Agent Me An Agent, Please

I wish I could hire an agent to find me an agent.  This part is a pain in the ass.

I've taken the advice of more than one article telling me to research books like mine and query the agents that represented them.  That's great and all, but I did that and was only able to query two agents.  Some books didn't say who represented them and others acknowledged agents that I couldn't find or that were closed for submissions.  Today I found a listing for agents that say they represent fiction and I went to their websites to query them.  Of that giant list, only a half-dozen agents even consider fiction and many of them explicitly don't represent science fiction or fantasy.

I started to ask myself, "How do these books even get on the shelf?" There's certainly no shortage of them every year.  I mean, seriously, the sci-fi section at Fred Meyer is huge.  Of course the romance section is twice the size.

I finally whittled down that group of agents to those that accepted fantasy and said that they were interested in urban fantasy.  A total of three agents that will likely reject my submission.  In all, I've queried five agents and will have to wait six to twelve weeks for their responses.  Not a typo.  Six to twelve.  And they'll only respond if they're interested.  Seriously, how do people do this?