Getting an Agent

[Matthew]

I have read some great articles recently about trying to find agents. This has lead me to ask several questions about the industry itself. Are agents still absolutely necessary? Who has an agent and how did they get them? Is the market moving away from them or making them more important? I would love to know what some people with agents think versus what the rest of the industry thinks.

Matthew R. Horn
www.matthewrhorn.com

[Wen-Szu]

Matthew wrote: "I have read some great articles recently about trying to find agents. This has lead me to ask several questions about the industry itself. Are agents still absolutely necessary? Who has an agent..."

Hi Matthew,

I went down the lines of finding an agent. After sending the query letter to about 30 agents, I had offers from two pretty prestigious agents. I signed with one.

She was able to send out my manuscript to her list of contacts, which included all of the top publishing firms. However, the first round of manuscripts that she sent proved unsuccessful as it did not fit with any one publisher's current list of categories that they wanted.

For me, I really want to control the timeline and don't want to wait around an pray that some publisher picks it up a year from now. So, I gave myself a timeline when I will need a publisher by or else I'd go publish independently. I have a few channels of advertising the book to a few million people, so I was not too worried about the marketing that the traditional publisher brought me.

Right now, I am in the process of self publishing with CreateSpace and have found contractors to help with the digital conversions. The marketing of the book was always up to me anyhow, so I have a list of people that I am sending emails to in order to try to get some initial reviews. Let's hope that they work. So, in the end, I did not leverage the agent.

Wen-Szu