New agent at Rights Factory seeks children's and young adult books

Alison McDonald, formerly an editorial associate with the Rights Factory, has been promoted to associate agent specializing in middle grade and young adult fiction.

Company president Sam Hiyate says he’d been interested in taking on more children's authors since the recent successes of Christine Walde’s The Candy Darlings (Penguin Canada) and Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim (Groundwood Books), but needed the right person for the job. “When Ali started working for me last year … it was mutual compatibility. I wanted someone doing that for me, she wanted to do it, so we came to an arrangement,” he says.

McDonald has already signed five clients, incluing Kelli McLeod, whose debut YA novel, The Secret Keeper of Sansum Prep, is about a trailer park teen at an elite boarding school. McDonald aims to have 25 clients by the end of 2010.

Alisha Sevigny, another agent at the Right’s Factory will be the guest speaker at the "How to Get Published" workshop in Burlington on February 19, 2011.  (Details here.) As she is a new agent most of Alisha's clients are new authors, but she's open to all kinds of material. “I don’t like people who say, ‘I’m only going to do this,’” she says. “I’m open. I love literary fiction, I love non-fiction. I did a lot of creative non-fiction in university, and I like women’s fiction. Basically, if the writing is good, if the story is good, it does not have to fall into any kind of specific category.”

Email queries to Alison at: alison@therightsfactory.com
Query Alisha at: Alisha@therightsfactory.com
Or query via the Rights Factory's webform: http://www.therightsfactory.com/submissions.html
More about the Rights Factory here.

Note: Brian Henry will be leading a number of "How to Get Published" workshops: in Gravenhurst on April 17, Moncton, NB, on April 23, in Peterborough on April 24, Kingston on April 25, Uxbridge on May 8, and (as noted) in Hamilton on May 15, in Mississauga on Dec 4, and in Burlington on February 19, 2011.

For information about all of Brian's writing workshops and creative writing courses, see here.