Words can barely describe the elation I felt when I read the sentence: “I SO love what you’re doing, and without hesitation, I’d like to extend you an offer of representation.”
That was the opening sentence in the email a book agent sent to me this week, and I now have an agent for my book, The Witchy Montessori Child: Liberating Little Lives.
I sent my very first pitch on September 27th and received an offer November 4th.
Although it took a lot of work to query agents, it wasn’t terribly complex–and I became better at it as I went!
Here’s how I successfully queried and secured an agent.
I wrote a complete book proposal (I started it two years ago but really buckled down this fall; it took me over a month of consistent work to finish).
Read scores of articles of how to find an agent, what sort of proposals they like, how to query, etc.
Fortuitously stumbled across “Query Tracker” in my research, and used that to start, setting the search results to narrow agents to “parenting” books.
My experience with Query Tracker was generally very good. It listed all the agents that it thought were looking for parenting books. Often though, I’d go to that agent’s page and find they were closed to new submissions, or they didn’t do parenting books, or they were otherwise not a good fit. But then I would still go through all the other agents at that particular agency and see if anyone was a better fit, maximizing my use of time with looking at each agency once, querying whoever seemed a good fit, and then moving on.
Personalized my query letters. I read each agent’s bio before I queried them. If they were looking for particular sorts of authors, I made sure to emphasize in my query letter the part of my bio that resonated with them. If they liked particular types of nonfiction books, I emphasized the part of my manuscript that fit that type.
Copy and paste. I wrote a general query letter that I could easily customize without rewriting the whole thing. Same for the other parts of my proposal, like the comparison titles, the audience, etc.
Set a goal to query one agent a day (minimum). Usually once I got started I’d do quite a few, but this helped me keep the ball rolling.
I didn’t give up, despite all the personalized rejections–and there were a lot. I received countless emails telling me thanks, but no thanks. I consoled myself that at least I had heard back!
When I landed an interview with an agent, I prepped for it by researching questions I should ask, and questions they typically ask. So I was well prepared and made a great impression…and landed an agent!
It was a lot of work, but once the proposal was written, it was mostly just repetitive–find an agent, submit a query with all required documents, repeat.
And it paid off.
I’m now officially represented.
If you’d like to support my work, please buy me a coffee! There’s still heaps of work to do before we’ll be sending the proposal to publishers.