Agent for adult vs children's novel

When you approach an agent, you really only want to offer one book at a time. If it's the first of a projected series, or if there's a sequel, you can indicate this in your query or cover letter, but you should initially be offering just the one book. Even if you can find agents who are equally interested in (and successful in selling) adult and middle-grade fiction, you'll need to pick just one of your books to query with.

It's not unusual for writers who work in different genres or markets to have more than one agent (at different agencies). So instead of trying to find one agent who might be interested in both your books, you could query for each book separately. This would greatly increase the pool of appropriate agents.

- Victoria

The problem with this approach is that if you find an agent for one of your books, chances are they will want to rep all of your work and when you say, "Well, you don't do MG and I have one of those and want to find a separate agent for that," you immediately create a bit of a conflict. If one of your books sells, but not the other, the agent for the one that isn't selling may be a bit peeved because they aren't making anything off the book you didn't allow them to represent.

Frankly, my advice would be to actually look for an agent who does both, but only pitch the best of the two projects. When you are signed, then you can pitch the other book, or you can bring it up when you know the agent is serious about you. But I don't know that splitting your efforts is the right way to go. As an agent, I have never been happy when I agreed to split representation and it definitely can become a sore point, so tread carefully.

Z