Upstart Crow Literary is a New York–based literary agency founded in 2009 by Michael Stearns. The agency represents adult fiction and nonfiction as well as children’s books, with particularly strong experience in picture books, middle grade, young adult, literary and upmarket fiction, and select adult commercial projects. Its clients include New York Times bestsellers, National Book Award finalists, and recipients of American Library Association and other major literary honors.
Upstart Crow Literary Submission Guidelines
Upstart Crow Literary welcomes queries from authors and illustrators across various genres, particularly emphasizing upmarket commercial and literary fiction, fresh young adult and middle grade fiction, and compelling non-fiction. They operate a nearly paper-free office and only accept electronic submissions via their submission guidelines page. The agency ensures that no fees are charged for submission, indicating their commitment to legitimate representation.
Submitting Your Work to Upstart Crow Literary
Before submitting to Upstart Crow Literary
The Market List recommends you verify the market is active and accepting submissions before sending your manuscript via regular mail. You may verify a market status by either visiting their website, calling their listed phone number, or confirming via regular mail that the market is still active before sending them your work.
To be sure your submission is appropriate for this market, we recommend you familiarize yourself with Upstart Crow Literary by reading a sample issue before submitting.
If you have recently submitted to Upstart Crow Literary or have experience with this market, please submit a comment below. Recent submission response times are always welcome and helpful to other writers.
From the Upstart Crow Literary guidelines:
Submission Guidelines Details for Upstart Crow Literary
How to Submit to Upstart Crow
Please route your query and sample through each agent's page at QueryTracker.net. We rely on their system to help us manage submissions and responses. Please submit to ONLY ONE AGENT at a time.
Author/illustrators: Please include a link to your online portfolio and/or to your downloadable dummy. (Thank you!)
For novel submissions, please cut-and-paste the first twenty pages of your novel into the field. Should we want to read more, we will contact you. For picture book manuscripts, paste in the entirety of the document.
Upstart Crow runs a nearly paper-free office (or that’s what we aim for, anyway), and trust that we are serious when we tell you: we do not accept hard copy submissions via the US mail. We consider only electronic submissions. Mailed submissions will be thrown unread into the recycle bin.
NB: We will NEVER charge a fee for reading or submitting a writer's work. Anyone requesting such a fee is not a legitimate representative of Upstart Crow Literary, but a scam artist.
Market Type: Literary Agency