As I continue down this journey of finding an agent, I have a hard time finding agents with an #mswl (Manuscript Wish List) that includes Steampunk Romance. Steampunk, yes. Romance, yes. Not necessarily both.
Romance is a broad genre and it includes a lot of subgenres. I usually end up looking for Paranormal Romance, Fantasy Romance or Sci-fi Romance. Arguably Steampunk fits into all of these but forms don’t usually account for the historical piece of steampunk. Sigh.
BTW – If anyone out there is writing Steampunk that has YA(Young Adult), NA (New Adult) or even MG (Middle Grade) elements – Agents are looking for you.
Women’s Fiction seems to be making a come back but I’ve seen these variations; Women’s Commercial Fiction, Women’s Literary Fiction, and Women’s UpMarket Fiction. I was starting to wonder if these were all snooty code for Romance. For Your Information they are not.
UpMarket Fiction is a phrase that bugs me…once I looked it up, it bugged me even more. According to my Google search as an adjective it means, “relatively expensive and designed to appeal to affluent consumers.” Okay… I still have no idea what that means.
I was speaking to another author recently and she was telling me that she’d received over 83 rejections in a year and then just last month found an agent on a Twitter Pitch Party. I’ve only sent out a handful of queries…so I have a long way to go.
I imagine agents are much like readers, they know what they like, and they probably have an easier time selling what they like to read. So here’s crossing my fingers that I find that agent who loves what I write and can sell it into the market.
~Tina
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