Gimme a Break: Join the Club

[cupiscent]

Are Literary Agents the same or do they enter somewhere above the ground floor? I mean, contacts are the name of the game, do they have more contacts than I do, starting off?

This depends a lot on the history of the agent in question and the style of the agency. A lot of agents I see who are "new" have been at the agency for years working as an assistant to an established agent (which I imagine being a lot like a mentorship) and are now working to establish their own list of clients. When I see a newer agent, I dig into history like that (it's often in their website bios, or if you google you see that they were an assistant at another agency, or worked in another area, like foreign rights - the Absolute Write water cooler is a great place to find history as well). I also look to see how established the agency is in that genre - whether senior agents also rep it - because I assume there will be a certain degree of contact-sharing. (It's in the interests of the agency as a whole to have lots of successful authors on their books.) So I'd probably only be nervous if a new agent was the only one at their agency who repped anything like my genre.

The flipside to that is of course that new agents are more likely to be taking on new clients. They also often have much quicker turn-arounds, but not always, so checking QueryTracker is always a good idea.

Like TAS says, it's worth a try. If you get to phonecall / offer of rep stage, you can always ask questions about where the agent might try your work, what other sales they've made, what contacts they'll be making use of.

 

[Caged Maiden]

wow, all good info! I never thought past the query phase, really, since that's where I am now. It might behoove me to think ahead even further. I feel rather like getting a full request is my next goal, I haven't even thought about what would happen if someone actually liked my manuscript.