Fourteen years ago in 2008, I searched for book agents near me and found out two things:

1. It’s rather hard to go door to door (sorry, Jennifer DeChiara, but luckily for both of us I never got past your doorman).
2. They’re not necessarily receptive to folks just saying, “Here’s my property, where’s my money?” It’s not like a real estate broker in Bay Ridge who’s desperate to lease you an apartment.

Or it shouldn’t be.

But there is a trick to finding book agents near me — near you, as the case may be. I’ve carefully sorting hundreds of them by both coasts and the major cities — Denver, Phoenix, etc — near you. This is super important because most of them work telecommute anyways, so it’s getting trickier to find out who’s near whom. Friend of the site Donald Maass, for instance, first moved from the Flatiron district shortly after bombing of 23rd street (I don’t think that had anything to do with the agency’s move, for the record, but it was near their original offices). They moved to a place I’d introduced him to named Berg’n. Berg’n was a community hall, beer garden, food court with upstairs offices. Well Berg’n closed, though the upstairs offices… may (?)… still be around due to… y’know… pandemic. Don moved to Seattle and his agents went almost entirely online. Still an NYC agency? Sure. But… it’s tricky: how do you search for that? And is theirs an isolated case?

You search for DMLA the standard way, of course, the way you search for any of these agencies. And DMLA isn’t the only agency: loads of these agencies that weren’t already online, went completely telecommute during the pandemic. Were I an agent, that would absolutely make sense: agenting sells the IP version of real estate in an increasingly digital publishing world. Why wouldn’t you work from home?

But that begs the question for the local author: how to find agents near me?

All you need to do, rather than merely search in Google and hope for the best (I’m telling you: that method doesn’t work well), is to find the state nearest you in the list below and grab that list. Find that agency’s website. Then follow their guideliens to the letter. I’ve been doing this for a little while both with agents and editors: trust me, these are the book agents near you. These are your best options.

Book agents near me:

• Arizona book agents
• California book agents
• Colorado book agents
• Connecticut book agents
• New York City book agents
• Pennsylvania book agents
• Philadelphia book agents

By genre:

• Action Adventure
• Military
• Poetry
• Children’s
• Fantasy

Please share this post widely, if you would. It’ll help get the word out to the folks in your own network who desperately need to get connected with literary representation. Call it overstatement, but I do mean desperate: some folks who have been writing for years seriously still do not understand how this works. And that’s completely okay. But we, as friends, have an obligation to help them.

Consider my friend who has written THIRTEEN COMPLETED FANTASY NOVELS and has yet to submit one. Because she’s scared? Nope. She just really didn’t know how it works. She knows how to write a novel — a good novel, it seems — but she hasn’t ever sold one. Consider that. Consider writing The Wheel of Time and never showing any of it to a professional who could help them sell it.

You have friends in your network with completed stories, completed poetry manuscripts, completed books. They’re looking for representation for their literature. If this post is helpful to you — or them — would you comment and share?

I’m doing my best to help my friend with things like Query Shark and connecting her to our writer’s Discord for critique. Maybe you could simply help your friends by commenting, sharing this post, and getting connected.