As mentioned in the last post, I’m
commenting here on a series of questions asked on one agent’s submission form.
The question for this week is, “What is the last book you’ve read?”
At the time, the last book I had
finished was One Crazy Summer by Rita
Williams-Garcia, so that’s what I said. Not only was it an honest answer, but
it may also have been a fortunate one. After all, I was querying middle-grade
historical fiction, and One Crazy Summer is
middle-grade historical fiction. That wasn’t unusual, either, since I often
read within my genre.
If I had filled out the form two days
later, I would have had to say that the last book I had read was Chestnut Street by Maeve Binchy, which
is adult literary fiction. Several weeks earlier, the answer would have been
the P.D. James mystery A Certain Justice.
And right before One Crazy Summer, I
read The Scandalous Sisterhood of
Prickwillow Place, a humorous YA by
Julie Berry.
It was an agency submission form, and
I don’t know what the agency was hoping to discover. Does it want me to be a
well-rounded reader or to stick to my genre? And I question the usefulness of
the question. What can an agent tell from a single book title?
When I filled out the form, my answer
indicated that I had been reading within my genre.
But I don’t always.
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