The Thing About Agents

by

Kathryn Page Camp

www.kathrynpagecamp.com

Here’s the thing about agents. Although most small and mid-size publishers take unagented submissions, most of the larger ones do not. So if I’m aiming at Scholastic or Penguin, I can’t do it on my own.

My past experience looking for agents and the wisdom gleaned from other writers has taught me two things.

1.     It’s almost as hard to find a good agent as it is to find a traditional publisher, and those agents that are easy to find don’t usually have the right connections.

2.     Author and agent need to click together like puzzle pieces. An effective author-agent relationship is also a close one, and personality matters.

Maybe that’s why my past attempts haven’t been successful. But now I’m at it again. I’ve spent the last few days researching agents to find the ones who might be the best fit for my recently completed middle-grade historical novel. Then I selected seven and sent each one a query letter.

But it’s a lot of work to do it right.

First, I went to www.manuscriptwishlist.com and sorted by agents who were interested in middle-grade fiction. I also used “historical” as a search term but soon discovered that the search doesn’t drill down that far—when “historical” came up, it was talking about fiction for adults. And I’d rather concentrate on agents who specialize in writing for children. But even those who specialize may not be the right fit. As mentioned above, personality matters, too. And how do I judge the personality of someone I’ve never met?

That’s one of the things I like about manuscriptwishlist.com. Some of the questions are designed to give you an insight into the agent’s personality. Not every agent takes advantage of the opportunity, but some do. One question asks for fun facts about that person, and a few answered it. More answered the question asking for their favorite books. Obviously, sharing the same taste in books doesn’t guarantee that we will click, and having different tastes doesn’t necessarily mean that person isn’t the right agent for me. But at least it gives me a place to start.

Unfortunately—or fortunately?—I didn’t recognize some of the books that were mentioned by several agents, so of course I had to go out and buy them and read them even though I don’t have the time. But I love to read middle grade fiction, so I can’t really complain.

After selecting potential agents, the next step was to go to their agency websites and made sure they are still working there. Wish lists don’t get updated as often as corporate websites do, so relying on the wish lists alone is a bad idea.

Once my agent list was set, it was time to submit. Each agent wants something different, and it is important to give them what they ask for. This meant looking at the submission guidelines on the agency website as well as those given in the wish list post. (For my thoughts on the importance of guidelines, read my December 7, 2016 post on this blog.) ]

Now it’s time to sit back and wait. No, now it’s time to write that next book.

While I wait.

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Kathryn Page Camp is a licensed attorney and full-time writer who writes adult non-fiction as Kathryn Page Camp and middle-grade fiction as Kaye Page. Writers in Wonderland: Keeping Your Words Legal was a Kirkus’ Indie Books of the Month Selection for April 2014, and her first middle-grade historical novel, Desert Jewels, was released in August 2017. You can learn more about Kathryn at www.kathrynpagecamp.com.