The Agent Search is a thing. The marketplace of ideas is tough. Marketing an idea is difficult. Agents get a lot of pitches, many of which must be nearly identical-looking.
A friend was looking at the agentquery.com site. It’s complex-looking. The advertising is easier to find than the primary search feature. But. It has a lot of results.
I’ve found some other resources of tracking down agents, including
https://literaryagencies.com/literary-agent-listings/browse-usa-agency/
https://querytracker.net/index.php
I’m not sure how good or complete these resources are, but they provide me a list of agents who want #SFF. Mostly, I need to embrace the discipline of sending a few letters each day.
One other question: did you personalize your query letter to each agent you submitted to, and if so, how? That approach is often recommended, and the usual strategy seems to be to compare your book to the work of an author that agent represents. Maybe it's just the nature of my own book, but I feel highly doubtful that I will find such works.
This is one of those great questions that I have zero insight into. I’ve read bunches of articles on query letters. Some say customize. Others omit this advice.
Is it pandering to the agent?
I like this advice on the writing the synopsis: http://www.manuscriptwishlist.com/2016/05/the-secret-to-writing-a-successful-query-letter/
Most advice seems to be a variation on this theme:
{The protagonist} is locked into {the conflict} against {the antagonist} so that the protagonist can {resolve the problem at stake.}
It seems like it may help to write the query letter hook first. Then fill the book in around it.
Part of my current rewrite of The Forge is to enumerate what’s at stake more explicitly. It’s almost like tweaking both the query letter and the book to come into an agreement over the character’s arc.