[Today we get a great piece of advice from the wonderful Sara Megibow, agent at KT Literary, who wrote about what querying writers should be trying to bear in mind when it comes to their TBR piles...]
“Sara, what advice can you give to a writer looking for an agent?”
My answer is always the same and it’s these two things:
1) keep writing
2) keep reading
In the spirit of reading and the OcTBR Challenge, here are four simple suggestions on how to choose the books you read. Following these four steps helps a writer become more familiar with the kind of books agents and publishers are looking for:
1) Read books in the genre in which you are writing.
2) Specifically those books that have been published in the past two years.
3) Books published by major New York publishers.
4) Especially books written by debut authors.
Occasionally I will get the question, “how do I know the genre of my book?” And since #1 above says, “read books in the genre in which you are writing” I want to address this question too.
Knowing your genre means picturing the inside of a bookstore. A bookstore is divided into aisles labeled “young adult” and “romance” and “literature” and “gift books”, etc. In what aisle do you imagine your book would be shelved? That’s your genre!
Happy reading!
(Huge thanks to Sara for this post and also to her and KT Literary for donating the book prizes for this year's challenge - more on that soon!)