Top Tips for Deciding Which Agent to Submit to

You’ve put your submission together and it’s ready to go. Now, you’re looking at a series of photos of agents grinning and wondering: who should I send my work to at the MM Agency? Here are our top tips for deciding which agent to submit to.

• Our Agents are listed at the top of the Our Team page and you can click on their profiles to find out more about them. On each profile, there’s a short summary of what the Agent is looking for on the left, underneath their biography. You can use this to discount any Agents who do not represent the genre that you are submitting in. For instance, you might notice that Emma Bal does not consider Fiction, or you might discount submitting to anybody, except for Chloe Seager and Maddy Belton, because your submission is within Children’s & YA.
• Read each Agent’s profile carefully. The MM Agents have detailed descriptions of what they are looking for on the right, underneath their biographies. These descriptions often mention specific genres, themes, and characters that the Agents would like to see, so you should consider how similar your book is to their wish list.
• If you scroll further down the page, the Agents have listed their favourite books and some Agents have also included their favourite TV shows or podcasts. This is a second opportunity to get to know the Agent’s taste before submitting to them. For example, let’s say that I’m querying an Upmarket Fiction/Book Club novel that consists of interviews about a controversial film maker after their death with a mystery element and I’m looking at Hayley Steed’s wish list. I would know that Hayley is probably a good fit for my novel once I see that one of her favourite books is Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
• If you are torn between two or more Agents and you feel that you might be missing an opportunity by having to pick one person, you should know that our Agents will always share a submission with a colleague if they’re grabbed by the writing but know that it’s not the right fit for them.
• And our final tip is to double check that you definitely are submitting to a Literary Agent. We have received submissions directed to ex-employees, our Translation Rights Agents, to no particular Agent, and even to Maple Milburn, our resident Wellness Officer, who also happens to be a dog! Maple sadly declined to consider due to her hectic schedule of napping. The MM Agents are open for submissions all year round and the only way to submit to them is through our three submissions forms (Fiction, Non-fiction and Children’s & YA), where you will need to indicate which Agent you want your submission to be read by.