You’ve done all the hard work, spent hours poring over your prose and got your manuscript as honed as you think it can be. Now all you have to do is find an agent, so how do you go about it? For Helen Giltrow, author of The Distance (Orion) it was a question of yet more editing and research. ‘I suspect I did what lots of people do. I’d already had a couple of agents get in touch with me, thanks to competition shortlistings. But I’d decided to go for simultaneous submission – aiming to have the book out with three agents at any one time – so I needed a longer list.
‘I started out with my favourite writers; found out who their agents were, then looked to see if those agents were currently taking new clients and if they were okay with simultaneous subs. Most are, provided you tell them up-front, and I read anything I could find about them – quite a few of them had done interviews or think-pieces here and there, which helped to get a sense of them.