How To Get a Literary Agent with This One Simple Trick

Can you guess what the trick is?

Oct 08, 2024

Write a book they want to sell.

Am I trolling a little…? Well, yes. But am being 100% sincere? Also yes. Hear me out.

Dear Friends,

I don’t have an agent. A good deal of my friends have agents and have whispered all their joys and woes to me. I’ve worked in and at the periphery of publishing for about 15 years now and seen a little bit of everything. You may think, “Why would I take advice about agents from someone who is unagented?” and I will tell you why: because even all the community and connections in the world doesn’t hand you a golden ticket toward book publication. And as someone who has made a lot of wonderful friends in every nook and cranny of the Book Cinematic Universe (BCU) for well over a decade…I don’t have any magic powers either.

Publishing a novel has the simplest formula in the world:

1 Writer’s Manuscript + 1 Agent Who Believes in Manuscript + 1 Editor Who Believes in Manuscript = 1 Traditionally Published Book

That’s it. There may be some unaccounted math for circumstance and luck (not to mention endurance and possible masochism), but even then, the agent is actually going to have to believe they can sell your manuscript to an editor at a publisher. You could probably get an agent who doesn’t believe in your book or doesn’t really know how to sell it—and you would get to say you’re agented!—but do you really want that?

I know I talk about money and capitalism a lot, but this might be a rare instance where I find it slightly comforting about just how impersonal publishing can be (hey, I have a lot of feelings). It’s not personal. It’s not about you. It’s about whether the folks who work in publishing see cartoon dollar signs in their eyes when they read your manuscript.

A Return to Hauntology

It’s spooky month, and I wrote a bit about the critical theory of hauntology in my previous newsletter on haunted house books. I’m bringing it up again because publishing, like many other cultural industries, don’t necessarily seem to be in the healthiest of places.

What I’m about to say is 100% conjecture, but bear with me. Hauntology speaks to a cultural inability to move forward, often recycling and remaking old ideas rather than creating something truly new. It’s why films like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once seem so earth-shattering when they make it through the machine. The haunted reproductions of art don’t want weird, don’t want originality. The haunted wants another Disney live-action adaptation and remake of previously animated films. It wants that next MCU movie. It wants massive preexisting franchises, existing characters and stories. It wants to be haunted by its own history. Why? Because at the end of the day an eleventh Deadpool movie is going to make more money than your avant-garde deconstruction of superheroes—which is probably better than the eleventh Deadpool movie—but it’s certainly not going to make as much money.

And why would they risk losing money when this is a business, after all?

I’m not saying this to demoralize you (or me… especially me!). I’m saying this because with all those sequels, prequels, reboots, spin-offs, copycats, and stock narratives—we (the artistic class) have a lot of competition. The constant resurrection of old or familiar ideas creates a haunting effect, where the past is always part of the present, which is why it can be so difficult for fresher ideas like EEAaO to move into new futures. But whewww, when they do break through. It feels like all of us win a little.

This framing is also helpful in being truthful with yourself about the odds you’re up against. There are more manuscripts circulating in the world now than any other point in history. There are a lot of preexisting universes and multiverses. The battle is as uphill as uphill can get.

The Puzzlebox of Choice, or, Rules to Follow

Snow Miser says read the acknowledgments of books that are comparable to your manuscript, look to see who represents said authors, and query those authors.

Heat Miser asks why would an agent who represents a dystopian romantasy set on Mars and another client who writes the exact same type of book. Don’t query an agent who already has X type of client if you have X type of book!

Snow Miser says your comps should be based on similarities between character, plot, and conflict.

Heat Miser says your comps should be based on similarities in tone, mood, and atmosphere—regardless of what the characters are like or plot is like.

Snow Miser says you should gun to be represented by an agent with superstar clients.

Heat Miser says agents with star clients are too busy with the stars and won’t have enough time for you.

Snow Miser says to try to query junior agents in established agencies who have assisted a senior agent and have a mentor/support system.

Heat Miser says just because a junior agent is at a legitimate agency doesn’t mean they have a mentor or a support system to make up for their greenness.

…

Well, you get the point (I was going to use Goofus and Gallant from Highlights, but I didn’t want one character to sound more ‘right’ than the other). There’s a lot of advice out there, and most of it can be contradicting. At the end of the day, I would say there are only three things in your control:

Reading the MSWLs and profiles (i.e.: on their personal website, agency site, or Publishers Marketplace listing) of agents to ‘read the room’ and see if your manuscript might be a good fit. You need to develop a sixth sense for vibes and have at least a small instinct whether your manuscript passes the vibe check. As an extreme example: don’t submit a horror novel manuscript to someone who exclusively agents cookbooks.
1. But don’t believe there’s not an agent for everything. There is. There are even agents out there that represent poetry. They’re rare, but they do exist.
Hyping yourself up and having the chutzpah to send that query letter out; i.e.: don’t self-reject before they reject you.
Reading all and I do mean all of the instructions that agents ask of you when you query. If they want you to paste 10 pages below your email signature, don’t attach a Word DOCX attachment with 20 pages.

The Query Letter & Relevant Resources

There’s a million other resources out there for how to write the perfect query letter, so I’m not going to rehash that. Google is your friend there. I will offer my perspective as someone who edited literary magazines for years though, as someone who wrote an extensive newsletter about how to submit to them.

I have a few small bits of advice. One is to read the agent’s (or agency’s) submission guidelines and follow them immaculately. Be creative, but follow the formula. Don’t get too cutesy or over-familiar. Don’t talk down to the agent like this isn’t their full-time job. They’ve seen everything. Use the cover letter as a space to show them that you can write-write, but don’t forget you’re also there to follow a formula that results in them taking you on as a client. When in doubt: remember K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple, Sillyhead.

The core of my advice as a once-editor is: no brilliant, stunning cover letter ever convinced me to publish a story or a poem or an essay that was outside of my taste.

Let me put it another way: I don’t really like coleslaw. I know this might be a moral failing as someone who grew up in the South in the land of BBQ, but it’s just never been for me. It’s not my taste. I love beautiful, ornate bowls though. However, no matter how beautiful a bowl of coleslaw you offer up, I’m still not going to want to eat the coleslaw. I might dump the ‘food’ in the nearest potted plant and then put the nice bowl in my bag and run away though…

So write your beautiful, elegant cover letter, but know that it’s just like going through airport security and showing your ID. You’re still going to have to take off your shoes and go through the rest of security with your manuscript.

I do have a few resources to offer up though:

Publishers Marketplace: She’s a pricy lady ($25/month), but you might be able to grab a free trial. This is a huge resource where agents and agencies report deals, and you can find out which agents are making sales in certain categories (e.g.: sci-fi/fantasy). They also have a bunch of useful newsletters to keep current with publishing news and find potential comps.
- PM tip: They use euphemisms to represent advances that writers receive for their books: “nice deal” = $1–49,000; “very nice deal” = $50,000–$99,000; “good deal” = $100,000–$250,000; “significant deal” = $251,000–$499,000; “major deal” = $500,000 and up.
Manuscript Wish List A.K.A. MSWL. There’s one site that tracks agents using the hashtag on Twitter (X) and an official site that agents/editors can join to list what types of manuscripts they’re looking for.
QueryTracker: A resource to keep track of agents you’re querying.
- QT tip: There are a bunch of acronyms in the land of querying, and this is a good place to learn them. Examples include “CNR” (Closed No Response”), PR/FR (a partial or full request of your manuscript after the initial query), and R&R (an agent asks you to revise your manuscript and resubmit it).

A Penultimate Thought Regarding Trends

Anyone who works in publishing will tell you not to chase them. Unless you’re the world’s most prolific and efficient writer, the trend will most likely be over by the time your manuscript is complete and polished.

Let’s say, for example, you saw Battle Royale in 2000 and thought hey, I could adapt this movie’s basic plot structure and set it in the United States. You spend a few years writing it, and suddenly in 2008 a book drops called The Hunger Games—which instantly blows up. That was my idea, you shout! Still, you query. Because you had a similar idea to The Hunger Games and had a completed, polished manuscript right when it reached its popularity, you may have been able to slip in the dystopian lit window of popularity. If you waited until 2010 when Mockingjay was being released to write your dystopian novel, it would probably be too late to start writing and publishing that story. As soon as the trend manifests, it’s already begun its ending.

I’ve heard that publishing has its own type of fashion forecasting: leveraging both creative intuition and data-driven analysis. However, I would suggest it’s always best to err on writing books that you actually care about and want to write instead of chasing trends. It’s possible you may have (or one day have) an agent who looks at the half dozen projects you’re fussing around with and points to the one they think will sell the best. That being said, that should hopefully come out of a healthy work relationship, not a desire to turn you, the writer, into some sort of commercial factory.

Write the book you want to write. Love what you are doing. That is going to be the way you keep your endurance up, even when failure is inevitable and present and haunting you.

In Closing…

Perhaps, at the end of the day, I’m trying to convince myself as much as I’m trying to convince you. What we all need to acknowledge though is that there are no shortcuts. It’s an uphill battle. It’s hard. Often it includes going through maddening rounds of failure and then starting over at the drawing board again and again. At the end of the day, you have to remember: it’s not about being talented or being smart or being clever or being the best writer or being morally successful. It’s about…

1 Writer’s Manuscript + 1 Agent Who Believes in Manuscript + 1 Editor Who Believes in Manuscript = 1 Traditionally Published Book

As long as you can keep that mantra in your mind (no matter how depressing it may feel at times), it will hopefully make the business of selling your manuscript feel a little less personal. It’s not about you! It’s about money! How comforting!

May we all keep our endurance up. May we be transformed by our failures instead of embittered by them. May we find community in our struggles—and remind ourselves that we are not alone.

And more than anything—may we (if you would like to be included in this we; it’s optional) all find our dream agents and dream editors and get out dreamiest of dream books out in the world.

Until next time,