Literary Agents

From Writer's Relief staff: It’s hard to be patient when you’ve sent out a query letter and still haven’t heard back from your literary age...

From Writer’s Relief staff: Let’s face it: Writing a book requires different skills than writing a query letter. While there are no “rules”...

Celebrity entertainers and politicians have no problem getting their memoirs published. So a book partly about celebrity entertainers and politicians should have had no problem getting published, right?

From Writer's Relief staff: In the tradition of David Letterman’s Late Show Top Ten, the submission strategists at Writer’s Relief want to shar...

"Dracula" author Bram Stoker was more than a skillful Gothic penman. He also studied law, and his talents are evident in the legal contract for his bl...

I have made a couple horrible, irremediable decisions in my life, but this decision to accept the writing of The Road Back for Knopf would go down as the worst I have ever made.

I started to believe I had written a dreadful book, that Sideways was unpublishable. Then I got a call informing me that St. Martin's Press had offered $5,000.

From Writer's Relief Staff: In the old days of publishing, literary agents had a clear and pretty much singular function: to advocate on behalf of ...

The 'slush pile' is the collection of unasked for, unpublished work that writers send to publishers. Wading through it is often a thankless task given...

One of the most painful lessons I struggled to accept was that my words and ideas were not sacred.

Every time I walk into a bookstore and I see a novel written by a celebrity or some newly-minted reality star, I cringe. Yes, I'm jealous and resentful. But the truth is the book publishing business is a terrible business.

From Writer's Relief staff: If you’re an aspiring writer, you’ve probably got an “I’d like to thank the academy” speech ready and waiting...

The wish for fame, so illusory a thing, can kill you. Or at least, it can kill your novel.

Big rejection numbers in publishing are not important. Big numbers in general are not important. No, the number to worry about is one. One. That's how many sentences you have to impress an agent or editor.

"We're closing in on a deal," my agent told me on the phone. "I'm just turning him upside-down now and shaking him for loose change."...

After the media tsunami surrounding the Casey Anthony verdict, 'analysts' have come forward stating she could reap nearly seven figures for a book deal. That's a crock and here's why.

There’s something new going on in the literary world these days: Some literary agencies are starting up their own publishing divisions. ...

In recent weeks, there have been a spate of agents who have cut deals on behalf of their clients with... themselves.  One such involved the agent to ...

Rejection letters from literary agents and editors of literary journals can be discouraging—especially impersonal, one-line form letters. But reject...

Want to write a query letter that will really get the attention of literary agents? There are plenty of ways to do it, but not all of them are right....

If you're curious about what goes on inside the submission process of publishing, here are 8 edited examples of the rejection notes I got, through my agent, for 25,000 words of a memoir.

Picture this. Your good friend texts you to say he just got home from a blind date. You call him right away to see how it went....

I started my career at a time when the conventional wisdom was that you couldn't even have a career without an agent. But experience has proven something different.

That is the question. There are many advantages to writing or translating your book to a digital version: shorter to-market turn time, less cost, e-b...

The path to publication can be a gauntlet beset with trials that test a writer's endurance. By sharing my journey I hope to inspire other writers to stay the course.