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Interviews » Collated Answers

Collated Answers from WW interviews

How should our members approach you if they want to?
Andrew LownieI take unsolicited submissions very seriously – how else are agents meant to find clients if they don’t already have inside contacts - and try to make the process as easy as possible. All the five hundred plus submissions a week are read by me initially and the promising ones then passed to my team of readers for a second , third or even fourth opinion. If we feel the book has commercial potential then we will work, sometimes for years, on shaping the proposal for the market.

Though I probably take on more authors than most agents - perhaps twenty authors a year - that is a very small percentage of the submissions I receive There are all sorts of reasons for turning down perfectly publishable authors– not my area of expertise, not sufficiently commercial, doesn’t interest me, have a comparable book already on the list – so authors shouldn’t despair. It’s important to keep trying and to take advice on making the submission as attractive and professional as possible. At the same time, many submissions are simply not suitable – poorly written, for genres I specifically say I don’t represent, not in the proposal format suggested on my website etc

Though I handle a wide range of authors and subjects , I am now taking on very little fiction and concentrating on history, biography, some trivia and reference books, memoir and issue books . For example, Amanda Steane’s Who Cares about negligence in the NHS and David Craig’s Plundering the Public Sector on wasted expenditure in Whitehall.
  
Sean Costello We accept hard copy and email submissions consisting of a brief synopsis and two or three sample chapters. These should be sent to: Crescent Books, 10 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh EH3 7AL or submissions@crescentfiction.com