Pitching an Agent: The Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency
If you feel like the doors of the big agencies have been slammed in your face because you don’t have the connections or previous publishing experience to garner interest, the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency might be for you. “In the course of one interview,” Jill Singer writes, “Jennifer DeChiara cheerfully refers to herself as “a champion of the underdog” and “the Statue of Liberty of publishing: Give me your tired, your poor,” she says. She calls the agency “especially open to previously unpublished authors, authors that no other agency would look at” and declares that “no matter how many clients we have, I don’t ever want to shut the door to any writers.” But even though DeChiara hates to say no-”I really love the idea of making someone’s dream come true,” she says-writers should be cautiously optimistic: DeChiara and her co-agent Stephen Fraser are savvy, and they won’t just take on anyone. “I’m very, very picky,” DeChiara says. “But if someone really is talented, then I’ll give them every opportunity.”" Just don’t pitch romance, westerns or poetry and pitch via snail mail.
Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our 
