How I found a literary agent - and what happened next

And why sending a "Dear Sir/Madam" email is the worst idea

Hello!

It’s 6pm on Tuesday May 20th, and I have just spent the day mapping out ideas for our political coverage in next weekend’s Sunday Times here in Ireland. For a Sunday journalist, Tuesdays are all about kicking around possible angles, arranging interviews and chatting with sources.

It is also one of the few evenings of the week were I’ll definitely finish up on time, so I said I’d hop to it and put up my next post on Fact to Fiction, and this one is about finding a literary agent.

Quite honestly, I have lost track of the number of agents that I submitted a manuscript to over the last 15 years. As an Irish author, it’s an interesting situation in that there are a good number of amazing and talented agents here, but they have full rosters of clients.

It seems slightly different in the UK because there are so many well-established agencies which cater to different sections of the market. Given the fact that publishing is a highly subjective business, a greater level of choice is only good news for aspiring writers.

I made a lot of mistakes when querying agents with different manuscripts down through the years, and I’d like to share them here in case a) it is of any interest or b) it helps anyone who is considering entering the fabled land of querying. Here are the top three mistakes I made, and how I sharpened up.

1. Incomplete manuscripts

I know, I know. You’ve finally reached word 80,000. You made it to the top of the mountain. You typed the words The End. That’s it! It’s done! Send her out! Wait for the imminent six figure book deal! Alas. I made this error a few times. Once, I literally typed the words The End and then sent it to a handful of agents. Shock horror, that book died. A good literary agent will spot the warning signs immediately. They will know it is a first draft: they’ll see it in the floppy characters, the typos, the raw dialogue. I had to learn to resist the bizarre temptation to send my first drafts out into the world. I now think the first draft is just a skeleton. It takes a few more drafts to put flesh on it, and even then, the edits process will humble me more. I have learned, now, not to send off a manuscript until I’ve run through a good few drafts. I will do one draft that stress-tests the plot, another entirely on the characters (do they have a story arc? Are their motivations believable? Who is this person?) another on texture (show, don’t tell, etc) and when all the words turn to one big unknowable amorphous blob, I realise I’m probably done ;)

2. Lack of research

So, unsurprisingly, no six-figure book deal appeared in my inbox the day after I sent out my unfinished manuscript. Delusional bubble: popped. Another mistake I made was this embarrassing Google search: “Email addresses for top literary agents in Ireland and the UK.” Copy and paste, attach novel. Quick pitch and away we go. Cue: silence. Cue: refreshing of emails. Cue: generic rejection message. The year before last, I took a different route. I went onto the Jericho Writers website and went through a list of 400 agents. I read about each agent individually, what their interests were. My book is a mystery, a domestic thriller under the broad umbrella of crime fiction. It has strong but complex female characters. There’s an intergenerational storyline. When I found agents that were looking for these kinds of stories, I checked that they were open to submissions. Then I researched them individually: interviews, their social media, their taste, their wish lists. Yes, it took a very long time. I was working as a daily journalist at the time so a lot of this work happened late at night. It was exciting but tiring. Eventually, I came out of that process with a list of around ten agents who I thought would genuinely be open to my pitch. Right at the top of that list was Florence Rees of AM Heath, the agency that represents one of my favourite authors of all time, Maggie O’Farrell. I followed her submissions process exactly (this also takes time to research; some agencies will want the first 50 pages in PDF. Some will want the first three chapters in Word. Others want a full document outlining everything including the ending of the book. These guidelines are there for a reason) and pitched my novel to her, making it clear I had done my research on what she’s looking for. I sent the novel to the other agents, and I did my homework on them too. The difference in outcome this time around could not have been more stark. I received personal replies requesting the full manuscript within days, including from Florence. Then one day, as I was walking out of a hospital appointment, trudging along the path, my phone pinged. Florence had finished reading and wanted to set up a chat. In publishing you might hear authors talk about THE CALL - when an agent wants to offer you representation. I stopped in my tracks outside of the hospital and just stared, agog (like picture agog. That was me) at the email. I emailed back to arrange the chat, then I phoned my husband, sister, and one of my closest friends Ellen in the excitement of it all. In the end, three agents offered representation. They were all amazing but after chatting with Florence (I was so nervous) I knew we were a good mix. She’s funny and intelligent and razor-sharp. She also doesn’t seem to mind my endless stream of questions. But anyway, that is one lengthy way of showing how important detailed research is.

3. Shoddy query letters, lack of elevator pitch

You would think that being a journalist, I could easily summarise my novel and devise a snappy elevator pitch. Eh, nope! I am so bad at it! For a while, I didn't think it mattered all that much. Surely the most important thing is the book itself, right? Red buzzer, trap door opens, wrong! We get one shot to get this agent’s attention as they scroll through an ever-expanding submissions list, why fluff it? A great tip I learned is to write your query letter almost like the jacket copy of a book. When you're in the bookshop, about to head off on your holibops, you turn the book around and say: oh, this sounds snappy and intriguing. When I made my query letters more like this, that seemed to help immeasurably. Another tip I learned is to put your comp titles in, let’s say if your book is The Paper Palace meets Nine Perfect Strangers (that actually sounds like a weird mix but anyway) then it’s worth signposting that so that the agent knows where it might be positioned in the market. I was going to write next that having an elevator pitch is so important. Honestly though, I still get tongue tied when people ask what my book is about ;-) must try harder there.

So after that long and rambling post, I will get out of your inbox. As for what happened next after I signed with Florence (and drank some bubbles that literally had sparkly things in them, thanks Jessica) it was a few months of edits before we went on submission. I’ll do a post on both of those topics next.

In the meantime, here are a few books I am adding to my To Be Read pile (a towering structure) Long Story by my Sandycove sibling Vicki Notaro, which comes out next week; The Secret Life of Leinster House by Gavan Reilly which will also be launched next week and which I was honoured to provide a blurb for; The Night I Killed Him by Gill Perdue; and It Should Have Been You by Andrea Mara. I am currently finishing Twist by Colum McCann and The Favourites by Layne Fargo, and shall report back!

Jen xxx