Hi, Everyone. Happy Friday! Please welcome our next anonymous guestblogger. Behind her mask, she’s a very cool author, so I’m so thankful she’s agreed to come on and share her experience. Here you go…
Expectations
You’re finished your WIP, and it is a marvel. Beautiful. You’ve had it beta’d. It’s fantastic. You really feel like, patience notwithstanding, that you’ve waited and made this WIP as strong as you can. You work out your query letter, and you carefully research your agents, and you send out your first queries.
This is the book.
Within a month, you have five offers of representation. Your brain is spinning, you can’t sleep and can hardly eat. What do you do now?
In my case, I could easily discount three of them after speaking with them on the phone. They were okay there was just … something not right. It was my turn to say I really thank you for offering, but…The other two were far harder. Agent A was with a big agency. Huge agency for my genre. Agent B was just starting her own but was super prompt and blew my mind when I spoke to her. Agent A called me crying on the phone right after she finished my book and gushed on my answering machine for five minutes. How could I decide?
I knew them both. I’d spoken to them both. They both had sales. They both were what I was looking for in an agent. And I was stuck.
What would you do?
In my case, I went for the small. I knew that probably a larger agency had ties to the movies, audio, what have you. I knew the bigger agency would probably add cachet to my submission where ever I was at. But you see, when it came down to it, I wanted the comfort and assurance of an agent who was just like me – starting out on their own, big ideas about my book, and a belief in me that somehow I could believe more than a huge agency. I haven’t been sorry one moment since, which is how I know I made the right choice.
I know that if this book can be sold, My Agent is the one that will sell it.
What about you? How did you decide on your agent?
6 Comments
June 29, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I feel similarly. If the book can be sold, my agent can do it for sure. I tried to treat it as a business decision. I looked at the stats for the agents and made sure to get advise from people that had been through this.
Response time and communication was huge to me. I contacted a couple of my agent’s clients. Not the super-duper famous ones because you expect those to get good service of course! But when I heard an author with one sort of midlist book say that she was treated like she was my agent’s only client and that she couldn’t think of a time he hadn’t responded to her dozens of questions in over 24 hours, then I knew it was a no-brainer!
June 29, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Let’s see, I decided on my agent because it was my only offer! lol. Thank goodness for agents who believe and want to be your advocate. It only takes one, people.
June 29, 2009 at 5:13 pm
I tried to ask agented authors: What’s your bottom line?
As in, if you could choose one quality in an agent and only one, what would it be? Then, I went from there.
June 29, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Don’t have an agent yet, but thanks for posting.
July 14, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Pretty cool post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say
that I have really liked reading your blog posts. Anyway
I’ll be subscribing to your blog and I hope you post again soon!
July 21, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Pretty cool post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say
that I have really liked reading your blog posts. Anyway
I’ll be subscribing to your blog and I hope you post again soon!