Pros and cons in the hunt for an agent.
Finding a literary agent can be a hell of a rollercoaster. This is especially true when it comes to the genre of fantasy. The main reason for that is because the genre of fantasy has so many sub-genres, and just because an agent is looking for fantasy, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're looking for the same type of fantasy that you'll find in The Stobrimore Chronicles. My novel series falls under a couple of categories. Given the element of the Worldgates, it qualifies as "Portal Fantasy". With the setting and storyline on the other side of the Worldgate, it qualifies as "High/Epic Fantasy."
It's surprising how many literary agents out there say that they're representing fantasy, but then they say that they're not the right choice if it's high/epic fantasy, involves dragons, elves, orcs or other non-human characters, is part of a series, if it involves parallel worlds or portals, if it has a "hero's journey", military, battles... you know. Pretty much everything that generally comes to mind when you hear the word "fantasy".
But, from time to time, you come across one of those select literary agents who has a wishlist or a client history that checks every box you're looking for, and you can't help but feel enthusiastic about them. I've found a couple of those agents, and as cynical as I have become after multiple rejections from the agents out there who have given vague descriptions of what they're looking for, only to respond with some equally vague form letter rejection, when I find one of those diamond agents among all of the coal, I can't help but feel like a bit of my faith in the process has been restored.
I feel a bit more enthusiastic when that agent requests multiple chapters or 30-50 pages, or some other far more reasonable amount of content to get a basic idea of the story, as opposed to those agents who, as I mentioned in my first "Adventures in the Journey to Publishing" post, request only 3-5 pages and then respond that they didn't connect with the sample pages enough. If feels like the agents who request a reasonable amount are more likely to give an author a fair shake.
Three such agents who restore my faith in the process a bit are agents like Matthew Bialer, of Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, Evan Gregory, of Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency, and Nina Leon, of Perez Literary & Entertainment. ( know what you're thinking. This is my attempt to try and suck up to them in hopes of tipping the scales in my favor, but the three agents I listed didn't request any links to websites or blogs, and I didn't volunteer them, so they wouldn't see this, anyway, until they decided to move forward. That and, given that, at the time of writing this, this is still a relatively newly created website, and the only people at this point who have a link to it are the 20-something literary agents who requested it, and based on the fact that the view count has not changed once, it's a pretty clear indicator none of them are actually looking at this site) Even if they ultimately end up rejecting my query (which I hope doesn't happen, but realize that it's a distinct possibility), the fact that they're far more clear about what they're looking for and they're willing to look at more than just a couple of pages give me a bit more hope.
The truth is, it's hard not to grow cynical in this business. When you get rejection after rejection (which is part of the process, I know), it becomes more and more difficult to not start thinking the worst about some of the literary agents or agencies out there. When they send a form letter rejection and don't even bother to sign it, ending it with just "sincerely", it doesn't really feel particularly sincere. When they tell you that the "publishing industry is subjective", even though the agent isn't a publisher or that "stories with dragons just don't appeal to me that much", or "I have to be wildly passionate about the projects I accept, and that happens so rarely", or they request only a few pages, and then come back with a rejection, having not read more than just those few pages, saying that they hope you consider querying them again for any future projects, you can't help but start to feel that the whole process is disingenuous or condescending.
But for every 10 - 20 (to 50) agents out there who seem about as invested as a 2 year old at a four hour long university lecture on historical methods of agriculture in pre-colonial Canada, there's that rare one out there who seems like they actually want to give an author a fair chance. So even in a sea of cynicism, there's still the occasional island of optimism.
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