Writer's Market

In the old days, you waited each year for the new Writer's Market book to come out - and the book would quickly go out of date. Publishers would change their rules, agents would go out of business, and it was a bit frustrating. In modern times with the web, things are much easier. You subscribe to the online version of the Writer's Market, month by month, and everything is fully up to date. You can easily scan publishers, agents, and find exactly who you need.

The key here is NEVER to spam everyone in the system. You want to specifically read and choose matches that work well for your topic area. That is the only way to get good results. Believe me, if you build a reputation as a spammer, then nobody will want to work with you.

It's $30 a year, which is about the same as a magazine subscription, but much more important and helpful for writers. You can also go month to month for $3.99 a month. Pennies a day!

When you sign up, you gain access IMMEDIATELY, not even an email response necessary. You get to see right away how up to date the system is. Here's the listing from when I joined in Sept 07:

The WritersMarket.com team has updated:
0 market listings today
12 market listings in the past 7 days
172 market listings in the past 30 days

So for example, you can search for an agent, and click to specify the agent should handle Romance Novels. I got 5 pages of listing (20 agents per page). I narrowed it down to agents with a website and got 3 pages back.

OK, so now here is the odd thing. The first FOUR AGENTS I happened to choose were ALL marked as "listing removed". Well, why are they still in the system if they aren't active? What does this say about how many of the entries are actually valid? It took me a fifth try before I found someone who did indeed match romance novels - but apparently it's not a focus of hers. It's not even listed as a type of book on her website.

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