This is part 4/11 in our series about How to Land a Literary Agent:
- Your Fishing Guide: What I Know About These Waters
- The Prey: What Exactly Is An Agent?
- The Why: Who Actually Needs an Agent?
- Dawn or Dusk: When to Start Fishing
- The Fish Finder: Locating Agents
- The Bait: Writing a Pitch
- Casting Your Line: Query Letters
- The Nibble: When an Agent Expresses Interest
- The Bite: Getting an Offer
- The Play: Interviewing Agents
- The Keeper: Final Decisions and Next Steps
OK, this seems simple enough: You need an agent to sell your book, so you need a book in order to find an agent. Right?
Right. Except when it’s wrong.
Let me explain.
If you’re writing fiction, yes: you need to have your book completed. And I don’t just mean that you plowed through that mammoth first draft. You should have the very best, cleanest manuscript you can possibly produce, which generally means that it’s gone through multiple revisions, you’ve shared it with skilled readers (writers or editors) who have given you detailed and maybe difficult feedback that you’ve taken seriously (albeit selectively). You’ve buffed and polished it as best you can, running it through spell-checkers and grammar checkers and doing all you can to make it error-free. In “The Prey,” I mentioned that a good agent will also make editorial suggestions, but that’s only after they’ve taken you on as a client, so don’t send a manuscript to an agent thinking they’ll see your genius through the clutter.
You have to wow them.
But let’s say you’re writing a children’s picture book. It’s counter-intuitive, but most editors (and publishers) don’t want to see any pictures! All they want is the story, broken into the page-by-page chunks (with at most a one-line description of a recommended illustration). So, you send the whole manuscript, but without pictures.
And then there’s nonfiction. Here things are all over the map. For (non-celebrity) memoir or personal essays, agents typically want to see the whole shebang, as polished as possible. But for historical narratives or self-help or popular science or biographies, you don’t even want to have the full book. You’re going to send a proposal—a query that explains your concept, provides a sample chapter or two, and a possible outline. That’s because publishers often like to weigh in on non-fiction projects while they’re developed. There are exceptions to this, of course, but in nonfiction, the proposal is king.
(My own background is primarily in fiction and personal essays, so I go the full manuscript route. And that’s mostly what I’ll assume for you in the examples I give. Adjust accordingly!)
In any case, I can’t emphasize enough that you shouldn't even start the agent search until your manuscript or proposal is in the best possible shape. You get only one crack with an agent, and you don’t want to burn through a bunch of candidates with a manuscript that’s half-baked. It’s only human to rush things at the end of a long project (they call this feeling “get-there-itis” and it causes a lot of plane crashes every year), but you need to hold off on querying agents until you’re sure the manuscript is ready.
But let’s assume you’ve done all that. The manuscript/proposal is perfect! You’re ready to start the agent search in earnest. But there are hundreds of them out there. Where to you find them—and how do you find the ones that might be right for you?
Lucky you: that’s the next topic!
Next Up: The Fish Finder: Locating Agents