Guidelines for Making Submissions

The Authors' Agent welcomes submissions from professional writers and from previously unpublished writers who have evolved their work to the very highest standards of conceptualisation, form, execution and grammatical correctness.

If you would like to make a submission, please follow the following guidelines. Please note that the agency is unable to consider submissions that are first (or early) drafts or that depart from these guidelines.

Please Submit:

• by mail only. The agency does not accept submissions by fax or email.
• a 300-1000-word outline/synopsis of the work, including its total word-count
• the first chapter plus two or three other chapters or 15,000 words (whichever is the greater), or at least 20 pages for children's books, printed single-sided and double-spaced on A4 paper.
• details of any publishers to whom all or part of the work has already been submitted
• a factual biographical note about yourself, (100-500 words), incorporating:
  
  • relevant details of writing experience and any works published in any form;
  • details of any website, blog, twitter or social media presence that you - as a professional person - may have;
  • and a brief statement of your objective/s for your writing and for the work
  • your email address. Normally we respond to submissions by email.
  • a letter-sized stamped addressed envelope, if you wish us to reply by mail. Or a large SAE or stamped postal bag if you wish us to return your material.

Additionally:

• If your work is not adult fiction or narrative non-fiction or a children's or young adult work, please do not submit sample materials (as above), but instead write to us, or email, with brief details
• Submitted materials should be unbound.
• Please number all pages of everything you submit to us
• Please do not include disks, USB-drives or any original material - eg. original art or photographs, or the sole copy of your manuscript
• Please ensure you retain your own copies of all material submitted
• While due care will be taken of all material received, The Authors' Agent cannot be held responsible for accidental loss and/or damage and will dispose of all material for which a stamped addressed envelope, bag or container is not included with the submission.
• We will respond to your submission by email.
• We will only respond by mail if you have enclosed a stamped addressed envelope.
• We do not respond to submissions by telephone.
• We will try to respond as quickly as we can, and in normal circumstances, within eight working weeks at most.
• We may ask to see more of the submitted work, or the work in full. In this event, this is not tantamount to a decision to represent the work, and a request to see more should not be interpreted as such.

If we say No:

• We regret that in the case of submissions that we are not able to accept for representation, it is not the agency's practice to give reasons for this, nor to provide any kind of assessment of the work.
• Nor is The Authors' Agent able to enter into further correspondence about our decision not to represent the work.
• We are only able to offer representation to a very small percentage of submissions, and many different factors can have a bearing on what our agency is able to take on.
• In light of this, if we are unable to offer representation to your work, this should not automatically be interpreted as a negative assessment of the quality or commercial potential of the work.

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