Query a Literary Agent Anywhere, Anytime?

Maybe you’ve friended an agent on Facebook. Maybe you have a few agent ‘friends’ over at LinkedIn. Maybe you follow and chat up agents on Twitter. Maybe you’ve followed an agent around at a conference, waiting for them to pause long enough that you can pounce–and present your query or pitch with trembling voice and sweaty hands.

Is this a fine way to go, or should you stick to sending your query via email or mail as per their agency website guidelines?

Personally, I’ve always gone with emailing/mailing as per their agency guidelines, unless, of course, the agent in question has made it crystal clear that it is okay to query via other methods.

To reinforce the idea that maybe it isn’t okay to query anywhere and anytime is a tidbit or two I found on Twitter today as per Jean Martha (AKA @TheJeanMartha–a literary agent):

“Woke up to find 8 queries in my personal email inbox via Linked In. Deleted them all.”

And just in case you thought nobody would notice:

“When someone chats me up on Twitter, I look at their stream. Full of Agent ass kissing? I discredit them in the future. Season’s Greetings!”

There you have it, clams in a bucket. Do what you will… but you can’t say you haven’t been warned.

Desperation, Finding a Literary Agent and Perfect Matches

The other day a bunch of us aspiring authors were yaking it up in an AgentQuery.com chat room. Litgal, the studious, brilliant type had us read a blog post about writer firsts (first time getting an agent, first time getting a publisher, etc). It wasn’t the ‘first’ aspect of the article that got us talking, but the aspiring author desperation that can make us act in  ways that may not lead us to attain our career goals. (Yes, we aspiring authors can truly be a desperate lot. Note: not an attractive quality in dating, and also not an attractive quality in aspiring writers.)

While we aspiring authors are not desperate all the time, we do have those panic attack moments. That alone, isn’t the reason for concern. (Like dating, it’s when we act on our desperation that things go down a path that leads to nobody’s best interests.) For writers, desperation can lead us to sign with an agent who might not be The One.

To be honest, the idea of The One or a ‘perfect’ agent stresses me out. Why? Well, first of all, how do you know who that agent truly is when you send them a query letter? Yes, I research agents before querying and target ones that seems as though they might have The One potential. Yes, your research may gather a general sense of who the agent is as a professional, but the reality is, you won’t know who they truly are until you have talked to them and possibly even worked with them. So, who do you query? How do you know? What if there isn’t a The One out there for you?

Freaking out yet? Don’t worry, I have a theory. (Purely untested, of course, but I’m working on that.)

The questions is: Are there several The Ones when it comes to matching up with a literary agent?

My hypothesis: Yes. I believe so. This is a numbers game. A business deal. There are a certain number of agents out there that can help you make the most of your business (writing). The more queries you put out there, the more likely you are to reach the right agent. Some folks hit the right partner within 20 queries. Some need to send 200. (And yes, some never do.)

Because this is business and not some life-partner quest, I don’t think it’s fair to aspiring authors to think of finding a literary agent to represent them as The One. When finding the perfect mate, I was willing to wait as long as I needed. Decades, even. With finding a business partner, I am not willing to waiting that long. I am certain that there are at least a handful of agents out there that could connect with me and my work and vice versa (no desperation required to fog my vision). There could be a handful of The One agents that could help me bring my work to the world and help me reach my career goals.

I also think that the odds are in my favour–more than they would be if I were to go about finding a new, perfect mate. With dating, approximately 50% of the population is eligible for match ups. (I know, I know, there are men in that population who aren’t interested in women, who have already attached themselves to someone else, and men who aren’t going to be ‘t suitable. But you what I’m saying.) Of that 50% there is, say, one man in two thousand that you could see yourself marrying–happily–and being partners forever more. Not exactly the greatest odds. (Sorry to any singletons out there who now feel depressed.) With literary agents (around a 1000 in the U.S.A.), approximately 50% of the agents rep women’s fiction or romance (approximate guess, my favourite searchable agent database is down at the moment). Of that 50% (500), there are maybe five agents who would make a very good fit as a business partner and you could see yourself working happily ever after. Look at my odds: 1 in 100. That’s downright inspiring.

Next time you hear someone making an aspiring author hyperventilate by tossing around words like The One in the same sentence as literary agents, do me a favour, smack that person upside the head for me. Thanks.

When Break Ups Are Like Literary Agent Rejections

If you are a querying aspiring writer you may have noticed that at times, a rejection from an agent can sound almost like a break up line. To keep myself amused, I’ve made a little list of break up lines and their agent rejection equivalent.

(Please note: A querying aspiring writer is an unpublished writer who is emailing literary agents, asking to be theirs. In turn, they more often than not, turn around and send you back a cyber rejection. Either that, or you get the cold shoulder–no reply, because agents are like the hot chick in the bar on men’s night and are literally bombarded with more requests than they can deal with.)

Here goes (Break up lines / agent equivalent):

It’s not you, it’s me. / It’s not you, it’s the market.

I need some time to discover myself. / Your project doesn’t fit my current list needs.

I don’t deserve someone like you. / I am not the best fit/match for your project.

You are too good for me. / You have great potential, but I don’t feel passionate about your project.

I just don’t see this relationship going anywhere. / Your pages/character/story didn’t draw me in as much as I had hoped.

I don’t know what I want right now. / While I enjoyed your work, I don’t feel passionate enough to offer representation.

I found someone else. / I am not currently seeking new clients.

We need a break. / You are welcome to query me with a new project, but please stop querying me with this same story.

I think you are a great person, but…. / You show great potential as a writer, but….

I don’t think we are the best match, but you’re great and will get snapped up right away. / I didn’t make the connection with your material, but another agent may feel differently.

And two more (one of which came up in the comments section):

We’re don’t have enough in common / I don’t represent this genre.

A break up followed by a restraining order / Do not pitch to me in the washroom during conferences. / Do not jump out from behind the bushes in front of my office to pitch to me. / Do not phone me every day and convince my secretary you are a sick relative so you can pitch to me. / I am putting your email and story title in my spam filter.

If I still don’t have you convinced that romantic relationships can be like writer-agent relationships, check out the literary agency Baker’s Mark and their ‘Get to Know Us‘ page.

Submission Tip: Word 2007

If you are so lucky as to be asked to submit a partial to a literary agent and you use Word 2007, I’ve got a tip for you.

Awhile back, after receiving a request from a literary agent, I whipped up my partial in Word. I added a nice little title page/cover page using Word’s templates and saved it as a .doc (not .docx which is the 2007 default file format–unreadable in older versions of Word). I emailed it to the agent who wanted to read it that weekend. I was happy and optimistic as I didn’t hit ‘send’ and then realize I had forgotten to do something stupid like write ‘requested materials’ or include my contact information. I didn’t even cruise through my manuscript and see that I had used the wrong word somewhere.

The following Monday I got an email informing me there was some type of image in my document that made it impossible for her to upload the partial into her Kindle. Therefore, she was unable to read the sample. Please fix and resend. The best I could figure was that the Word title page template has some sort of embedded image (probably one of the nice text boxes or the vertical line that goes to the left of the title) that was messing things up. So, I whipped off the old title page, made a slap-dash, plain as punch title page (remembering to add in the word count) and resent the partial. Then I sat on my hands for about 3 weeks until she had time to read it. While I don’t think I would have been accepted as a client if I had managed to get her to read it right off the bat, I missed the benefit of ‘read it right now’ as well as riding that small wave of agent enthusiasm. I also made a busy agent’s life more difficult and caused her some frustration. You don’t want to do that.

Therefore, boys and girls of the aspiring writer world (or anyone within range of a Kindle), don’t use the Word 2007 title page templates if you think the document might come in contact with a Kindle (or possibly another electronic reader device such as the Sony Reader–it might have the same problems).

Lesson learned? Lesson learned.

Querying and Maintaining Your Self-Esteem

First of all, self-esteem in a writer is highly over-rated. Really, what are you planning to do with self-esteem anyway? Turn into some snotty, old curmudgeon? That’s what I figured. A little bit of healthy self-doubt is good for writers. It pushes us to struggle to the next level. It makes us humble.

If you aren’t feeling humble enough these days, try querying. Yowzers. (For those blissfully out of the loop, querying is when writers send query letters to literary agents, requesting representation. (A query letter is a business letter describing one’s work in hopes that it will interest the agent, who reads approximately 20-120 of these letters a day, prompting them to say, “Yes, send me the first 50 pages of your project so I can look them over.”). If you are lucky (and approximately in the top 1-5% of those querying), the agent will reply asking for a ‘partial.’ And no, they aren’t asking you to get them revved up. A partial is a small sample of your manuscript. Usually, this covers about the first 50 pages (although that can vary). With the convenience of email, there are some agents who ask for the first 50 pages right off the bat, along with the query. If the agent likes what they see, they will ask for a ‘full.’ A full is the whole manuscript. If they like that and feel passionate about it, they will offer representation. Occasionally, they will ask to see changes first. If you think you can work together, you sign a contract, the agent helps you put some more polish on your work, and then they approach publishing house editors on your behalf in hopes of landing a book deal.

The first part of querying (after you have removed all the hair from your head through the masochistic method of yanking it out, one small tuft at a time, aka, writing and editing the query letter approximately 80,000 times) is doing your research. This means cruising agency websites trying to find a match. (You can also use handy services like agentquery.com which gives you a list of agents who represent what you’re peddling and provide info on them. Still, you should do a cruise by the agency website to double check, etc.) This is where my knees get a little wobbly from time to time. Why? Some of these agency websites are mighty intimidating for a first-time novelist.

For example, a long list of big name authors who make a decent living curling up with their computer and pumping out stories–just a little bit intimidating when you think of the agent helping them one minute, then turning around to help you and your incorrect comma usage the next. Or how about sites that say things like, “We welcome talented writers….” How do I know if I’m a talented writer? Writing is so subjective. To say you have talent is like saying, “Look at me and my ginormous ego! Woo, get a load of me. I’m the next Faulker, Shakespeare and Dickens, all rolled into this fantastic package. Yeah, baby!” The subjectivity of determining talent makes me think of ‘So You Think You Can Dance, Canada?’ When I watch the auditioning dancers, it goes something like this:

Me: “Yeah, this guy rocks. He’s got moves. He’s so in. Look at that energy.”

Then it snaps to the judges and they are pulling at their very expensive hair, and practically yelling, “No! No, no, no. No.”

What is talent and what is sheer hard work? And can you tell when you look at a page?

Of course, if the research doesn’t get you, there are the rejections flying at you. Those can make some dings in your armour. Although, I am pleased to say that I have personally reached a stage where I send a batch, forget about them and assume anything coming in is a rejection. Then I am pleasantly surprised if they request a partial. It’s good for my self-esteem.