Pitching your novel to an agent

We realise that having poured hours, days and weeks of creative effort into crafting your manuscript, the process of submitting it to an agent can seem daunting. So we thought we’d offer some tips from an agent’s perspective that should hopefully help you to connect with the perfect agent.

For fiction, both adult’s and children’s, the most important thing to communicate is a strong and original concept. An agent is likely receiving half a dozen submissions every day, and what will make your submission stand out is if you can express the strongest selling points of your book in as few sentences as possible. What everyone in this business likes to call the ‘hook.’ This is also important because when an agent takes you on, they will have to do exactly the same thing to get an editor’s attention. So an awareness of the market you’re hoping to publish into and what will make a reader pick your book up over others in a huge plus.

If your book isn’t particularly plot-driven and can’t be neatly summarised in a pithy one-liner, you can still communicate its strengths quickly and effectively in a few sentences. Its strength and originality might instead be in the writing, so compare it to authors who successfully rely on voice and style over plot. Or it might be in your perspective as the writer – maybe you are in a unique position to tell this particular story, so tell us that.

It’s also important to include your relevant writing experience. Any courses you’ve completed or work you’ve had published gives us a sense of where you’re at in your career, and how much you’ve honed your craft. And it always helps to do a bit of research on the agent and agency you are submitting to. You should be able to see from their current roster of authors if your book is going to appeal to their taste, and they usually say on their website what kind of writers they are looking for.

The other important things to display in an initial submission email, I think, are professionalism and brevity. Ultimately your chapter samples are going to be the deal breaker, so get the agent’s attention and then let your writing speak for itself.