About ALM

What does Australian Literary Management do?

1) We actively seek out publishers for the work of writers we represent: book and magazine publishers, film, theatre, radio and television producers, and others.

2) We supervise the contract relationships between authors and publishers. We make sure our authors get a fair and profitable deal from publishers’ advances and sales royalties.

3) We carefully negotiate overseas rights, translation rights, film rights and opportunities, residual rights, and many other detailed contract matters.

4) We advise publishers how to best promote our authors’ work.

5) We act as a clearing house for publisher payments to authors, checking the promptness and accuracy of payments and passing them on authors after deducting our agency commission (usually a percentage of the authors’ earnings) and any reasonable expenses we might have incurred such as postage and photocopying. We do not charge a fee to join our agency, and we do not charge any other fees.

I’m a writer. How do I bring my work to the attention of your agency?

1) First, to save your time, we do not consider scripts of any kind, or children’s books by unpublished authors, and we do not consider work that has been self-published as either a paper book or an e-book. Please read this again, as some people do misunderstand it: it only applies to writers of scripts, and to writers of children’s books, and to self-published authors, not to general authors who have not had a particular manuscript published.

2) If you have already sent your manuscript to the major publishers in Australia, and they have all said no, please don’t send it to us as a last resort. Publishers generally refuse to read a manuscript twice, so we would have no chance of interesting them in your book if they have read it once and said no.

Hint: find an agent first, not last.

3) Make sure that we are the only agents who are currently considering your work. Our time is precious, and we do not wish to spend hours reading your submission, only to find that some other agent has just accepted it. To repeat: if some other agent is currently considering your work, you must NOT send it to us.

4) Second, phone us on (612+) 9818 8557 or send us a plain enquiry email (see the Contact us page) to check that we wish to see your work. Some kinds of writing are not of interest to us: children’s books by previously unpublished authors, screenplays, plays, poetry or individual short stories, for example.

5) If we ask to see a sample of your writing, send a copy via email of a one-to-two-page synopsis of your book, together with copies of some pages from two sample chapters (up to a maximum of fifty pages total), to our office. Do not send the whole work. Please go to our Send us Your Work page, and follow the instructions.

You may send by the slower and more expensive method of postal mail. Our postal mail address is

    Australian Literary Management
    2-A Booth Street
    Balmain NSW 2041
    Australia

Please note: if at all possible, please format your work as Rich Text Format (any word processor can “Save As” RTF). If you wish to send by postal mail, send copies, not the originals. Always keep the originals in a safe place. We cannot be responsible for loss of material.

Here are some further points to note:

1. You may Contact us by email. It is simpler, quicker and cheaper than postal mail. And you may send us a sample of your work by email. This different to a simple enquiry, and you need to go to our Send us Your Work page, and follow the instructions.
2. If you wish to send by the slower and more expensive method of postal mail, we ask that you enclose a self-addressed envelope for return of the material, large enough to enclose the material, with sufficient postage. Please make a note of this point: it is easy to overlook. When we receive a submission without return postage, it will not be returned. If you live outside Australia, you may ignore this point, but do not expect your typescript to be returned.
3. Binding: please don’t. We prefer that the material should be in the form of loose sheets, unbound, held together by string or cotton tape, or a large folder or envelope.
4. Line spacing: the pages should have double-spaced lines of type, or one-and-a-half spaced lines, to make the pages easier to read. We do not accept single-spaced work. Most publishers have these same preferences. ‘Spacing’ here means spacing between the lines of type, not spacing between the words or letters.
5. When you send us copies of your samples, you must let us know if any publishers have seen any versions of the work. We cannot sell a work to a publisher if every publisher in Australia has already rejected it.
6. Make sure that every item you send is clearly labelled with your name and address. With a manuscript, you do not need to put your name and address on every page: just on the front page. Please number all the pages, and include your name and the title of the work on all pages. Your word processor makes this easy to do by inserting an automatic Header on every page.
7. Do not send cassette tapes, CDs, or video tapes.
8. Do not send mail that needs to be signed for, like registered mail or person-to-person mail. We can take up to six weeks to respond to a submission. If you would like to know right away that we have safely received your submission, please include (along with your submission) a regular size stamped self-addressed envelope or postcard with ‘acknowledgment of receipt’ written on the back. We will post this back to you as soon as we receive your submission. We repeat: Do not send mail that needs to be signed for.
9. Please do not call in person with your submission. We cannot and will not accommodate personal visits.

We will consider your synopsis and sample chapters and decide whether we wish to look at the full manuscript. This will take from four to six weeks. Please be patient — we get over a thousand submissions a year, and our staff are generally busy with other matters.

Do you charge a fee to look at a manuscript?

No.

Do I have to pay a fee to join your agency?

There is no fee to join our agency.

What fees do you charge, then, to represent an author?

Like other agents, we charge an agency commission on our writers’ earnings. The usual commission is fifteen per cent. This applies for the life of any contract which we negotiate, not the life of the author!

Does this mean that if I join your agency, then later wish to leave, I can do so?

Of course — all our authors are free to leave the agency at any time. Keep in mind, though, that our agency commission applies for the life of any contract which we negotiate. This means in most cases that as long as a book is in print for which we have negotiated the publishing contract, we continue to earn our agency commission on the author’s royalties for the sales of that book.

If I send say a hundred pages for you to consider, will you read them all?

We may look at a few pages, or we may read the whole thing. We assess manuscripts for our own purposes, and we have to be economical with our time.

I think I need some guidance to help me improve my work. Will ALM read my manuscript and provide this kind of advice?

No, we don’t comment on your work, or provide that kind of service. That’s not our business. But we do have a list of freelance professional writers and editors we can call on to provide manuscript assessment services for you. They will read your work carefully and provide a detailed and unbiassed written report on its strengths and weaknesses, with advice as to how to better shape your work and therefore improve your chances of finding a publisher. The charge, for an average novel, is about $300. This service has no connection with ALM’s agency work, and a positive report does not oblige ALM to consider your work. There are many small businesses that offer similar manuscript assessment services, for approximately the same fee. They can usually be contacted through your local writers’ centre. As a general service to all writers, we provide a detailed list of such services on the website of the Australian Literary Agents’ association, here:
http://austlitagentsassoc.com.au/contacts.html
 
E-mail is easier and cheaper than postal mail. May I submit my work via e-mail?

Of course. See this item above.

What about other literary agents?

There are over a dozen literary agents in Australia… [»»] here is the Internet site for the Australian Literary Agents’ Association, with members’ contact details, their code of practice, tips on how to find an agent, and dozens of useful literary contacts.

…back to ALM’s homepage.