Site Upgrade: Hotlist, Filters, and Listing Pages


A number of big changes hit LitMatch in the past few days. Like most of the changes we make, they incorporate suggestions made by our users and combine them with a few ideas of our own.

The first thing you’re likely to notice is the new layout to the agent and agent listing pages hereand here. We’ll get to that in a moment, because while it is the most obvious change, the biggest and potentially most useful change is in the hotlist.

Where the hotlist used to be an all or nothing, yes or no toggle switch, the new hotlist allows you to rate agencies on a scale of 1 to 5, represented by a series of flame icons that appear both on the agent/agency detail pages and the listing pages. Hotlist entries added before the change have been automatically defaulted to 3, so none of your existing information was lost during the transition between old and new.

Because the icons appear on the agent and agency listing pages, it’s easier to see, at a glance, which agents and agencies you’ve hotlisted, and sort those agents and agencies according to your rating. Under the old system, the only way to view your entire hotlist was by using the filters on the listing pages, which made it difficult to view the items you highlighted in the context of all the listings available.

Which brings us to the changes to the listing pages themselves. They’ve been reorganized with a cleaner look to make the information you need easier to find and the filters easier to operate. Here are some highlights of what’s been changed:

  • The filters have been moved to the left of the listing table. This brings the listings to the top of the page where they belong and gives us more room to add new filtering options in the future.
  • The agency addresses are no longer part of the table, but when you hover over an agent’s or agency’s name, a tooltip appears with their full address inside.
  • On the agent listing, the agency names have been moved below the agent names in order to compact the table and aid in browsing. Even with this change, you can still sort agents according to the agencies they work for.
  • You can now view the agents and agencies you’ve hotlisted without using any filters and sort according to your hotlist just like you would with any other column.
  • The color coding used on the “Total View” filter has been updated and a key has been added to make it easier to read.

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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.