What is a literary consultant?

Posted on | April 15, 2009 | 1 Comment

Increasingly, aspiring and even experienced writers find that publishers and agents cannot offer them the advice, attention, and editorial assessment that they seek. Publishers and agents are often too flooded with submissions to be able to offer more than a curtly anonymous rejection without even a flicker of advice.

The literary consultant is a new feaure of the book industry, a professional who aims to bridge the gap by offering advice, editorial assessment and help.

Literary consultants do not offer to place your book with a publisher, but rather to advise you on the marketability, and the literary or commercial merits of your work.

Typically, a literary consultant will read a complete work, a synopsis, or in some cases an extract from a work, and will provide an editorial report which will include an assessment as well as editorial recommendations for the improvement of the work, if that is indicated. This is very similar to the kind of report a publisher’s editor would provide an author who was under contract with a publishing house. It’s an opportunity for a writer, not already taken on by a publisher, to receive the kind of editorial attention that a published writer would expect.

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