Customer Reviews

2006 Guide To Literary Agents (Guide to Literary Agents)(Revised & Updated 15th Annual Edition)

5 star:		(5)
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The execution of the book is excellent. The contents are another matter entirely. I don't know the criteria for inclusion in this book is, but it would seem to me that if the agency has no intention of accepting new clients, the publisher ought not to waste the paper on them. The same could be said of those agents who cannot bother to provide details. As for the rest of them, as a group they seem to be smug and too elite for us mere common folk. Read the listings from cover to cover and you'll find very few that could even be called friendly. It may be a useful document to many, but it could hardly be called encouraging at all.

Many writers wonder if they even need an agent. Head to your local bookstore and take a look. A vast majority of books on the shelves are written by an author with an agent. When you decide you need an agent to represent your work and help you break into the publishing business, you need the current edition of the Guide to Literary Agents.

Insider articles tell you exactly what to expect from an agent, how to find an agent that will work for you and what to look out for to avoid agent scams. You also get detailed help on how to write a query letter with step by step guidelines.

Now in its 15th year, The 2006 Guide to Literary Agents wouldn't be complete without the hundreds of pages of literary agent listings. Know exactly what the agent is looking for from a writer, contact info, the agent's recent sales to publishers and so much more. Each listing is verified every year to make sure all of the info is accurate and up-to-date.

Use the Specialties Index in the back of the book to find agents who specifically handle your type of work. From health/medicine to psychic/supernatural, every type of genre is covered.

The business behind writing is hard enough. The annual Guide to Literary Agents helps you take the guesswork out of finding an gent that's right for you.

This guide is an absolute must for any writer seeking an agent. Just be sure you always update to the current year's edition in your search for an agent.

I found that the information in this book really helped and guided me search for an agent. The book was user friendly by showing which agents were accepting new writers, what types of books they were interested in and by having a good and bad copy of query letters and synopsis'. This helped with my writing a correct query letter and I was able to avoid sending scripts to agents that would not be interested in my type of story. Very informative and I highly recommend it, especially for a new author,

This guide is very helpful in sorting through the hundreds of agents that are available. The book breaks down steps on how to contact agents, and what to be aware of. The cross section in the back is very helpful in finding the agents that are interested in what you plan to write.

This is an extremely valuable resource for writers that have never worked with an agent before. The book provides information on many agencies, as well as helpful advice on the "who, when, and why" questions we all have.

The consistent high rankings of this book on Amazon show how many people out there are keen to get published. This book, and those like it (like Jeff Herman's guide), are essential, indeed compulsory, reading for would be authors. Look up, for example, James Peters Associates and the Ed Claflin literary agency, and you will see my name there as well - not as an agent, but as an author. While going to conferences and book fairs can help, what truly makes all the difference is an agent - and you will find the right one for you in a book like this. Most publishers will, in fact, now only take an agented work, which makes it all the more important. Buy this book and change your life as a writer - you will actually get published! Christopher Catherwood, whose book CHURCHILL'S FOLLY: HOW WINSTON CHURCHILL CREATED MODERN IRAQ (Carroll and Graf, 2004) owed its existence 100% to one of the agents in this book.

This book contains exactly the information I was looking for. It was highly recommended by a friend, and it lives up to her sales pitch.

This book will help you locate agents. What happens to you after that is up to you. Literary agents are probably the most misnamed hucksters on the planet. Probably 10% of the people who call themselves literary agents in united states are people who make a living from the agent's percentage of books they sell to publishers for authors, or agent's percentages of film rights they sell for authors. The other 90% are scam artists. This book claims to list only those who do not charge fees and are members of the AAR, which I hope is true, but anyone with a book who is looking for an agent to place it for them should take everything any of these people say with a grain of salt until you are absolutely sure there are no hidden fees, which is the actual way the charlatans make a living. (...) Fee chargers never sell a book, have never sold a book, and will never sell a book, and wouldn't know the first thing about selling a book. That is because they make their living from fees they charge hopeful, yet gullible, authors who have put their hearts and souls into writing a book. These "agents" know that most people who write a book are willing to invest a few hundred dollars for the chance to be published. That's all they need to know, and they take that few hundred from hundreds of people, and you can do that math in your head. Why would someone making $50,000 to $100,000 for simply sending out sensitive and caring rejection letters bother trying to actually crack the almost impossible world of publishing? Caveat Scriptor indeed.

The author does an excellent job of organizing agents of every genre and receptability. Don't go home without it.

This is an excellent resource for writers looking for a agent. It is clearly organized, and the indexes are very helpful at narrowing down the vast list of entries.

In the next edition, I would like to see an even more organized listing format - some agents gave helpful information, such as response times to queries, while others did not, and it was not always presented in the same location in the entry. That is one example.