Top 20 Picture Book Agents: 234 Sales in the Last 12 Months

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What agents are selling picture books? Publishersmarketplace.com does a great job of monitoring the business of selling manuscripts to publishers. If you’re looking for an agent, you’ll want to spend a lot of time there doing research on agents to find the perfect match for you and your stories. Here’s just one way to look at the agents for picture books. This list includes information on the agent, links to his/her agency and the number of picture book deals made in the last twelve months. Please note that the agent/agency may have made many other deals in addition to these; these are limited to those self-reported by the agent/agency in the category of picture books. For more information, go to Publishersmarketplace.com (you must pay to join to see full information).

This is the first of three articles on current agents for children’s books. See also Middle Grade Agents and YA Agents lists.

Interesting, when I did this in 2013, the top 20 picture book agents had reported 171 sales. This time, the top 20 agents are reporting 234 sales. This could be due to a couple reasons: first, Publisher’s Marketplace relies on agents to self-report. This means that the agents are, for the first time, in a sort of competition for rankings. Reporting more sales means they are ranked higher, which gives prestige and possibly brings in more prospective clients. Second, it could mean that sales are up for picture books. We hope the latter is the case, but suspect the first reason has much to do with the increased number of sales.