What We Are and What We’re Not


If you’ve been using LitMatch for a while, then you already know exactly what it is that we’re all about. But, if you’re new to the site, or perhaps new to how the traditional publishing system works in general, a quick overview may be in order:

What We’re Not: A Literary Agency. We don’t represent authors directly, nor can we accept submissions on their behalf. Despite that, we get a fair number of submissions sent to us, most of them via email. Unfortunately, as soon as we see these for what they are, we have to delete them without reading them.

What We Are: A great way to find agents you can submit to. We have searching and browsing features that will help you narrow down our list of over 1700 literary agents and find the ones who are right for your particular book. We allow you to search by the genres an agent represents, the projects and authors they’ve gotten published, and over a dozen other options. Once you find agents you like, you can add them to your hotlist to keep them on hand throughout your entire submission process.

What We’re Not: A Query Blaster. Query blasters, for those unaware, are services that charge you a fee to send your submission materials all at once to a list of agents and agencies that they control. At first, this may seem like a great way to save time. However, query blasters are almost universally frowned upon by agents, who prefer personalized contact and thoughtful selection of recipients. (For more on query blasters, see our blog on the subject.)

What We Are: A simple and powerful way to track the submissions you send. We designed our tracking system with ease of use in mind, and our built-in statistics and graphs allow you to see, at a glance, what your response rate is like, how many submissions are still outstanding, and how long it takes for agents to respond. Responses are anonymously gathered and aggregated in order to give users a sense of the response times for each agent.

ABOUT US

LitMatch was created to be the largest, most complete, and most up-to-date directory of literary agents and agencies on the Web. Created by writers, for writers, LitMatch offers unique research and submission tracking features designed to help writers of all kinds connect with the people who are best able to help them get published.