Literary Agents Editing and Proofreading Services

An agency's business is conducted in short documents sent to people who receive too many of them. Editors have submission piles as deep as the agent's own slush, and they read a pitch the way an agent reads a query — a paragraph in, deciding. What separates agents whose submissions get read from those whose do not is rarely the quality of the list. It is that the good ones write pitches for the specific editor, say what the book is in one sentence, and are known never to oversell, so the enthusiasm means something when it appears.

We edit what literary agencies produce — submission letters and pitches to editors, author and manuscript pitch documents, rights and co-agent material for foreign, film and audio sales, rights guides and fair catalogues, submission guidelines for prospective clients, query response templates including rejections, agency agreements and commission explanations, editorial notes to clients on manuscripts, offer and negotiation correspondence, author biographies and comparative title analyses, prize and award submissions, and agency website and about copy. Our editors work in the register of the market you are selling into and know that a pitch to a literary imprint and a pitch to a commercial one are different documents.

The submission letter is the agency's core product and it lives or dies on its second sentence, where the book has to become a specific thing. Comparative titles are the usual failure: an agent writes that a novel will appeal to readers of two enormous bestsellers, which tells the editor nothing except that the agent is reaching, and comparisons to books more than a few years old suggest nobody has checked what the market is doing. We write these so the pitch opens with the hook rather than with the author's biography, so the comparison is to titles the editor has actually acquired or competed for, recent and at a plausible scale, so the reason this editor is the right home is stated concretely — the book they published last year, the list they are building — and so the author's platform is described in numbers where numbers exist and omitted where they do not. We also make the pitch state what the book is not, where the category is ambiguous, because an editor who reads a crime pitch and receives a literary novel about grief will pass on both.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including unsold manuscripts, submission lists and offers under negotiation. We are editors rather than agents and offer no view on the market, on any commercial term, or on which editors to approach. What we can do is make the pitch specific, the register right, and the whole document short enough to be read.