I’ve begun looking into querying again, after all the chaos of the year. Time to put myself out there!

Okay, after I got a block of text I was happy with written for the query (which was so difficult because I had to choose who’s perspective it would come from, as well as introduce all the concepts that are kind of make or break for a lot of agents) I then went on to the MSWL and searched for agents open to my categories.

That was nearly impossible.

So my catagories are:
LGBTQ (because there’s a very definitive line for whether a person will read that or not, so even if I personally don’t consider it the main drive of the story, a lot of other people won’t share that view)
Romance (because again, that is one of those hard lines a lot of people have)
Fantasy (angels and demons are called out as definite no’s in a surprising number of agents lists)
Science Fiction (The least confrontational of the subjects, but important to me)

When I included those on the MSWL, I got 135 agents. It’s an overwhelming number to start with, and it only got worse when I realized it included every agent who had even one of those marked. I tried finding just the ones who had most or all of my categories, but after nearly an hour of carefully reading and searching, I found I hadn’t even gotten out of the A’s yet. As someone who spent their entire childhood with a name that fell toward the end of the alphabet, I wasn’t about to start playing favorites now.

So I did what I do when I am overwhelmed with data. I copied it and pasted it into excel. Well, google sheets, but same thing. I threw in a couple search functions beside the columns [ =if(ISNUMBER(search(“LGBTQ”,$A34)),”LGBTQ”,”no”) etc. ] and I filtered down the list. I found all the agents who had included all four categories, and I copied their names to a separate sheet.

Twenty-six people. That is a far more manageable list to work with. Next I cut out the ones who only work on children’s and young adult books. I removed any who had hard lines or questionable phrasing. I have less than a dozen now who I can potentially query to, and the one at the top of my list is accepting queries until the first of November.

I’m going to do it. Even if I fail, I’m going to get it out there. Wish me luck!

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