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CHAPTERMore on Choosing an Agent
THE SEARCH AND HOW IT FEELS
IF YOU ARE A NEW AUTHOR, THE FIRST THING TO REALIZE AS
you search for the right agent is that you probably feel anxious. Oh,
there may be good moments—moments when you feel confident
that your work is at least as good as anything out there.
Then there are the bad moments when you remember what
you've heard about the odds, slush piles, agents. Maybe you have
heard that it is easier to get a contract than to get an agent. Or that
without an agent no decent publisher will read your work.
The truth, here, is that you have a choice of agents. You may not
feel like that, but you do. Understanding it, believing it, is your first
challenge. To help you, here are three common feelings that block
the empowerment I am talking about:
Okay, just one more rewrite and it will be perfect. A reluctance to let
one's novel go is a common experience. The problem is that it is so
easy to rationalize rewrites: most novels probably could use another
rewrite... and another... and another. ...
Where does it end? That can be difficult to decide, but end it
must—sometime. Now a whole bunch of fears arise. Chief among
these may be the horrible feeling that you have missed something,
that there is one more change that must be made—a change that
will mean glorious acceptance instead of humiliating rejection.
Authors with manuscripts on submission are forever sending me
replacement pages, chapters, and even whole new manuscripts.