Your Dream Agent

Hello Friends,

I hope you're doing well and having some summer in your summer. I love summer, heat and all, and I always think I'm going to really take advantage of summer this year and then get confused when I still have to work every day. I think I was waiting for school to let out, lol. See you at the beach this weekend.

Anyway, I've been thinking of the concept of the Dream Agent and how social media can help and hurt that concept. I mean, literary agents have never been more accessible with Instagram, TikTok, newsletters, the works. Heck, when I was a baby agent, we didn't even have Twitter etc. <rattles cane>

But now that we do, writers can get to know prospective agents really well, at least parasocially. There have never been more literary agents than now, by my estimation, and you want to give your work its best shot. So you see that agent who's funny and down to earth and brokers big deals and does cool things and you think: that's my dream agent.

They might be! But it won't be because of what you're seeing on social media.

First of all, I would like to dispel this concept of a dream agent. I do not think there is one perfect agent out there for you and/or your book, just like I don't think there is only one perfect romantic partner for every human on the earth. I don't believe the universe if organized that way. You can! That's ok. But it also seems like authors want that one perfect agent and also would love to get multiple offers of representation, so..... You want there to be many agents who can see the value in your book, just like you want many readers to see the value in your book. It only takes one agent and one editor to get a book into print, but you don't want that to mean there's only one reader out there, too.

I get it, though. Pinning your hopes and dreams to one person is a time-honored tradition and it brings a small amount of order to the chaos. I certainly can't stop you from doing this, but I do advise against it.

The agent you see on social media, me included, is the one we want you to see. That doesn't mean we're all secretly evil behind your backs, but there are plenty of things I consider cornerstones of how I agent that you're never going to see online. I may have talked about it in general here, but I don't often show just how dogged and feisty I get about contracts. When I see a clause I don't like or that is not right for my client(s), I get mad about it! I take it personally! I take a second to calm down before responding to the very nice contracts managers, but I'm also not making a cute Tiktok (no shade to cute TikToks) of me typing furiously and saying omw to tell this contracts person how I really feel. I just would....not do that? Someone might think that I'm not particularly aggressive when it comes to those things because I'm pretty laid back online. But who I am online is not who I am when fighting for my clients, because online is not where I fight for my clients.

I'm also not going to go on here and tell you all the details of a sensitive and nuanced problem I navigated with a client and their editor because, that's none of your business. It's only the business of that client and that editor. I'm not going to post about all the balls I'm dropping and believe me, the best agents in the world are dropping balls regularly. We're just people not publishing robots. I have manuscripts that I am taking too long with, more unread queries than you want to know about, and a bunch of emails left on read. I'm know! I am doing my best. But if I were your Dream Agent, and you encountered that from me as my client, would you be surprised? Disconcerted? Felt like it was false advertising? Maybe. And any client is allowed to come talk to me about these things and we'd deal with it, because that's how problems are solved with your agent. But of course, I'm only going to talk about the good stuff online.

When considering editors for my clients' books, I've definitely come across ones that have been perfect for one kind of writer and would be horrible for another, even in the same genre. There's personality fit and workflow fit and all kinds of things, but those editors and those clients are still good at their respective jobs. They just might not be good at their collective jobs together. The big, fancy agent with the million followers and nothing but significant deals might be the perfect agent for you, or they might not. You won't know until they consider your work and you consider working with them.

And those big, fancy agents who get nothing by significant deals, yeah, we all want to work with them. Of course there are agents who are more high powered than others. But we all still only know the editors we know, and I've gotten referrals from some of those fancy agents because they didn't know a genre well and they knew I did. That Dream Agent was not that author's Dream Agent. And the agents who are not online, who don't post big deals, or post deals at all, who fly under the radar a bit, they're just as powerful as those big, fancy agents. You don't see that quiet agent's amazing lunches with the most powerful editors, the ones with the track record of hits not in the Deals section, the one every editor thinks oh I LOVE their taste, I can't wait to do a book with them.

We've all gone to that well-regarded doctor and had them barely look at our charts. The hairdresser billed as magical that didn't know how to handle your curls. The movie or book or restaurant or play that everyone loved, but just wasn't for you. If you pin all your hopes on a Dream Agent, to the exclusion of all or most others (even if you query tons but set your heart on that One True Agent) you're gonna be let down. The chances that all the stars will align perfectly are slim, for everyone! You might miss the shining star that is most aligned to you, right over there.

I know this post doesn't help you figure out how to choose which agents are right for you, and I bet I have something back in the archives that does. If not, I'll tackle that next week. But there isn't a magic checklist or formula, a perfect set of questions to ask or answers to get to find your Dream Agent. Most of the time it just comes down to a gut feeling and a willingness to try, on both the agent's and the author's parts.

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XOXOXOOXOXO,

Kate

Who am I and what is this? This is Agents & Books, a twice-weekly newsletter about writing, publishing, and the creative life. I've been an agent for almost 20 years, most of it at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and I'm the author of two books: Write Through It: An Insider's Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life (Simon Element, 2025) and a picture book called Pay Attention to Me!, with illustrations by Rob Justus (Sourcebooks, 2026). If you haven't already, become a subscriber today. $5 a month or $50 a year. Same price since 2019! Need to cancel? Look here.