Agent Search: The Hand That First Held Mine

 Root Page for All Comp Titles 

Links

Wikipedia for HTFHM 

Amazon Listing 

Barnes & Nobel 

Strategy

I start with a handful of "comp titles" which I think are close (4) to my book, Sabine (3). I have to get good at finding the agents for books (5), and find out lists of books that were also bought by the people who bought my comp titles.

1. Find the agent for a given book -- still have no clue how to do this

2. Find the list of books bought by people who bought a given book -- still unclear

"You know, it's unclear"

Early Goals

1. Find the agent for a given book. This is proving difficult.

2. Find an "People Also Bought" listing on Amazon and other sites. So far unclear on Amazon

3. Find agents for all books in the network, particularly overlap (1)

Agent Search for THTFHM

So far, nothing. I may have to buy an expensive industry database subscription, and even that may not get me anywhere.

I may have found the agency. A. M. Heath.

Sarah Chalfant  Wylie Agency (USA)

By the way, I may have found the agency for My Year of Rest and Relaxation, The Clegg Agency. 

Related (2) Titles for THTFHM

Amazon

I'm not sure about Amazon.

This may be kind of obvious, i.e., same author's books. Maybe I'll check this on other books (like other Maggie O'Farrell books).

Then there's this:

There appears to be a lot of titles, and I'm not sure at this point what "related" means.

Barnes & Noble

Here's the link to the book.  It has an "also bought" list.

The publisher (Harper Collins) may be a trove.

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(1) Agents who have sold multiple books in my "association network" for a given comp title

(2) The idea is that books should be associated by people who bought my comp titles also buying other titles, and that should lead to more agents that would be interested in my work, and possibly the win-win of finding agents who appear multiple times in the tree, which would strengthen the credibility of the given comp title as well as the preferences of the given agent.

(3) "Sabine" is working title. Current full title is Between Laughing and Crying. I am currently up to the seventh major revision of the Advance Review Copy (ARC).

(4) Obviously, if I choose these comp titles badly, this isn't going to work as well. However, one mollifying factor could be that if I do a haphazard job of picking titles related to my book, others may do the same, i.e., also pick titles they think are "pleasingly close" to the comp title, and then make the same error I made, and pick books that are closer to my book than the original. This will potentially provide a useful agent list, if of lower quality, but multiple agents in the same tree will still be interesting.

(5) Publishers might provide this information freely. So far, the Web is proving to be the vast ocean of low-quality sewage it always is.