Below is a list of the aproximate number of agents representing different genres. I did this to get an overall view of what genres are most popular today with legitimate non-fee agents. My source was Agent Query. I was curious about trends. This is by no means ALL the agents, only those listed in this source. These values are aproximate.
Adventure--25
Historical Fiction--144 agents
Children's Books--104
Horror--128
Romance--128
Sci-fi--80
Fantasy--88
Chick Lit--106
Thriller/Suspense--216
Literary--344
Humor/Satire--48
Women's Fiction--192
Gay Lesbian--16
Multi-Cultural--8
Christian--16
Off beat/Quirky--64
Western--16
Mystery--224
True Crime--48
Commerical (Mainstream?)--384
Military/Espionage--16
Young Adult--128
Short Story Collections--56
Family Saga--65
Wow, you go girls. Between romance, women's and chick lit, there is a huge female oriented market out there. No suprise--women do buy more books.
Looks like Commericial/mainstream dominates the field. No suprise there. I'm surprised that horror is neck-and-neck with romance. I think that romance, generally speaking, outsells horror, and that they lumped women's fiction in there and I'll bet that romance is crossing over into this category. What's really the shocker for me is that if you cross-over thriller/suspense with mystery, you have a "put me on a thrill ride page-turner" mentality. Look at literary, almost as large as commercial. Are literary books the salt of best-sellers and classics? Another big suprise was the historical category and how large it was, but couldn't historical also be termed literary?
Now, I'll just guess that family saga means "memoire", eh? Has memoire had a rise in the last 15 years? I don't remember it being that popular. Now, by Military/espionage, would that also include "techno-thriller"? You know, the Clancy type material?
The biggest hurt on me would be the extremely narrow agent market for Adventure, or what I like to call and write--Action/Adventure. Truly, hard darts on me. Remind me to never refer to my novel as an action/adventure. I'll play it safe and call it Thriller/suspense.
It's obvious that some of these categories bleed into each other, and why they try to distinquish them within these parameters is anybody's guess. But this site was a survey site, so I assume that each of these agents were asked using these designations. It's certainly relative, isn't it? I would defy anyone to give me ax-stroke divisions between each and every one of these genre descriptions. Remember the days when editors were king and bought books? Now we have marketing Gods to contend with. I remember being told by my agent 15 years ago, "Don't you dare cross-over." Just recently I found a publisher who PREFERS cross-over manuscripts, and takes straight genre as a secondary consideration. Are trends changing? And where's experimental?
Would that be Off beat/quirky?
Does anyone have any other statistics on agents and what genres they represent? It would be nice to see another survey.
Triceratops
Adventure--25
Historical Fiction--144 agents
Children's Books--104
Horror--128
Romance--128
Sci-fi--80
Fantasy--88
Chick Lit--106
Thriller/Suspense--216
Literary--344
Humor/Satire--48
Women's Fiction--192
Gay Lesbian--16
Multi-Cultural--8
Christian--16
Off beat/Quirky--64
Western--16
Mystery--224
True Crime--48
Commerical (Mainstream?)--384
Military/Espionage--16
Young Adult--128
Short Story Collections--56
Family Saga--65
Wow, you go girls. Between romance, women's and chick lit, there is a huge female oriented market out there. No suprise--women do buy more books.
Looks like Commericial/mainstream dominates the field. No suprise there. I'm surprised that horror is neck-and-neck with romance. I think that romance, generally speaking, outsells horror, and that they lumped women's fiction in there and I'll bet that romance is crossing over into this category. What's really the shocker for me is that if you cross-over thriller/suspense with mystery, you have a "put me on a thrill ride page-turner" mentality. Look at literary, almost as large as commercial. Are literary books the salt of best-sellers and classics? Another big suprise was the historical category and how large it was, but couldn't historical also be termed literary?
Now, I'll just guess that family saga means "memoire", eh? Has memoire had a rise in the last 15 years? I don't remember it being that popular. Now, by Military/espionage, would that also include "techno-thriller"? You know, the Clancy type material?
The biggest hurt on me would be the extremely narrow agent market for Adventure, or what I like to call and write--Action/Adventure. Truly, hard darts on me. Remind me to never refer to my novel as an action/adventure. I'll play it safe and call it Thriller/suspense.
It's obvious that some of these categories bleed into each other, and why they try to distinquish them within these parameters is anybody's guess. But this site was a survey site, so I assume that each of these agents were asked using these designations. It's certainly relative, isn't it? I would defy anyone to give me ax-stroke divisions between each and every one of these genre descriptions. Remember the days when editors were king and bought books? Now we have marketing Gods to contend with. I remember being told by my agent 15 years ago, "Don't you dare cross-over." Just recently I found a publisher who PREFERS cross-over manuscripts, and takes straight genre as a secondary consideration. Are trends changing? And where's experimental?
Would that be Off beat/quirky?
Does anyone have any other statistics on agents and what genres they represent? It would be nice to see another survey.
Triceratops
Last edited:
