Join the club. Oh wait, you say you have always been a writer and now you’re getting serious about finding an agent and getting your book published. Writing is a tough business. It is an extremely competitive one and an industry dominated by corporate marketing.
One of the most difficult aspects of writing professionally, even beyond penning those first 100,000 words, is looking for Fiction Agents. That’s not to say that fiction agents are hard to find. In fact by doing a search on agents you’re bound to find many public listings of their name, their agency, the kind of books they represent and available contact information.
Now this is when the process gets tricky. The majority of well-known and reputable Fiction Agents will not review unsolicited submissions by a previously unpublished novelist. Interestingly, most publishers will not review an unsolicited submission from a writer without an agent. This means that writers hoping to sell their first book must look for Fiction Agents who will consider material from a first timer.
Some are willing to consider first time novelists, but then scrutinize the background of the author. Has the writer published short stories before or won any writing contests? Does he or she have any media connections, famous friends or endorsements by celebrities? If not, does the writer have a strong educational background and is he or she an authority on the subject matter they present? It’s widely acknowledged in the publishing business that a writer’s resume and marketing ideas sell a book, not necessarily the story itself.
Complicating matters further, not only are such things as a “vanity presses” (book publishers that produce your book but don’t really try to sell it) there are also unscrupulous Fiction Agents who will do an aspiring writer even worse. Some untrustworthy fiction agents have been known to plagiarize authors, while other fiction agents though honest have no sales on their record. Other fiction agents will actually negotiate a deal for an author with a vanity press, thus defeating the whole purpose of finding a legitimate agent, considering that vanity presses will accept material from anyone regardless if they have representation or not.
Be sure and run a background check on your selected choice and his or her agency. Googling an agent’s name can be very telling and can help prevent an aspiring author from putting his or her career in the wrong hands.
If you want to publish your novel with a large publisher, minus all the hassle, the best way to do that is to first produce a bestseller. Once you write a bestseller and it sells at least one million copies then it becomes much easier to break into the writing business.