You’ve written your book – congratulations, that’s a huge achievement!
After all that effort put into writing, you then:
Worked with an editor and did revisions
Worked with some beta readers and did revisions
Have researched other books in your genre.
You’re almost ready to hit the query road!
You are now going to need to write some query letters and in order to do that, you need to research what book agents are looking for. Two good places to start with that are:
Manuscript Wish List: free to use
Publishers Marketplace: https://www.publishersmarketplace.com/: subscription required, with a more limited ‘quick pass’ available for short-term research.
You need to be prepared to compare your book to already published books in the genre, e.g. what books would your manuscript sit on a shelf with in a book store? Do yourself a solid and have a very clear idea of what your genre is and what comparable books have been published in the last several years. How is your book similar to these recent books and what makes it different? An agent will want to know this, just as a publisher will want to.
The query process is part creative, part business, and all of it needs to be handled professionally. Set up a spreadsheet to track who you’ve sent your query to, when you sent it, when you can expect to hear back, and the response when you do hear back.
If you hear back from an agent, they will almost always be saying thank you, but no. It can be tough to hear so many people ‘pass’ on the manuscript you’ve spent so much time on – a little like having someone look at your child and say, “I hope that’s not the only one you had – but either way, I’m sure someone else will like it.”
These are the preliminary steps to preparing a query.
More on the process and letter itself to follow.
christyoslund 