Agent database search could be helpful
I recently made some discoveries on how you can search for agents you might not find otherwise using database searches, and I thought I'd share the methods here.
For some time I'd been querying agents listed in my genre in Writers Market and was getting a once-in-a-while request to see a partial. And then I got one rejection from an agent I'd found with the
ManuScript WishList thing on Twitter. She said, "I think this is for the Christian market, and we don't really do that," which then led to the question, how do I figure out who is in the Christian market? Because if you do a search on "religious" on Writers Market or Publishers Marketplace, you find an awful lot of agents who sell books about Tantric breathing exercises, and others who do commentary on Scripture. (Not knocking that, but it's a mismatch.)
Ok, so that was my dilemma, but it doesn't just apply to the Christian market, but it's a question that anyone could ask, that is, "What agents and publishers are involved in books similar to my manuscript?" And recently I was tooling around in Publishers Marketplace and found the following methods to be helpful.
First, I knew of a few publishers that I hoped might take my book, and I found that I could do a search on the deals that publisher had done. From the Publishers Marketplace main page, on the left list bar, I clicked on "dealmakers" and then went to the upper right corner of the screen where there was "search dealmakers." I typed in the first big publisher's name (or imprint), and up came a page with a list of all the books they'd bought in the past 12 months. I then clicked on "overall" to get all the deals since 2004, and then I could scroll through the deals, finding summaries of books that were 2-3 sentences long, which usually ended with the
name of the agent. I then typed all of those names in to a spreadsheet.
Second, I wanted to find other publishers that I didn't know about in that genre, so I started from the main page, clicked "dealmakers," then in the middle upper left corner, the section called "browse top agents," where under "dealmaker type" I selected "imprints," and under "deals category," I selected my genre, "non-fiction: religion/spirituality." And then that brought up a list of top religion/spirituality publishers. I could then click on each publisher and scroll through the deals to see if they ever printed books like mine and for the ones that did, I grabbed the
agent name from the end of the summary. I put all of them in to the spreadsheet.
Third, Publisher's Marketplace allows you to search agents by genre, which wasn't as helpful to me because I'm sort of stuck in between two categories with Christian memoir. But I was still able to find a few names this way. From the main page, I clicked on "dealmakers," then "browse top dealmakers." Under dealmaker type, I said "agent" this time, and under deals category I said, "non-fiction:religion/spirituality," which brought up a list of the top 100 agents in that category, and then I did the same thing but changed the deals category to "non-fiction:memoir" and got the top 100 agents in that category. And I was able to find a few more people who sold titles in those categories.
So what this got me was a list of 130 agents who rep books related to mine, only 19 of whom I'd previously queried. This made me quite happy as I was thinking I'd already annoyed all the fish in the sea. Now, I'm sure as I actually check each agent's Web site, I'll find that a number of them have retired, switched agencies, closed to new queries, etc., but I was very glad to see that there are some new possibilities for my manuscript, and I can target agents more precisely.
A couple of limitations of this method: One, it's heavily biased towards quantity. There are some hyper-efficient agents out there (in my genre's case, Chip MacGregor and Greg Johnson) who seem to be everyone's favorite rep, so it won't tell you who might be willing to take on an obscure author such as yourself. Also this doesn't tell you anything about how successful a particular book was, and you find the perfect agent who repped a book just like yours, and then she writes back and says "meh. The last one was a stinker."
So I hope you found this interesting. I don't know how effective it will be as I'm still just slogging along with no agent right now myself, but there you go.
