Fiction Agents

So you have decided to become a member of the writers club. You've always been a writer, you've written your first work of fiction, and now you've reached the point where you're serious about finding a fiction agent and getting your book published.

Writing is a tough business to get into. It is an enormously competitive industry and one dominated by corporate marketing.

One of the major difficulties of writing professionally, even beyond writing those first 100,000 words, is searching through the ranks of fiction agents. Now that's not to say that fiction agents are hard to find. In fact by doing a simple search on fiction agents you're bound to find numerous public listings of their name, their agency, the kind of books they represent and available contact information.

But this is when the procedure gets tricky. Most of the well-known and reputable fiction agents will not even review unsolicited submissions if you are a previously unpublished novelist. Not only that, but nearly all publishers will not review an unsolicited submission from a writer without an agent - especially for fiction. This means that writers hoping to sell their first book had better first look for fiction agents who will consider material from a first timer writer.

An extremely small number of publishers are willing to consider first time novelists, but you'd better be prepared for your background to be heavily scrutinized. They'll want to know: Has the writer published short stories before or won any writing contests? Does he or she have any media connections, famous friends or endorsements by celebrities? If not, does the writer have a strong educational background and is he or she an authority on the subject matter they present? It's widely known in the publishing business that it is the writer's resume and marketing ideas that sell a book, not necessarily the story itself.

Complicating matters further, not only are there such things as "vanity presses" (book publishers that produce your book but do not really attempt to sell it) there are also numerous unscrupulous fiction agents who will do even worse things to an aspiring writer. A few untrustworthy fiction agents have been known to plagiarize authors, while other fiction agents, though honest, have no sales on their record. Other fiction agents will actually negotiate a deal for an author with a vanity press, thus defeating the whole idea of finding a legitimate agent, considering that vanity presses will accept material from anyone regardless if they are represented by an agent or not.

It is very important to run a background check on your selected fiction agent and his or her agency. Googling an agent's name can be extremely telling and can help stop an aspiring author from putting his or her career in the wrong hands.

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