Justice Literary / Justice PR

Thanks for starting the thread.

I was similarly taken aback by the website with its weird appearing/disappearing blurb about getting to know "us", the truncated bio, and the apparent use of the first person plural for a single-agent group.

The large number of requests in #tenqueries is worrisome, too. I rarely see more than one request in twenty or thirty queries there, and Alicia is requesting three or four in every batch. Sign of a newbie trying to build a stable quickly?

And some of the individual tweets are disturbing, too. A request because the plot has been in the news lately? Is it still going to be in the news by the time she pitches it to editors, let alone by the time it sees print?

My semi-educated opinion is to wait and see. Let someone else take the risk of signing with Ms. Justice.

I also see red flags all over her website. I wish I was brave enough to ask her what her credentials for being an agent are.

Per her LinkedIn profile, her previous experience consists of being a book blogger and a wedding/event planner. She's also co-owner of a PR/blog tour company, which is at least a potential conflict of interest, especially given this from the Justice Literary website:

With the Justice label we also provide our PR and Marketing department, which offers a range of support in all areas of marketing and public relations, including areas of social media marketing all the way up to print marketing.

Click to expand...

Back in the late 1990's and early 2000's, manuscript display sites were major trolling grounds for amateur and questionable agents. Now the same thing seems to be happening with Twitter.

- Victoria

I blogged about it a few months ago: Twitter is an unfiltered conduit, so of course the less-than-stellar agencies and publishers gravitate toward it.

Coming back from #Pitmad, I had one of my tweets favourited by Justice Literary and tried googling around (couldn't find much), checked their website (very little info), and checked the BR&BC sub forum and thankfully found this. Looks like it might be one I'll be passing on.. Thanks AW.

I wrote a tweet imploring #pitmad folk to follow instructions and do their research before subbing. The tweet got retweeted by Justice Lit. I clicked out of curiousity, clicked out again just as quickly. Not much to see at all.

And if that website sentence posted by Victoria is an example of sentence structure for press releases etc...ugh.

She followed me on LinkedIn. I asked her if she's accepting submissions. She was, so I submitted. Got a rejection a few weeks later.

Any more news on these guys? I submitted to them before I saw this, and they requested my full manuscript.

Congrats on the full, lucky toaster!

Lucky Toaster, I gotta ask, what drew you to them? Enough to submit a query?

She's not listed on querytracker, which claims it screens agents before listing them there. I don't know how rigorous they are, as I've run across some on their site I'm leery of subbing too (ones who don't seem to rep anyone trade published or who don't have any sales in my genre). But if they haven't put her agency up, that might very well mean something. The lack of any experience in the publishing industry makes her a non starter for me, even if she repped my genre.

Filigree, I had compiled a list of agents who were open to YA science fiction with disabled characters via ManuscriptWishlist.com and they were on it. Not many are willing to try--not as many as there should be, in my opinion--but anyway, I put it all down in an excel spreadsheet. Then I accidentally subbed to a few I didn't mean to (not yet) under the fog of too much cold medicine. Only when she asked for a full did I take a closer look and realize I'd made a booboo. I haven't given her my full though.

Good luck on your submissions! And remember, just because an agent doesn't specifically say they want your kind of book doesn't mean they don't want it. Let us know when it's accepted.