How To Find A Literary Agent

How do I find a literary agent?

Finding a literary agent is probably the toughest part of the whole process, and it's probably got tougher since publishers have decided to close down their unsolicited manuscripts departments. If you were sitting in Bradford or Cornwall or wherever, and you have no connections to literary London or anything else, you might think it's a very closed shop and it's very difficult to break into. What I would do if I was one of those people and I didn't know a cousin who worked in somewhere, I would look on the web for news about new writing. I would also look at The Books I Love, which is a trade magazine which may seem very boring but at least you get a sense of who's who out there. Then I would target a few literary agents. I would find out who they represent. You can do that by going into a bookshop, opening one of these books, and sometimes there's an acknowledgement page where the author says thanks to their agent. If you liked the works of, for example, Treasure Chevalle, you might be someone who could spy on me. You have to do a little bit of research. We at Curtis Brown get 600 unsolicited manuscripts a month. We do welcome them but that is a lot of manuscripts, and many of them are 300 pages so we have to make a lot of quick decisions. To prevent yourself being on a pile, it's probably best not to write a Dear Sir/Madam letter, because that implies that you haven't done any research. It's best to target the literary agents that you think might be best for your work. Write to them personally. I wouldn't email directly because if you email directly, some literary agents feel that's an interruption in their day. You wouldn't interrupt someone on the train and ask them to buy your product. I think a letter is the perfect submission, with three chapters, a synopsis; a very concise, well written letter. To tell you the truth, I really look at the letter and if the letter has grammatical errors in it, or has jam on it or something, it just shows that it was dashed it off and I'm one of 25 literary agents they've sent it to. It won't be the top of my priority list.