How to Find Literary Agents and Book Publishers

India is now a literary landscape with many literary voices who wish to be heard. Central to this pitfold are literary agents and book publishers. In this blog, we will look at how to find the best literary agents and publishers for your book project. 

The Importance of Getting a Literary Agent

Literary agents are the catalysts of book publishing and ensure that stories are heard from the farthest corners of the world. They serve an important role which may go beyond representing an author or his/er work. First, they assist in curating quality writing, wading across a sea of manuscripts to find the best written works to pitch to publishers. They help in maintaining high literary standards and help in blending myriad literary voices in the landscape of publishing. 

How to Craft the Perfect Book Proposal

The query letter is extremely critical to get a literary agent excited about your book. It is a sales piece on your manuscript. You need to sell the uniqueness of your work to be represented in the most efficient way by a publishing agent, who is your spokesperson and relationship builder with the publishers. A query makes us think of a book, as a product, to be marketed and sold. The first step is to check if the manuscript is ready and tick all the boxes to appeal to a book agent, and further to a publishing company. Once it is ready, then is the time to carefully place all these appealing features to your book proposal. 

Elements of a Query Letter 

The elements required for making the book proposal unbeatable:

• The genre/ category of your book, the word count of the book and its working title and subtitle
• A detailed description of the work, and must contain at least 2000-3000 words 
• It should not be well elaborate, highlighting all important sections of the book.

Opening of your Query Letter

As literary agents and publishers receive hundreds of proposals every month, your opening statement can make and break your impression with them. There are multifarious ways to open a query letter: 

• You may mention the referral of your literary agent/ Publisher, if any
• If you met your agent at a pitch event and your book was requested by him/ her, you need to mention it in the opening
• Hook the literary agent by marketing your book like a story
• If the proposal is self-explanatory, the you may also take a straightforward approach and share the crux of the book in the initial lines itself, such as my book is a supernatural thriller about a town called Yorkshire.
• Published or seasoned writers mention the awards, or accolades they have received in the query letter.

Personalisation of the Query Letter

It is a sales tool and good sales people try to create a rapport with their target audience, for example the source of inspiration for my novel is the book ‘’Title’’/ a place/ an incident/ a personality etc. 

Identify What You Wish to Sell

Book title and word count are mostly tentative for a working title, so it is good to state that the shared information is draft file. Word count must be stated properly. An average word count for books for adults is approximately 80,000 words. Also state the genre of the book in your proposal. If there are any books that can be referred to for identifying the theme of your book, please state them such as ‘My book has been written in the same manner as ‘’ written by ‘’, published in the year XXX.

Describe the Book

The description of the book, irrespective of the genre, should include an introduction of the book and what it wants to show, the main theme and its conclusion. The book must describe the main character of the book incase of adult and children fiction. How the events in the story flows and the characters are built, and the ending. 

How to improve your book description

• This is the main premise to hook the literary agent, so it should not have red flags. Your description should not be longer than 300 words. 
• Does the description reveal the surprise ending of the book, or the main argument? 
• Does the description mention more than three characters in the book, if it is fictional. 
• The description should talk about the book and not go too much into detail. Keep it crisp. 
  

Write the Author Bio in the Query Letter

Writing about the author needs to be mentioned in the query letter. It should be in third person and should mention academic and professional background. If you have written any previous works, it should be stated in the author bio.

• The query letter should not contain marketing plans. It should be only about the book and its target audience, but in case you have fixed plans and would definitely like them to be part of the book’s promotion, it is okay to list them. 
• Close it by stating it would interest you greatly and incase of series, mention that the book is part of a series. In this case, you may need to submit a further detailed plan introducing the complete series, how many parts it’s divided into, and how each part progresses.
• Thank them for the consideration of your book.
•  Move on to the next agent, if you do not hear back within 30 days.

You now know the way to write a query to a literary agent. All you now need is information on the literary agents in India and the publishers to submit your proposal.

The Literary Agents in India

The list of best literary agents depends upon individual preferences, but here are the top literary agents: 

• Verbatik Media lists literary agents such as Dipti Patel, Anish Chandy and others.
• The Himalayan Writing Retreat has mentioned Siyahi, a notable literary agent.
• The other ones are Jacaranada. It is a literary agency based in Singapore and represents authors all over the world. 
• International literary agents include Kevan Lyon and Joane Wycoff based in the USA. 
  

The publishers you can contact are of various kinds namely trade publishers that publish books for the general populace and they publish fiction and non- fiction. They include Hachette, Harper Collins, Penguin Random House , Simon & Schuster. Academic publishers publish only academic and scholarly works of various disciplines. They include Allen Press, Begell House, Cambridge University Press and self- publishers for which you do not need approval. They include Blue Rose Publishers, Orange Publishers and Clever Fox. Budding authors can also contact a young publisher like Double9 Books for faster approval and publishing. 

Finding big traditional publishers and literary agents is no walk in the park. It requires research and persistence. You need to refine and tweak your query letter, reach out and build connections, in order to find literary agents. You need to keep pushing forward because your work deserves to be published.