In an agent package, there are three documents that you need to send off. One is the synopsis; one is the cover letter, usually in the body of an email, and probably the most important is your sample text.
Your sample text is the agents first impression of your book and your writing style. It also shows them if you have a keen eye for detail. Riddled with spelling mistakes, and your manuscript will go in the bin because you haven’t taken that time to comb it for any mistakes. You hadn’t proofread and, as far as the agent is concerned, it is not fit for publication.
What is the agent looking for?
Normally, the agent will request the first three chapters as the sample text. Sometimes they’ll say the first five pages, or they will give a word count, but most of the time they will simply say “first three chapters”. If your book, for whatever reason, isn’t in chapters, the general rule of thumb is that it will be the first 10,000 words.
This means that the first 10,000 words of your novel or academic book have to be polished and tightened to the best of their ability. Proofread it. Cut. Proofread it again and cut more. Make sure that every single word in the extract matters. Make sure that you haven’t mixed up bold and bald or boy and buy. I’m dyslexic… it happens to me all the time so I know to look out for it. Your spell checker though? Well, bold and bald are both valid words. They could work in a sentence together. Chances are, your spellchecker is going to ignore the spelling.
So proofread. Get someone else to proofread. Print it off and go through it with a ruler. Read it aloud with a stick in your hand… seriously, that stick is magical. Make sure the extract is as perfect as it can be.
Engaging text
If your first two pages of the sample text are purple prose, the agent is going to put it in the bin because it is too long-winded when it doesn’t need to be. Check your descriptions. Do they add something or can you move the pace along quicker. I had just tried to read the first book of the Yew Queen series. Got to the fifth chapter and decided the book wasn’t for me.
I didn’t care who the characters were, couldn’t remember their name from one page to the next. And the mystery of the castle was just ‘meh’ for me. On the flip side, I read The Runaway Girls by Jacqueline Wilson. In the first few pages, I cared about Lucky Locket, understood her family set-up and her train of thought.
This is what the agent wants. They want to be able to connect with your characters straight away. They can’t do that if you faff. So cut to the chase when it is possible and only describe the stuff that needs describing.
Strong characters and world
The agent has three chapters or 10,000 words to determine if your characters are strong. Do not give them something that has no backbone. I mean you can have a character without a backbone, but your writing needs to have it.
Show the character’s world within the first instant and how that may have effected the character that the agent is seeing. When we are introduced to Katniss in The Hunger Games, we are thrown into her thoughts. On waking, she is looking for her sister, the most important person in her life. The absense of Prim means that she had a nightmare. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness throws the reader into the world by showing us Todd can read the thoughts of his dog and the men in his life.
“The first thing yer find out when your dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got much to say.”
This is the Knife of Never Letting Go first line. This line is purposely grammatically incorrect but it says so much at the same time. It says: this is not the world you know. It says in this world, dogs can talk. The first sentence also shows that the character we are following probably doesn’t have a standard education due to their speech pattern.
Immediately, the agent knows who the character is and what world they are not inhabiting simply because the dog can talk. They also know, because there is a dog, that some things are going to be the same.
You need a strong opening like this. Something that will hook the agent in and keep them reading. But it’s not just the first line. It’s the first page. The first chapter. The first 5000-10,000 words. The whole of your sample text. It all has to hook.
Author Voice
The agent is also looking for author voice. That is, your distinct voice. You pick up a book from the book store and immediately, you’d be able to tell if Jacqueline Wilson wrote it, or Stephen King, or Terry Pratchett. Or if they are likely to. That is because every author has a distinct voice. It’s something you develop as you write. Its your style. Wilson writes in very simple English (my dyslexia thanks her) while King loves to open with long sentences leading into the story, keeping the reader at a distance at first glance. Pratchett loves to jump into the action.
Your style will be yours, but it may be everywhere at first. It is only after the fourth, fifth, maybe sixth draft that your style will come into an element of its own. And you want that style to be clear.
If you’re not sure whether you have a strong author voice, give a few copies to people you trust but who are also not your friends. Give them no context and then ask them what they think. This would be useful, not just for voice, but for character and setting too. It would also let you know whether you can successfully hook a reader because if they made it through the first three chapters, then you know someone would read the full story. There’s nothing that boosts your ego more than someone telling you they love the story you have written.
Example text is strong, now what?
If you haven’t already done your synopsis or cover letter, then that is next. If you have also completed that, then it is time to send to an agent. A scary part of the process, but the worse they can do is say no.
If you do not have a list of agents, you are more than welcome to use my agent list sheet. It contains 800 agents, and notes (signalled by the black arrow at the corner of a cell) explaining what to do for each column.
You do not have to but if you would like to donate something for the resource, you can use my kofi account.