Step 1: Finding an Agent – How Hard Can It Be?

Now that I’ve finished the first draft of Blood Pools and polished it up with a review for continuity and editing, I’m ready for the world to read it.

There are a couple of different routes I can go with this.  I can either find a publisher directly, find a literary agent who will hopefully sell Blood Pools to a publisher, or I could publish it myself on BookBaby, Amazon’s Digital Text Platform, or some other site.

My first choice is going to be the traditional route – a publisher or an agent.  The big advantage I see there is the promotion and marketing a major publisher can provide is something I simply can’t duplicate on my own.  A lesson I learned from having Flesh Wound published by a small, independent house was that the visibility of your book is so small that it isn’t likely to gain enough traction to sell well, regardless of how good it is.

So my first step was to pick up two reference books.  The 2013 Writers Market and the 2013 Guide to Literary Agents.  The former will give me all the contact info I need for publishers, and the latter will do the same for agents.  In addition, there is some great info on how to craft a query letter, which is the one chance I’ve got to capture enough of someone’s interest that they’ll want to read the manuscript.

So I jump right into the Guide to Literary Agents, which is helpfully organized by the genres the agents represent, and find out there are 139 literary agencies out there that represent mysteries.  I think this is awesome.  Can you imagine the novel you’ve worked on for the last half-year being rejected 139 times?  That doesn’t matter, really.  All I need is for 1 agency to want to represent it.  The other 138 can regret their bad decision when Blood Pools hits the NYT Bestsellers List.

138 rejections won’t happen, of course, because not all 139 agencies are going to be a good fit for Blood Pools.  My job now is to go through those listings and decide which ones are most likely to be interested in Blood Pools, given work they have represented before.  Let the prioritizing begin…..