Agents specialising in literary historical fiction ... help!

QueryTracker is a good place to start. You can search agents who rep historical fiction and literary fiction and read their bios to see who might be a good fit. What is the word count on your MS?

How long is it? What qualities make it literary?

I agree with Lauram about querytracker. My other thought is to look up who represents recently-published novels that are like yours.

A quick search on Agentquery.com for historical fiction throws up 254 agents. Some of these will share agencies of course, but I think there should be enough to keep the OP busy for a while.

There are strong commercial reasons most books are the length they are and books which are much longer or shorter than the established length are only going to get published if they're exceptionally good, or they come from an exceptionally successful writer. If your book doesn't fit within the norms you might well be wasting your time, I'm afraid, no matter how many agents you query.

How long is your book? Are we talking 10k over the usual length? Or 50k? Or more?

573,000?

An average novel has about 350 words per page. Your word count equates to a 1600+ page book. In all reality, that is a deal breaker. GRRM, Diana Gabaldon, long writers both, top out around 800. Yours is double that. Unfortunately, I think you're going to have to do some hard thinking about wrestling your book into trimmer shape.

SimoneZE said:

I guess from your jaw-dropping reaction that you can't really help me. But thanks anyway.

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Brutal truth? At that length, I'm not sure anyone will be able to help you.

I suspect that word count will scare most, if not all, agents off. If I were you, I'd think long and hard about whether you can break it up into a series. There's a chance no one will ever look at it because of the word count, regardless of how awesome the story is.

A bit over is one thing, 573k is a whole other kettle of fish.

eta: As for not knowing whether the MS is good or not, has anyone (not an agent or an immediate relative) ever read it?

Simone, that is a lot of words. Too many, I'm afraid. And did that one agent actually encourage you to keep submitting at that word-count, or did he say he thought there was potential? There is a difference. I agree that pretty much the only chance you have is breaking up those 500k words. That's going to be a big, daunting task. Ideally, that is four or five books worth of material. My thoughts: write up an outline of what you have, with salient plot points and word count. (I might use an Excel spreadsheet because it can do math for you.) At every 100k words or so, take a look, and try to find a way to tie off the story there, or somewhere near. This may mean shifting a subplot from one part of the story to another, or ending on a "cliffhanger". Another thing I've found that helps me is writing down plot points on slips of paper and shifting them around until they make sense. These are just methods I use when looking at a story in its entirety.

In any case, good luck with this ms!

I agree with what's been said about the word count. Even someone like Sharon Penman isn't publishing books that long. I think you have two options: try to split it up into a series or write something else. Well, or self-publish. Everything I've seen is that a first-time historical novel should be between 90k and 130k. I've gone one I've never queried because it's 150k and I know it's too long (it has other problems as well). I don't think you'd get anyone to publish it at that word count, but if you write something else as a debut novel that is successful, you might get a bit more leeway on a second novel or series.

It's an incredibly tough market out there. I'm afraid that you're unlikely to find any agent who is able to take on your word count, unfortunately.

Has anyone read any of it besides the one agent? It might help to find a critique group or something. Get someone to read maybe the first 25-50k and give you general impressions.

You're not going to get anything but rejections at that length; I'm sorry. It's not close to somewhat overlong. If you were at 150,000, people would be warning you that you'd receive automatic rejections and should cut. At the length you've got, it's simply not feasible. An agent has to be able to sell a book -- a publisher has to be able to make money off a book. You're like, outpacing David Foster Wallace over there.

That's literally five books worth of words, not two, and if you can break it into five, the first one has to stand alone to sell. It can't be a cliffhanger that's only resolved four books down the road.

We're not trying to be discouraging or harsh here, we're trying to save you the angst of submitting this forever and not getting anyplace. If you can take stuff out of what you've got to make what might to you, heh, be a mini-version, that'd clock in at a normal wc, that might be a solution. If you try a different avenue, using a character to try a whole new novel, or writing something entirely new as a thing to do and then coming back to this with fresh eyes, those might help too.

I wouldn't keep querying what you've got though. There's honestly no point at all, and that way lies madness.

SimoneZE said:

If I can't split it up, that's my next best option by the look of things.

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I just want to caution that I don't think your manuscript is publishable at its current length, no matter what. George R. R. Martin had to split the fourth book in his Song of Ice and Fire series into two (and even those were door-stoppers) because paper books simply cannot physically contain that many words. If you have a different debut that does well, you might be able to convince a publisher to let you split yours into two or three books, rather than four or five, but you're still going to have to make a split. You *might* be able to publish this digitally as an e-book no problem. I've taken to buying the longer books (like THE LUMINARIES) on Kindle because lugging around an eight hundred page novel is how I end up needing shoulder surgery again. But that would limit the markets you can reach, etc.

cornflake said:

We're not trying to be discouraging or harsh here, we're trying to save you the angst of submitting this forever and not getting anyplace.

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I want to echo this. We're not trying to kill your dreams. It's the opposite. We want to help you reach your dreams. I know it's hard to hear all of this. I know it's frustrating. I've gone through periods myself where my disillusionment or frustration with the publishing industry has sapped my creativity. So I understand. It was very hard to me to finish the 150k manuscript I wrote because I knew it simply wasn't possible to pursue as a debut novel. Now it's sitting on my hard drive awaiting another life down the road someday.

So please don't get frustrated and give up.

SimoneZE said:

Yes, this agent told me to submit as it stands and to many agents concurrently. He was very encouraging in his words, actually. Gave me quite a bit of feedback. But of course, he did say that the length is challenging.

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I think that you either misunderstood what he told you, or he wasn't a good agent. Would you be willing to share with me the full text of his message to you? In confidence, of course. I am intrigued to know who he is. If he did tell you to submit it as it stands then he's giving you extremely bad advice, I'm afraid.

At 573,000 words your book contains enough words to fill more than seven novels. There is no way it could be published as it is, in one volume. It's not likely to be able to be published as two volumes, or three or four.

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

Several people have asked if anyone other than the agent has read it. That you haven't answered suggests that no one has. I would hand the ms to several readers who could help you take the book apart and remake it as several books. Or you could find a good private editor to help you do that (but that option costs).

Alternately, you could self-publish (as said upstream), though it should still be edited.

We all really do want you to succeed.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

Little bit of a different idea: rework/revise the MS.

I'm someone who sometimes writes a bit long sometimes, too. I don't even think there's anything wrong with it--sometimes you need those words, they're there, readers just shouldn't see them in the final draft, if you know what I mean.

Any story can be revised. No book has just one *perfect* plot. The nature of plots and story arcs is that you can dig into them and shift them around. Tighter--and consequently shorter--is usually better than having the exact causality and set-up you need.

Again speaking as someone who's gone long before, you don't get to 573,000 words without some problems in the writing and story construction. It might seem perfect now but you can probably fix it. Have you had a beta reader? You can't post in SYW yet, but when you get your 50 posts here, put up a chapter or two. People will tell you if it's all set-up, if you're continuously overdescribing, or not controlling the pacing well. All of those things can be revised, but when they're there it's not hard to get to a whopping word count like that.

I'd really second mayqueen's advice to outline the story either in whatever format works. One good method I've used for dealing with structural issues is to write the three biggest story events on index cards and then stick them to my wall. Then I fit other events in around them, but only as many as I need. You'll start to see places you can skip the stuff that happens in-between plot points. The idea here isn't necessarily to split the book into four or five, though you may see some good spots to do that, too. It's too look at your own work analytically, and develop the self-awareness to recognize where it's working and where it isn't.

Yeah, writing is creative and pleasurable. Revising isn't. It's the work. It's also, IMO, where the actual magic happens--not some mythical Twilight Zone of the Pen in our subconscious. Revision is where writers show skill. It's where we can craft something for the reader. It's an important step towards publication, because publishing is writing for the reading public. Yes, it's our story. But we have to make it into something engaging to read.

Hope this helps.

VeryBigBeard said:

Yeah, writing is creative and pleasurable. Revising isn't. It's the work. It's also, IMO, where the actual magic happens--not some mythical Twilight Zone of the Pen in our subconscious. Revision is where writers show skill. It's where we can craft something for the reader. It's an important step towards publication, because publishing is writing for the reading public. Yes, it's our story. But we have to make it into something engaging to read.

.

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I'm going to second this, and add that you might well have a lovely piece in there - it's just obscured by the hugeness. Can you identify which character's narrative thread is strongest for your theme? If you isolate that, you should have a clearer idea of what to work on and what to let go.

Also - you've probably done the major part of the work now. Don't despair. It may just be that you've written everything down, and not been rigorous enough about focusing. (Probably. Extrapolating, because that's how I work - though I'm always under-word-count, not over).

Well done having finished this stage, anyway! And revising - re-visioning - can really be magic

I love revising. I find it so rewarding seeing something clean and hard and true emerging from the waffle and confusion. Odd how we are all so different, eh?

I would strongly advise against hiring an editor. There's so much be learned first from places like SYW here and from critiquing and being critiqued in a writing group or with a writing partner.