Research is the name of the game, whether you’re searching for a contractor to put a new roof on your house, or an agent to represent your book. How do you research a contractor? You check references. You make sure the company has experience doing jobs like yours. You verify that there are no outstanding complaints. Your book deserves the same consideration.

Before submitting a query, the canny author will carefully research the agents s/he has targeted. Aside from the obvious--you want to approach agents who have an interest in the sort of work you're trying to sell--there’s another compelling reason to verify an agent's reputation before (as opposed to after) you submit: You don’t want to find yourself having to fend off the dubious attentions of a questionable agent.

The Procedure

Start with a good print market guide (I don’t recommend most agent listings you can find on the Internet; they’re too likely to include disreputable agents). Two I like are Rachel Vater’s Guide to Literary Agents and Jeff Herman's Writer's Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents. Listings in these books provide not just agents’ names and addresses, but details about their interests, specialties, and submission requirements, so you can decide if your work and their expertise are a good match. Often, representative recent sales will be listed.

It’s also a good idea to expand your search by picking books you think are similar to yours and finding out who agents them. This can be as simple as looking through the book’s acknowledgements--authors often mention their agents by name. Or you may have to poke around a bit on the Internet. A search on the author's name or the name of the book may bring up the author's website or news articles in which the author's agent is mentioned.

Once you’ve assembled a list of appropriate agents, you’re ready to do some checking (see below for links to the resources mentioned in the following paragraphs).

First, look for warnings from other writers or watchdog groups. After all, why would you even consider an agent who’s been the focus of author complaints? The Preditors and Editors website warns about questionable agents; you can also contact Writer Beware, which tracks questionable agents and maintains a large database of information. Agent Research & Evaluation, which also collects writers’ complaints, offers a free agent verification service. Finally, pay a visit to Google Groups (a searchable database of Usenet messages). Writers often post agent questions to Usenet, and the answers they receive can be informative. Just type the name of the agent or agency into the search box, and any relevant messages will come up.

If everything looks okay, try a web search on the agent using a search engine such as Google (it’s a good idea to search on both the agency’s name and the name of the individual agent--if the agent has a common name you can minimize irrelevant results by adding “agent” or “literary” to your search terms).

What you’re looking for is evidence of a track record of commercial book sales--i.e., proof that the agent is professionally competent. A web search can turn up an agent’s website if there is one (a reputable agent’s website will include info on recent sales), news items about the agent and his/her sales, writers' conferences the agent has attended (conference websites often include informative bios of attendees), interviews the agent has conducted in which s/he mentions clients, and so on.

Another nifty trick to try: go to Amazon.com and type the agent's name in quotes into the search box ("Henry Morrison"); or, if the agent has a common name, refine your search by adding the word agent ("Henry Morrison"+agent). Be sure your search is set for Books. Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" feature, which includes books from many top publishers, will bring up all text references, such as authors' mentions of their agents in their acknowledgments.

Be sure to do some further research if you don’t recognize the names of the publishers where the agent claims sales. Questionable agents sometimes list “sales” to vanity or questionable publishers.

Other good places to search

* The Association of Authors’ Representatives website. To join AAR, agents must prove they’ve made sales, and when they join, they agree to abide by a code of ethical practice. Some good agents choose not to be members, so not finding an agent here doesn’t mean s/he isn’t reputable--but membership is a good indication of legitimacy.

* The Publisher's Weekly website. PW regularly reports on agents and their sales. Formerly much of this site's content was free, but it has recently gone to a paying subscriber model. Even so, typing the name of an agent into the website’s search function will bring up short "teaser" references if there has been any coverage of the agent or his/her sales.
* For genre writers, there may be a specialty magazine that covers the field. For instance, Locus for science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers publishes a monthly column about who’s sold what to whom.

* Publisher’s Marketplace, a website where many established agents have detailed listings (as with any online agent listing, use caution: there are a few bad eggs here).

* The Publisher’s Lunch Newsletter, which provides the latest news on the publishing industry plus a weekly special edition covering recent book sales. This is a goldmine of information, some of it available nowhere else.
* The rights sections of publishers' websites, where recently published and forthcoming books are listed, along with their agents. Not all publishers host such listings, but some do, and they are a real treasure trove of information.

I've left till last the most obvious source of information: the agent him/herself. No agent is going to want to respond to an out-of-the-blue inquiry from an author s/he's never heard of, but an agent who shows interest in you should be willing to answer a polite inquiry such as, "Can you tell me something about your agency and your most recent sales?" Refusal of this information, vagueness, or statements that sales information is confidential should be regarded with suspicion.