My website was down for a whole week, so I missed my Monday blog post, sorry. Here it is now.
I’m getting good advice
I hereby promise to send at least one agent query a week. That doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it is actually pretty labor-intensive. First you have to identify agents to query. One way to do this is to look in the acknowledgements for books that you liked and find out who the agent was. Another way is to search online for agents that are interested in the kinds of things you like to write about. For each agent, you need to look up their website, check out who they’re representing and make sure it seems like your kind of material, read most of their website to figure out what they’re interested in, and read their requirements as to how they want to be queried. You have to write a query letter that conforms to a strict formula for query letters, also conforms to the individual agent’s requirements, and yet is really interesting.
One of the things I am doing, now that I’m back trying to get Like Light from Stars published, is sending agent query emails. The plan is, first I’ll try to get a suitable agent interested in representing me, because the big publishers will not talk to authors directly so you have to have an agent for that. It is possible that my book, however wonderful, is not one that a large publisher will buy, and if that is the case, the agents will know that and will turn me down. If I can’t get a decent agent, the next step will be to approach smaller publishers directly, because they do not require a person to have an agent. For now, though, we are concentrating on finding an agent.
I’m not sure why this task is so frightening but it is.
“Obsessive love, a nightmare journey, musical genius, a chain of abandonment…The book follows seven generations of the same family in San Francisco, from 1849 to the present.” Would that interest you? I can’t tell. It interested me enough to write a whole book.
You can do it!!