New Literary Agent Alert: Andrew Wetzel of Martin Literary Management
Literary agent alerts (like this one with Andrew Wetzel of Martin Literary Management) are golden opportunities for new writers because each one is a literary agent who is likely building their client list.
November 2012 UPDATE: It appears that Andrew is no longer with MLM. Do not query him.
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About Andrew: Andrew is a relatively recent transplant to the West Coast and joins the Martin Literary Management team after spending three years in the New York publishing industry, first with a brief spell at Soft Skull Press and later as a junior literary scout for Aram Fox, Inc. The intersection of the book and film/TV world is one of his favorite aspects of working in the industry and he always keep an eye out for properties that would lend themselves to that treatment.
He is seeking: "Speaking of my tastes, the areas I'd most like to carve out for myself with Martin Literary Management would be 'Literary with a capital L' fiction (think Eugenides, Houellebecq, Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Martin Amis) as well as the dark corner of the literary list that is slightly less pretentious and slightly more commercial (think Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Johnson). That's a very 'male' list and it is definitely where my personal tastes lie. I love a great story but style is just as important to me sometimes. I'm also very interested in reading Young Adult novels, specifically those with a macabre sensibility or a fascinating dystopian or fantasy setting.
"As well, I'm deeply interested in pop-nonfiction (think Mary Roach, Legs McNeil and, admittedly, gimmicky books based on popular blogs/Tumblrs) and that area of the industry my old coworkers called "Nonfiction for boys": funny books by comedians, pop culture oral histories (!), books by-or-about criminals, memoirs of all sort and stripe, though instead of the inspirational memoir side of it, it would be a mix of warts-and-all athlete/musician/comedian memoirs (or possibly even the sleazy memoir, like Tucker Max/Neil Strauss, if someone had an interesting new angle to that type of book). Lastly, I have a deep nerdy love for graphic novels, though I realize how hard that market is to crack."
How to submit: November 2012 UPDATE: It appears that Andrew is no longer with MLM. Do not query him.
Chuck Sambuchino is a former editor with the Writer's Digest writing community and author of several books, including How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack and Create Your Writer Platform.
