Emphasis on "search." Fortunately, I live in an age that includes -- along with Spotify, Nobuo Uematsu, and the Post 9-11 GI Bill -- a wonderful website called agentquery.com. Have you written a book with a loosely definable genre-classification that you desire to publish? Go to agentquery.com, select your genre from the drop-down menu, and hit "search." Poof: all the agents looking for that genre are right before you. Except, not quite.
Because, see, as with Spotify, Nobuo Uematsu, and the Post 9-11 GI Bill, agentquery.com is not perfect. Agents move on, stop seeking clients and/or certain genres, or cease being agents entirely. And while the staff and contributors to agentquery.com do a fantastic job, well, nothing is perfect. Besides all that, sometimes you have one of those squiffy genres that require you to get to know the agent a little better before being confident that they even want to see what you have.
Enter the search.
Because one thing agentquery.com does provide is a link to the agency website. You still need to know how to format your query, after all; and the entries on agentquery.com are more like the personals in the newspaper. "This agent likes long walks on fantastic beaches, and enjoys laughing and food and travel." Do they also enjoy crime? Only their website tells you that. (Funny that no personal will ever read: "This agent is a pretentious stick-in-the-mud who has a very precise method of submission, and any deviance from this method results in the writer's being cast into outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth." Some of them should.)
So, you search "Agents looking for fantasy" and get somewhere around 160 hits. If you fare anything like I did, that does not mean you will be sending out 160 queries. And some agents have to be dug at to see how and where their roots grow. Selection of one agent included no less than clicking through her author list, and finding one writer (after tracing her books to Amazon.com user-tags) who did, indeed, write YA fantasy. The initial search on agentquery.com took two seconds to come up with 160 agents. It took me additional fifteen minutes of searching to determine whether querying that one agent had some chance of not being a colossal waste of time. It still might be, but maybe not.
Funny, the speaker in chapel today imparted the wisdom: "Don't give up, but push."
See you Friday.
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