The Intimidating Road To Querying

I did it! I finally did it! I have a finished manuscript! With two small children, it is no easy feat to reach this point, and I did a little happy dance after I crossed the finish line. My dreams of becoming an author are one step closer to fruition! Then, I started doing research on how to acquire an agent, and the publishing process...And suddenly that first finish line seems like a paltry thing. A small victory in the grand scheme of things. And perhaps it is...but if you have written your first manuscript, and polished it into the best version of itself, take that moment to dance around your kitchen. Revel in your accomplishment. You deserve it!

Now onto the meat and potatoes, the first step towards representation: Research! The first thing you MUST do is identify your intended audience. Are you writing for children? Young Adults? Is it a compelling memoir? Pin down your audience, and genre so you know what direction you need to be looking into as far as literary agencies. If you query indiscriminately, you will likely have little success, and have wasted a lot of time for yourself, and the agents that are utterly disinterested in representing your book. Look for agencies with a track record of selling your genre. Make a list of agencies to do more research on, and then read the bio's and wish lists of the agents that make up the agency. Find one agent from each agency on your list to submit a query to - and make sure they are open for queries!

This is the point I am at on this dreary October day. Just barely on the road to querying. It is intimidating. There is so much information out there, and each agent has their own query specifications to follow. My personal list consists of 20 agents from 20 different agencies that I am doing further research on. I hope that one of them will be intrigued by my query, and ask for the full manuscript. But much of the coming process will be waiting. With bated breath, pacing the confines of our lives, hoping that someone will reach out. That someone will be just as excited, just as in love with our work, and want to get it out into the world as much as we do.

So how do we do it? How do we gather the courage to press on? To put ourselves out there? We keep at it. We keep pushing forward. And we take the criticism, and rejections as the tools they are to make our work better.

To all aspiring authors, you are not alone.

#querying #findinganagent