Is a Literary Agent Right for You?

Now that you’ve written your synopsis, you need to decide if you want an agent or not. There are a number of pros and cons for choosing an agent or not. The agent is a good thing because knowing the publishing business and who would likely buy what is their business, it’s how they get paid so they are usually good at it. There are also a number of large publishing houses that will no longer take submissions by authors that aren’t represented by literary agents. However, there are a number of dishonest agents who will sign you to a deal that will be much more beneficial to them than the author or that agree to represent a book for a fee but never plan to send that book to publishers. There are a lot of horror stories about agents but literary agents are often very good helps and can open a lot of doors unrepresented authors can’t touch.

Once you’ve decided you want an agent, you need to research which agents will most likely enjoy your book (genre, previous books…) Each agent wants specific things and possibly different formats. If you’ve decided that you don’t want an agent, you have to do the same research on publishing companies.

As an unpublished author, I can’t give you proven advice on how to pick an agent but I found a number of sites that can give proven advice and help finding good literary agents for science fiction writers.

As an ex-agent, Nathan Bransford has an interesting perspective on the publishing community and what literary agents are looking for in a query letter and a book.

Chuck Sambuchino’s blog is a guide to literary agents and their blogs or articles with a focus on new agents with less on their plates who are more open to new writers than some of the ones in the business that already have a lot of clients to keep up with.

SFWA is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website and an excellent resource for and science fiction or fantasy writer. This is an article on the pros and cons of literary agents as well as how to choose a good one that will actually do the work needed to make your novel a success.

WEBook is a writing community and this article is a list of a few agents looking for science fiction and fantasy writers.