Wherefore Art Thou Query Letter

Lately I've been doing the extra legwork of finding an agent.  It's hard to get started too early on this end of fiction writing (this being the marketing end, the end I hate) because there's a lot of work to be done.  Ultimately, this is the first gateway to a world of success and possibility.  Your first sell as a novelist is usually your hardest one.  You have to get out there and say, "Hey! Jaded-ass-editor person who reads pile after pile of shitty manuscripts on a daily basis.  Yeah, it's me down here, Chumbo NewAuthor.  I think you'd really like my book."

Lately, I've been putting together a list of agents that I'm going to send queries to.  The last thing you want to do here is shotgun a bunch of manuscripts at agents that you find on a database.  Everyone hates that.  Instead, they like you to do a little research and find out what books they've represented in the past.  Then send them that sort of book.  This one is much easier to do the other way around.  Confused?  Good.

You've written a book about an eccentric college professor who falls in love with an alien from another dimension who only communicates in cheeseburgers.  You call it Cheeseburger Out of This World of Love.  It's a masterpiece.  Here's how you get an agent for it: find another book that falls very closely into this same category.  Might be tricky with Cheeseburger Out of This World of Love but you manage it.  You find a book about an archeologist who falls in love with a magic dinosaur fossil that comes to life and wants to be a gourmet, Italian chef.  It's called Jurassic Meatball of Love.  Now that you've got this book, which is pretty similar to yours (and that isn't a bad thing in this industry) you open it to the acknowledgements.  Sure enough this author, Dutchess Esmerelda De Allistair, has credited her agent in the front, one Chumbo McWeatherbottom.  You Google Chumbo and find his agency along with his contact information.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Finding more books like yours and the agents who represented them isn't that hard.  It just takes a little extra work and the agents you query will usually really appreciate it.  The tricky part, at least for me, is writing a query letter.  This is my next labor that I must meditate on.