Authors Lunch

Gail Hochman is the president of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc. For 20 years, she was the head of the AALA, the Association of American Literary Agents. She represents authors in numerous genres, including literary fiction, mystery, children’s middle grade, and serious nonfiction. Do you have any advice on how many agents to query at a time? If they are personalized, perhaps a rolling query with a limit? I would say get your core group of favorites first, and send to them—maybe five or six. Realize that many people these days do not answer queries when they are not […]

Long After We Are Gone (Sourcebooks Landmark, May 14, 2024. Editor: Erin McClary. Agent: Abby Saul at The Lark Group.) Terah Shelton Harris is a librarian and freelance writer, who now writes upmarket fiction with bittersweet endings. As a freelancer, her work has appeared in consumer and trade magazines including Catapult, Women’s Health, Backpacker, and more. How did you find your agent? I love this question because it gives me an opportunity to tell my unique story. My editor, Erin McClary, responded to my query and first 50 pages, asking for the full manuscript. It was a miracle that I […]

Stacey Barney is associate publisher at Nancy Paulsen Books for Young Readers. She has edited bestselling and award-winning titles such as Krystal Sutherland’s The Invocations and House of Hollow, Renée Ahdieh’s The Beautiful quartet, Ayana Gray’s Beasts of Prey, and Katherine Arden’s middle grade quartet Small Spaces, as well as Caldecott Honor–winning The Cat Man of Aleppo and Coretta Scott King Illustrator honoree Nina: A Story of Nina Simone written by Traci N. Todd and illustrated by Christian Robinson. Can you talk about what, for you, separates a middle grade from a YA novel? How are the voice, characters, themes, etc. […]

The Great Divide (Ecco, March 5, 2024. Editor: Sara Birmingham. Agent: Julie Barer, The Book Group.) Cristina Henríquez is the author of The Book of Unknown Americans, The World In Half and Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories. She has been longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Real Simple, and elsewhere. She earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and is a graduate of the […]

Lucinda Halpern is a literary agent and the founder of Lucinda Literary, based in New York. She currently represents New York Times and internationally best-selling authors in the categories of personal growth, popular science, narrative nonfiction, memoir, and upmarket fiction. Her classes and coaching programs have been taught to hundreds of writers worldwide, and became the inspiration for her new book Get Signed: Find an Agent, Land a Book Deal, and Become a Published Author (Hay House; February 6, 2024). In GET SIGNED, you discuss why it’s important to commit to a genre and find comp titles. Can you talk […]