Exploring Three Mistakes To Avoid When Approaching Literary Agents

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If you want to get a book published (regardless of whether you are wanting to publish a novel, a nonfiction book, a book of short stories, or just about anything else!), you will need to have a literary agent – but anyone who has ever gone through the process of trying to land a literary agent has found that this can sometimes be the most difficult obstacle of all in getting published! The biggest reason why so many people find it to be borderline impossible to land a literary agent is because they do not know the mistakes to avoid (the mistakes so many writers tend to make!), but when you take these steps, you can avoid these mistakes yourself.

Because landing an agent can sometimes take such a long time, a lot of writers think that they should “get the ball rolling early,” contacting literary agents before their work is complete; this is an absolute “No,” however – not only should you wait until your manuscript is completely written before approaching agents, but you should also wait until you have thoroughly edited it, so that it will be ready to send if an agent shows interest.

Learn more from the Complete Idiots Guide To Getting Published.

Another mistake many writers make is “trying to save time” by approaching a lot of agents at once – sending out a mass email, and/or addressing their emails as “Dear sir or madam”; take the time to approach each agent individually, and you will have a much greater chance of success.

Trying to be "cute" or "gimmicky" in your query letter to literary agents is always a bad idea; your goal should be to display good writing, and to get an agent to your sample pages as quickly as possible with an idea as to what the story is about – nothing more than this!

You would also be wise to study some of the more valuable resources online if you are serious about getting published; one such resource is Query Shark, which is one agent’s edits of query letters that have been sent to her, and the blog post The Biggest Mistakes Writers Make When Querying Agents, in which the poster emailed over fifty agents to get their response to this single question.