Email has made querying is easier than it used to be (and the same with rejection.) There are still a few ancient agents still murdering trees but generally we’re firing off our missives in pixels and saving stamps. Presumably the agents and editors who insist on snail mail ride to work on horseback. As for the rest, there are numerous agent blogs so you can take their temperatures and read between the snarkiness to divine where they fall on the bonehead/human being/transcendent genius maven index.
They all have two things in common: they complain about getting lousy manuscripts to evaluate (as if we all don’t have aspects of our jobs that suck) and they are all looking for a book to fall in love with. (Maybe yours! Well, not yours, but somebody’s!)
I’m working on an agent query now. It’s a mammoth exercise in second-guessing that goes beyond editing. It’s more like looking for the tiniest excuse for the query letter to be laughed at, denigrated or misconstrued. And then blogged about. (I’m also naked in the paranoid fantasy that ensues and it’s really, really cold.)
We were all happier before the Internet and the wave of agent blogs. We did much the same submission for everybody back then and didn’t see the sausage getting rejected and thrown on the slaughterhouse floor. Now the agent blogs are there for us all to see the sausage not getting made in ugly detail.
BONUS:
Don’t believe me. Go to their blogs and form your own opinions. Best thing? They all have their individual quirks and guidelines laid out somewhere in their blogs. Look it up before submitting. They’re looking for any excuse to say no. Don’t give it to them.
*About the term blagent. It means a blogging agent and no, I cannot recall who coined the term first.
Filed under: agents, publishing, agents, querying, writing
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