Next, find a literary agent. No publisher will talk to you directly — you can imagine how much bad writing publishers would have to weed through if they didn’t have agents as their first line of defense. The thinking is, if agents don’t believe they can sell your book to a publisher, they won’t represent you, and so a publisher won’t have to deal with it.
For my first book, I compiled a list of about 60 agents who represent authors in my genre (non-fiction) and who will represent non-celebrities. This latter point is a killer — in our culture, the best selling books are written by celebrities, and they can write on any subject they want. Bill O’Reilly and Chris Matthews, for example, can write history without backgrounds as historians, and we’ll eat it up. Very annoying.
Here’s your first exposure to rejection. Of the 60 agents I contacted, only about 4 responded, and of these only 2 were interested in talking further. I finally decided on one, and she gets my works in front of publishers, so I really have no complaints (unless, of course, she decides she doesn’t want to represent one of my books and leaves me on my own, which happened. She threatened to end her representation when my original publisher took this book on and she was to receive no commission. We made amends because I agreed to include her as my agent on the book she rejected — giving her a little bit of nothing is better than having to start an agent search all over again. (More on little bit of nothing later.)
Get used to this
