Finding the Right Literary Agent for You

by | Oct 2, 2013 | Uncategorized

by Stephanie Morrill

Stephanie writes young adult contemporary novels and is the creator of GoTeenWriters.com. Her novels include The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt series (Revell) and The Revised Life of Ellie Sweet (Playlist). You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and check out samples of her work on her author website.

When I first started looking for an agent, my search was just that. The search for an agent instead of the right agent. Which is kinda like if I had looked for a guy to marry instead of the right guy to marry. It’s just not going to work out well.

Literary agents are not a one-size-fits-all deal, but many writers (my young self included) take on the search for an agent with a desire to find someone, anyone, who will agree to represent them.

I understand the desperation and remember it well. In some ways, finding the right agent can feel harder than finding the right publishing house. I hope you’ll be able to learn from my mistakes.

You are looking for the right agent for YOU.

Some agents are go-getters. The type who blast editors they don’t know with queries, drive a hard bargain with a publishing house, and take charge in meetings. Other agents take a more patient, let’s-wait-and-see approach.

Some communicate mainly over email and others by phone. Some will respond to you within 10 minutes and others it’s 10 days…before you send them a reminder email that they haven’t responded to you yet.

Some agents insist on being involved in the shaping of the manuscript. Others view that as strictly your job.

These are good things to know up front about your prospective agent. When my current agent and I were having our first phone conversation, she told me that she can be hard to get a hold of sometimes. That was a really helpful thing for me to know, and it avoided a lot of frustration along the way.

Your agent is not just the person who gets you contracts. They’re the person who’s looking out for your career. Who is providing counsel. Who has your back if the publishing house isn’t holding up their end of the bargain. Your reputation is tied to their reputation because they’re who you’ve chosen to represent you. When your agent is at a conference and starts chatting with an editor about you, you want to know they’re behaving professionally and acting in your best interest. Otherwise that reflects poorly on you.

I’m going into all this deetail because I simply didn’t get it in the beginning. You want an agent with a good reputation in the industry, who understands the genre you write for, who loves what you write and is excited about you, and whose work style meshes with yours. And that is worth waiting for.

So how do you find these people?

I posted about the methods of querying for agents in my Thursday post. Most writers I know would tell you that meeting an agent at a conference is the ideal route. There’s something about the face-to-face time and observing the way they behave in a professional setting. Plus at a conference you’ll meet a lot of agented writers who you can talk to about their relationship with their agent. (Most writers will instantly tell you how much they adore their agent, whether it’s actually Blissville or not, so you have to be prepared with specific questions to get the info you want.)
Another way to get a sense of who an agent is and if you’d want to work with them is visiting their blog if they have one. If they don’t have one, they might have guest posted on a few blogs. The first exposure I had to my agent was in a blog post she wrote about the publishing process that showed a lot of heart.
If you don’t even know how to go about finding names of agents, one good resources is AgentQuery.com. This site can help you find a list of agents to investiage. You can also look through the staff names at writers conferences and check acknowledgements sections in books you really like or that are similar to yours.
Will this ever happen for me?

A few months ago, I was feeling very discouraged and asked my agent for a pep talk. (Not really, but it was totally in the subtext.) When we talked she told me, “I know it’s an uphill battle. Unless you give up. And then it’s not a battle at all.”
Finding the right agent for you will likely feel like a battle sometimes. It did for me, anyway. But the other option was giving up, and I wasn’t okay with that either. All you can do is lock arms with a fellow writer or two and try to forge up the hill together.