Saving All My Favs

We save our favorite everything lately, photos, trinkets, cards, even emails. But what about your favorite agents? In all my agent watching there are some that stand out and resonate with me. In their behavior, their talk, and their hobbies. These are folks I’d like to be friends with and to do business with.

But I’m having a hard time keeping track.

So I made myself a spreadsheet. Here’s how to make one for you as well. I added this as a tab in my manuscript master-list sheet (it’s getting big eek!). If you want to know how that works check out my other post.

I did this spreadsheet opposite of how I normally set this up using the left most column for all my categories.

1. The top row will be the agency and the agent’s name (spelled correctly!!) You can also add contact info/website/twitter if you forget where to find them.
2. These are notes I’ve received based on contact through rejections or Twitter interactions. These can be vague or extremely specific.
3. Here’s where all the things I’ve seen or noticed or I can relate to them with go. This is how I add a little bit of personal information to my query letter. But not in a creepy way… for example, I see you like Shakespeare so here’s a story I wrote reworking it. Not hey your kids are cute (cus that’s creepy).
4. This is actually duplicate information for me. I have all this in my regular spreadsheet but having it here lets me see quickly if I’ve sent my favorite people my latest work. It also gives me a place to add their personal thoughts on why they did or did not like that specific story. This way I can try to gauge what story may resonate with a certain agent more or less. For example, an agent may like sci-fi and fantasy stories but may not like steampunk. I have this spot last as I continue to send more and more stories out to the same agents.

It’s easy for this to get big so turning on text wrapping is going to make things easier to read long term.

I don’t know who your favorite book people are but keeping track like this makes it easier for me to quickly send out new manuscripts to the few folks I’d love to work with.

Happy Questing!

If you found this post helpful in your book journey please buy me a coffee.