Speaker 1: Hey everybody, I am John Bard, Managing Editor of Children's Book Insider, the newsletter for children's writers, and Fightin' Bookworm in Chief at the CBI Clubhouse, the community for children's writers. Today, quick tip, but a very powerful one, about how to get an agent. If you're an aspiring author, you probably already know that having a dedicated literary agent working for you can be a tremendous boost to your career. But there's a problem. It's hard to find literary agents who are accepting new authors, who are looking for new authors, and once you do, it's hard to connect with them. They have tons of authors trying to hit them up all the time. So today's tip, we'll talk about how to find an agent that's looking for new authors, and how to build a relationship with them. Let's get started. Okay, let's go. If you want to find an agent that's accepting new clients, I have two words for you. Writing conferences. From our experience, most of the agents who will be attending writing conferences as staff members, faculty members, or maybe just there to do critiques, are accepting new authors, or at least looking for new authors. It's not a hard and fast rule, but it makes sense when you think about it. If you're a literary agent and you're looking for new clients, what better place to go to find new talent than a writing conference? If you have a filled up client roster, there's much less reason for you to go to a writing conference. Now again, there are exceptions to the rule. There are people who attend writing conferences who are agents who are not looking for new authors, but they are in the minority. So start from this assumption. If an agent is attending a writing conference as part of the faculty, you can at least make the assumption there's a very good chance they are accepting new authors. So the next question is, how do you find them? It's pretty simple actually. Just go to Google or whatever search engine you use and type in writing conference. Put your genre or the area that you like to work in as part of the search. So if you're a children's author, children's writing conferences, romance writer, romance writing conferences, whatever it is, just do a Google search and you will find tons and tons of links to go check out. So you get there. Here is one, this is an example. This is the Rutgers University Council on Children's Literature and these are their participating mentors. These are the people that showed up to their conference and as you go through it, you're going to see number of agents were there and so on. There's probably about 10 or so agents, maybe more even, who attended this conference. Pull them out, copy and paste, make yourself a list of these agents. These are the people you're going to research, you're going to find out more about until you start narrowing down the agents who are exactly the right ones for you. Now let's talk about how to do research. So you've got your list of possible agents, people who have shown up at writing conferences and who are representing people in your genre and your field of writing. Now we need to do some research and learn more about each of them. First step, check these sources. ed-ed.com is Predators and Editors, sfwa.org is the Science Fiction Writers Association. Both of them maintain databases of agents and tell you whether or not there have been complaints made by their members about these agents. Now as with anything, take it with a grain of salt. There's always two sides to every story, but if you see an agent's name pop up again and again as having had some problems, it might be something you want to be aware of. Guide to Literary Agents is from Writer's Digest Books, it is sort of the traditional bible of people who are searching for agents, absolutely worth the purchase. And here is where you want to look each of these agents up and find out what kinds of books they represent, a little bit about them, who they work with, and that sort of thing. So definitely use these three more traditional means of finding more out about agents as your first stop. But now it's time to delve deeper. First, do a Google search using the name of the agent and find out if they've been part of interviews, videos, you'll sometimes see a lot of panel discussions and addresses that they might have made show up as videos, articles that they've written, news items about them. You will find a lot of information out there just by doing this search. For example, the Guide to Literary Agents blog tends to do a lot of interviews with literary agents that are very, very useful because they go in depth on whether or not they're looking for authors, the kinds of books they're looking for, the kinds of things they wish they were seeing that they aren't, and how they like to be contacted. As you might imagine, that's gold, that's really, really important information. Now here is where you're going to start getting in touch with them. Start looking for them in social media areas. Find out if they have a Twitter page, if they do, follow it. Find out if they have a Facebook page, if they do, friend them. Find out if they have a LinkedIn presence, if they do, connect with them. And find out if they have their own blog or perhaps blog as part of their agent's group blog. If they do, get there and start reading all their blog posts. Here's how you connect with them. Retweet their posts. If they put something really good out on Twitter, retweet it and let them know you retweeted it. Comment on their blog. When they write something and you have something to say, make intelligent comments on the blog post. Again, friend them on Facebook, post on their wall, don't post garbage, post useful stuff on their wall. Add them on LinkedIn. Now when you see a blog post that you really like by them, email them and ask if you could reuse their post on your blog. And this is really a terrific way to connect, ask if you could interview them. Ask if you could send, say, five or six questions by email that you will interview the agent and then post it on your blog. I mean, that's a powerful, powerful way to get on an agent's radar. They're going to see you retweeting their posts. They're going to see your comments on their blog. They're going to see on Facebook and LinkedIn. And they're going to be very flattered and honored that you are reusing their posts on your blog, again, with permission only. And you are interviewing them for your blog. Now you've made a connection and you haven't even hit them up yet to ask them if they want to represent you. Now it's time to do that. After you've connected, after it's been a few weeks and you've built up a relationship with them, maybe you've had some emails back and forth, you've commented back and forth, they know you, hopefully by now they like you, now you can ask them by private email if they'd like to see a query or sample chapters of your work. In just a couple of weeks, you've taken a huge leap forward in identifying agents who are accepting new authors, connecting with a few of them, and now it's time to actually on a much more professional one-to-one level, ask if they want to move forward and represent you. If you like this tip, if you like our kind of no-nonsense approach, check out the CBI Clubhouse for tons of tips just like this. For just the price of a latte every month, you will get our legendary newsletter. We've been doing it for 20 years. It's Children's Book Insider, the newsletter for children's writers. You will get audio, video, podcasts, message board, chat room, all sorts of great one-on-one help. If you are a children's writer and you are serious about it, you really must become a member of the CBI Clubhouse, become a fighting bookworm. We have a special offer right now, right below this video. Jump on it. For the price of a latte every month, you will get everything. You'll get the newsletter. You'll get the website. You'll get our CBI Challenge step-by-step writing course, all of it. It costs the price of a latte every month, but you got to jump on it right now. We'll see you at the Clubhouse, and this is John Bard reminding you, keep writing.