10 Novels Agents Have Seen a Billion Times, and How to Make Yours Stand Out

It is not easy to write a book or get published. I’ve been a literary agent for almost 20 years, and I’ve written six books myself, most of which are tucked away in a drawer. As an agent, I receive hundreds of query letters every month, all vying for a spot on my list and a chance to go out to editors to see if they’ll get published, too. It’s daunting to say the least.

The first battle is figuring out what to write. Clearly everything has been done before, no? I see familiar concepts and tired storylines every day. But if there’s nothing new under the sun, how can writers stand out to agents and editors while also giving readers what they want and maybe taking advantage of trends?

There’s so much to say on this topic that I basically wrote a whole book about it. Writing Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life helped me better understand how writers can navigate the weird, opaque, and confusing publishing landscape. There are no shortcuts or sure things, but my bird’s eye view of the industry has given me some insight, starting with what to write. 

Way back in 2017, I wrote about the novels literary agents see all the time. No more zombies, I said back then. Now, times have changed! You can write a zombie novel if you want! It’s time for an update. I’m back to tell you about 10 novels that fill agent’s inboxes these days, but also how you can make yours stand out from the crowd. You can write anything you want. The key is to think about the reader, too.

1. Thinly Veiled Political Satire
   Listen, I can’t believe what is going on in the world either. Writing fiction about it might make you feel better and that’s great. Publishing it probably won’t change the world the way you hope, unfortunately, and everyone recognizes that character named Pylon Dusk. If you want to change the world, you can fundraise for mutual aid or canvas for candidates, and then write something else. Readers are not flocking to books that recreate our news feeds, just with funny names. 
2. Sigh Cli-fi
   This science fiction subgenre focuses on climate change in a noble attempt to sound the alarm. But often they’re preaching to the choir. Most readers who like these books already know we have to act yesterday. If you want your cli-fi to reach the unconverted, what can you bring to your story that is not just HURRY UP THE PLANET IS DYING? The reader that should read your book will be the very last to do so, because then it would feel like homework.
3. The Witches of Everywhere
   We’ve seen so many different witches in books: historical, contemporary, good, evil, goofy, scary, teen, crone, highbrow, lowbrow. It feels like the post Twilight days when vampires flooded the market. If you’re plotting a witch book right now, you can put it on the backburner until it comes back around again (which it will) or make sure your witches offer something new. You have to go deeper than my witches have white cats or other surface-level attributes. It will take some serious inventiveness and character development to turn a reader’s head with a witch book these days.
4. Hello Fellow Cool Kids
   I often see YA novels where the main character’s primary motivation is to be popular. And honestly, (and thankfully) I don’t think kids today feel this as strongly as the adults writing those YA novels did back then. Plus, it makes me ask why those characters want to be popular. What will it get them? What will it protect them from? I think kids these days want to be safe and seen, not crowned prom queen, and a book about wanting to be popular needs to explore that desire more deeply in order for readers to connect with it. 
5. AI Run Amok
   I see science fiction about AI more than any other trope, and like with cli-fi, the authors are preaching to the choir. The robot overlords have been a bad idea since Hal closed the pod bay doors. If you’re writing about AI, ask yourself what you want the reader to come away with, and then ask yourself if you think they already feel that way. How can you make the reader question their own beliefs? How can you surprise them?
6. I’m Coming Out
   We need more queer and trans stories in the world, not fewer, especially now. And while coming out is a formative, important, sometimes traumatic, sometimes joyous moment, it’s only one aspect of a queer person’s life. Queer stories are so much more. What else can you share? What about joy? What about love? What about everything else?
7. Picture Books with a Lesson
   My advice to all picture book writers is to read 100 of them published in the last five years and then start writing. You’ll find the ones that attempt to teach kids a lesson, whether it’s don’t pull the cat’s tail or share blocks at school have been done a thousand times or are not that enjoyable to read. Kids know when they’re being talked down to or lightly scolded. Instead of a lesson, can you tell a story, with a beginning, middle, and end? Can you show a character that learns, grows, and changes? It’s tough to do in so few words. This is one of the hardest genres to be published in for good reason. 
8. A 12 Book Series
   The New York Times bestsellers list is full of novels that are part of a series. As a writer, I too would like to park myself in a world and write about it for years. But not all successful series were planned that way (as you can often tell by book four or five). If your new project is something that will only make sense to the reader after the third or fourth book, you aren’t going to get very far in today’s publishing climate. I mean, how many second TV episodes have you failed to watch, no less second books? Focus on making that first book a uniquely satisfying read, and with some success, you might find yourself in a series down the line.
9. It Happened One Night
   Many main characters suddenly find themselves in the middle of things—a mystery, a romance, an intergalactic war—and it makes me ask, does this character do anything, or do things just happen to them? If your main character is the recipient of the plot instead of actively engaged in it, the reader will start asking their own questions. Why don’t they just leave? Why do they have to solve this mystery now? Why is this battle theirs to fight? Make sure your main character wants something and goes out to get it. If it’s compelling enough, the reader will want to see what happens next. 
10. It Happened to Me
    Writing is hugely therapeutic. That writing, though, doesn’t always fit in the publishing world. While you’re not trying to publish your diaries, sometimes when we’re too close to our subject matter—in both fiction and non-fiction—we can’t see how the reader will interpret things. Just because it happened doesn’t mean there needs to be a book about it. Just because you wrote about it doesn’t mean it needs to be published. It has value whether someone else can buy it in a store or not. 

It took me years to get my first book deal as a writer. I wrote picture books and a middle grade novel and an adult novel with no luck. It wasn’t until I wrote a non-fiction book based on my newsletter that I found success. What made the difference for me? I thought about what the reader would want, not just what I wanted to say. This alone can help troubleshoot your ideas. Assume your reader is smart and has little time and money to spend on books—because it’s true. You want the reader to say ohhh, I’ve never seen that before. Because at the end of the day, the reader is always going to ask, what’s in it for me?