Literary Agents Will Love You!

Tips for finding, querying, and landing just the right rep for your book

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

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Hi Everyone,

I’m writing today in the pleasant glow of a very positive reception from several prospective editors to my latest ghostwriting project— which has reminded me of the true value that literary agents provide their clients.

To give you an idea of this process, my Author and I spent three months developing our nonfiction proposal. At the end of November, our two co-agents signed off on the final draft, but they knew December would be a dead zone for deal-making, so they waited until January to send it out. Two weeks ago, they sent their own query to 18 editors they’d hand-picked for this particular project. A couple of names on the list have worked with me before. All publish books in the general realm of our topic. None were familiar with the book’s official Author, who’s not a celebrity, but all these editors have plenty of personal experience with and respect for our agents, so they hopped to. Inside of one week they’d responded to the query, received and read our proposal, and either passed or asked to meet the Author. We are now having Zoom meetings with the editors and publishers who are considering making an offer.

This kind of access and lightning speed are just part of the package that literary agents can bring to your publishing party. You can see why it helps to have an agent represent your writing.

And so, since it’s time for Write On! Roundup, I thought I’d use this moment to corral the answers to some recent questions about querying agents, sent by

Amy Brown

. Some of these answers are drawn from other posts I’ve written, some from posts written by other publishing pros. Follow the links I’ve included below, and you should have all the agent intel you need!