What are some good publishing agents?

[henry]

What are some good publishing agents for previously and self published author.

Is it still the case that a writer needs an agent before he can work with a publisher

My work is almost finished what is an agent and publisher looking for.

[nous vivons]

I'm not sure what the equivelent is but in Australia we have the Australian literary agents' association. the easiest way to seek a legitimate literary agent is to look them up on the associations website, i assume america has something similar but i could not find it when i searched, possibly because i used an australian search engine, hopefully you might have more luck.

make sure you have a look at the agents credentials, whether they have a degree of some sort, experience working for a well known publisher or have published their own work. if they don't list their credentials maybe call them to find out, but if you can't find out then chances are they don't have any and you should look elsewhere.

these days publishers only want to deal with literary agents, so without one you look unprofessional and show that you have no knowledge about the industry.

agents look for something that will sell. good agents don't get paid by you, they take a percentage of what the publisher pays you, so if you don't get published they don't get paid. ideally your work will be well edited, gramatically correct and formatted properly, if not then they can organise an editor to fix up your work before sending it to a publisher, but the question is would they think you're good enough to be published if you send poorly edited work to a literary agent?

so basically- edit your work, look up a few literary agents and send your work with a letter off to them and hopefully one of them will pick you up, if not take their criticism on board, change what they suggest and send your work to more agents, good luck

[SC]

Working with a publisher does not necessarily require an agent and as a previous self published author you must possess extensive knowledge of having a book published and having the book distributed to various sales channels. I am not sure what kind of help you are looking for or what kind of distribution you are expecting but SGC Publishing can publish your work in e-book and print format for affordable prices. The book will be available on Barnes & Noble and Amazon and a copy of the book will be mailed to the Barnes & Noble executive office for possible store distribution. Give them a try at http://stevecarley.us.

[Joss]

Literary Agent, not 'Publishing Agent'. Make sure you're using the right terminology when you're dealing with professionals in the industry because you don't want them to think that you dont know what you're dong.

No, you don't need a literary agent, but if you want to work with most of the larger publishers, you'll need an agent.

Agents and publishers are looking for well-written original stuff. If you're writing something for a tight market (for example, dystopian) then you need to show that your work really stands out in the field. If the market is saturated then it's going to be harder to break into and you'll also need some very unique twist to stand out.

One thing to remember, you'll have to write a query letter. Make sure it's well written. Your query letter is indicative of your manuscript. If your query letter is badly written and full of grammatical errors and run-on sentences, then chances are your manuscripts is just as badly written and you'll get rejected (agents know from personal experience that the writing in someone's query letter will be the same in their manuscript). So, take your query letter seriously. Make sure it's written well. I follow lots of literary agents on twitter and they turn down more than enough manuscripts because of 'weak writing' - poor sentence structure, bad grammar, wordy, etc.

And don't mention your self-published work unless you've sold thousands of copies over a short period of time (not 1,000 copies over 3 years, but 1,000 copies per month! if it's an ebook). I'm assuming you're going to submit a new manuscript that's unrelated to your self-published novel(s).

aaronline.org is what I use to find agents, but that's not the only place and not all agents are registered with them.

Good luck.