Publishers And Agents

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We check on agent credentials through a number of sources to make sure they are active agents who are recognized in the industry.  If we learn that agents charge fees (apart from special costs such as copying  which some agents charge), we drop them from the list.  (And if you have complaints about agents, let us know).

The sources we use for vetting agents to determine their legitimacy and rate them based on their size and number of clients are the following.   Links to these organizations are included, so you can contact them for more information.

Publisher's Lunch and Marketplace: They have a free newsletter with information on the latest deals, and offer a searchable database for subscribers, with a history of past deals and contact information for members.  You'll find us listed as one of their members, and we've reported our own deals, too.

Agent Research & Evaluation Service (AR&E): They offer more extensive details on individual agents, plus a monthly newsletter and new agents list.  They rate agents based on the number of clients, and you can check if particular agents are legitimate, might be questionable due to reports of problems, are new, or have little information reported about them. 

Association of Authors' Representatives (AAR): This is an organization with about 325 members.  While many legitimate and very successful agents are not AAR members, you can generally rest assured that AAR members are legitimate and currently active agents.  The list of AAR members is available online, though it only include names and addresses -- no phone numbers or e-mails, which we have obtained through additional research.

Literary Marketplace (LMP): This is perhaps the most comprehensive source of information in the publishing world.   Besides the printed directories of editors, publishers, agents, and other publishing industry contacts that comes out each year in late November, LMP has an online directory that provides extensive information on who's who in each company and the interests of different publishers.  We subscribe to their online service. 

Everyone Who's Anyone Directory (EWA):  This is a listing of top editors, publishers, and literary agents, which includes e-mails, Web sites, and addresses, plus occasional correspondence between the writer who put the site together and editors and agents reviewing his submissions.  It's a good source for cross-checking our own data.

In the past, we have obtained information from the Writer's Market, the Writer's Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents, and the Guide to Literary Agents, although many of the most successful agents and agencies are not listed in these books.

You can certainly gather information yourself from these and other sources.  But we have gathered it together, along with agent ratings, affiliations, and the main interests of each agent or agency, so we can target your query to the appropriate agents for your project.  It took us hundreds of hours to put this together, and we save you the many hours it would take you to send out individual queries via either e-mail or postal mail.  Plus we send your query only to agents who have already been screened through our review process.