how to pitch agents – Women Who Submit

Dear Him/Her/Them/You:

Before we knew each other, I shaped you into a complex character because that’s how we writers deal with agent querying. Even memoirists create a kind of life to live in when faced with the business side of writing. Dream sequences. Reliable narrators. End on an up note.

I imagined your office was in a pre-war, West Village brownstone off Hudson, even though most of the publishing world speed walks in the 20s crosstown between 5th and 6th Avenue. Manuscript pages whirled in the air as you released each loose leaf from your hands after reading them. Authors stopped by after midnight for advice and fell asleep on your Perla tufted sofa, intoxicated from the scent of cherry red markups and pink eraser dust. You dragged a landline phone cord over stacks of books that measured up to your waist while talking me out from underneath five thousand line notes crowding my brain. You waved your pen like a conductor and my book was submission ready. I was enchanted by the notion of you as a romantic bibliophile, a protective lion or lioness, a guardian angel. Continue reading “A Letter to your Future Agent”

by Diane Sherlock

While working on my MFA at Antioch University, Los Angeles, I started my fourth novel, Wrestling Alligators. My primary mentors for the book were Rob Roberge (Liar: A Memoir, Crown 2016) and Gayle Brandeis (Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write, HaperOne 2004). I finished a first draft for my thesis project in May, 2009, and continued to polish it to the point where I was confident about sending it out to agents. At the time, my daughter was an assistant to a lit agent in Hollywood, and he read it and recommended an editor he’s worked with for many years. I sent it to her and she peppered me with hard questions about the material, pointing out that some of the imagery was in conflict. She was pessimistic about my solving those problems. That lit a fire under my inner “I’ll show you!” She recommended a big reorganization of the material, which ended up serving the book well. I walked a lot of miles in the hills near my place to figure out answers to her hardest questions and after a few weeks, I solved them. It was one of the best breakthroughs I’ve had. Even so, the Hollywood lit agent passed.

Undeterred, in no small part because I’d been through a lot of rejection with screenplays in Hollywood, I sent it out to about 100 agents. For the few agents who requested exclusivity, I set a time limit of 2-4 weeks, nothing open-ended. Mostly, I contacted dozens of agents at a time with simultaneous submissions. I received many requests for pages and many compliments about those pages. One agreed to represent me if I could get a publisher on board. This was sounding a lot like Hollywood: do the hard work, and we’ll close the deal for you. Continue reading “The Long and Winding Road of Not Having All Your Eggs in One Basket”