Monday's Mentionables: The Agent Search Begins

Yesterday I began my YA agent search and sent out about 8 email queries to agents in my "A" group (I have an "A" and a "B" group, for what it's worth - those who would be dream agents, and those who I'd still like to work with even though they might not be as perfect a fit). I'll admit, I did have a moment of thinking "Should I be sending queries at 8:00 pm on a Sunday night of a holiday weekend?" but then decided that agents who accept email queries are pretty open-minded about when those queries actually arrive in their in-box.

I focused my agent search in a few places: the forums at Absolute Write, because those people run the gamut from new author to published expert; AgentQuery, since it's a nice straight-forward compilation and you can search agents by keyword; and the latest issue of Writer's Digest, which listed 27 agents cuurently open to new authors (not all YA, of course, but there were quite a few who were). One thing I found interesting: on one agent's website (can't remember which one), she wrote that she was interested in any YA sub-genre EXCEPT those featuring vampires or zombies. Maybe the Twilight craze is finally dying down?

At this point, I'm sending out email queries only. I found it interesting that there are still quite a few agents (even well-known, well-established ones) who accept postal mail queries only. Seems like such a waste of trees and time, especially now in the 21st century.

So...I will keep you posted! Today I need to work on my synopsis for the book (hate writing those), since I skipped those agents last night who want synopses in the query. Blech. Sample pages, fine. Synopsis, yuck. But a couple of those agents are on my "A" list, so looks like I'll spent at least part of this holiday from school working on my summarizing skills.

Happy Monday!