For the past month or so, I have been working diligently on editing my young adult manuscript. I found a wonderful editor, who taught me a lot about what is important and what isn’t, pertaining to certain characters, as well as paying attention to detail. (I’m still horrible with comma usage).
I had cut a huge section out of one area which wasn’t really important to the story; sometimes, too much detail is just that, too much detail and it has to be cut. I then added more here and there to help strengthen certain areas. I also changed a character’s name after seeing it closely resembled another character’s name.
After deciding my manuscript was finally polished, I began to send out query letters to literary agents in hopes of finding someone to represent me and my work. This can either be hard, or easy. I have a book called, ‘A Guide to Literary Agents’. Over half of the book is nothing but agencies and agents. I started out with a few, checked out their websites, then checked out each agent’s bio, as well as their submission rules. It’s crucial to follow their submission guidelines.
Though I’ve received two rejections so far, I’m not letting that bring me down. It just tells me that there’s someone else out there, I just have to find them. Plus, it also tells me that someone actually read my query letter; some agencies receive over 100 query letters a day, so they don’t have time to read every one of them.
If you are in the same boat as I am, searching for a literary agent, I wish you the best of luck, and remember to stay positive.
Author Jennifer N. Adams 
Pingback: A Letter To a Literary Agent | Adult & Teen Fiction
Good-luck in your quest Jenn.
It will come soon, I promise.
Keep your pen busy!
Your friend & creative writer
Alex
Thank you Alex! 🙂
Good luck from me too!
Thank you! 🙂
Best of luck finding that agent, Jennifer! Just a word of warning, you may want to clean up your synopsis a little, you’re mixing your tenses every now and again. Pick one and stick to it (you’re switching between present and past tense in a few places). Personally, for a synopsis I’d choose the present tense. Try and be extremely critical of your own synopsis; don’t include anything that doesn’t absolutely need to be there to make someone else understand what your story is about. And have fun writing Book Two 🙂
Thank you so much for the advice! I’ll check it out and correct it. 🙂
Good luck, Jenn. I see it’s been several months since you posted this, so how goes the search? To be honest, I’m beginning to suspect that literary agents are like werewolves, vampires, and Bigfoot. You hear stories about them, but do they really exist? If all of my rejections were in paper format, I could wallpaper the inside of my house.
It has been awhile since I’ve been on here too lol! Thanks for the comment. I’ve actually added over 11k more words to my manuscript, crossing my fingers that that will do the trick. I’ve been told by a couple of publishers that they wouldn’t publish anything below 50K, so now I’m at a little over 54K. Good luck to you in all your writing endeavors.