Nathan Bransford - The Forums

There is a process: Research the agent you want. Do they accept your genre? Yes? OK. Check their website for submission guidelines. Do they accept snail mail, or email queries? Jessica Faust clearly states on her website that they will only accept proposals via snail mail if they have specifically ...

Has the entire world gone mad? I've spent twenty years now, living in poverty, teaching myself how to write fiction. I've sacrificed everything... everything... in order to teach myself how to write commercial fiction - and a literary agent won't even accept a ten page submission of mine printed on...

Her reason for not accepting my submission had nothing to do with her submission guidelines. Am I not making myself clear about this: the reason she stated for not accepting my submission was her concern for the environment. Okay, does anybody here... and I mean ANYBODY... find it slightly odd, and ...

No shirt, no shoes, no service. In other words, businesses are generally able to conduct business and refuse service on their own terms unless it breaks the law. Her agency is a business. She's taking a calculated risk that she won't miss out on something great from someone who doesn't use email. O...

Jessica Faust lost all credibility with me this summer when I sent her an e-mail in which I inquired if she would accept an unsolicited query for a novel in hard-copy - I was hoping for an enthusiastic response, and wrote that the submission was right here on my desk, good to go, and that all she ha...

Then again, who knows... maybe this person IS delving into the slush pile in search of stuff... did anybody here submit anything even remotely like The Space Kapow or whatever it's called?

I'm sure he has better things to do than steal ideas from his slush pile. Again, completely misses the point. Not in a million years would I believe that any literary agent would delve into the slush pile consciously searching for material to plagiarize. See, this is the type of response that just ...

Also, one faintly stuffy question: but how many of you here are published novelists?

Myself, I have a one-page synopsis for a novel I've been working on for five years now - in other words, it's taken me five years to arrive at the point where I actually can articulate the idea in just one page. There's no way in a million years I would send this to Mr. Bransford....You think I'm g...

To each his own, but if you're an unpublished novelist, and you've just written a book, say, about a young lawyer who gets a job with a firm in Memphis... my advice would be to be careful who you shop that to. On the other hand, if you've just written a novel titled 'Ted and Jane's Zombie Wedding', ...

I've searched this forum (and maybe I simply missed seeing the thread), but it astonishes me that people haven't brought up the issue of the literary agent also being a practicing novelist. Here's what Mr. Bransford has listed near the top of his web-page. "I'm a literary agent with the San Fra...