Instead, I'll let Curtis Brown agent Nathan Bransford do it for me: http://nathanbransford.blogspot.com/2009/06/stepping-up-your-game.html

I'm pointing everyone I can to this blog post because a)he's hilarious, and b)everything he says here is completely true. I try to balance out my "omg but it's sooooo hard" posts (this one) with the occasional "glimmer of hope" posts (yesterday's rundown of some recent debut deals) and I think Nathan's post is a good middle-ground.

A few weeks ago I posted some of the more interesting debut sales that had been recently made. There have actually been A LOT of exciting debut deals recently - a bright spot in a grim time! - and here are some of my faves:

Maybe you've got your finished, edited, as-close-to-perfect-as-it's-gonna-get book ready to shop around, or maybe you've just recently gotten a sprout of an idea for your first novel floating around in your head. There's one simple thing you can do to help your chances of getting that book published..

We've established that querying everyone in the book is a bad idea. So how do you go about picking the right agents to query? Research. Lots of it. It can be tedious. It can be frustrating (maybe you'll read an interview with an agent that convinces you she's your soulmate... and then you find that she's not taking on any new clients.) But it's worth it.

Have you seen how expensive postage and shipping are these days? Oy. I get a little huffy whenever I get something in the mail that requires an actual through-the-mail response or payment, because for some reason I was ok with paying $.42 but not $.44. ($.44? That's two diapers! I have an eight month old, so I automatically calculate everything in terms of diaper cost now.)

I'm far from the first to complain about this (see every other tweet with the #agentfail tag), and unless all literary agents have a sudden, mass change of heart as a result of reading this blog (ha!), I won't be the last. It's one of those things that drives me crazy though, so today I'm going to rant about the proliferation of the "we only respond if we're interested" policy.

Yesterday I saw a pass on a project, and the agent was thoughtful enough to give some insightful feedback. And while the main issue she pointed out wasn't something new, it was something that I think we all know and then forget about a little. It was an issue with those darn first fifty pages.