Ayanna Behin Literary

I queried Ayesha Pande Literary and just yesterday received a partial request from Ayanna Behin. I assumed that was just the name of the assistant (the email is from the AP Literary agency), but now I am very curious as to how these two are working together.

Does anyone have more info?

I saw this the other day. She wrote about it, briefly, on her blog. Here.Doesn't fully explain it, but.

Interesting. It looks like Pande is mentoring her, which is a good sign that Behin is going in the right direction but she seems to have decided to start at the top, rather than as an intern or as a contracts manager at another agency (which seems like an appropriate role for a lawyer who wanted to transition to being an agent). Many agents are lawyers, which is well and good, but the part of the PM page that made me roll my eyes is that Behin's editing experience as a LAWYER would help her. Not really the same thing.

But congrats on the request, Octavia! She clearly has exquisite literary taste, which is another big piece of the agent puzzle.

Having been a lawyer certainly wouldn't help in terms of editing for style/content, but it should help in terms of catching typos and grammatical errors. I'm a lawyer, and we're all trained to read very carefully (what seem like the smallest points, like borrower instead of debtor or the placement of a comma can have a big effect on a legal document).

I don't know what her publishing contacts are like, but a lawyer should also be able to negotiate the fine print of a contract nicely.

I couldn't find much on some of the authors listed on the PM. I Googled, and some of them can only be found on her PM page, no web presence of their own. But then there's no mention of sales, so I don't know what to make of any of it.

Interesting. Did any of them have books listed anywhere (amazon, etc)? With some of them, could it be that she's just signed them up and is shopping their work now?

I didn't look up all the authors, but I know at least one had an amazon page (although there was no cover for the book). One of them is apparently a ghost hunter, but I didn't see any books. Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough...

Any news in the last two years? The website may not be up to date (the news page is still "coming soon," and the blog hasn't been updated since 2012), but the listing of authors doesn't seem to show many books sold. Most of the author bios don't actually mention any. I checked Amazon for the author at the top of the list -- I found published books, but with no comments, or only two. Not a stellar record, sadly.

Does anyone else know of anything I've missed?

Behin Literary

Worked with her for 2 years. Very sincere, very supportive, but unable to sell my novels. Any published books by authors on her site were not her sales. She is still getting her agency established. She may give you a chance but you are giving her a chance as well.

Has anyone worked with her more recently?