorn paranormal science fiction novel that has a fantasy story arc with magic and the characters go back in time to the Civil War for a while AND THERE’S ROMANCE TOO. Also dinosaurs.”

Sure, your book may touch on a couple of different genres. But there really is only one question you need to answer when figuring out your genre: On which shelf would your book sit in a bookstore?

If you can’t answer that, you may have bigger problems than finding an agent.

Start in the obvious places

Okay. So. You have your genre and you’re ready to start.

There are two places to look first:

  1. Who represents your favorite authors in your genre? You can use the ol’ Google for this one, otherwise a good place to look is in the acknowledgments sections of books. The only exception to this is that you may want to avoid agents who represent something *too* similar to your work. Same genre? Cool. Eerily similar plot line? Might want to steer clear.
  2. Who do people in your network recommend? Ask the people you know who have agents or who are connected to the business for recommendations (and by “people you know” I mean “people you actually know in real life who are familiar with your work”).

See if you can compile an initial list of names.

Supplement your literary agent research with databases

The agents who represent the books you love and who you’ve been recommended may well comprise your initial “top tier” of agents. But you want to do more research than that.

There are a few databases out there that can help. All of them allow you to filter by genre:

  • Publishers Marketplace – This is a great place to see who agents represent and what they sold. Many agents have created their own pages with lots of good information.
  • The AAR Database – The Association of Author Representatives is a good place to look for reputable agents. All the agents abide by a canon of ethics, and have to meet certain criteria for membership. Not all ethical agents are members of the AAR so don’t necessarily write someone off if they’re not in it, but the agents in the AAR should be real.
  • Agent Query and Query Tracker – These sites will allow you to cast a wider net, but you’ll definitely want to supplement your research to make sure the people you’re finding are reputable.

Combing through these should give you a long list of people to query. Next you want to start winnowing your list down.

Confirm an agent’s bona fides

So. You now have a list of 100 agents you could potentially query. How do you know they’re real? Better yet, how do you know if they’re right for you and your unique book?

First off, make sure you know your rights as an author. Learn to spot major red flags.

There are two main buckets of agents you are looking to query:

  1. Established agents who have a substantial track record of selling books to the five major publishers. Those five publishers are Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. These publishers have about five million imprints (e.g. Knopf is a part of Penguin Random House), so it can be just a tad confusing to figure out the agent’s track record by what’s on the spine of a book alone, but this infographic should help you if you’re in doubt.
  2. Young agents who have put in a few years apprenticing for established agents. Everyone has to start somewhere, and sometimes young agents can be a good fit because they’re hungry and actively looking to build their list. But you want to make sure a young agents has learned the ropes from someone who really knows what they’re doing and didn’t just hang out a shingle. For instance, by the time I started taking on clients I had worked at Curtis Brown Ltd. for over two years, had sold audio and other subsidiary rights for bestselling authors, and had already worked with some of the biggest names in the business.
Another good place to look if you’re in doubt is Writer Beware.

Follow the literary agent’s submission requirements

Aside from making sure someone is reputable, make sure you know how they like to receive their queries. This may be via their work email, a dedicated submissions email, a third party querying service, or good old fashioned snail mail.

Follow. The. Procedure. If the agent put the info out there they did it for a reason.

Can’t find any procedure? Email the agent the query directly (though don’t expect that you’ll necessarily hear back — they may not be actively looking for clients).

Prioritize and PERSONALIZE

How should you rank your top prospective agents, the people you will query first? Go with your gut.

Get a feel for the books an agent represents. Follow them on social media and get a sense of their personality.

Rank your list, and plan to have your query out to about seven agents at a time.

You can’t know in advance who the perfect agent will be, and don’t get your heart set on any one agent, but you can get in the ballpark by getting a sense of whether you think you’d enjoy working with them.

As you’re doing this, TAKE NOTES. You can use those to personalize your query letter. (I’ll have a post that details how to personalize a query on Thursday).

Whew. Are you ready to start querying? Time to write that bad boy: How to write a query letter

If you need more personalized help on all of this, a service I highly recommend is Query Mastery, which was started by my friends Natasa Lekic and Rachel Stout.

And let me know your favorite research tips in the comments!

I’m available for manuscript edits, query critiques, and consultations! And if you like this post, check out my guide to writing a novel.

Full disclosure: I receive an affiliate commission via the links to NY Book Editors and Query Mastery, but I believe in these services. I mean, Natasa and Rachel met at a party at my apartment, and I’ve provided feedback on both services. Click freely!

Art: Haystacks by Vincent van Gogh

What Do Literary Agents Do?

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Literary agents fulfill a crucial function in the publishing process. Here are the ins-and-outs on what they do.

For context, I was a literary agent at Curtis Brown Ltd. from 2002-2010, so posts that I link to that were written during that time will sound as if I’m currently an agent (which, again, I’m not).

Behold! This is organized in the form of tracking one project from query to post-sale:

The Literary Agent Filter

Literary agents are the baleen to the publishing industry’s whale. The Brita to the publishing industry’s drinking water. The pan to the publishing industry’s gold. (I could go on)

Basically: agents serve as a filter. Because editors are so busy, it’s rare for publishers to consider unagented submissions and they instead rely on agents to filter through the tens of thousands of aspiring writers and present editors with only the very best projects.

This means that agents open the floodgates to submissions. Most agents receive between 5,000 and 20,000 or more submissions a year and choose only a few carefully selected projects to send to editors.

Agents may specialize in certain areas or they may be generalists, but all have to reject way way way more projects than they are able to take on.

For further reading:

Pre-submission Editing

Because the marketplace is so difficult, many agents will work with clients or prospective clients on their manuscripts or proposals prior to submissions.

I was a hands-on agent and would often work with authors on revisions before offering representation so that we could both get a sense of how well we would work together.

A project has to really be perfect in order to attract an editor, and so it behooves agent and author to work together to get the project or proposal as perfect as possible ahead of time.

For further reading:

Submitting to editors

Submitting a project to editors is both art and science.

The science: a huge part of being an agent involves networking, knowing which editors like what type of books, networking, keeping imprints and mergers and layoffs and hires straight, networking, keeping up with industry news and gossip, networking, and networking.

The art: An agent will carefully select the best editors to consider a particular project, but at the end of the day an agent never quite knows who is going to respond the strongest to a particularly project.

Then agents will also pester the editors they submitted to at regular intervals until they get a response.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that every responsibility I’ve listed up until this point is done on spec – an agent has not yet gotten paid for any of this. Since agents only receive income if they’re able to sell a project, they could very well spend tens or a hundred or more hours on a project, send it to editors, and come up empty.

For further reading:

Negotiating offers

Hooray! An offer comes in!

Now the agent will help the author decide what comes next. There are different types of offers with different territories and terms, and, of course, the dollar amount of the advance varies greatly. It’s an agent’s job to negotiate the terms of the offer upward, possibly conduct an auction if multiple houses are interested, and make sure the i’s are crossed and the t’s are dotted prior to the author accepting.

For further reading:

Negotiating publishing contracts

Some agencies have in-house contracts specialists, some agencies have agents negotiate their contracts directly. All will negotiate an agreement that is far, far better than what an unagented author will achieve on their own.

For further reading:

Keeping track of the publication process

An agent will follow up on payments and badger publishers until said payments come in, keep track of key dates, discuss marketing plans with author and editor, serve as mediator between author and publisher in case any disputes arise, and generally keep on top of everything to make sure everything is proceeding as it should.

For further reading:

Subrights

In the offer stage the agent will also try to retain certain rights, such as film, audio, and translation, which can be sold directly. These rights can be quite lucrative, and if they’re sold directly the author doesn’t have to split the revenue with the publisher.

Some agencies work with subagents to place these rights. Some, like Curtis Brown, have in-house film and foreign rights departments.

For further reading:

Career Shaping

Even apart from the nuts and bolts tasks that go into making a book happen, an agent can help an author plan their career trajectory, whether that involves helping the author choose projects to pursue, thinking of new ideas for breaking them out to larger audiences, serving as a sounding board, brainstorming, keeping the author apprised of changes in the industry, and in general being an experienced ear and brain, helping the author navigate the business.

For further reading:

The Ultimate Advocate

Ultimately: the agent is the author’s advocate. They help the author become more successful and work tirelessly to advance the author’s career.

For further reading:

This is just a basic list, and there’s often more to it than this. It’s quite a catchall job, one that requires a long apprenticeship, time in the business, a strong work ethic, a good eye, and a passion for books.

For all of these tasks the agent receives income based only on commission — again, the agent is only paid if/when the author is paid. The standard commission is 15% for domestic book deals and 20% for foreign (split between the agent and subagent).

And in case you’re wondering if having an agent is worth it – here’s Jeff Abbott’s post (once again) on the reasons you need one.

Originally Published: September, 2009
Revised: August 13, 2017

Art: Sir Walter Scott by Sir William Allan

In defense of personalized queries (and five tips!)

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Agent Janet Reid recently posted a rant about one of the frequent flash points in the “This process is too freaking hard” camp of agent-seekers: the personalized query. Essentially, Janet believes personalized queries are pointless.

In one sense I do agree with Janet.

Is a personalized query, by itself, proof that the author has written a good book? No.

Does it matter that an author is a good querier if the book is otherwise fantastic? No.

In an ideal world, would authors need to personalize their queries in order to find an agent? No.

But…

Do we live in an ideal world? No.

Agents are positively besieged with queries at all times. I still receive queries to this day and I haven’t been an agent for six years. It’s a relentless deluge.

And that slush pile should really be called a sludge pile (bonus: this article examines the origins and possible connotations of “slush pile”). At least 50% of the queries I received as an agent were so far away from anything approaching publishable material I constantly wondered if I was being punk’d by an evil competitor.

When you’re dealing with that kind of volume (I answered between 50-100 every weekday), anything that makes a decision easier is a godsend. And one of the absolute best shorthands that I was dealing with a professional author going the extra mile was when a query was personalized.

It didn’t mean I liked being kissed up to.

It didn’t mean I tossed out every query that wasn’t personalized.

It just was a tipoff that I should pay closer attention to the query. If someone took the time to personalize a query they also were more likely to be the type of professional, hardworking author I wanted to work with. I’m absolutely positive this extra attention tipped me over to requesting manuscripts a non-trivial amount of the time.

Contra Janet, finding an agent is not like hiring a plumber. You, the author, are not choosing someone to work with out of the Yellow Pages (ha! Remember those? I just lost everyone under 25).

A more appropriate metaphor, I think, is that finding an agent is like finding a potential investor in your business. And if you want someone to invest in your book startup, are you going approach that venture capitalist casually? Or are you going to research them, make sure they’re a good potential fit, and dress snappily when you pitch your business plan?

Does researching an investor and putting on a suit make you a suckup? No, it’s just the professional thing to do. And just like an investor, most agents will appreciate it if you’ve done your homework.

The ultimate proof I believe in this? When I queried agents for Jacob Wonderbar I always personalized. I didn’t know Catherine Drayton prior to querying her, but I did know she represented The Book Thief and mentioned it in the query letter.

If you are going to personalize, here are some tips:

  • Include the personalization at the start of the query, not the end, for maximum “hey, tipoff, I’m a professional” effect.
  • Don’t fake it (yes, some people try to do this).
  • Don’t overdo it. You don’t need to write a page-long ode, just a wink and a nod is okay.
  • Be professional, not overly familiar. You may feel like you know someone from their blog or social media account, but if you don’t actually know them, you don’t know them. 
  • Build off this basic formula: “I chose to query you because [you represent X books, I saw your write X article] and [how this resonated you].” How I did this for my Jacob Wonderbar query: 

As a young literary agent with Curtis Brown Ltd. I have long admired Inkwell, as well as your strong track record. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, if you searched for a book that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike THE BOOK THIEF (which I absolutely loved), you might just have JACOB WONDERBAR AND THE COSMIC SPACE KAPOW, a middle-grade-and-up science fiction novel that I just completed. Still fun! But no one dies – Mr. Death would be lonely.

Authors/agents, what do you think? Do you think it helps or is it more trouble than it’s worth?
Art: Image from The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1889.

How to get over writer’s block

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With National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) starting tomorrow, here’s an excerpt from How to Write a Novel: 47 Rules for Writing a Stupendously Awesome Novel That You Will Love Forever, on sale now!

Rule #34: You don’t have “writer’s block”

The most important thing you need to know about writer’s block is this: it doesn’t exist.

Seriously. Writer’s block does not exist. It is not a worm that suddenly lodges itself in your brain, it is not a mysterious goblin that sneaks up on you and poisons you with an anti-writing serum, and it is not something that you need to fear coming down with.

Now, when I say writer’s block doesn’t exist, I don’t mean that you will never have the feeling associated with writer’s block or that people who say they have writer’s block are big fakers. I’ve felt the feeling! I’ve been there.

But when people encounter the phenomenon otherwise known as “writer’s block,” what they are really describing is one thing and one thing only: writing stopped being fun.

That’s it. That’s all it means. The writing process stopped being easy and the words were no longer flowing as readily as they were in the beginning. Writing, in other words, just got really, ridiculously hard.

Writer’s block is what happens when novels stop being polite and start getting real. The Real World: Writing!

But remember: it’s a feeling. It is not something that will stop you from finishing, nor is it something that you have to give into because it’s inevitable. You can’t treat it like a virus that will pass in time if you just wait it out. You must seek a cure.

There are ways of dealing with “writer’s block,” and they all have one thing in common: work. Here are the strategies that will help:

Figure out the problem you need to solve
Chances are you will, at some point, feel completely and utterly stuck. This isn’t writer’s block (which, again, doesn’t exist). You’re just stuck.

It’s completely frustrating. And this is okay. There are going to be setbacks. Don’t stress yourself out thinking that everything should always be easy.

Instead of focusing on your exasperation with your own writing abilities, it’s eminently important to figure out why you’re stuck. Does something in particular need to happen in your story that is stymieing you? Do you need to figure out how characters get from Point A to Point B? Is something just not feeling right, and so you need to go back and fix some things leading up to the sticky spot? Has a plot thread gone astray?

The first step to getting unstuck is understanding the problem you need to solve. Once you’ve identified the main issue, the solution is just around the corner. You might not know what to do immediately, and your brain might need to work itself toward the solution, but knowing the problem is a crucial nudge toward writing again.

Go outside and get some fresh air and sunshine

Once you have a general sense of the problem at hand and what you need to accomplish, it’s okay to take a break. Give your brain a breather, get some Vitamin D, stare at some flowers, and ponder how in the world you ended up writing a novel and how maybe it would’ve been simpler to take up gardening instead.

Changing your location and experiencing some peace and quiet can help dislodge the clog in your brain. Find as much nature as you can, depending on where you live. Trees and grass and oxygen are magic.

Exercise

Get the blood flowing. Lift some weights. Punch a punching bag. Really punch that bag stupid novel argh *#&%@.

You’ll be amazed at the ideas you’ll have while exercising.

And not only this, but, as I’m sure you know, the brain is part of the body, so you might want to keep the whole enterprise healthy. You’ll be happier and more creative if you spend time getting your heart rate up.

Whenever I was stuck with the Jacob Wonderbar series, I headed straight to the gym. The problems had often been solved by the time I got back to my apartment.

Force yourself to stare at a blank screen until you think of something

This is the ripping-the-bandaid-off approach to dealing with writer’s block. It is painful but utterly effective.

Turn off your Internet connection and cell phone. Close the blinds. Hide the TV remote. Lock the doors.

Open up your novel. And stare stare stare at the blinking cursor.

This is my absolute favorite technique for dealing with the affliction formerly known as writer’s block. You just power through.

It is absolutely agonizing to stare at a blank screen and a blinking cursor. It can inspire feelings of panic and despair. You may start wondering if you’ll ever think of another idea again. You may start to wonder if the blinking cursor was originally invented as a torture device.

But then, after ten minutes or more of staring at the blinking cursor of death, you’ll eventually start to calm down. You’ll do the only thing you can do in a quiet, Internet-less room with nothing else to occupy your attention: you will start thinking of ideas. If you concentrate and don’t let the feeling overpower you, you’ll eventually come up with something that will get you out of the writing block hole.

It may take minutes, or it may take hours. It may be the most agonizing few hours of your creative life, or you may be surprised at how quickly you get going.

But here’s what happens after you’ve overcome your blockage and you get back into the flow: you’ll be so euphoric that you’re back on track that it will start feeling fun again.

You’ll realize that the whole writing block thing never existed in the first place.

Read the rest of How to Write a Novel: 47 Rules for Writing a Stupendously Awesome Novel That You Will Love Forever. On sale for just $4.99 at:

Amazon Kindle
Apple iBooks
B&N Nook
Kobo
Smashwords

Traditionally published short story collections

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I get a lot of questions about short story collections. How do you write a query letter for a short story collection? Do publishers want them?

Well, it’s complicated.

Short story collections do get published, usually by the cream of the crop of the literary fiction world. (Note that I’m not talking about anthologies with multiple authors, which can sometimes be published around a high-concept hook.)

It’s rare for a debut short story collection to be published unless:

a) The publisher wants to whet the public’s appetite for a debut novel
b) The author has previously been published in All The Places (think: The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Atlantic)
c) Both

Think: Junot Diaz’s Drown as a (decade-prior) prelude to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, or Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies as a prelude to The Namesake.

Yes, there are authors like Alice Munro, Nathan Englander, and George Saunders, who are primarily known for their short stories. Please see rule b.

So how do you query a short story collection without an accompanying novel? Well, in my opinion, you don’t. If you’ve achieved enough literary success to get a short story collection traditionally published, the agents will come to you.

Art: Der Brief an den Liebsten by Adolf Schmidt

This Week in Books 2/25/12

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Books! This week!

Lots of heads were shaking about a story in the New York Times this week: Veteran author gets rejected by 13 publishers, then she adopts a pen name and the book sells in three days.

Now, it’s easy to chalk this one up to the fickleness/stupidity of publishers, as lots of people have done in the past week, but it’s not quite that simple. Yeah, publishers definitely look at the sales track of an author, but that’s because booksellers are doing the exact same thing when they place orders. It’s really, really hard to go to booksellers with a new book by an author with an established sales track and convince them to order drastically more copies. And reviewers and even readers can be lured in by the cachet of a hot new writer on the block. So chalk this one up instead to the modern bookselling culture.

A culture, incidentally, that’s going to change very much as online bookselling and e-books continue their ascent.

Meanwhile, publishing industry sage Mike Shatzkin has some very helpful context on why publishers are so reluctant to let libraries lend e-books. This is definitely a tricky issue for publishers, and I don’t envy them being on the wrong side of public sentiment on this one. Publishers are looking at a landscape where library patrons don’t even have to go to the library to borrow an e-book – they can do it from home. Why would anyone buy an e-book once they figured out how to legally get tons of books for free just as easily?

People tend to act like the new e-book world should operate exactly like the print world when it’s convenient – people should be able to give away their book when they’re finished and there should be no DRM whatsoever, they should be able to borrow them from libraries. But I don’t think you can ignore fundamental physical differences. With e-books you can give away a million copies all at once and download an e-book from the library in your pajamas. It drastically changes the economics of publishing, and I think the industry should be cut some slack as everyone works it all out.

And lots of agent advice this week: Mary Kole has a great post on questions you might be asked when offered representation, Rachelle Gardner has 13 ways to impress an agent, Writer Beware talks about why poets shouldn’t seek literary agents, and Alan Rinzler talked to four great agents about why writers still need to have an agent.

This week in the Forums, when is the best time to start a blog, people are sharing their daily word count output in February, what to do when your hero is the bad guy, and advice for a nonfiction writer.

Comment! of! the! Week! Goes to Josin L. McQuein for her comment on writers as magicians:

A step that a lot of people miss with writing is to realize that they’re capturing 3 dimensions in 2, like those posters of dots that become 3-d images when you look at them right.

Writing is the evolution of the tribal storyteller and the wandering bard, both skills that required movement and tone – the occasional flourish of hands or dance or tossing of sparking powder into a fire for effect. Writers don’t have those luxuries, so they have to trap those breaths on the page.

Telling a tale is taking the reader’s hand and dragging them behind you like an excited child who can’t help but point out every unexpected delight as they run along. You’re wanting to show them what happens, they want to explore, and intend to come back after their first read to see what wonders they missed.

It’s a thread that connects the past to the future, and the voices of those long since dead who continue to live through the words they spoke into being. Their breath catches the next voice and the next until they’re spoken out 2,000 years later.

And that, most definitely, is its own kind of magic.

And finally, in tech news Google is making some big changes to its privacy policy and will be sharing your search history across every Google product. Here’s Sharon Vaknin (who btw you should follow on Twitter) on how to remove your search history (disclosure: I work at CNET).

Have a great weekend!