Help for Those in the Querying Trenches

Photo of the book The Modern Guide to Querying LIterary Agents on a somewhat messy desk.

I was recently given a copy of The Modern Guide to Querying Literary Agents by Alyssa Matesic and Patrick McDonald to review. As I am currently unagented and working through some revisions on a novel and since the only agents sending me emails are clearly scammers, I though it wouldn’t be a bad idea to see if this old dog couldn’t learn a new trick or two.

I should point out the first time I ever queried literary agents, it was by snail mail. So, that bit about being an old dog is not just a clever turn of phrase. (For the non-authors among my readers querying is the process by which an author attempts to get a literary agent to represent their work and is done by sending them correspondence that basically says hey, I’ve written this really awesome book and I’d love for you to help me sell it. As for why authors would want a literary agent . . . well, it’s pretty much the only way to get a major publisher to even consider publishing your book.) These days pretty much every agent in existence deals exclusively in electronic queries, though as The Modern Guide to Literary Agents points out, just what method of e-querying is preferred varies from agent to agent. The one co-author of the book, Patrick McDonald, is the found of Query Manager – a website that didn’t exist the last time I was looking for an agent, but which is now a site that a LOT of literary agents use for receiving queries. So, yeah, it a whole different ballgame.

Although there is information online about querying agents (information that’s getting increasingly more difficult to find thanks to AI slop, but I digress) and chapters on the querying process in other books, it’s nice to have an entire book devoted to what goes into landing a literary agent, with up to date information.

As one would expect there’s easy to follow step by step instructions for crafting queries along with some helpful examples. However, what I appreciated even more were the insights from authors and literary agents to give writers a good idea of what to expect at different points along the querying process. These survey responses are compiled into handy graphs at the back of the book to give writers a nice overview of things like how long they should expect to wait for a response or the reasons an agent offers to represent an author.

Well, in a short while I will likely be putting some of the advice in this book into practice as I prepare to dive back into the querying trenches. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

—Alissa