Best AGent for Memoirs?

Welcome to the forum.

The best short advice for finding a good agent is this: Go to bookstores. (Do not do this step online.) Look at books like yours. Find out who agented them. Research those agents. When you have a list of good, reputable, effective agents who represent your type of work, start querying.

These are good places to start learning more about agents:
On the getting of agents
Everything you wanted to know about agents
The Safest Way to Search for an Agent
Researching an Agent's Track Record
Writer Beware Blogs
Preditors and Editors
Miss Snark
Also see the Bewares and Background Check board here on AW.

Thank you aconite - great articles. I will bookmark this page

where are the agent names listed on books?

http://aaronline.org/Find

Put "memoir" in search and you'll have a long list

sense said:

where are the agent names listed on books?

Click to expand...

Sat Nam! (Literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

In the acknowledgements.

You can also go to querytracker.com, which has a list of who agents which authors.

The best website I've found, though, is agentquery.com. Try a full search for memoir, and you'll get lots of listings. You can also do a full search for memoir + something else, if your memoir bridges genres or if you work in several genres. (Most of us who write memoirs write other things too.) You can then check at preditors and editors, etc, to see who has the best rep.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

I tried the bookstore thing and only found one author who thanked her agent out of the 20 or 30 books I looked at. Maybe I was looking at the wrong books, but how does one know which books will list the agent?

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

What really works better than going into the acknowledgements is going into

a) agentquery.com and doing a full search for agents who handle memoir. You can refine it by searching at the same time for agents who handle whatever other genre your memoir touches. (I'm guessing health & fitness in your case.)

b) You can also go into querytracker.com and hunt for agents who handle memoir, then check to see who their clients are. querytracker has links to Amazon for the listed clients (nowhere near all the clients an agent has, though, so take it with some salt), so you can look at the books online.

c) You can also go into Writers Digest. There's a blog about agents.

d) aar-online.org also has lists of agents, though many of these are no longer taking on new clients.

Oh, and one little trick: you can google writers conferences, look them up and check the bios of the agents.

Good luck!

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal