In Order to Write

What NOT to do to get an Agent

May 8th, 2008 | by smokingpen |

http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2008/05/lessons-in-how-to-never-get-agent-part.htm

I discovered the previous link about a week ago… at least it’s felt like a week since I saved the link.

For those who are interested it is a (slightly edited) letter to an agent that goes into a great deal of detail about why the prospective author is right about his/her works of fiction and the agent was wrong to pass on reading sample pages based off of a one-page query letter.

I can imagine, from reading the parts of the letter that are available, that the prospective author was/is frustrated at receiving a lot of passes on queries. I can also imagine that he/she wanted to take it out on someone and chose to send a very terse and vulgar letter to someone he/she doesn’t know.

The outcome, without knowing the agent, is that the prospective author, regardless of how much he/she thinks of himself, will probably find it even more difficult to get representation. I don’t think there is an active list of people for agents to avoid; I do think that this person hit the unofficial, only between agents when they talk, list of people to politely refuse and then delete any emails and burn any mail that is sent to an agent from said individual.

Seriously folks, it doesn’t take someone with a PhD and MD in psychology to realize that you get farther with people by being polite and carefully stating your case, asking for clarification or reasons, and seeking feedback on how to improve than you will ever gain by going off the handle and ranting at someone you don’t even know.

When you are looking for an agent you are asking someone to help you succeed. Yelling at someone, no matter who, is not a way to influence people to want to help you. An agents greatest successes don’t come from people who think they are great, it comes from people who they can work with and who write well.

If you want help writing query letters, Kristin Nelson has a blog (Nelson Literary Agency) that offers a lot of usefully good advice on that process and she just finished with a whole series of entries on how to write that pitch paragraph to quickly entice prospective agents/editors by getting to the heart of the project.

nuff said.