Get a Literary Agent: The Complete Guide to Securing Representation for Your Work by Sambuchino Chuck

Author:Sambuchino, Chuck [Sambuchino, Chuck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2014-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

STARTING YOUR FIRST CHAPTER RIGHT

If an agent gets past your query and synopsis, she’ll read and consider your first pages or chapters. This is called “requesting a partial” and usually involves the agent asking for a sample of twenty-five to fifty double-spaced pages. Sometimes the agent asks you to paste your pages in the initial e-mail correspondence, and sometimes she asks for solely a query first, only to ask for first chapters after the query gets her attention. No matter how the process goes, the key hurdle you face when an agent is reading your first chapters is making sure she likes what she sees.

So it’s vital to start your story strong, but the stakes are even higher than you might imagine. Let me share a dirty little secret that no one likes to talk about: Much more often than not, agents are looking for any reason to reject you. This is sad and frustrating but true. It all comes back to the daily responsibilities of an agent: They’re so incredibly busy that they don’t have much time to review query letters from new writers. As a result, an agent is looking for any mistake, any flaw, any chink in the armor—a reason to say no and cut that pile of letters down by one.

Making the process even more difficult for writers these days is the dark side of the Internet. While the Web has allowed you the ease of submitting queries widely and quickly, that “good news” for you is bad news when you consider that everyone everywhere has that same ease and that agents’ slush piles are getting bigger and bigger every year.

You can’t control everything as you try to overcome agents’ trigger-happy tendency toward “no” and the growing competition of other writers, but you can certainly do your best not to fall into any of the three most common traps that cause an agent to stop reading and reject your work.

The book starts slow.

The book starts outside-in and not inside-out.

The book has an information dump.

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