Your literary agent has two primary roles:
- Represent your fiction or non-fiction manuscripts to appropriate publishers.
- Guide your writing and your career.
To be effective, your agent must recognize the potential in your work and actually believe in your writing as much as you do. Consequently a sensible agent focuses on the kinds of writing s/he appreciates, understands, and likes to read.
Fiction
Benrey Literary represents commercial fiction for adults, including most genres except science fiction, fantasy, and erotica. We're especially interested in romance, historical, suspense, mystery, and women's fiction. We don't represent children's fiction or young adult books. We don't market short stories, screenplays, scripts, or poetry.
Non-Fiction
Benrey Literary represents many categories of commercial non-fiction, including self-help, true crime, business, and inspirational. We don't handle occult, New Age, or academic (e.g. textbooks) manuscripts. We don't represent magazine articles.
High Ethical Standards
Benrey Literary follows high ethical standards. We don't charge fees for reading queries, proposals, or manuscripts. We don't refer clients to coaching or editing services related in any way to our firm. We don't bill clients for routine costs (e.g. routine copying, postage, and telephone). We carefully define our working relationship with clients with a straightforward representation agreement (an "agency contract").
Fees
We have a traditional fee structure. Our fee is 15 percent of advance and on-going royalties earned by the work we sell to publishers.
Response Time
Every aspect of the publishing process takes longer than writers would wish — including the time an agent spends evaluating their work. We do our best to respond to solicited queries and proposals within four weeks, and to report back on submissions (which may include a complete manuscript) within eight weeks. Unfortunately, our workload sometimes stretches these nominal evaluation times.