April 1, 2025

If you want your non-fiction book to be traditionally published, at some point you will need to pitch it to an agent. But, what is the best way to do that? What do agents look for in non-fiction? At what stage of the writing process should you be thinking about this? What do you need to include in your submission and how can you make your book stand out and grab the attention of your dream agent?

Join us for our online event where agent Anna Pallai and author John Grindrod will be talking all about this process and sharing their tips and advice.

Although this session will be focused on non-fiction there are bound to be some tips and pointers that will be helpful to you if you are writing fiction or children’s books instead.

Some more about our speakers:

Anna has been working in British publishing for over 25 years. She is a literary agent and freelance PR and runs her own agency, AMP Literary, where she specialises in women’s non-fiction..

Starting out at Faber and Faber, she worked in the publicity department for 18 years before setting up on her own. She has worked with celebrities including Harry Hill, David Mitchell and Jarvis Cocker as well as prize-winning authors, from Peter Carey and Seamus Heaney to Jan Morris and David Peace.

John is the author of four non-fiction books, including Concretopia (2013), Outskirts (shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize in 2017), and Iconicon (2022). He has also worked in publishing for 25 years, at HarperCollins and then Faber, where he worked in marketing on a huge range of non-fiction books, from humour to memoir, history, current affairs and travel. Before that he was a bookseller at Waterstones for many years. He’s given creative writing lectures, workshops and tutorials for Arvon, both in person and online, and many talks on his books around the UK.