It is about that time where I am ready to abandon my first novel and try to get it published through an agent. It is character driven literary fiction with supernatural and horror aspects. My next two projects include a creature horror and a sci-fi(esque) historical fiction (no horror at all but lots of philosophy). If my first work is deemed marketable and I get an agent, would that same agent represent all of my fiction? Does it just fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction?
My understanding is that once you have an agent, your contract with that agent only covers the specific work being represented. Upon writing something new, you would naturally (assuming that your initial contract worked out to your mutual satisfaction) look to the same agent, but it would be yet another contract. Writers and agents do tend to develop long term business relationships, but they are not etched in stone.
Many agents represent multiple genres. I would suggest searching for agents under the genre of your first book and then seeing what other genres an agent represents before sending them a query.
first of all, with horror/supernatural content, it wouldn't be considered 'literary' which isn't a genre to begin with... so you have to query only agents who rep horror/supernatural... for historical fiction you will have to query other agents, if you're lucky enough to have gotten an agent for the first book and s/he doesn't want to rep that genre... if you do have an agent at that time, s/he'd most likely recommend you to others who might take it on...
So does that mean works like A Christmas Carol are merely speculative fiction? If so, I guess I am a spec-fiction author.
i didn't say anything about spec-fic... besides which, that's not a genre... it's a broad umbrella under which there still exist all the regular genres, so you'll still need to find agents who rep horror/supernatural genre fiction...
VERY interesting article, featuring publishers and agents discussing what is 'literary fiction.' It's one of those undefinables, apparently, although these folks do seem to recognise it when they find it! http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/literary.shtml
