How to get a literary agent
Where to find them, how to pitch them—and how to get them to come to you
Two weeks back, I discussed a few scenarios where you (*gasp*) might not need a literary agent. If you didn’t find any of those scenarios applied to you, or if you did but decided you still want to seek representation—or if you didn’t read the last post at all but want to learn more about signing with a literary agent—then read on. My previous post covered the “why” of signing with a literary agent—this post will cover the “how”.
A day in the life of a literary agent
First off, let’s set some expectations (and give you a glimpse into the minds of the folks you’ll be pitching). On any given day, I’ll wake up with some combination of these tasks on my plate:
Author outreach: I regularly go searching for promising potential authors to work with.
Proposal development: I work with my existing clients to develop proposals for their next (or first!) book project.
Active submissions: I almost always will have some non-zero number of book proposals actively out with editors, so I’ll be fielding questions, updating authors, and generally managing time-sensitive correspondence as I pursue publishing deals for these active projects.
Contract negotiations: Once a publishing deal has been reached for a project, I am responsible for negotiating the contract with the publisher. This can be easy, or it can be fairly painful–either way, it’s more time-consuming than you might expect.
Miscellaneous correspondence: Once an author is working on their book with a publisher, there are myriad issues that can crop up during the production and publication processes. I can almost guarantee I’m in the midst of conversations about a handful of these at any given time.
Meetings and calls: I will regularly have meetings or calls with authors, editors, and my agency colleagues.
You’ll notice that unfortunately I haven’t even mentioned “reading submissions from authors” yet. The truth of it is, unsolicited submissions often sit fairly low on the priorities list—a good agent should always take care of their existing clients first—which means a) submissions only get read when there’s a rare gap in an agent’s schedule, and b) they are often read with one eye on the clock, since an agent likely hasn’t set aside a lot of time to read submissions. To make matters worse, speaking from my own experience about half of submissions that come in to me have not been personalized or targeted to me in any way—I’m talking about things like novels, religious manifestos, or personal memoirs unrelated to my areas of interest. As a result, when I read submissions my default mindset is “skeptical”.
All of the above means that successfully pitching a literary agent is a little like getting a hole-in-one on this hole in mini golf:
But let’s give it a try anyway!
Pitching literary agents
If you’ve read almost any of my other posts on this Substack, you probably know that I love snappy subsection lists—here’s another one. In my opinion, there are three stages to successfully pitching literary agents: find ‘em, fit ‘em, and forget ‘em.
Find ‘em
The first step to this whole process is of course to figure out whom you want to approach. Targeted Google searches should net you a bunch of names, and you can’t beat it for convenience—but let me mention two other avenues (one digital option and one analog option) that will give you a bit more depth.
On the digital side, I suggest checking out Publishers Marketplace. I’ve mentioned it before, but let me recap: Publishers Marketplace is sort of like the book industry’s water cooler—you can get daily news about publishers, publishing professionals, books, and authors, and if you pay for access you can also see contact details and deal histories for specific editors and agents. Back at the start of my book proposal arc, I mentioned that those deal histories could be useful when trying to unearth potential comparable titles to your book idea. But they’re useful here for an entirely different reason: you can see which literary agents have worked with authors and projects that are simpatico with you and yours.
Let me run the same disclaimer here that I ran the first time around: You have to become a Publishers Marketplace member to get access to the databases of agents, editors, and deals. At the moment, membership costs $25/month, though they have launched a new $10 “Quick Pass,” which gives you access to the site for 24 hours or 50 page requests, whichever comes first.
On the analog side, I suggest something I’ve also mentioned before: head over to your local bookstore! As with my Publishers Marketplace advice above, I suggested a bookstore visit as a good way to get a sense for the market and competition for your book project as you started building your book proposal. Here I’ll take my advice a step further: once you’ve located books that are in your general subject area (AND that you have either read and enjoyed, or just like the look of), open them up to the Acknowledgments section.
Not all books have acknowledgments sections, but for those that do there is a decent chance that the author thanks their agent. (To my authors: Do not take this to mean that I expect to be thanked in your book! I’m grateful when it happens, but I do not expect it at all.) If you spend a couple of hours perusing the shelves, by the end of it you should not only have a handful of promising agent names, you’ll also have a list of titles that those agents have worked on.
Here’s my disclaimer for this analog strategy: If you go this route, make sure you’re looking at fairly recent titles. The last thing you want to do is gather up all this research and then find out that half of the agents on your list retired ten years ago.
Fit ‘em
Once you’ve got your list of agent targets, the real work begins. This is unfortunately not a situation in which you can send one email out to the whole list—when it comes to pitching agents, personalization is everything.
In my experience, 100% of literary agents are humans—and pretty headstrong, individualistic, anti-authoritarian humans at that. And most of the time, they agree to work with an author because they are personally excited to do so. The easiest way to short-circuit that potential personal enthusiasm is to make your pitch impersonal.
Now, when I refer to “personalization” I do NOT mean needlessly delving into your personal life, or into agents’ personal lives—I mean customizing your pitch to address each agent as a specific person with specific interests, and likely with specific submission preferences. Another way to think about this personalization process is that you are trying to eliminate every “quick-no” you possibly can. (I call it a “quick-no” when there’s an easy reason for me to quickly pass on a submission and get to the next thing on my to-do list.)
Here are the three biggest “quick-no”s that you can sidestep with a fully personalized pitch:
Quick-No #1: “This project is not for me.”
Among the submissions I receive are ones that are clearly mass emails—they’ve been sent to a distribution list and often don’t even mention me by name. These are the only submissions I receive that I don’t reply to even to say “no thanks.” If the email hasn’t even been addressed to me, I don’t think a reply addressed to the sender is warranted.
There are certainly other submissions that are personally addressed to me but still fall under this quick-no #1. These are the aforementioned fiction projects, religious manifestos, personal memoirs, or other subjects that I don’t have the experience or interest to successfully represent. The good news is that you can sidestep this quick-no by simply researching each agent—whether on their agency website, on Publishers Marketplace, online more generally, or by actually finding their names in the acknowledgements sections of books at the bookstore—before you submit to them. (If you’ve done the analog bookstore research I mention above, not only can you sidestep this quick-no, you can pass by it with flying colors by actually mentioning the specific books that led you to personally reach out to each agent.)
Quick-No #2: “This is not the format I ask for in submissions.”
This quick-no can be more frustrating, not only because the reason feels a bit ticky-tack, but because it requires a lot more prep work from you to get past it. Nearly every literary agency has different submission guidelines—and even within agencies some agents might have different guidelines!
This is where having a full book proposal ready to go is indispensable, because you can tailor each of your submissions to the agent’s exact specifications—whether they want a query letter, author bio, summary, sample chapter, full proposal, synopsis, list of competing titles, or any combination of those elements, you can repurpose everything you’ve already worked on to suit each submission. Even better, you can also much more easily deliver more material as soon as an interested agent asks for more.
Quick-No #3: “I couldn’t quickly tell the value of the idea and the suitability of the author’s background.”
This quick-no is an unfortunate side-effect of most agents’ busy schedules—speaking from my own experience, if an author’s pitch, or the description of their background and platform, isn’t crystal clear, I’m much more likely to move on to the next submission than spend time trying to unearth its potential value.
There is more good news here, however: if you’ve already done the fit-fandom-freshness exercise, and you’ve already got your tilth elements lined up, you’ll have a much easier time spinning that material into a couple of tight paragraphs that give agents an immediate sense of the value of your project.
If you can get past these three quick-nos, the odds of getting reads and replies substantially increases. Personally speaking, I bet over half of the submissions I receive don’t get past these three hurdles.
Forget ‘em
Once those submissions are out, it’s time to preserve your mental health. Remember that these are real people you are pitching. You may not hear back for a while. You may not ever hear back. You may get a mealy-mouthed pass. All of this is absolutely frustrating for any author—but let me also say that, for the vast majority of agents, none of this is due to bad intentions or laziness. No agents that I know are receiving submissions, saying to themselves “this person doesn’t deserve a reply,” and then spending the rest of the day bingeing Love Island.
So here’s perhaps the hardest bit of advice in this section: Don’t take it personally if it feels like your submissions have disappeared into the void, or if you’re receiving perfunctory replies from agents who are passing on the opportunity to work with you. Our modern world has gifted us with overloaded email inboxes; with bots, people, and newsletters (including this one) clamoring for our attention, to the point that genuine engagement with them all is impossible. Solving that problem is slightly beyond the scope of this post, so I’ve got to settle for the local solution: to the extent possible, try to separate your SELF from your book proposal. A judgement on your proposal is not a judgment on you—it’s simply the individual reactions from a group of agents who might have all sorts of other things going on beyond your control. Send pitches, follow up a month later if you haven’t heard anything (unless specific agents’ guidelines suggest they need even more time), and then let them go.
Attracting literary agents
There is of course an alternative way to get a literary agent: entice them to come knocking at your (virtual) door. I mentioned this briefly way back when I first introduced the “tilth” idea, but let’s delve into it a bit further here.
The overall idea is that most nonfiction-focused literary agents, as part of their job, go out looking for authors almost as much as they read submissions that have come in from authors. If you are actively developing your public platform, and seeing some success with your efforts, it’s entirely possible that literary agents will start reaching out.
Of course, this route is almost entirely out of your control, so I don’t recommend trying it instead of pitching. But I thought it might be helpful to give you a brief rundown of what my author outreach efforts look like, just to show you what the view is like from the other side of the relationship.
Social channels, newsletters, podcasts: In any given week, I’m likely jumping on Instagram, TikTok, Substack, or various podcasts to search on specific topics. Vast numbers of followers or subscribers are of course tantalizing, but I’m looking for more than that—I’m looking for some sort of depth to an author’s content that might suggest there’s book-length potential. A channel with depth and growth will induce me to send a note out much more often than one that shares a miscellaneous cool factoid or a famous quote once a week.
Media outlets: I’m also regularly scouring science, nature, and business magazines, news sites, and other media outlets for intriguing articles, columns, and op-eds. As with my other efforts, though, I’m looking for pieces that are more substantial than a listicle—I’m looking for articles that hint at book-length arcs. For example, I reached out to journalist Eric Berger in 2018 after he wrote this piece for Ars Technica because it seemed to be just the tip of a massive narrative iceberg.
Academic outreach: This may well be less actionable information, depending on your background, but I also check in on faculty directories in certain departments of certain universities from time to time. When I do this sort of outreach, I’m looking for a public-facing vibe: links to a professor’s personal website, to active social accounts, to recent articles or media coverage—and sometimes even just a bio that is written in an accessible and engaging way. If you are affiliated with an academic institution, and have any sort of control over your page on their website, I suggest dressing it up with as much of this sort of material as possible.
This is not even close to an exhaustive description of my outreach efforts—along with all literary agents, I have a “secret-sauce” element to my author outreach that (I naively believe) gives me a competitive edge. But it covers the main areas that I think are valuable to focus on if you want to do more than wait for agents to respond to your pitches.
A programming note
My next post, scheduled for March 31, will be a sort of mini bonus follow-up to this one, because I am moving that weekend and will have my hands full (literally). I’ll run through some good questions to ask literary agents if your pitches hook them, and I’ll get into what agency agreements look like. In the meantime, best wishes on your best pitches!