Literary Agents – Gerry Mooney Illustrating Dickens

The Hard Work of Selling

The five years I spent creating the artwork for Dickens’ BLEAK HOUSE was not only a labor of love, but it was a process where, as I went along, I pretty much knew what I was doing, and if I didn’t, I knew the ways to figure it out.

Selling this project is another horse of a different color! I knew at the outset that an illustrated classic novel had no natural niche in the current publishing market, but I considered that fact against the marketability of Charles Dickens, and happy to say, Charles and I won.

So Step One was a smashing success. Step Two, a little trickier. I have some friends (or friends of friends) who are published writers, and I did ask one for “advice”, but the fact is, you’ll get the same advice in one form or another from everyone: Pick up a copy of The Writer’s Market and do the research. There are no shortcuts and no preformatted path to success, but this book has a wealth of information. You just have to be determined to dig for it.

Buying stamps

Since my original intent was to write about creating artwork, it suddenly seems odd to me now that the art creation is done that I still need to write about the whole process that led me here and that I am still pursuing, even though the way is not clear.

But it’s the task I set for myself, to document the whole process, warts and all. So I will tell you about buying stamps.

…And that was the easy part!

As you may know if you have visited my blog before, I’ve now completed a five-year project: illustrating Charles Dickens’ epic novel, BLEAK HOUSE. It was a task of love and devotion, heartbreak, missed connections, long nights, big dreams…and I think that may have been the easy part.

Finding a publisher (which mainly means finding an agent) is no easy task under the best circumstances. Agents have specialized areas of interest and it’s easy but arduous to look them up in the extremely helpful Writers Market. As far as I understand, agents break down into two main areas: literary agents, who assist in matching authors and publishers, and illustrator’s agents, who, due to the present genres in publishing, specialize mainly in children’s books, children’s book illustrators, graphic novels, matching up writers and artists, and putting them together with publishers.