9 Agents Seeking Young Adult and Middle Grade Novels
What they want, what they've published, and who else they're representing.
At the dawn of the genre-by-age classification system, YA was aimed at teens (well, from 12-18). Now, it’s as though each year comes with a different freakin’ age range genre.
Okay, exaggerating, sure, but things aren’t as clear cut simply because 12-18 year olds no longer read the same kind of stuff. It’s become harder to predict what will strike the fancy of individuals by age (who knew that the number of years you’ve been on this weird planet wouldn’t correlate perfectly to your reading habits).
MG (Middle grade, in case that needed explaining…probably not, but here we are) has also become a bit of an anomaly. While YA sales have increased pretty happily (sometimes ragingly so, depending on certain trend explosions like the vampire romance genre no one misses, Stephanie), MG’s floundering. Part of that’s because a lot of middle graders just prefer to read what would have earlier been classified as YA. And even adults are reading YA (more than half of YA fans are adults). So everyone’s reading YA. We all want to be 16 again, obviously.
All of this is to say…things are murky when you’re looking to submit your book to agents. Especially if you’re novel is MG, seriously consider why it’s there. And if you have solid reasoning to back that up, stick to it and present it as such in your query letter. Otherwise, might be worth it to get in on the YA wagon.
This list includes:
The agent & agency they work for
What they are looking for right now
Favorite books/writers where we could find that
Authors they’ve represented
Where to query them
What else do you want to know? If we can find it, we’ll include it.
This is one of our paid subscriber lists this month. Our paid subscriptions are what give us the ability to gather all of this information and maintain our database. If you have the means, you can upgrade here.
Of course, we are always happy to help those in need; just let us know.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Sub Club to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.