Getting an agent is hard, and I also think people rush to get an agent too soon.
In some ways, getting published in children's literature is a little more open than publishing adult literature. It's less hinged on who you might know.
If you want to be traditionally published, then you most likely want to get a literary agent. To sign with an agent, you need to send them a query letter, but agents can get up to 20,000 query letters a year. With numbers like that, it helps to get in front of agents with every opportunity you have.
Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.
I tried for years to get an agent because I was told you needed an agent. The agent-hunting process was grim indeed.
The best advice I got as a writer was also the first advice, which came from the late fantasy author and editor Karl Edward Wagner: Any agent who charges to look at your work is a crook.
There are a lot of bottlenecks to getting published. Publishers are only one of them. Having the time is another one. Feeling entitled is another one.
The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good.
By 17, I was submitting to publications and collecting my first rejection slips.
I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to 'The New Yorker.'
