How I selected my agent
When I was just beginning to market Lucy Hatch, I found it maddening that most guidebooks on the subject of first novels all dealt in worst-case scenarios?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ‚Äö?Ñ??you’ll struggle to find an agent, you’ll never get the attention of the big houses, you’ll never land a decent contract?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ‚Äö?Ñ??so that when I had multiple agents interested in representing me, and when I landed a contract with a big publisher, there were no guidelines to advise me.
Let’s play best-case scenario, then, and assume you find yourself in the enviable position of having simultaneous offers of representation from a variety of agents; or that you’ve received a single offer, and you’re wondering whether or not to accept it. How do you determine the best agent for you?
The decision is just about as personal as selecting whom to marry. Different traits matter to different people. Some want a business partner; some want a best friend. Some want an aggressive personality; some prefer a more soft-spoken approach. Some want a seasoned professional; some are willing to give a rookie a chance. Some require rampant enthusiasm (“This is the best manuscript I’ve ever read!”); some respond more positively to conditional praise. Some need more coddling than others?¬¢‚Äö?ᬮ‚Äö?Ñ??but let’s not let that be you.
My suggestion for how to weigh these choices is two-part. The first is to approach it dispassionately. For the three agents who simultaneously offered to represent me, I made a chart listing traits such as demeanor, experience, track record, sales of projects similar to mine, enthusiasm, general comfort level, and prospect for a long-term relationship, then graded agents A, B, and C in each category.
In addition to rating your choices in all the pertinent categories, you need to assign some sort of value to each category. Is experience more important to you, or enthusiasm? For me, the defining category was general comfort level, which was made up of all the listed traits but most heavily influenced by demeanor. I wanted someone to provide a bit of guidance through the first-time publishing process, someone who’d have the right contacts and the chops to approach them in a quietly confident way.
Once you’ve rated your choices dispassionately, turn around, a hundred and eighty degrees, and listen to your heart and your gut. I didn’t intend, God forbid, to be one of those neurotic clients who needs her hand held at every turn. But I did recognize that there was a lot I didn’t know about publishing, that I would have a lot of questions, some of them pretty dumb ones, and that I had to feel comfortable asking those questions. It wasn’t just a matter of who could nail the deal, but who was interested in the bigger picture, who, rather than focusing only on one book, hoped to guide me in a writing career.
Since by then I’d made the decision to split my manuscript into two parts (my plan was to condense the second and third parts into a second book), the deal-breaker for me was to ask each agent who offered to represent Lucy Hatch, “How do you feel about learning the book has a sequel?” When Agent C said, “Wonderful! We can pitch a two-book deal,” I knew then I’d found my agent.
There’s one other matter which I admit influenced my decision, and it’s up to you to decide whether it will factor into yours. Any number of people will argue that, in this technologically advanced age, it doesn’t matter where an agent is based, that as long as she has contacts, she’s no more than a fax or an email or a long-distance call away. But the seat of the book publishing industry is and probably will always be New York and, technology be damned, a large amount of publishing business gets transacted face-to-face there, over lunches and cocktail parties and book signings. For that reason, and for the sake of tradition, I wanted an agent headquartered in New York. The importance of this has been borne out several times since she began representing me, from small matters, like praise for my manuscript exchanged at an industry gathering, to events of greater significance, like lunching with an editor who ultimately bid on my book. Could an agent doing business from San Diego or St. Louis have handled things so expeditiously and with such aplomb? I’ll never know, but it was a chance I didn’t care to take.