When in 2011 I was on the hunt for a literary agent to represent my memoir, I clicked on too many agency Web sites to tally, scanned the AAR (Association of Authors’ Representatives) site every week, and asked friends who’d authored books how they’d met their agents.
I pored over ASJA’s agent-penned questions-and-answers, sifting through many back issues of ASJA Monthly. At the 2012 conference, I pitched three agents in person, all of whom listened politely but then told me that memoir was too hard a sell for them to take me on.
How on earth, I thought, might I get inside the head of a literary agent? How can I get to know his or her tastes and personalities, to see if we might fit as colleagues or my book might fit his or her list?
The answer was a tweet away.
Hundreds of agents use Twitter to tout sales, publicize the kinds of books they seek, and share the rudest replies they’ve gotten from those whom they have rejected.
I followed one, @LaurieAbkemeier. I liked her voice right away, and, reading back over her tweets, I developed a feel for not only what she wanted in a query but also what aspects of the publishing business she was following closely.
In following @RachelleGardner, @SaraMegibow and @jawlitagent, I started to realize that literary agents aren’t just huddled in one block in Manhattan. They’re not only all over the world, they’re all in my phone.
In the press and among colleagues I’d been consuming a steady diet of doom and gloom about the prospect of selling my book, and yet here in the Twitterverse was this thriving underworld of book sales, success and free advice.
In Twitter I made a list of agents to follow. Each time I felt I’d absorbed something of an agent’s style, I’d query him or her (making sure first that the agent represented my genre). Not everyone replied, but most did, some with a form rejection, some with some personal notes of encouragement. Laurie Abkemeier, that first agent I’d followed, sent me a lovely rejection – not an oxymoron – and encouraged me to keep at it.
When @FairbankLit signed me in March 2012, and I tweeted the news, Abkemeier and other agents I’d first gotten acquainted with on Twitter tweeted me their congratulations. Which is why I still follow them, and why I believe there is no better way to follow agency and publishing news and trends than by logging into Twitter.