Directory of Literary Agencies - nearly ready

[AgentPete]

It's coming along, have a look.
The format I’ve chosen closely resembles the system I’ve personally used very successfully to track publishers activity and to fine-tune my pitches to them.
Some (most?) agency listings I’ve seen online have a more “structured” approach to presenting data. If only life were that simple! The fact is, agencies are complex, evolving, difficult-to-pin-down operations. The great danger from a more structured data approach, with searchable fields for everything from what sort of coffee the agent likes to their pet cats name, is that you will miss out on some highly significant leads because the data excludes them. Fra better to spend a few extra minutes browsing entries rather than having a search performed in a fraction of a second that misses out many key prospects.
Anyway, work continues...

 

[Paul Whybrow]

Are you not worried about upsetting fellow agents with your directory, @AgentPete? You're an iconoclast in many ways, who's ploughed his own furrow, establishing new ways of looking at books and querying and I seem to remember you saying that you're not a member of the Association of Authors' Agents, so how many cages will you be rattling?

How personal will you be getting? I'm in the throes of researching agents to query, and the tone of some agents' pronouncements makes them sound like irritable scientists examining writer-viruses through a microscope, while others are friendly, love books and the people who write them and come across as approachable.

 

[Marc Joan]

Looks great -- I think this will be a fantastic resource! This writer-virus (thanks Paul!) is shedding his capsid proteins in excitement.

 

[AgentPete]

Are you not worried about upsetting fellow agents with your directory, @AgentPete?

OK, good question, needs some explanation/guidance from me.

The idea is not to create a “grudge list” of reasons why you don’t happen to like a particular agent. That might – I say might – be useful in getting something off your chest, but in the wider context of drawing up an Agents’ Hit List, it won’t be useful at all. Your experience of one agent will vary, often dramatically, from another writer’s. That sort of info is usually quite subjective and almost useless in terms of zeroing in on the agent/agency likely to be a good prospect for your work.

I can see I need to be more specific in the guidance I give for postings. Will do.

 

[Kitty]

This looks really good. It's going to be such a useful resource!