Literary agents really need to take their own advice. When querying, it’s all about signposting everything and making it easy for them. Give important details, sell the project, no extraneous fluff. Great.

Then you check out agents to see if they’d be a good fit or even just if they rep your genre and get hit with a wall of ‘Jane Smith loves cats and long walks on the beech. She wants to fall in love with a book so hard it feels like cheating on her partner and has a passion for helping authors achieve their authentic creative vision. Fiction that’s different, that’s unique, will catch her attention, though she’d also love lots of what’s currently trending, as well as new takes on what was trending a few years ago.’

One and only one agency I’ve looked at kept it to a short bio paragraph, a list of genres, and a few recent novels the agent liked. Absolute breath of fresh air.

Also, you guys really need to agree on what genres are. Specifically, wtf do you mean by ‘speculative fiction’? I’ve seen some list spec fic but explicitly not any form of fantasy and sci-fi. I’ve seen others list spec fic titles they liked and they’re just fantasy books. Others still provide examples that are all just near-future sci-fi, but then say they’re not open to sci-fi!