Backdoor Routes to Getting a Literary Agent
Let me shatter an almost universally held belief straight away: not all writers find their agents via the slush pile. Many take another route altogether. If I could present you with a pie chart of ‘ways to find an agent’, the slush pile would be a small sliver of that cake.
Slush piles are vital to all literary agents – at DGA Ltd we read each submission carefully and respond to every submission. We have also found some very good writers via that route. I’m not telling writers to stop sending in their submissions to agents – do continue – and remember the three golden rules: do your research on all the agents you submit your work to; only send in your work when you feel it is the very best it can be; and target your submission – don’t make it feel like a ‘mass submission’. Agents like to be flattered.
The publishing industry loves stories about finding gems and undiscovered talent in the slush pile but let’s consider the figures – say an agent receives 50 submissions a week, 2500 a year, and takes on 2 or 3 of those writers, that’s a 0.08% chance of being taken on through the slush pile. So what about the backdoor routes to an agent – those ways that agents don’t talk about and writers are reluctant to admit to.
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Continue reading in issue 01 of Publishing Talk Magazine.
