Waiting for Agents

What it's like to get one literary agent interested in representing your book.

(Photo by Merritt Thomas on Unsplash.com)

Some of my clients finished their cookbook proposals recently. Now they’re looking for literary agents to represent them to publishers.

You need a literary agent to help sell your book the Big Five publishing houses. Typically you’re not supposed to submit to those publishers directly, but every once in a while someone succeeds.

The Big Five, by the way, are:

• Penguin/Random House

• Hachette Book Group

• Harper Collins

• Simon & Schuster

• and Macmillan.

This list encompasses imprints or sub-publishers, as in Ten Speed is an imprint of Random House, so it’s actually a bigger list than it seems. Agents will also solicit mid-size and smaller publishers if they don’t get anywhere with these big ones.