When: Monday, July 21st, 2014, 7-9:30pm
Cost: $150
Location: West Midtown Ideasmyth HQ
Limited to 15 Students
Finding a congenial agent who will work well with you and be a champion of your writing is the most important part of becoming a successful author. In this evening workshop, former literary agent and acclaimed author Priscilla Gilman will give you her inside tips and strategies for how best to identify, approach, and work with literary agents who will successfully advocate for your book.
This course will cover:
- How to find potential agents for your work
- Best strategies for the initial approach
- How to write a good query letter
- What material to submit to an agent
- What not to do when first approaching an agent
- How to pick the right agent for you (if you’re lucky enough to have a choice)
- How to work productively and collaboratively with an agent
- Red flags that make an agent wary of taking on a client or frustrated with an existing client
- How to lose your agent
- What agents can do for you and what they don’t/can’t do
- When is it time to change agents?
Have a question about Ideasmyth courses? Contact Courses@Ideasmyth.com.
Instructor: Priscilla Gilman is a former literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates and the author of the acclaimed memoir The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy (Harper, 2011, Harper Perennial 2012). She is also a former professor of English literature at Yale and Vassar. The Anti-Romantic Child was excerpted in Newsweek and featured on the cover of its international edition. It was an NPR Morning Edition Must-Read, Slate’s Book of the Week, selected as one of the Best Books of 2011 by both The Leonard Lopate Show and the Chicago Tribune, and one of five nominees for a Books for a Better Life Award for Best First Book. As a literary agent, she represented literary fiction authors including Ann Beattie, Roxana Robinson, and Lara Vapnyar, memoirists including Dan-El Padilla Peralta, Sunny Schwartz, and Rachel Adams, and self-help and education books by Ana Homayoun, Sean Meshorer, and B. Janet Hibbs. She writes personal essays and reviews fiction and literary non-fiction for the Daily Beast, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times‘ Motherlode, the Chicago Tribune, MORE magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, the Boston Globe, and Huff Post Parents. She teaches classes on literature and a private memoir workshop in New York City, does free-lance editing and consulting work with authors, and is writing her second book. She is the daughter of legendary literary agent Lynn Nesbit, whose clients have included Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Michael Crichton, Toni Morrison, Anne Rice, Jimmy Carter, Jeff Eugenides, Susan Choi, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe.
Cost: $150
Location: West Midtown Ideasmyth HQ
Limited to 15 students