Skip to Content

How best to present yourself to an agent

21 January 2019

'Your book is special to you and may one day be to other people but at the moment it is just another submission. Authors need to remember that agents are inundated with submissions. Most have full lists already and need to concentrate on their existing clients. Of course we are looking for new talent but the chances of selling books from the slush pile are small.

Some agents claim they have never sold anything from the slush pile though I take it very seriously, and personally look at almost twenty thousand submissions each year . Given each submission may be over forty pages long, that is a lot of reading to fit around the reading of my existing clients' work, such as the fifty delivered manuscripts each year, and the normal work of the agency...'

Andrew Lownie of his eponymous agency on how best to present yourself to an agent http://www.andrewlownie.co.uk/fifteen_tips