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You’ve done it. After weeks—months—years of laboring over your manuscript, it’s finally done. You wrote a book. Whether it’s your fifth or your first, you’ve decided that not only do you want to get your book published, but you don’t want to self-publish it, so you decide that you’re going to submit it to a publisher.

Congratulations! You now have a lot more work to do.

On your internet journey to find publishers, you’ll soon notices that many of the “big” publishers don’t let you contact them directly. That’s right—they only allow agents to contact them. Since when do writers need agents?!

A literary agent is exactly what it sounds like: they’re your representative in the literary world. They broker contracts with publishing houses for your book, edit and review your word, talk over your new book ideas, and do everything in their power to help you achieve your writing goals. Literary agents work on commission, meaning that they take a percentage of your royalties as payment for their services. A standard commission rate is 15%. The two biggest benefits of a commission-based system are that (1) you don’t have to pay money up front and risk losing (more) money if your book doesn’t sell and (2) the fact that agents work off of commission means that they’re inherently more motivated to sell your book and make you more money, which makes them more money too! (I know that sounds crass, but let’s face it, agents need to pay their bills too.)

So, you know this, and you decide that you want an agent. Should be easy, right? But then you come across this term called “querying.”

Finding a literary agent is highly competitive, and so you must submit applications to agents for them to review and decide if they would like to represent you. This process is querying.  

There are a few principal steps to querying, which I will generally outline:

1.  You have to find agents that you would like to query. A very popular resource for this is Query Tracker, which has a yearly subscription fee of $25. Not all agents represent all genres, and they usually have sub-genre preferences for what they are looking for (i.e. Young Adult novels with diversity). You will need to filter through the agents and come up with a list of agents that you would like to query who are a good fit for your book. I highly suggest using Excel to keep track of your queries. I organize my query file in this order: (date queried – agent name – literary agency – response time – Query Manager or website link)
   
2. You will need to submit your query letter and supporting materials (or query packet) to the agents you have selected. Please see my post on Building Your Query Packet to read more about this. There are many different recommended methods for querying, but the most common one I see is submitting queries in rounds of 10-20 at a time.
   
3. Wait. Yup. You saw those estimated response times—anywhere from 4 – 12 weeks (if the agent site had a time listed at all). While you’re waiting, you can either start on your next novel idea, or sit back and take a breather! Publishing is a marathon, after all.

Some tips for querying:

• DO make sure your manuscript is polished before you submit it to agents. This includes proofreading, editing, and beta reading. If you want to learn more about beta reading, click here.
  
• DO make sure your query letter (and the rest of your query packet) is well-formatted and if you can, have more experience friends review it.
  
• DO find agents that are reputable and a good fit for your manuscript.
  
• DO keep track of your queries in an app such as Google sheets or Excel
  
• DON’T get discouraged when you get rejections—and you will get rejections. It’s the name of the game.
  
• DON’T compare your journey to other writers. Some people may get agented faster than you, and some may get agented slower. Each writer’s journey is unique.
  
• DON’T be rude to agents if they reject your manuscript. It is not personal, and as you will very soon learn, publishing is a very subjective business.