I thought I’d come back and update, because I have now got an agent!
It feels quite amazing and I’m not sure what swung it. I had more or less given up. I had significantly changed my letter and blurb after sending about thirty letters out with barely any replies. I sent out the new version to five. All at both stages were AAA members, for what it’s worth. I think I got a slightly higher response rate with the new version, but still form rejections.
I pretty much gave up after that and decided that I would start on a completely new book. I thought I might come back to the agent search later, as I was still nowhere near 100 rejections, but the whole thing was getting me down at a time when there were more than enough tough things going on to cope with, all at the same time.
I have, in the past, used elements of the snowflake method - www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/ - for plotting, so I looked it up and made a start on what I thought would end up being a thriller. As I was trying to put together my one-sentence summary, I was reading the New York Times bestseller blurbs (as recommended) when a new one-sentence summary for my MS swam into my head. I noted it down in case I wanted to come back to it.
A couple of days later, I thought perhaps it would be a useful exercise to do step 2 for the MS I had already completed. I had probably done this before I started, but the storyline had likely changed, so I started from the beginning. I didn’t get it down to the four sentences, but trying to really concentrated my mind and by the end, I finally had that ellusive one page synopsis that I’d really struggled with before.
I still wasn’t really ready to plunge back in on a big scale, but one quiet evening, I thought I’d look through the Writers’ and Authors’ Yearbook to perhaps find agents that didn’t have a website or that only accepted submissions on paper. Logically, only those looking seriously for an agent would go there, so these agents must surely at least have a smaller slush pile. For the first time, I also thought perhaps I should drop my idea that membership of the AAA was non-negotiable.
I found a few that fitted my new parameters. There was one in particular that stood out. For reasons I won’t go into, I thought she might “get” my novel, more than the slightly more random selection of AAA members I had been approaching. I looked through her authors and they seemed quite successful and the whole thing seemed fairly well established, so I went for it.
She got back to me very quickly to ask for the full MS, then read that really quickly too. She was springing with enthusiasm right from the start. So now, after all that, I finally have an agent who has been so enthusiastic about my work that I genuinely feel hopeful that she might persuade a big publisher to take it on.
So after having literally no requests for the full MS from any other agents, I suddenly have one I am incredibly happy with, because she really seems to want to represent me. She’s not one of the big hot-shot agents, and that suits me, because I don’t think I can do all the super-high pressure sales stuff that I think some of them would demand.
As for my book comparisons, I gave a couple, but they were aimed at giving a real idea of what my novel fell between and not an attempt to compare to other super-popular authors in my genre. As I said before, that’s the kind of thing I need my agent to do. I want to write and will obviously work with any publicity, but I’m not interested in researching and reading a whole load of books in my writing genre, whatever that might be. Time for reading is limited and there is a lot of Terry Pratchett to get through.
So that’s my summary.