Greetings from August break, where I'm writing this post while waiting for a kayak to arrive for a couple-hour Berkshire adventure (a slow, relaxing adventure) before an afternoon and evening of music.
It's a lovely break in the quiet of August before the girls come home from camp, school starts back up, and the publishing industry wakes up. There had been a few years--around 2008-2011--when folks didn't take their breaks because they were concerned that when they got back they wouldn't have a job. But oddly, in this period of transition and uncertainty, there seems to have been a return to the sleepy summer. There's a bit of a difference, in that everyone is talking about how busy we are (and we are--everyone is catching up on their eighteen manuscripts they haven't been able to read for three months). And rather than everyone going on vacation simultaneously there appears to be a sequence of rotating vacations. As a result, it's been difficult to gain traction on submissions even when I sent in my books (seemingly) early enough in, say, June, to have received closure by this point.
One of the things that happens right as August turns to September is that many writers on academic calendars complete heir manuscripts and send them to me and to my agent colleagues for consideration (we typically get bursts in early January and late May as well). In anticipation of this, and as a public service to both other agents and to first-time authors, I want to go back through a couple of useful guidelines for submissions to agents, if you've not done so before. Some of these may seem obvious. But they're on this list because they are violated time and time again. Also, these are guidelines for novelists, not nonfiction writers; and for prose stories and not picture books.
1) Finish the book before you send out a submission. Not "mostly done," not "it'll be complete in 3 months but I wanted to gauge interest. Done so if I like it you can attach it and send it right back and it can either join the queue or jump the line if it's exactly what I'm looking for. And done means proofread, formatted, in Word.
2) To the point of "exactly what I'm looking for:" I have submissions guidelines on my website and on my Publishers Marketplace page. It says what genres I represent, and also what I do not. Many agents do the same. It also says exactly how I like to receive a submission--letter, first five pages, no synopsis, no middle sections. Here's the point: if I say on my website that I don't like, say, fantasy with dwarves, that's specifically not an invitation for you to write "I know you SAY you don't like fantasy with dwarves, but that's only because you haven't read mine. So to prove it, I've included a synopsis of the 300,000-word first book of the trilogy, along with chapters seven and eight because that's when the story really gets going."
3) I realize that #2 sounded snarky, but here's a gentler way of putting it: there are a lot of agents out there. Most of us have certain kinds of books we do well, and others we don't have as much experience or comfort with. But for every genre and every style, there are multiple agents who will be open to loving the book. Your trick, as a writer, is to do the research and figure out who those agents are, and not to carpet-bomb New York with your novel. It does help, and makes me that much more receptive, when I see a line in the query letter saying that an author looked at my guidelines and thought that because I like historical suspense, I might like her novel of a murder in 14th Century Belgium.
4) The final thing, of course, is that you need to be ridiculously patient. We are all trying to read our queries in reasonable amounts of time, and there are periods of the year where that's easier and more difficult. If you get interest from an agent, let the other folks it's with know (interest means an offer of representation, typically), and perhaps give them the chance to scramble and read it before you make a final decision.
In the meantime, good luck getting those books done (and proofread and formatted!). We look forward to seeing them--as long as they don't have elves!
very useful information for a new author who has only written two books. I don't have an agent- just me, the computer and the publisher (I'm self published).
Posted by: Elaine Colton | August 06, 2013 at 05:10 PM