|
| |
How to get an agent
(Page 1 of 3)
The first thing you need to do in order to get an agent is to get yourself a writing resume. An agent is far more likely to take you seriously if you can say that you've been published in this and that magazine/anthology beforehand. This doesn't need to be anything big – you don't have to have written a best-seller or anything – but having a short story or a poem in a small literary magazine is very often the first rung on the ladder for most writers. There are a load of suitable magazines listed at
www.firstwriter.com/magazines. You have to pay a small monthly fee to access this site, but you'll need it later on anyway, so you may as well sign up now. Don't worry that these are often small magazines with circulations in the hundreds – they're your best chance of getting published, and will still sound (and feel) good when you can say "I have been previously been published in X and Y...".
Once you've got a few credits to your name you need to get your proposal package together. For nonfiction you can often get away with sending off a table of contents, a few sample chapters, and an overall view of your book, but if, like me, you write fiction, then don't even think about contacting an agent before your book is finished and polished – agents will only consider completed books for fiction; they don't want to hear your "great idea" for a book.
Increasingly, agents are expecting material to be
professionally edited before it's submitted to them, so you should consider having your book edited/critiqued (I personally wouldn't go for a critique, as I think it steps too far into the role of the author, but it's definitely worth having it edited, as you'd be amazed at the silly mistakes those guys spot). If you've signed up for firstwriter you'll see they offer both these services, but in my view they're over-priced. You're better off finding an independent editor on the Internet like at
www.writetightnow.com.
Continues
on next page>
| |
|
