Thread by @annzhao_

thread for #amquerying authors of kidlit (YA and under) who want to look up agent deals but don't have money for publishers marketplace!

(this also works to look up editors but i will speak about agents from here on out)

this does NOT work for adult books, sadly

long story short: use boolean search terms on www dot publishers weekly dot com, which has a newsletter that puts out *most* children's deals (some agencies don't report there though). keep scrolling for more step-by-step instructions w/ explanation!

there are 2 main websites where book deals get reported: publishers marketplace and publishers weekly. PM costs money :/

but you do not have to pay for PW's rights report, where children's deals get announced! unfortunately there is no equivalent for adult books :(

publishers weekly has a pretty old search function. but you can filter it using boolean search terms, one of the most valuable things i've learned so far in college! basically, this tells the search function to narrow down your search specifically in the way that you want it to

so without further ado, this is what you type in the search bar!!!!!! do it verbatim but subbing out the agent's actual name

"agent's name" AND "rights report"

in the following tweets, i'll explain further what all this means

quotation marks make multiple words into a phrase so it'll search for that whole phrase and not just any time either of those words appear.

e.g. if you just searched john smith w/o quotation marks, you'll get every single article in PW with the name john or the name smith. yikes

AND tells the search function to search for both phrases. when you put AND in your search, only articles with both that name and the words "rights report" will appear.

if you'll recall from earlier, "rights report" is the name of the column where children's deals get reported

essentially what this does is it'll find every single rights report where that agent's name was mentioned. it won't pull up other articles where that agent was mentioned (like articles about soon-to-be published books)

from there, you just click on the article and control-f to find the agent's name. and that's it!

nothing came up? or too many irrelevant results? some troubleshooting below!

this might sound silly, but check for typos. any typo, and it just won't work. there's no "did you mean ____?" on publishers weekly.

are you doing this search on a phone? some phones turn straight quotation marks " into curly quotation marks “”. this will break the phrase!

did the agent recently change their name? do some scouring to find their previous name; PW doesn't update that.

is the agent new or do they mostly rep adult? they probably won't have any children's deals up! search their agency's name instead to see how the agency is overall

is the agent also an author, or have they previously been an editor? you'll get some results of their other book deals where they were involved in some other capacity. as far as i know there is no way to troubleshoot this, you just have to weed through it :(

finally, there's the chance that that agency doesn't report to PW. if all else fails, and you *know* they have sales, you might have to look on PM.

happy searching, good luck querying, and reply below if you have questions or need help!! i may add to this if i think of anything