How do I know my book’s genre?
Well, your book is either fiction or nonfiction. So let’s start there.
Fiction:
If it’s fiction, then there are about a dozen industry standard genres and one must describe your book. The good news is that your book can have more than one genre.
Keep in mind that most fiction falls under two umbrellas: literary fiction or commercial fiction. In other words, don’t narrow your genre search too much. You might miss out on possible agents.
Got a chicklit novel? Search chicklit, of course. But also search commercial fiction or even romance, depending on your novel's character development, plot, and love story (assuming there is one).
Got a dark criminal mystery? Try searching not only mystery, but also true crime and thriller/suspense.
It’s important not to over-define your book. It should have many marketing facets within a clearly defined genre. Exploit these facets and be sure to search every genre that might produce a proper agent match.
Still having trouble understanding the variations between women’s fiction and chicklit, or mystery versus suspense? Review our handy genre descriptions to help clarify things.
Nonfiction:
Non-fiction books are notorious for having overlapping genres. When you view the titles sold section of each agent’s profile, you will notice that many nonfiction books have multiple genres.
Each genre is self-explanatory, but rest assured that it’s okay to consider your book a multi-cultural-heath & fitness-cookbook. Or a true-story/adventure-travel-memoir. Or a humorous home/design and garden guide.
Again, consider every angle of your book and be sure to search agents on each angle.
When I search on a genre, the database picks up agents who do not represent that genre? Why does it do this?
The database is actually trying to be smarter than it needs to be. Say you search on “Narrative” Nonfiction and the database picks up tons of agents that don’t have narrative nonfiction listed in their profiles. What the database is telling you is that these agents have a few "Narrative" Nonfiction titles sold, and that’s why it’s pulling them up.
You should always review the titles sold by an agent, listed in their FULL PROFILES, as well as the GENRE REPRESENTS in their SNAP SHOT profiles in order to understand exactly what type of books any given agent might be interested in representing.
How do I find all the agents in a single agency?
The best way to find all the agents in an agency is to do a quick search of the agency name. This quick search will bring up all agents currently employed by this agency.
However, the database will also bring up former agents who used to work at this agency as well. So be sure to note each agent’s affiliation with a given company.
An agency address in your database is different than one that I found elsewhere on the web. How do I know which address is the right one?
We are right, always. Okay—maybe not, always, but darn close. And to avoid confusion and needless competition with old cyber information still floating out there, we list any old addresses in each agent’s profile under the previous agency section.
If you find an agency address elsewhere on the web and it matches an old address listed in our database, you can sleep better at night, knowing that we trumped our competition, yet again, and provided the most accurate information.
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