Literary Agents
When I started writing I had so many stories to tell. Some I didn’t even know I had. Then I’d finish a book. Create my querying materials. Create my submission-ready manuscript and then I would think, OK now let’s get started. I did. I started sending out queries to literary agents. I was not just hopeful or optimistic, I knew. I absolutely knew this was a great read and would be picked up quickly. Nope. Uh uh. Didn’t happen. I got a lot of responses. They pretty much sounded the same: no, uh uh sorry, not for me, keep trying but, no. Pretty soon I thought to myself, what is wrong here?
I discovered through researching the marketplace, that literary agents are bombarded with queries. Some are really good, some are not. But it isn’t that they don’t like anything. It’s that they just have a very narrow window of opportunity for anyone looking to get representation for their work.
The publishing business has changed radically in the last few years. AI has made it possible for virtually anyone to write a book. Publishers are squeezed by the market. Amazon now owns a significant market share, and their Kindle Direct Publishing platform is successful and is used by a lot of writers. Books don’t sell like they used to and the number of big book retailers has shrunk due to the popularity of eBooks.
So when an agent gets a query he or she has to view it through the lens of, does one of my publishing customers have a place for this? Has an editor asked for something like this? And can I spend the time necessary to get this published? All those things keep the window of opportunity for a writer very narrow.
Is that pretty discouraging? Oh yes, it is. But I love to tell stories. So, the love of writing keeps me going and from time to time I decide that a particular work needs to have traditional representation, so I query it. The other work, which I absolutely love, gets self-published with Kindle Direct Publishing.
It’s pretty cool to see my work become a book. But the same thing that traditional publishers face, I also face – getting someone to read my book.
So, I keep doing what I love. I tell stories.