There are, of course, some tried and true ways to get an agents attention for your work. And variations in the tried and true ways, almost always ending up with a rules based criteria for selection that have no rules.
A good list comes from the Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk. Using a list of seven things to get an agent’s attention from her own agent.
It’s a pretty good list.
My favorite was to “show outside validation:”
The key to self-praise is to have others say it for you. So, for instance, if someone else has called you a gifted writer and that someone is not your wife or your mother, do tell us. Outside recognition could be that your blog gets a gazillion hits a day or was just cited in Time Magazine. This is what we want to hear. There’s an art to bragging and it involves finding someone else who will do it for you.
The one thing that technology can give you is some fact-based numbers to support your case about you being an expert at what you write about. Whether it is X number of subscribers to your blog, the traffic to your blog, your traffic ranking on Alexa, your “authority” ranking on Technorati (where my “authority” ranking is higher than my traffic ranking…), or number of downloads of your e-book, technology can support your case for why you can validate that which you write.
Outside of pulling out previous publications and interviews with Writer’s Digest next to those of Newsweek magazine (which happens to all of us, right?), technology numbers can be one of the few things that can support your work before you are published.
Once published, you can add the publishing to the list of outside validations.
But to get to the first brass ring, technology can help.
Scot
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