How to Get a Literary Agent With Dani Hedlund

Welcome to this edition of the Real Fast Results broadcast. 
Dani Hedlund is here today to share her secrets on how to get a
literary agent.  This, of course, is very important to know if
you have a desire to become traditionally published.  Let's
see what she has to say... Today's Promise Today I'd like
to talk about how you go about getting a literary agent.
There's a lot of debate about whether or not a writer should seek
out an agent, or whether or not they should go to an independent
publisher, or even a self-publisher.  It's the stance of my
company, and myself, that the best way to go about getting your
work out to the public is going through an agent. The reason for
that, agents are your best avenue to a large traditional publisher.
Frankly, if we have ideas that we want to put out, maybe that's
through a quirky sci-fi or a deep-rooted memoir, we want as many
people to read that as possible.  What we are aiming
at, as authors or editors, is to get that to the largest house that
can give us the most proliferation.  That is always a
literary agent.  Your top five, or top ten, publishing houses
do not accept unsolicited work.  So, these agents are the
gateway into that larger avenue. Literary agents have kind of a
horrible reputation of being these, you know, heartless bastards
that are exploiting the great writing of these new creators.
However, in a lot of ways, literary agents are the new
editor.  They are the people that you call in the middle of
the night, and you're drunk, and you don't know if you're going to
have to kill off that character.  Your agent is going to be
the one that's like, "Okay, calm down.  I don't know. 
That character kind of needs to die, but let's drink and talk about
it."  And, they're also there to make sure that you
don't get screwed.  They are there to verify all of
your contracts, to make sure the house that you're at is the right
one. Also, now that there's this huge avenue for writers to
go from book deals to film deals, an agent is going to be the one
that makes sure they can navigate that new space.  I
mean, we're writers; we all wanted to grow up to be Hemingway
without the shotgun.  We don't know these sorts of
things.  So, we need someone to be our conduit through it
all.  Literary agents, in that respect, are the goldmine of
being able to help a really great author get everything they want
out of the industry. Finding the Right Literary Agent for You Let's
say that you have a great book, and that's going to be where we'll
start.  The end goal will be that you have an agent that signs
you.  I'm not going to do any of the "write a book well" sort
of talk.  We are all starting from the point that you
need to sell it.  This is a very common situation,
where I will come into work and have a really brilliant novelist
who has the "Great American Novel," and this person can't get an
agent to reply to them.  A big thing with that is just forming
the query. The way that querying used to work, like back in the
day, before the 90's, was you wrote a good book, you summarized it
in a page, and then you sent it.  Agents just wanted a good
book, so they would read an interesting description, they'd ask for
pages, and then they'd buy it.  That world is no
longer the world we're living in.  We're now living in a
publishing world that's inundated with so many books and so many
queries that agents are trying to make their jobs as easy as
possible on themselves, which means a query letter has to do two
things. It has to do the old thing it always did, which
was making a book sound interesting, but it also has to make an
author seem marketable. Writing a Good Query The
first thing about making a book sound interesting is you have to
sell it in a way where it's not just like the back of the book
blurb. It has to be, "Here's a new interesting idea,
and then here's possible ways it could go," without actually
telling the agent anything about the ending of the book, and never,
ever telling the agent how to do their job. A very good
query starts out straight in, and it's going to say, you know,
"Sandy McClain was a woman who always knew her place in the world,
until the day she discovered a letter written from the
future."  Yes, that's a terrible line, but it's going to show
you instantly that I have a character and here's why I care about
them. That's going to make up one or two paragraphs of the
query, but a lot of times an agent won't read those first couple of
paragraphs.  They'll skip right to the third
paragraph.  This is the crux of selling the author.  This
third paragraph just says where else the author has been
published.  That's called a publishing platform. It'll say
something like, "This author has been published in The New Yorker
and The Paris Review," or any literary journal or anthology. 
What this says to an agent is, "Okay, somebody else has already
taken a chance on this author.  This author clearly can write
well, and they're already developing a fan base.  Great. 
Most of my work is done for me." After they see that, then they'll
go back to look at what the book is about.  A
lot of really great authors will even sell their books while
developing the query, but since they have no publishing credit, an
agent would be like, "Ugh, I mean, that sounds good, but do I
really want to waste the hour it would take me to read the
first couple of chapters?"  And, often times, the
answer is no.  Definitely when you're querying an
agent, make sure that you're selling the book well and that you're
selling yourself well. Another weird thing that's
emerging in the industry right now is social media
platforms.  Again, before the 90's, publishing houses
were big enough, and they had enough money, that they had really
large marketing departments.  That meant you could take a
totally unknown author, buy their book, and then marketing people
would market. Nowadays, people are reading less and that's
hemorrhaging from the company.  So, large publishing houses
are taking that out of marketing and publicity. Which means that
the author has so much responsibility now to market themselves and
so does the agent.  That's why an agent makes a larger
percentage now, because they do a lot of the marketing
work. One of the things that a lot of agents look
for is they'll have their secretaries Google your name and then
write down the number of Twitter or Facebook followers at the top
of the query.  I know so many agents that just
discard anything with under 1,000 Twitter followers, which is
crazy. They don't even read the query letter. It's very
important for an author to make sure that they are creating a
professional social media platform.  There are so
many young authors that I run into, and their social media handle
is like "SweetCheeks5".  Like that's the first thing I do...
I'm like "No.  Use your name.  Be professional. 
Reach out to other people in the industry." A very
important thing, in writing a good query letter, is selling
yourself as well. 

Get good publishing credit.

Have a strong social media/marketing platform.

And of course, sell the book well.

I know that I could talk about any of those aspects,
but I think it's most essential that we go over having your own
platform because a lot of authors have trouble doing
this.  You must market your stuff, and parcel with
that is developing a fan base, a rabid fan base that wants to buy
anything that you create, pretty much right out of the gate. 
If you can do that, then you are so much more desirable for an
agent and a publishing house because you have inbuilt sales, or at
least that's the thought.  That's the reason why you need to
do this. How to Make Yourself More Attractive From a Marketability
Standpoint The most common thing that is done is to get
smaller publications.  That's submitting to literary
journals, submitting to contests, submitting to anthologies. 
The big reason for that is you have people in the industry taking a
chance on you and publishing your work.  That allows you to
build a fan base, but mostly it just shows the agent, "Okay, that
person writes well enough that someone bought something they
wrote."  It can be a literary journal that no one has ever
heard of, or it could be a very prestigious literary award, it just
has to be something. This is especially true for literary
fiction.  If you're writing literary fiction, you need
publishing credit because that is one of the most difficult
industries to both make money in and to find
representation.  That's just because it doesn't sell
near as well as the other aspects.  So, that's publishing
credit, and that's very important. A really great thing
about publishing credit is that if you're writing shorter works,
you're growing as an author.  I could just kick
myself because my first work, right out of the gate, I wrote a
novel.  If I were writing and published short stories first, I
would have learned all of the very stupid things that I was doing
in a short, manageable way that didn't make me think, "Oh my
God!  I have to get rid of the last three years of my life."
I highly encourage writers to always be making short work,
and it's a great emergence into the industry, and it's another way
to make contacts.  A lot of the time, you can get
published in a literary journal and an editor will be like, "Hey, I
was so excited to publish it, can I help you in some other
way?"  The moment someone in the industry turns around and
says, "Can I help you,"  that's a wonderful moment.
 That's a big aspect.  Especially if you're writing
nonfiction. Blogging and building up a blogging fellowship is also
incredibly helpful. You look at The Rules of Inheritance, which is
a beautiful memoir that was published a couple of years ago.
Jennifer Lawrence ended up insisting that the film rights were
purchased, and it will be a wonderful film, and Claire is a
wonderful writer, but she didn't [need to work on getting] an agent
because she ran one of the most successful grief counseling blogs
in California, at the time.  So, she got to pop that into her
query and say, "Hey, I already have hundreds of thousands of
followers that care deeply about my grief counseling, and I want to
write a non-fiction book about losing my parents to cancer." 
And, the agent was like, "Okay, I'll book the writer.  You
instantly can sell." I know that blogs get a lot of crap in
the industry, but they're great.  If you can make
people care about you, that is wonderful, and social media is the
same sort of thing.  If you're writing quick little
things about your cat that, you know, 70,000 people like,
cool.  Good.  I mean, if you write about physics, at
least 10% of those are going to come along.  So, those are
great aspects to grow, and depending on what you're writing, you
can build up that sort of awareness in other arenas.  For
instance, if you were writing historical fiction about the Roman
Era, and you're a Roman critic at Oxford, that's going to lend a
huge amount of credibility to an agent being like, "Okay, you're
definitely the person to write this." That works in a lot of
different arenas.  You know, if you're writing a feminist
non-fiction piece, and you're the head of a feminist group in your
state, then great.  So, anything that could help an
agent paint for themselves, "Okay, this person obviously has the
ability to write this book, and they have credibility that I can
market," is really good.  There are certainly
unconventional ways to build publishing credit, but those tend to
be the ones that are the most successful and the most accessible to
agents. The other thing that I would say, that one of my authors
pointed out to me a couple of years ago, and it always really stuck
with me. His name is Scott O'Conner, and he wrote Untouchable,
which was a totally wonderful book.  He's brilliant.  I
love him... But, he told me that the most successful thing
that he ever did for his writing was to be "a good literary
citizen".  I've always loved this. He ended
up landing, essentially, his book deal because he stalked his local
bookstore.  He went to every single reading, every
single time someone came out.  He read their
books.   He went and he talked to them, and book
signings, honestly, aren't very popular.  So, you'll end up
having a really great writer that has, you know, ten people come to
the book signing, and you talk to them afterwards.  You talk
to them about things they care about.  Suddenly, you have an
arsenal of people with power and influence who like you. He ended
up randomly getting his book deal because the bookseller was like,
"I want to pick up this book.  What do we need to do about
it?"  And, he just stalked this book store for like five
years.  Giving back to the community in that way,
going to signings, reaching out and doing reviews of books, and you
can build that on your blog.  If you're a young
person, get involved with your literary journal at your school,
intern somewhere. This is just a game of who you know, and who you
can grow from, and who  you can lean on when it matters. 
Clearly, use those connections.  Anything you can do to build
connections is the right way to go. Where to Send Your Query
We've discussed, roughly how to construct a letter.  You sell
the book well.  You sell yourself well.  But, who
in the world are you going to be sending it to? 
Where are you going to find a good literary agent?  This is
one of the most common steps I see authors struggle on. The first
thing they usually do is list to me their favorite writers, which
it's everything from Neil Gaiman to Stephen King, and they think,
"Well, I kind of write it like that.  I want that
agent."  exceptions to that rule, but generally, if you are
the sort of agent that represents really big names, you may only
have five clients.  That's all you need because you are
pulling in 20% of these enormous deals. Take into
account where you are as an author, and then try to reach out to an
agent that's in a similar place.  There's a really
wonderful website called AgentQuery.com, and it lists pretty much
all of the agents out there and the genres that they like, and what
they're looking for, and whether or not they're actually open.
 I would recommend going in there.  There are great
little checkmarks where you can say, "I write fantasy.  It's
magic realism.  I'm looking for this kind of an agent." Put
together a very nice spreadsheet.  You have to be so
organized about this stuff and figure out when they're open for
submission. And, it's very important to specify why you
are submitting to that particular agent.  That means it's a
lot of research.  If you see an agent that fits all of the
things that you're looking for, and you read their description, and
they want, "Character-driven sci-fi that has reflections on
society," and you're like, "Oh my God!  That's what I just
wrote," you can't just put down, "I read those things, and that's
what I wrote."  You have to put in the time.  It's a lot
like dating.  You have to listen to what they want and then
know things about it. Go look up the titles that they
represented, and then figure out whether or not that's the sort of
thing that you fit into.  That way, in the letter you
can say, "Dear Mrs. Johnson, I would be really keen to be
represented by you because you published this book, and it does
this thing, and my thing is like that."  Then the agent will
be like, "Okay.  You put in some time, and you actually know
what I do for a living.  You respect me, so let me show you
respect."  That's a very common thing that new writers don't
do.  They just assume, "I'm going to be making the agent
money, so why would I have to do that?"  It's not like that at
all.  It's a mutual relationship, and if you start with
respect, they will give respect you back. The best way to
find an agent is by looking at the books that are most like what
you write, and go to the back of the book, to the acknowledgement
page, because every writer acknowledges their agent. 
Then, look up that agent directly and figure out what they are
doing.  I find that [looking in] Barnes & Noble's
"Discover New Writers" section is a super great way to poach agents
in the way that you know that those agents care about new
talent.  They're looking for new voices, and they are usually
pretty new in the industry because that's who deals with debut
talent. Go through and find books that are your book.  Read
all of the descriptions, or order the books and read them, and then
really care about querying to those agents.  New people in any
agency, like always junior agents are lovely.  They're still
not broken inside, so they still read most of the queries.
 Make sure you're querying to the right sort of
people.  Also, there's just a couple of things you
should never do. Never, ever use the words, "I think this
will be a bestseller," and never say it has "film
potential".  Agents hate it when you tell them how to
do their job, so never, ever do it.  I find that comparative
lines, and by that I mean, if I say that I have written Fight Club
meets Grapes of Wrath, that tends to work pretty well on East Coast
agents, but like UK agents hate comparisons.  It's a very
weird sort of thing.  But, kind of figure out what demographic
[book fits in]. There are so many great resources online. 
QueryShark is one of them.  It's a wonderful New York
agent who, essentially you just submit queries to her, and she
chooses them, and then she just rips them apart
online.  But, it's the most helpful way to figure out
what you're doing wrong. There are a lot of weird sorts of things
for that, and there are a lot of resources.  Just make
sure that you're not falling into the pit holes of telling an agent
what to do, and make sure that you are querying to agents that
actually care about the stuff that you care about. 
That is, along with showing the fact that you have publishing
credits, you have a marketing platform, and of course, your work
has to be really good to start with. Steps to Finding Literary
Management The first step is writing the query exceptionally well.
The second step is making a list of all of the agents that you want
to reach out to and doing the actual research. Then, the next step
is sending your queries out. I would never recommend sending a
batch of more than  5-8.  You have your whole list of all
of the agents that you could possibly want, and then the middle
ground people, like the B-quality people.  Send out
5-8 query letters, and make sure that you're catering them
correctly.  The reason for that is because,
inevitably, the first query letter that you write, no matter how
much you love it, is probably not going to be good enough. 
You only learn that by getting rejected. Then, some agents promise
to get back to you in three months, but some of them are six
months.  It's kind of insane, but send it out and see if you
get rejected, see if you get comments back.  In a
month go back and make revisions to the query
letter.  Make sure that you're sending it out to
everyone you know, not just the literary people that you know, but
send it out to some of the readers you know because they'll be good
at telling you whether or not it would make sense.  Keep doing
what you're doing and adding more people to your list. 
Usually, you'll get to a point where you haven't heard anything
back and you're just kind of confused.  That's the
time to kind of seek help.  Like I said, there
are  lots of great online resources that can help you get good
at this stuff. This is usually  a sign that you're selling
your book wrong.  The primary way that someone is
usually selling their book wrong is they're not identifying the
genre correctly.  Like I said before, literary
fiction, you can sell some, but to get a literary agent to be like,
"Okay, I'm going to take a huge chance on someone, who even if they
are Don DeLillo, are not going to make me very much money." 
So always go back and look at your genre, and see if there is a way
to pitch your book in the best possible genre.  If you wrote a
literary fiction book that is 5% fantasy, you pitch that thing as a
fantasy novel.  You pitch it to a genre agent because that's
the way someone is going to be able to justify taking a chance on
you. One of our writers is amazing, Emily St. John Mandel. 
She wrote Station Eleven, which you know, won like every award
known to man last year.  It's a very beautiful,
post-apocalyptic book about a Shakespearean troop, after the
apocalypse, traveling around. It is straight up literary
fiction.  Half of it is written in poetry.  It's like a
mystery, sci-fi.  That's what you need to do. 
You need to figure out the most sale-able thing about a
book and then you push that.  That's just a matter of
a writer letting go of their ego and saying, "Hey, I'm not selling
out, but I'm trying to figure out how I can push this book in a way
that matters." Then, I say go through the entire process
again under a different genre.  Seek out new agents,
and make sure that you're being as marketable as possible.  If
you're still hitting a whole bunch of walls, it might be time to
think about bringing in an editor, or think about bringing in
someone who can tell you whether or not the problem is your first
couple of chapters, because some agents will ask for a chapter
sample right up front with a career letter.  Maybe the career
letter is too long.  A lot of times that doesn't mean that
your work isn't great or that it won't find a publisher; you just
haven't figured out how to sell it correctly.  Because, why
would you know that?  You're an author.  Like, you wanted
to be an introvert for the rest of your life, and now you're
expected to get up and sell something? During that entire
time, what you should be doing is building the
platform.  You know, you're submitting things out,
and you put your soul on a query letter before passing out into the
darkness.  The only thing that's going to keep you sane is
progress.  So, keep submitting to literary journals. 
Keep building that platform.  Keep being a literary
citizen.  Build your blog.  Build your social
media.  That way, every time you go through a round on a
cruise, you get to add another line in.  "I got to publish at
this new place," or "I have this many followers."  Or, "I met
someone great and they said they'd pass it along to their own
agent."  That does miraculously happen sometimes. As
long as you are constantly keeping progress, and you're making sure
you're growing, I swear if you've written something good, someone
will take a chance on you.  It's just that you've got
to be ready for rejection, and don't give up.  It's just like
business.  You have to just believe in what you're pushing
enough and just keep fighting because the world is hard and you've
just got to be harder. Genres that Sell There are certainly
statistics.  You can just, essentially, Google how many sci-fi
titles got moved by Penguin or all that jazz, and they fluctuate a
little every year.  I can tell you with certainly, the
thing that sells best in all of the book world is
non-fiction.  That's everything from memoirs, to
celebrity memoirs, to cookbooks.  It sells significantly
better, but in terms of what sells for fiction, it is without a
doubt genres like mystery and fantasy.  The thing that
sells the absolute best is YA (young adult).  Young
adult books can reach into so many different demographics, and that
tends to sell exceptionally well. If I had to go back in
time and tell you that you need to create a bestseller and make as
much money as you possible because your life is on the line, I
would have you write a YA book because I know that's where the
money is at.  It's really where it's at.  If you
really want to sell, write a YA series.  Anything where you
can have the same characters for as long as possible, it's a
win.  But, aside from YA, our genre really sells about the
same.  From fantasy to romance, it's very similar
demographics.  Literary fiction, on the other hand, is less
than 10% of the market, and especially anyone that goes out and
gets an English degree, they pop out wanting to write literary
fiction. You know, we all want to be Dickens and Hemingway, and
that's fine.  You've got to write what you feel.  You
know, if you wrote Brickhouse, you put down that you wrote a murder
mystery.  You do not write that you wrote literary
fiction.  Pretty much, don't write down "literary
fiction" on anything, ever, or at least not anything if you can
avoid it. Find Writer Friends I think that's what I would
recommend, more than anything, is to go out and find writer
friends.  I know that might seem contradictory of all the very
process given, but this is a very difficult process.  One in a
million get an instant acceptance.  Their uncles are literary
agents, and you know, they went to the Iowa Writing Workshop and
walked out with a contract.   You're really going to
start doubting yourself.  You're going to doubt whether or not
you're a good writer, you're going to doubt whether or not you made
the right move when your mom was begging you to become an
accountant. It's going to be so hard, and the only thing
that's going to get you through that is to be able to lean on
people that care about the same things that you care about, and
that care about you as an artist, and that are going through
similar things.  I remember going through this
process, and I had friends that were going through the same
things.  We would go to the pub and buy each other a shot for
however many times someone got rejected.  You have to lean on
each other because this is going to hurt so badly, but it's worth
it.  If you have something great that you've written, it
deserves to be in as many hands as possible.  You have to put
in this hard work now.  Be open to revisions, and be open to
change, but keep believing in yourself and lean on the people that
believe in you.  It's going to be hard, but it's going to be
worth it. Thoughts on Self-Publishing I have a really hard time
with self-publishing in the respect that there are a lot of times
when a self-published book falls on my desk, or even an
independently published book, and honestly, it's one or two edits
away from being picked up by a big house.  I look at the print
numbers, I look at circulation, and this book that could have
changed the way that people think, it sold at its max, maybe 1,000
copies.  I know, as a publisher, that this could have gotten a
major distribution.  It really breaks my heart because
this author not only has shot himself in the foot for this book,
but he's come onto the scene as a debut author, which is one of the
only aspects of publishing that still has any marketing
oomph. You sell well as a debut, or you sell well
as established.  This middle ground is the really,
really hard part.  Honestly, it breaks my heart.  And,
that doesn't mean that there aren't some books that are brilliant
and no traditional publisher will pick them up because no one wants
to take chances.  There are times like that where I will
advise an author and be like, "Hey, you've written something
brilliant, and it's insane because I don't know of any way to get
it published.  The only way is for you to go out and just do
it yourself."  But, I've said that twice in my 12-year
career.  I definitely think that if you believe in yourself,
and if you're getting feedback where people are saying, "Hey, this
is good.  This is worth it," just put in all of the rounds of
revisions. It sucks and it's heartbreaking, but do it because your
work deserves it.  Honestly, going it alone is so hard. 
A lot of people think that it's easier than surviving with an
agent, but if you really want to get out there and get your voice
heard take the hard road. Connecting with Dani I run a non-profit
called Tethered by Letters.  We are an international company
that helps people do exactly the things that I'm rambling
about.  We run full editing workshops, we walk people through
the query process, and we are, you know, the strange, loud
advocates for, "Hey, you've written something really well. 
Let's help you get it published."  You can find us at
TetheredbyLetters.com, an internationally distributed literary
journal.  It is the fastest-growing literary journal in the
states.  We just found that out, and we're so excited that
we're going to get it tattooed somewhere.  So, if you're
looking for some way to get that publishing platform credit and
certainly try out F(r)iction.  It's totally lovely, but I'm
completely biased.  So, reach out.  We're always happy to
help.  That's what we do. Resources Books Mentioned by
Dani: The Rules of Inheritance Untouchable Station Eleven
AgentQuery.com QueryShark TetheredbyLetters.com Real Fast Results
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