Chapter 08
Further reading
This handbook will get you oriented. These five books go deeper on directories, query strategy, and what it is like to be the person opening your letter. None of them replace finishing the manuscript first.
Paperback
Guide to Literary Agents 30th Edition
The Most Trusted Guide to Getting Published
Edited by Robert Lee Brewer
The fat desk copy: more than a thousand agent listings, conference dates, and articles on queries, synopses and proposals. Directories go stale. Use it to learn the shape of the market, then check each agency’s own website before you query.
Paperback
Get a Literary Agent
The Complete Guide to Securing Representation for Your Work
Chuck Sambuchino
How to research agents, write the query, put a proposal together, and not ruin the relationship once someone says yes. Sambuchino edited the Guide to Literary Agents for a decade and quotes more than a hundred of them.
Paperback
The Modern Guide to Querying Literary Agents
From Rejection to Representation in 8 Steps
Alyssa Matesic and Patrick McDonald
The QueryTracker and QueryManager people, writing from the data behind four million queries. When you are ready, who to target, what a normal wait looks like, and how to read a rejection without setting fire to the manuscript.
Kindle
How to Land (and Keep) a Literary Agent
From a working New York agent
Noah Lukeman
Written from the other side of the slush pile: why agents pass, how they decide to take someone on, and how not to become the client they quietly drop. Lukeman has been in the job long enough to be specific.
Kindle
I Hate Literary Agents
How to finally get representation with the breakthrough step-by-step guide
U. B. Red
A novelist’s walk through the query slog, written for people who would rather be writing the next book. Use it for the sequence of tasks. This edition is sold on Amazon.co.uk and is not listed on Amazon.com.
Amazon.co.uk links are this site’s UK associate links. Amazon.com links use the Upcott Studios US associate tag. As an Amazon Associate, this site earns from qualifying purchases. Always read the sample pages before you buy: a good querying book still cannot sell a book that is not ready. For the letter itself, see how to approach an agent.