Querying When You Write Multiple Genres
- By: Jessica Faust | Date: Feb 20 2020
Throughout the course of your career, your goals and priorities will shift, as well as the genres you might choose to write in. The same happens to agents.
At the beginning of my career my focus was on romance and nonfiction. As the market changed, and as I changed, so did my list. Now I represent primarily upmarket and literary fiction and all areas of suspense and romance and, after a few years off, I’m back to nonfiction.
So how does an author who plans to write in multiple genres find an agent and prepare for these changes?
I write in multiple genres and am getting ready to query. At this point, I plan on sticking with only one of the genres, but someday in future years, I want to branch out. Do I look for an agent who represents just the one genre and save the other genre(s) discussion/decision for the future since it is so far down the road? Or do I try to find someone who represents the other genres as well?
From Questions for the Blog
The thing is that you can’t really plan these changes. Life happens and so does writing
Querying for Future You
Because you don’t know what future you will write or if future you will really want to write all of these genres you dream of now, I would focus on present you.
When it comes to querying, one book at a time. Find the agent who is right for the book you are querying now. As your career shifts, or if it shifts, you make changes as needed.
I’ve always assumed that when you are ready and wanting to write a different genre you have that chat with the agent. Most agents seem to rep different genres.
This is so timely for me. Thank you so much for answering my unasked question.
[…] also loved Jessica’s advice for authors who are planning to write in multiple genres: focus on the present […]
I have a question. I have a couple fulls out in speculative fiction, my last book. I’ve written a thriller and am about to start querying. If I get an offer based on one book, how do I go about notifying other agents if it’s on a different book than what they currently have? Some of the agents don’t overlap in both genres. Thank you. Love your blog and YouTube and can’t wait to send you my thriller.