Finding an Agent
Life’s significant moments need to stop colliding with such unrelenting regularity. Yesterday, Mia left Kinder behind. Today, Daisy and I finally received a long anticipated email regarding finding an agent.
Now that it’s here, it’s impossible to ignore the fact it could change our lives forever.
About three weeks ago, we sent out our first query letter. We sent it to a local agent in the hopes that he could represent some of our already finished children’s stories. We selected the agent with care, drafted our e-query, and hit send. We thought it would take somewhere between all week and all Summer to get a response in our new quest at finding an agent.
It didn’t.
Precisely ten minutes after I heard the woosh of the query leaving my laptop, I heard the ding of an incoming message.
It was from the agent, and he did not like our query.
To be more specific, the agent said the query gave him “shudders of horror,” and that, “it did not work at all.” I made the mistake of writing my query letter in rhyme, as though it were a children’s book; a deadly sin to an agent that I will never commit again.
We had decent luck in finding an agent, just not impressing him. Fortunately, the agent didn’t slam the door in our face. He said with a letter of recommendation from a previously published children’s author, he would accept our query. Daisy knows a wonderful author, Debbie Yamada, who spoke to her fourth grade class during Author’s Day the year before she left the classrom. Debbie has written a wonderful chapter book about the Chinese gold rush, called, Strike it Rich!
We contacted Debbie. We asked her if she would please look at our material and help us in finding an agent.
She did; she loved it; she agreed to write our letter.
Debbie’s letter is in my inbox. All that’s left to do is attach it to our already drafted query and send it to the gentleman who might one day be our agent.
I’ll keep you posted. Who knows? Maybe the task of finding an agent is only just beginning.
About Sean Platt
[...] The response was from the same agent we’d already sent a query once before; he of the, “shudders of horror” [...]