So. Looking for an agent is exhausting.
Of course I knew it would be hard – everyone says so – but I had always assumed the hard part was writing queries and waiting months to hear back only to be rejected. So I prepared for that. Silly me, I never thought about how hard it was to decide who to query in the first place…
I don’t know any agents, nor do I know anyone who knows any agents (I don’t think? I mean, please DM me if I’m wrong and/or clueless here.) So I’m starting from scratch. Which is a phrase that I think refers to what you want to do to your own eyeballs after staring at agent pages for entirely too long.
Quirk is speculative fiction, which is the kinda generic genre that encompasses sci-fi/fantasy/other. (Quirk, being about villains in modern day, is “other”.) There are a grand total of 29 agents who specifically list speculative fiction as something they look for in Publisher’s Marketplace, so that does help narrow it down considerably. That’s assuming I’m right and I shouldn’t actually be looking in urban fantasy or something. There aren’t a ton of similar books to compare it to that I’ve found (I’ve had to try though – some agents request a list of books your book can be compared to. More on that another time.)
So you find an agent, and you look at their Manuscript Wish List and see if your book might kinda sorta fit with their interests. And you check their twitter and see if this is a person that you think you’d work with well. And you check if they belong to the guild, make sure they’re not listed as being fraudulent or having a bad reputation, and see what books they’ve sold recently to which publishers.
And then when you decide to go ahead and query – you discover they’re currently overwhelmed and just stopped accepting them for now.
…
This must be a sign that it’s time to shut down the laptop and take a walk…
