Hey everyone,
A few writers in Bookish Pursuits, my mastermind for authors, are about to query agents in the next few weeks. Having just been through this process (twice!) and signed with agents (twice!), I do, of course, have some advice to give.
The most important of which is this: Go in with the goal of not finding an agent, but getting multiple offers so that you can find the right one.
The advice usually offered is that you only need one, which is of course true. It is also true that having multiple offers gives you options.
When writers, especially new writers, query agents, they’re hoping to get that one offer, that one response from an agent who loves your book. This is great, of course, but what if the only offer you have is from an agent who’s lukewarm about your book? What if they don’t share your vision for your career? What if they want to put you in an “immigrant writer” box when you don’t even write about immigration? (True story.)
When you only have that one offer, you can either walk away, something most writers don’t do, or accept it, which could lead to problems down the line, not only in your relationship with your agent but in the trajectory of your career.
The solution?
Get several offers. Pick the agent who is right for you.
When you have multiple offers of representation from agents, it takes the desperation away. You’re not eager to sign with an agent, any agent, simply because they offered. You can step back and be more discerning. You can consider who might be the right fit for you and for your book.
It’s not as difficult as writers make it out to be. Because when you break it down, it’s really simple. There are only two parts to the process of getting an agent interested in your book:
1. Getting them to read your book
2. Getting them to love your book
Getting them to love your book comes down to the actual book and isn’t something I’m going to be able to teach in a few emails, or even in my course, but there is one thing I can guarantee: The more agents who read your book, the more likely it is that you’ll find a few to love it.
So then we circle back to the first part of this process, which is to get as many agents as you can to request your manuscript and read it.
And how do you do that?
Yep, by writing an excellent query letter.
This is the thing that most writers get wrong about querying agents. They think the goal of a query letter is to sum up their book. It’s not.
The goal of the query letter is to get the agent to request your manuscript.
Now does this mean that you’ll need to provide details about your book, the genre, possibly even comps? Sure. But the goal here isn’t to provide a complete summary of your book. The goal here is to intrigue an agent, to give them a sense of the conflict so that they want to read it.
From there, it’s on your writing and on your book. Whether someone loves your book or not is a separate conversation. But they cannot love your book if they don’t first read your book. Your book may, in fact, be exactly what an agent is looking for, but if your query letter doesn’t intrigue them enough to want to request the chapters, they’ll never get a chance to see that.
The query letter that you send to an agent has one purpose and one purpose only. It’s to intrigue an agent enough to say, “Yes, please send me chapters.” Or proposal, if you’re writing nonfiction.
I should know. The query letter for my novel got 12 requests for fulls from a total of 23 agents, and the query letter for the memoir I’m co-writing got 6 requests for the proposal within the first twelve hours. I had multiple offers on both.
Query letters are my jam, as most of you here already know. I’ve been teaching journalists how to write effective pitches for the last five years, pitches that have landed them in some of the world’s top publications, including The New York Times, TIME magazine, National Geographic, Wired, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, and many more. Writers in my courses, many of whom came in with no idea where to even begin, have left with full-time, award-winning careers.
Now I’m transferring that skill to publishing.
I’m opening The Agent Game, my new course on pitching and signing with literary agents, on Monday, April 26.
If you know anyone who’s looking for a literary agent this year, let them know they can sign up to this newsletter and get notified the moment registration opens.
Just send them to https://www.natasharelph.com/free/ and we’ll take it from there.
Cheers,
Natasha