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Scott Meredith Literary Agency

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I was searching, but couldn't find any comments on the Scott Meredith agency. Can anyone help?
Do they charge fees of any kind?
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Miguelito

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By the look of their website, there's a publishing wing associated with this agency. Isn't that a wee bit of a conflict of interest?
 

James D. Macdonald

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Yes. It's iffy.

They used to do reading fees, too. That was also iffy.

This is the infamous "Scott Meredith Exception" that you sometimes hear about. As in "Practice X is a red flag unless it's Scott Meredith."
 

victoriastrauss

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They used to do reading fees, too. That was also iffy.

Scott Meredith invented the reading fee. For a long, long time (and also under Klebanoff after Meredith's death), the agency had a whole division whose entire job was providing evaluations to hopeful authors for a fee, a service that they aggressively marketed with brochures and advertising. They were notorious for this, in fact. Authors were encouraged to approach the agency through the reading fee division, but were rarely passed on to the literary agency division, which actually had many well-known clients and made substantial sales.

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HapiSofi

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As Jim says, Scott Meredith is the reason we have to stop in the middle of nice clear-cut statements like "All agencies that charge reading fees are scams," and ritually say "except Scott Meredith."

Not many of their fee-read authors crossed the gap to the other side of the agency. That's no wonder; most slush is bad.

Historically speaking, some good editors and agents have come out of Scott Meredith. The unfortunate corollary to this is that they're no longer there.