Submission Basics

How to research and track agent and editor submissions

Monday is writing craft day here at the Wells Writing Workshop. For the month of June, I’m covering some basics for fiction writers. These are essays on topics that can get overlooked by experienced writers who forget that when you’re first starting out you don’t know best practices for basic things.

Image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay.

Today’s topic is submission tracking.

If you want to get your novel, novella or short story represented by an agent or published by a publisher or magazine, you’re going to have to go through the submission stage.

Yes, you always risk rejection when you submit and that can be pretty painful, but it can also be an enormously useful exercise in your development as a pro. Why? It teaches perseverance and desensitizes you to the sting of rejection/critique. When you get published, you’ll be constantly faced with other people’s opinions of your work and, trust me, an agent or editor will seem like a sweet baby lamb compared to the anonymous commenters on Goodreads.

I’m focusing on novels today because I know them best. If you’re selling short fiction, the process is different. But the first thing you should do is subscribe to Duotrope (it’s $5 a month). If you want more insight into short story submissions, I can address it in a later post. But on to today’s focus:

NOVELS

These days, if you want to get published by a big publisher in New York (we call them the Big Five in the industry) you’re going to need an agent. Most editors at big houses won’t accepted unagented manuscripts unless they specifically invite you to submit following an in-person pitch session.

Couple of tips:

-Don’t submit a pitch submission for an unfinished novel as a new writer. They only want completed manuscripts. This shows you can actually finish a book. It also allows them to see how well you finish a book.

-Don’t try to be a hero here. Follow the agency’s submission guidelines, which will be posted in their web site. Professionals respect the process and don’t waste busy agents’ time by being clever. Yes, we’ve all heard stories about someone who did something unique. The vast majority of pro writers got their agents through the traditional query route.

-Even if you plan to self-publish, you should still know the big agents who work with self-pub or hybrid authors. They’re helpful for foreign rights, movie and TV deals, audiobook rights, etc. Some can even help you self-publish so you can focus on writing (often for a percentage of sales, so tread carefully).

Best Places to Find Agents to Submit To:

-QueryTracker: This database allows you to search for agents who represent your genre or subgenre. It includes contact info, submission preferences (always double check these on the agent’s site though), and other info. It’s a good starting point for creating your initial list.

-Absolute Writer Watercooler: This is a board where people discuss agents and editors they’ve worked with or submitted to. It’s a good stop on your research journey. One negative story doesn’t mean they’re a bad agent or editor, but this information should be considered when you’re paring down your list.

-Publisher’s Marketplace: This is next level because you have to pay for a subscription, but this site is the clearinghouse for information about book deals. I often get a subscription for a month or two when I’m looking for an agent or need to research editors. Then I just cancel it when I’m not on submission anymore.

How’s your subgenre selling right now? It’s there. Want to know which editors or publishers your target agents have sold to in the last year? It’s probably there. Note: If your target agent doesn’t have any reported sales it might be a red flag. It’s possible they don’t report deals to PM, but that could also be a sign of trouble.

This site is also helpful once you land an agent and you’re brainstorming target houses and editors with them. You can see what they’ve been buying. And BTW, yes, you should discuss who the agent will be submitting to—you’re business partners.

-Twitter. Okay look, I’m old. I first got published when paper queries were still a thing (they were dying out though). I don’t know a lot about the pitch periods on Twitter, but I do know that following the agents you’re targeting to get a feel for their outlook is a good idea. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and they’ll post manuscript wish lists or tips about how to best approach them in a query. You can also see if you share common interests—like favorite books—or if their vibe will or won’t gel with yours.

What Now:

So you have a list of prospective agents. You’ve researched them. You might have crossed some names off the list or added a couple. You might even have a sense of who your top three dream agents might be. Once you start submitting this list will continue to expand as you get rejections and/or discover new agents/editors to approach. This is why it’s important to keep good notes (see below).

So you have a list. Now you write a query letter. This is a whole other series of posts to cover, so I’ll send you to some people who have discussed best practices for queries.

Jane Friedman: Jane is a great resource for learning almost anything about publishing, including self-publishing and marketing. She also has a great post on query basics, which is what I’ve linked to.

Nathan Bransford. This agent’s blog is a treasure trove of posts about working with agents and navigating publishing’s murky waters.

GalleyCat. This blog has a list of pitch letters that worked organized by genre.

Once you’ve written, edited, polished, gotten beta reads on, and reedited your query letter, you need to create a submission tracking system.

You can use Excel or Google Sheets for this. Or anything that you’re comfortable with, but you definitely need to keep a record because things start to get confusing quick once you’ve got multiple submissions out to different agents/editors.

Below is the Excel file from the first book I ever submitted for publication. This was a humorous paranormal romance that I eventually ended up self-publishing. Obviously, I’ve redacted names of agents and editors. The pink highlight indicated queries that were still out. The “what sent” column keeps track of which sort of materials they prefer on initial contact. You’ll see there’s some disparity, this is why you need to do your research. Back when I did this, I was still sending out a lot of paper queries. but as you can see e-queries were becoming more popular. Nowadays, it’s mostly e-queries, but the agent’s preference for what and how to include materials differ.

I have one of these for every novel I’ve queried. I didn’t sell to NY until my third book, so by then I had a pretty good record of which agents were responsive to my work (via personalize rejections or invitations to submit more projects). Some never got queried again because they never responded or something about their response rubbed me wrong or I learned more about them from fellow writers.

These documents are also important because it helps you track how your work is being received. With this book, I got a lot of form rejections. The second book I queried, got fewer form rejections and more requests for partial or full manuscripts. That was proof I was improving. By the third manuscript, Red-Headed Stepchild, I got mostly requests for more until I finally signed with my first agent.

It’s helpful to keep good notes. This is a living document. In addition to all of the things I’ve already listed, this document also helps you get to know the players in your corner of publishing. Which agents are hot, which ones are sketchy, which ones are known for specific genres. You want to work with someone who knows the market for what you’re writing, so this is pretty important info to know.

Wow, this post ended up being longer than I anticipated and we’ve only just scratched the surface. The two things I hope you’ll take away from this post are: to do your research and keep good notes.

Good luck and happy submitting, friends! If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to the newsletter so you never miss a post.

I’ll take your questions in the comments section.