A couple of people have asked about this so here goes:
You’re going to be with your agent for a long time, hopefully the entirety of your career. They will be in your life. They will laugh with you and cry with you. They might tell you about their badly behaved pets. They may commiserate with you about your poor tomato harvest… It’s hard to say, to be honest, but the pair of you will spend a lot of time talking about “trivial” things (apostrophes, oxford commas, the best pantone shades for blood, the reproductive organs of extraterrestrials I don’t know are you writing horror or SFF or maybe both?) so it will be good if you get on.
But believe it or not, the most important thing isn’t that you get on; I’ll tell you the most important thing. It’s this:
They have to absolutely love your books.
Your agent has to go out there and beard the cynical commissioning editors in their dens and persuade, coax, bully and beg them to put your book above the 48 others they’ve been offered that day. If they don’t love genuinely them, if the only kind of admire them, they won’t be able to do that. And they know it. So they won’t take on your book.
This is why, when choosing an agent, that you don’t just go for the most successful (though Simon’s one of the most successful), the prettiest (though Simon IS the prettiest) and the coolest (OK, Simon is also pretty cool) … go for the agent whose author list makes you swoon, not in terms of stature or fame but in terms of writing books that you personally utterly adore.
When I saw Simon’s author list, it looked like my bookshelf. The really favourite bit of my bookshelf where all the volumes are completely dogeared because I have read them so many times. So even though he wasn’t actively seeking urban fantasy, I knew he would love my book and he did. And I was right. Even though Simon has almost never taken on a book that’s not hard SF, he took on my bumbling romantic urban fantasy Grave Secrets. And he sold it. And I got an advance…
I will finish by saying that just as every parent believes their kids to be exceptional and just as all pet owners know their pets to be magnificent, all authors know that their agent is amazing. Simon is amazing.
The Lavington Windsor Mysteries 