Sources

My main sources in researching agents consisted of two main sources and a number of sometimes relevant ones.

The first was Publisher’s Marketplace. Yes, it costs $25 USD per month, but the depth of research is exactly what a person needs to look for an agent. The industry news is mildly interesting, probably more so to people in the actual publishing trade, but i did scan the new deals lists occasionally to see what publishers were buying.

The most useful piece to me was the ability to search for agents within a genre, in this case SF, and instantly see how many sales they’d made in that genre over the past months and years. If somebody hadn’t made a sale in the SF genre in three years then they probably weren’t going to push my book very well. Someone who’d inked SF publishing deals for their clients in the past six months, on the other hand…

Publishers Marketplace contains info about agents, links to their agency websites, and in many cases, a query submission page that was the only way to contact the agent. That might not be proprietary to their website, but I don’t remember seeing that particular submission method anywhere else.

The second major source for me was Manuscript Wish List, or #MSWL on Twitter. Publishers Marketplace gave me lots of information goodness, but #MSWL gave me the info I needed to know if an agent was right for me.

On the #MSWL site you can also sort by genre and come up with a list of agents. I actually walked the list, over the course of a couple of weeks, and then researched that agent in Publishers Marketplace. Each agent will provide a picture, short bio, and what types of books they’re looking for. Pretty simple. Some contain more info than others, but reading each one is like a mini-interview. This site saved me a ton of time. In short, if it was obvious my worldview and that of the agent were diametrically opposed, I entered their name into my spreadsheet and added a note as to why I wasn’t querying them.

#MSWL isn’t the slickest of web sites, but it’s free and gives an author exactly what they need when looking for editors or agents.

Other sources included Twitter, where I looked up agents to see what they tweeted about. Just like #MSWL, I learned more about some people than I wanted to know. QueryTracker was another site with a database of agents, but I didn’t use it much since I developed a good routine with Publishers Marketplace and #MSWL. Facebook was useful to some degree, but since I wasn’t a member at the time its usefulness was limited for me.

The final source was agency web sites, usually linked to from one of my main sources, but also searchable and easily accessible. In a handful of cases I checked an agency site and found the agent I was researching was no longer with that agency. In those instances I was glad I’d clicked through to the literary agent’s site instead of wasting my time sending off an email that was going to bounce immediately. Other times they would have more up-to-date information, usually saying the agent was closed to queries at that time. I found it a best practice to always check the agency site for more info and status.