In preparation for this post, I read query letters until my brain went numb. I looked for the letters marked “successful” — those that garnered agent’s attention. After days of reading, certain constants emerged.
A successful query often includes a combo of:
The query letter has one job–to get the agent (or the publisher, if you’re going that route) to read the pages you sent.
This means it doesn’t necessarily have to be brilliant, it just has to work. How to write a query letter that works?
There are eight parts of a query letter:
Every writer dreams of hearing the words I love your book.
When looking for an agent to represent your fledgling novel, it’s key to find someone that shares your vision and passion.
Here is an alphabetical list of 22 literary and genre agents on the hunt for their next bestseller.
Will it be you? You’ll never know till you query.
If you want to write for kids, then you’re in luck!
Every year, children’s books produce almost two billion dollars of revenue, and the market is only getting bigger each year.
But with great size comes great competition. You’ll need an excellent agent to get your book published.
{{Please check out my new post of literary agents.}}
This post is based on old-fashioned research: I emailed 19 new literary agents seeking to build their client list, and got the inside dish from each of them.
Many agents responded promptly to my question regarding what type of work they were seeking, and I was impressed and encouraged by the warmth and directness of their replies. By and large, agents are really looking for emerging writers.
There are lots of articles with practical tips on how to find a literary agent.
You’ve probably heard most of those before. But what I’m going to give you is much more than a checklist.
After years of grueling work, avoiding distractions, and breaking through writer’s block, you finished your novel. Now what?
Even though some jump straight to submitting it to publishers, for many writers, the next step is finding a literary agent. Literary agents help writers find publishers, as well as negotiate the deal and sales of the book.
But some agents who have been in the business for years get north of 10,000 queries a year, and only sign 1 or 2 clients. Those are terrible odds. You need to find a new agent who is the lookout for new writers, and this is exactly what this list gives you.
Why do so many writers thank their agents first in the acknowledgements?
Because the agent is pretty much the most important person in a writer’s life.
Countless people work behind the scenes to bring each author’s budding vision for a story to its fruition, from friends and family to the publishing house’s distribution, but none is as essential as the agent.
Since the agent literally holds the dreams of the hopeful writer in their hands, finding the right one is imperative.
Now, you could either spend hours and hours hunting down the names of your favorite author’s agents and create tables ranking them based off their sales, or you can read through the list I’ve compiled after spending many days on Google and creating multiple charts based off my results.
By Jennifer Carr
I was recently having coffee with an editor in New York, who was giving me some advice (and a pep talk) about finding a literary agent.
One of the things she said was like lightning into my analytic brain: literary agents are like real estate agents.
They want to move a product and make a commission. If a literary agent told you she liked it but didn’t know how to sell it, what she meant was that she didn’t know how to sell it for a lot of money.
When I came back home and told my writing group what I learned, one member was disheartened at the news. And this surprised me because I had seen this as a watershed moment in my approach to queries and my work as a whole.