The Weird Process of Finding an Agent

Let’s face it. The partnership between literary agent and author is weird. I’ve been told – by a literary agent at a writer’s conference, no less – that agents are the employees of the authors. The agent is there to help the author succeed. But that doesn’t mean an author can hire on an agent as easily as they may hire a dentist or a plumber or any other professional who provides a specialized service.

First, there’s a tiny number of literary agents out there. That number can fluctuate wildly from year to year as new agents join the fray, seasoned agents move to different agencies, and retiring agents find new careers. Covid, especially, seems to have made things go more haywire than they ever did in the decade prior to it.

Conversely, there is a surge of authors out there without agents (me included). From what I’ve learned from reading and listening to interviews with agents, and from what I’ve learned from reading through submission guidelines on hundreds of agency websites, agents get too many requests for representation, far more than they can handle without setting boundaries. Boundaries may include scheduling a submission period and closing themselves to new queries for the rest of the year. Boundaries may also involve dismissing queries outright if they don’t meet the agency’s (often arbitrary) rules. Although the querying process is far from easy for authors like me, I can still sympathize with the agents. If I were in the agents’ shoes, I’d likely do the same or I’d be overrun.

So, what is the author who wants a literary agent left to do? They have to do work. Lots and lots of work. It includes the long, arduous process of researching agents; writing a pitch; crafting a personalized query letter; writing an author bio; crafting a synopsis; attaching whatever attachments the agent wants to see (and it’s never the same); sending off the query; waiting; getting rejected; and moving on to the next agent.

The last time I went to a similar length for anything, I was applying for graduate school. I never knew that the process of researching universities, writing application essays, gathering recommendation letters, paying for transcripts, gathering together other requested materials, submitting applications, and waiting for replies would be foreshadowing anything else in my life. The upside of the graduate experience is that I only had to apply to 7 graduate programs in order to be accepted by 1 of them. Not even job applications have required an equivalent body of work – and as anyone who has filled out an online job application can attest, those things are a pain in the ass.

Literary agent bios go into detail about what they’re looking for in a manuscript from a new author. So, I wondered: What if the author shared a similar overview of what they're looking for in an agent? With that in mind, I once published this page on my website:

I included a link to this page in queries I sent to literary agents. When I decided to self-publish a different project, I took that page down from my site. But if I try to seek out a literary agent again, I wonder if I should put a page like this back up on my site. I can only hope that it would help.