It's that time again

[megwrites]

I am THIS close to being done with all of the heavy lifting of the final revision of the Tower!Guy novel.

The only thing left is to get these last three chapters all tidied up and then go back and do the nitty gritty line editing, which will be full of shame and display all the ways in which I suck at grammar, spelling, and other such formalities.

But, once that's done, the novel has to go somewhere and be on someone else's desk for a while. I'm doing as much research as I can on the agents I wish to query. So far, there have been precious few who look like they would be interested in a novel like mine and are open to unsolicited submissions.

It's odd because it seems like plenty of agents are open to urban fantasy and even some types of sci-fi, but don't handle a lot of straight up fantasy of any kind.

Which makes me wonder if I'm just not looking in the right places, or missing out on some vital research I should be doing.

So, I'm wondering, is there any other place I can go for research? I've done LitMatch.com and AgentQuery.com, although I have to say that AgentQuery isn't all that helpful. When I searched for fantasy, a lot of agents came up who were categorized as accepting it, but when I checked their websites and blogs and researched the books they'd sold before, there was nary a genre client to be found.

Not to mention that many of those same agents who, according to AgentQuery, accepted fantasy then went on to say in their submission guidelines that they didn't want fantasy or sci-fi (on a side note: a few had some rather unprofessional snarky remarks about the genre in their guidelines) and instead would, apparently, prefer books about people who do nothing for 300 pages and discover themselves and their Inner Strength.

*scowls* Yeah, because my genre is so unrealistic.

But anyway, that's where I'm at. So if any of you who have done this dance before know of anywhere else I should be looking, please, for the love of cheesecake, let me know.

Now for my next trick: writing a query letter that doesn't make my novel sound like the next best thing besides Ambien for those nights when you just can't get to sleep.

Comments

[jongibbs.livejournal.com]

Have you considered going straight to a publisher. Like TOR, for instance?

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

I have, and if all else fails, I probably will submit straight to a publisher, just to see if it nets anything. But I have little or no hope in that.

Most publishers who are worth a damn don't accept unsolicited manuscripts in the first place, and those that do accept them seem like they don't take them very seriously.

I did my own sort of informal study of debut books and books that did really well, and when looking in the acknowledgments, I saw that a very big chunk of those books had acknowledgments that thanked an agent for their hard work. A big enough chunk to convince me that having an agent is a Good Thing.

Not only that, but I don't know that I'd feel secure dealing with the company directly without an agent. Because a) I know bugger all about what the editors of these publishing companies are looking for, what they want, how they want it, or when they want it, b) I know even less about contracts and industry standards. I don't know how much I should expect to get paid either in an advance or through royalties or even how those payments are made and c) I have no idea how to conduct myself professionally. I don't know what rights and responsibilities I have as the writer, I don't know what I'm expected to do and what I have a right to expect from the publisher/editors/etc.

While not making any accusations, I do know that the writer and the publishers do sometimes have competing interests and that one benefits from by shorting the other.

As far as all this goes, if I were signing some kind of contract with a company for a deal, they could say, "Oh, it's standard to have a five dollar advance!" or "It's standard for a writer to promise a piece of all future profits of books to us whether we publish it or not!"

And I wouldn't know the difference. They could piss in my pocket and tell me it's raining, and I'd have to believe them.

An agent, however, knows how it works. And knows when they can bargain for more money or better terms. They know when a company might be willing to extend a better advance, or put a little more oomph into the marketing. They also know how to deal with editors. So that if I have an issue and I don't know how to go to someone and say, "I'm not happy with this", they know how to make things happen.

Not to mention that I've heard some horror stories about submitting straight from publishers, including the writer who's manuscript has been in limbo for three years because the company asked her to submit it to them exclusively but hasn't even read the damn thing.

And one suspects that if this writer had an agent, that her manuscript would either have been accepted or rejected in a timely manner rather than being up in the air that long, which is frankly silly.

So, eventually, yes, but I want to give the agent route a shot first.

Though I won't say that isn't problematic, too. Because agents right now, especially in the genre I'm writing for, seem few and far between and many too busy to deal with some newcomer's book.

Which bothers me, because not only does it up the chances for rejection, but ups the chances that the rejection will not be because the book was bad, but because the agent was just too overwhelmed to take on the project and wanted to focus more on paying clients than new ones.

[jongibbs.livejournal.com]

You're probably already doing this, but if not, have you tried finding out the names of agents whose clients write books similar to yours? Chances are, they'd be open to your query.

Hope that helps.

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that is a helpful tip, and yes, I'm already doing that.

I've garnered most of my agent names from the acknowledgments of books that are like mine where an author has thanked an agent and places like that. But that's also why my list of agents to query is rather slim. Because I've deliberately excluded those agents who, while saying they accept fantasy, have a client list of only hard science fiction or vampire-heavy urban fantasy. Because I figure that's no good anyway.

ETA: And by "that's no good", I mean there's no use querying an agent who isn't interested in this particular type of fantasy and just wants, say, vampire novels.