Earning a spot in the finalist list for a contest can help an author, even if they don’t win. Forevermore, the notice of being the finals becomes part of your bio and even acts as a credit when you list your accomplishments. You can tell a prospective agent about your short-listing.
But where do you search for agents, and how do you decide who’s right for a submission? You can use a wide swath at first, but tracking down even the big list can seem daunting. The internet is there to help, if you check the right places.
Publisher’s Marketplace is a good site to track more traditional publishers’ signings. This identifies what agents have been able to sell. Indie and smaller press publishers don’t rise up nearly as often as mid-major and Big 5 imprint deals. Still, if you’re swinging for the fences, agents whose deals earn advances of five figures and more have their victories noted at PM. It’s $25 monthly.
QueryTracker is more of a crowdsourced report on agent response rates and submission requests. Even if an agent responds to a query, they may not have time to read requested pages. It’s a wall-to-wall business, this agenting. QueryTracker is free on a basic level; Premium membership is $25 a year and gets you data like Reply Rates (how often an agent replies) Reply Times (how fast an agent replies).
AgentQuery is a database full of listings, but without the author reports on responses and requests. It’s free and has about 900 agents. This is a resource that’s proud of its subjective slant. Its database “was created from sheer, mind-numbing research, countless irreplaceable hours of tedious data entry, grinding computer programming, and psycho-obsessive determination. We decide—like a bouncer at a trendy club—who’s in and who’s not”
Manuscript Wish List is a newsletter and website that is free and brimming with information. Agents and editors post their needs. For example, Caitlin McDonald at the Donald Maass Agency (where I once got a read of a sample) says she’d like the next Artemis Fowl, all about the adventures in the world of fantasy. Agents dream big, too. Their wishes represent books which they’d love to pitch to presses. You want that love established and beating hard from an agent.
Seeing if an agent is legit comes from Query Tracker and Writer Beware websites, but you should be aware that the WB complaints are not always proven like they’re a matter of law. Victoria Strauss has run WB as part of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, so any mention of an agent there would be worth researching yourself. It’s always dangerous for any industry to have one appointed judge, without any appeal, watching the door for trouble. Strauss is among those in the business who believes any subsidy or hybrid publisher is a vanity publisher, until they can prove otherwise. The proof turns out to be evidence of a traditional distribution element. This is not a bar that many tradition small presses can cross.
