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I'm Jennifer Laughran. I'm a Senior Agent at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency, representing great authors and illustrators….

  • By Jennifer Laughran
  • Based in United States of America
  • Roughly two posts per day
  • First post on

Posts per month

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Posts per month
Month starting Posts
Nov 2022 51
Dec 2022 149
Jan 2023 114
Feb 2023 129
Mar 2023 78
Apr 2023 45
May 2023 60
Jun 2023 50
Jul 2023 83
Aug 2023 74
Sep 2023 73
Oct 2023 62
Nov 2023 90
Dec 2023 10

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Most recent posts

Hi, Jenn. First of all, I love all your made-up examples. Hot whale trends! I know you just said trends don’t make or break a book, but I heard people aren’t super interested in contemporary MG set in schools, just because it’s like… that’s all kids do now. School. I’m especially worried because I’ve been hearing middle school kids aren’t doing so well in school in the first place. So does the industry try to get kids interested in school again? Does it just pivot WITH kids, toward escapism? How do you get kids interested in reading again?
I think contemporary MG is having problems for lots of reasons, but I am not sure that "kids are sick of school" is one of them (or not the largest one, anyway). Reasons some contemporary/realistic …
On , 333 words
I have a very niche question for you. Is there some magic place where you can search for pubbed books by word count? I’ve been hunting for months for more series that fall into that CB+ space like Bad Princesses or The Mythics … somewhere in that 18k-25k range. I can’t find many above 11k or under 35k. Is it just a length that’s hard to get published? Do you have any suggestions on how to narrow the search? Thank you!!
As far as I know, there is no method by which you can "search by word count" on any existing book-search-type platform.My suggestion is that you find comps on bookshelves, and then look them up …
On , 237 words
I know people say don’t write to trends but what do you do when it seems like that’s 95% of what gets picked up by agents or sold on submission?
I don't know what to tell you that you haven't heard. Like, writing to trends is kinda futile, because by the time you have heard of a trend, it's probably too late to jump on …
On , 313 words