Step 2: Find the Right Agent
Once your novel is done, here are five lessons it took me 20 years to learn.
I’ve been submitting work to agents since college, which was a very long time ago. In my first post, “The Victory Lap that Wasn’t,” I told the story of getting an agent only to have the novel not sell. It was back to Step 1: Write a Novel. Five years later, I was ready to search for agents again—this time with a new project, during a pandemic. After twenty-four submissions and two maybes, I changed my query letter a fourth time and made a last big revision to the manuscript, addressing concerns raised in the rejections. Adam Schear of DeFiore & Company read my submission in ten days and offered representation.
Getting two agents in five years is a lot better than getting zero agents ever, so does that make me good at this? I’m a freelance editor who helped a lot of writers with their query letters, but writing and querying my own project was hard. And every project has different needs.
Here are some lessons learned—about querying, and generally.
1. Agents are people too.
I’ve been congratulated on “bagging an agent.” A competition mentality makes writers stop thinking like full human beings, which makes them stop seeing other people as full human beings too. Forget about competing. Focus on making your book ready for your audience, and then on identifying agents who work with editors who publish in that genre. Publishers Marketplace is a useful site for discovering these connections. You can read a detailed how-to on my editing website.
Empathy is also useful. Imagine receiving 50 queries a week (or more) when you are already behind on things and you’re just trying to do your day. What kind of behavior helps an internet stranger seem like someone you want to collaborate with for years, who you’ll trust not just for your 15% commission but also to work well with your friends and colleagues?
The process of finding representation is burdened with a lot of mystique. Establishing this relationship is important if you’re a prose writer and want a traditional deal with a large publisher (one option among several), BUT it will go better and feel healthier if you treat it like reaching out to any other person about a shared interest.
2. Ignore the shiny things.
When starting out, it’s normal to be excited about a particular agent because maybe they have twenty superstar clients whose books you love, but this excitement often doesn’t reflect the industry’s internal reality or even what’s right for you.
If someone at a good agency loves your novel now, it’s irrational to hold out for a so-called “dream agent” who’s been sitting on your submission for four months along with a hundred others. Be open to the people whose names you don’t recognize, who aren’t all over Twitter, and/or whose bios or wishlists don’t immediately turn your eyes into hearts. So much of a writer’s submission research happens online, and agents’ digital personas do not fully reflect their day-to-day personalities.
Leave room for good surprises, because the real dream agent is the one who loves your novel, knows exactly which editors can publish it well, and whose values match yours (see #5).
3. Referrals are the tree; community is the forest.
When querying, doors open a little wider when a friend introduces you to their agent. Yet no schmoozy shortcut exists, and over-focusing on obtaining referrals will probably feel gross for everyone. The dream of publishing a novel has a better chance of becoming a reality if it includes the dream of having an organic writing community, which is something that takes a long time to develop. A community isn’t a contact list of industry insiders; it can be the seniors at a workshop you volunteer at, the other writers in an online workshop, a favorite librarian or bookseller, and editors of smaller journals who accept your work. Anyone you actually like.
Existing in this kind of network indicates a long apprenticeship in the craft, which has created natural opportunities to gain mentors, friends, and colleagues. Not only will years of good working relationships sustain you when the pursuit of a dream hits a rough patch, it’s also about having friends who genuinely want to read a manuscript and share their thoughts. It’s about a mentor who volunteers ideas. It’s about sharing a revised first chapter with a partner and hearing them say it works. It’s about a colleague who speaks a character’s language and helps fine-tune dialogue. It’s about an unsolicited offer from a lit mag editor who suggests querying his partner’s agent. In my journey, it was all of these things as well as saying yes to opportunities I hadn’t heard of, smaller journals, and classes and readings online. It was about a client and her wife who understood literary agency contracts and could offer advice before I signed.
It’s about all these people being part of my life and willing to help, not in a transactional way, but just because engaging with good people around a dream is its own reward. It enables persistence. It enables being generous in return. Genuine referrals help, but you can catch an agent’s attention cold with a good query letter.
4. Give rejections a chance to be right.
Receiving a lot of rejections can signal a need to just go back and invest in your craft. And mastery isn’t linear; a new project might require new techniques. There’s no shame in needing to learn more, going back to the workshop, or sitting with niggling problems a little longer. Any effort that helps you, and then your audience, understand what shines at the heart of a project is worth your patience.
Maybe other writers have built their careers faster, with less hassle and heartache. I don’t know. But writing a nonlinear magical realist novel about queer Palestinian women while working and going to school full-time is not the fastest way to arrive at a publishing deal. Although I am fortunate to have a lot of writing education—both in classrooms and on the job—I know with absolute certainty that I needed every minute of it to figure out how to craft this one novel.
Give energy to whatever helps you go back to the page, remember the vision, and try again. Even if everything goes right and the novel is published well, the party will end and everyone will go home, and then it’s time to write another one. The process is the only constant: read well, give some attention to the project every day, talk through problems out loud to the walls, be your own kindest supporter… and then ask yourself, “Can I improve it? How?”
5. The agent has to say yes, but so do you.
Find your agent, not just any agent. Preserving your power to say no is important at many stages of the publishing journey—selecting an editor if you get multiple offers, deciding which revision notes to accept and how to implement them, and what publicity you’re willing to do. Writing professionally in a world that monetizes almost everything is a bizarre and astounding privilege, and it’s easy to get caught up in always saying yes out of desperation or naïvety.
I learned by trial and error what questions to ask, when to extend trust, how to discern mere nuisances from actual problems, and how to recognize when a situation is good. As a result, I’ve turned down opportunities that don’t fit, and more often than not, it lets me say a strong yes to the ones that do.
The cliché “Find your tribe” isn’t wrong. I love my agent, Adam, because he’s thorough in every communication, exceptionally even-keeled, clear about expectations and deadlines, and excellent at upholding them. He is engaged in making the literary world a better place for everyone, and it’s an ethic he applied both to reading my nontraditional narrative with an open mind and to finding a diverse and open-minded list of editors to submit it to. He’s also really kind. He’ll be my agent for as long as he wants to keep submitting my work. Peers have found agents who have a different style and emphasis, and these writers harbor the same unconditionally positive feelings about their own relationships. The important thing is to be specific about what you need and what you value most, so your yes is uncomplicated.
There are other, less foundational aspects of the process that can be met with a tentative Sure, why not? but literary representation isn’t one of them.
Parting Thoughts
When on submission, take your time, meditate on why you write, and get some fresh air. I felt better when I composed queries three at a time and then let them sit in my draft messages overnight; I’d reread them aloud in the morning for typos and tone, then hit send and did some research for a totally different project. This ritual helped me remember the promise I’d made to myself: Control just what I can, so no matter what happens later, I can move forward without regrets.
Much like this Substack post, the process is long.
