Tips from an Agent: 5 Questions to Ask About Your Manuscript

The “Now What?” Months continue, and we’re shifting our focus to the wide world of publishing! Today, Lindsay Edgecombe, a literary agent at the Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency, shares five questions to ask yourself about your manuscript before sending it out on submission:

I’m a big fan of NaNoWriMo and want to start by saying that if you are reading this with a draft of your novel complete, I am sending you my respect. That’s a huge accomplishment.

So you have the draft, you’ve let it rest, gone through some reads, and you have a hunch that somewhere in there, you have something pretty special. Something that could catch on. Something you want to publish. But how do you know when the novel itself is ready to go out into the world on submission?

As a book agent, I believe that one of the most useful skills you can learn about publishing is how to set the right intentions for yourself and your book. Writing a novel, you already know, is hard. Publishing can be hard, too. See this stage as an opportunity to learn and to develop resilience. There’s lots of advice out there about how to pursue agents and publishers (how to do your research, how to write a query, how to choose comparative titles—all important), and your job is to learn as much as you can, and then learn how to filter out the noise and do what’s right for your manuscript.

Here are some questions you might want to sit with as you work on your book and think about sending it out to agents or self-publishing:

Have you gotten outside reads? Have you gotten the right ones? Have you gotten enough of them? 

You want to solicit feedback from readers whom you respect, then really sit with what comes back to you. Sit with the yucky, terrible feedback. Sit with the praise that makes you feel like you’re floating. Don’t touch the manuscript as you collect advice. Then make the decision about what’s right for your book. 

Here’s the thing: publishing is wildly subjective, and the more you can learn how not to get blown off course, the better. This is a great way to learn to trust your own gut, because you’re probably going to get conflicting feedback. Let your early readers be your teachers.

Does your novel have a hook? 

Is there an interesting premise that you can articulate? What called you to write it in the first place? What’s the kernel that feels important to you? Write this down and save it. Keep notes as answers come to you. These may well go into your pitch.

Is your novel a page-turner? 

No matter what genre you’re working in, ask yourself: is your plot as tightly paced as it can be? This bullet isn’t easy, I know, but the pacing of your novel is incredibly important. 

Learn how to construct plot. What do you think needs to happen next? When did you feel a little bored writing it? Ask your readers if they got bored and when. If you can push yourself on this skill, and master it in your book, it can make all the difference.   

Is your title great? 

Ideally, you want to have a title that you love as much as your novel. You want it to evoke sparkly things for the reader. You want it to be a little bit emotional, no matter what that emotion is. You want the reader to feel something, something related to your novel and what you have to say. So don’t settle. Maybe include an alternate title or two when you do submit. If you can get this right, it can really help.

Do you know how to approach an agent?

There are a number of useful resources online and in books about how to find an agent, and I don’t have room in this post to cover all of them. So here is a summary of the nuts and bolts of submitting to agents: 

Do your research, and learn how to write a good query/pitch. Query multiple agents at once—enough that you’re giving yourself a good shot, but not so many that it feels sloppy. Personalize all queries. Have a good hook. Make yourself sound smart and human. List your chops. Don’t summarize plot. Workshop that query just like you did the manuscript, but know when to reject bad advice.

Grappling with these hard questions now will make it easier for you later. Let your novel bake in its own time. As you are revising, you are strengthening this muscle of your own intuition about your work. Don’t be a perfectionist. Stay humble and hungry for the work itself. 

Try to see approaching agents as a sort of a game. Rejection sucks for everyone. Only the good news matters. If I had a slogan above my desk, it would be that sentence.

Lindsay Edgecombe is an agent at the Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency, where she has been for a happy ten years. She represents a wide variety of nonfiction and some literary and commercial fiction. You can read more about Levine Greenberg Rostan here and can find her at @LindsayEdgecom1.

Top photo by Flickr user Leo Reynolds.