Agent Hunting

So I'm now working on chapter 10, and I think it's shaping up fairly well. I'm getting excited to be getting close to done. So I'm beginning to research agents. There are a bunch of ways to go about this. Probably the most popular are the various books published every year listing agents and publishers: Writer's Market and Jeff Herman's, though there may be others I don't know about.

They are good resources, but I find that pretty sparse. You get names and catagories they are interested in, but still, you are searching for the business partner for your career and doing it by essentially looking in the phone book. I like to go a bit more in depth.

I subscribed to Publisher's Lunch. They send you emails every day giving you bare bones run downs on the news and deals in the publishing world. You get to see what agents are selling what. Anytime they have a book deal for a book kind of like the one I'm writing (and I'm loose about that. After all, agents usually represent more than one genre/catagory and it is worth checking out) I make a note of the agent and the agency and do a Google search. I look for website, content, and what books they've represented. Even if I haven't heard of it, the titles and covers still give me an idea of what sort of books the agent represents. Also, some agents have their own blogs or other pages of biography, etc. I always read those. I'm trying to figure out if the personality would fit too.

I like this method because you know for certain that these agents are legitimate. They are already making deals, since the deals are being reported. There is also a section in Lunch where they discuss the various movements, promotions, etc, of agents and editors. I make a note of anyone who has left someplace to start an agency or has been promoted up to an agent. New agents and agents building a business are going to be more likely to take on a new writer. Again, I do a search and see what I come up with.

I also go hunting through books. I try to hunt up who is selling the books of my favorite authors, and they are usually thanked somewhere in the acknowledgements.

Right now all the agent names I've collected live on a notepad until I'm ready. I'm not quite ready yet, but I have a decent sized list of possibilities to query, all of whom I have a decent idea of who and what they represent and who they are selling to.

I don't know if in the end I'll wind up buying the big tomes listing agents. I'm just getting started. For right now I have a list of 12 possibilities and I know a lot more about them than a list of catagories. So we'll see what happens with that.