I'm querying literary agents. Any advice? What am I in for?

>>9116354
Success

>>9116354
Never mind maneuvers, just always go straight at them.

>>9116354
Read Miss Snark, and visit Evil Editor. Seriously. They have everything you could ever want to know about the process.

>>9116354

>what am I in for

Rejection. Plenty of it.

>Any advice

Be thick skinned. Don't take it personally, and take feedback on board on the few occasions it's given.

>>9117648
>They have everything you could ever want to know about the process.

Eh, not really, but it's good beginner advice.

Agents are people, they all have different tastes, a query letter to one can be the worst they ever read, to another it can be the best.

A good query, by the way, doesn't necessarily mean you'll get published, and a bad query doesn't mean you won't.

It's all pretty simple, just stick to what you do best, do it well, and hope it reaches the right person.

It should go without saying to avoid the common query trendy formats you see other losers using like:

>Things (main character) never thought he'd do today:
1.
2.
3.
blah fucking blah blah...

Read the agent's individual profile, then their submission guidelines. Tailor your submission to both. If the agent wants 'strong narrative driven stories' then play to that strength. If you don't think your story has that quality, reconsider who within that agency you submit to. And if they ask for your ms in Arial size 12 double spaced, do exactly as they ask. You don't want to risk going in the trash before your material is even seen.

>>9117712
what the hell does

>strong narrative driven stories

even mean?

That's the problem I have with a lot of agents is they put vague terms like that for what they're looking for.

>>9117738
it can be more useful to just look at the list of books a particular agent has actually published in the last couple of years.

Happens all the time that they say they want xxx, and hate genre fiction or whatever, but then you look at their book list and see they've published 100% romance novels for the last three years.

No surprise, agents are full of shit.

>>9117738

It means nothing. It was a vague example of what you might expect to see. Other such nebulous terms include 'strong voice', 'gripping plot', 'page turner'. Just throw their own vague term back at them to show you bothered to read their profile before submitting. They'll appreciate that you took the time to do it; surprisingly a lot of people fuck up even here. Imagine being an agent and getting a bcc'd submission that doesn't play to their criteria. Into the fucking garbage it goes.

>>9117759
>It was a vague example of what you might expect to see

No...I've seen that exact wording in a LOT of agent's profiles.

>Imagine being an agent and getting a bcc'd submission that doesn't play to their criteria.

Well how can you be surprised when you're so vague about what you're looking for?

>>9117771

Well, nobody said they're competent, but they're agents, they still make the rules.

It's like any profession, at any given time only about 5-10% of people doing the job are actually good at it and really understand what they're doing.

The problem with publishing is you generally have to have some pretty big writing creds already to get one of those agents, meanwhile you have to goof around with these clowns until you get to that level.

>>9117738
It's the just barely functioning version of:

"we don't want 20something mumblecore in which pages pass and nothing happens; in which pages are spent trying to describe an inner mental state that adults can convey in five words; in which there is no conflict, or the conflict is imaginary, or the conflict is a cliche already done several hundred times and better, where the conflict is trivial, where the conflict is a transparent political screed; in which there is no plot, or no characters, or no settings, or anything that excuses itself with the word "experimental."

which covers about 99% of the average slush pile.