If you're looking for a literary agent, vague, poorly
targeted submissions can waste you precious time and lead to soul-destroying
rejections. You can of course trawl through the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, but these days we are all more
geared up for online searches, so the AgentHunter website (www.agenthunter.co.uk) is the perfect
solution.
They list every agent and agency in the UK for fiction,
non-fiction and children’s writing and give quick, well-informed overviews.
They also feature useful biographies of agents and specify their all-important
literary preferences. For many, you get a further insight from a detailed
interview.
You begin your search by specifying genre (e.g. women’s, crime,
literary fiction, thriller etc.), and then further refine it, for instance by
typing in key words that characterise your work, such as family drama, suspense mystery, dark psychological thriller. You
can filter agents according to the size of the agency, how open they are to
taking on new clients, how long they have been in the business and how active
they are on the festival scene and social media.
You then get a list of suitable agents that you can save –
and off you go on your round of submissions. You can later start new searches
by changing some of the criteria.
The site was perfect for me, especially when I showed the
submission material I had been sending to agents for my psychological thriller Unspeakable Things to my writing
group. To my great surprise, the group were
unanimous in the view that the novel isn’t a psychological thriller at all. We
settled on the descriptions ‘dark family suspense mystery’ instead. With
AgentHunter, I was able to remove the description ‘psychological thriller’ and
type in the new key words. This led to a shorter but hopefully more relevant
list of potentially interested agents.
AgentHunter have a variety of subscription options: £5 gets you access to the site for a month, £18 gets you
12 months and for £27 you also get a free cover letter and synopsis review (which
can be expensive if you go to a literary consultancy). The platinum
subscription, for £195, gives you 12 months plus a free query letter and
synopsis review and a professional editor’s review of your opening 5,000 words,
with detailed, constructive advice.
Anything that helps us writers to refine our
work or access professional help can cost a fortune, but AgentHunter seems to
be the exception, and is therefore well worth a go if you are ready to send your work out and want to go down the agent route. Good luck!
