I also started helping agents in the office go out on submission with projects and communicated with writers about their projects. There’s a lot of work with contracts and royalty statements and managing whatever crisis comes up. After a few months, they offered me a full time job as an assistant.Īs an assistant I had a lot more administrative duties, but I started to learn more about what it means to be an agent – most of their time is actually not spent looking at queries. I read multiple projects for every agent in the office and did a lot of editorial work on their manuscripts to help out, and I also started re-organizing the database software on our computers. I loved it so much that I started coming into the office every day and I stayed well beyond the hours I was supposed to be there. I spent my days as an intern reading queries and reading manuscripts – that’s it. I took an internship (unpaid) with FinePrint and commuted from Philadelphia to Manhattan a few days a week, thinking it would be a good opportunity to learn about the agenting side of the business. But when I moved to NY, publishing houses were getting hit with a lot of layoffs and job opportunities were pretty sparse. My initial plan was to try to get a job in the editorial department at a publishing house, hopefully in a science fiction, fantasy, or romance imprint. When the CA budget crisis hit the district where I taught, I started to think about doing something other than teaching and I decided to try to go into publishing. I found that I really liked revising and critiquing manuscripts, and that I was actually better at that than my own writing. I did join several writing groups, though. I started a ton of projects but I never took any steps towards publication. I’ve always loved to write and I devoted most of free time and my summers off to writing when I was in college and teaching. I’m a former English teacher and now an (almost) agent and the executive assistant to the CEO of FinePrint Literary Management. 1) What made you decide to become an agent?

Fineprint literary mangaement