This month Adriann Ranta from Wolf Lit Services is in the spotlight.
About Adriann:
Adriann Ranta is Senior Agent and Vice President at Wolf Literary Services. A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Arizona, Adriann’s first introduction to publishing was at The Editorial Department, a freelance editorial firm based in Tucson, AZ. After making the move to New York, Adriann spent two years at Anderson Literary Management before moving to Wolf Literary in 2009.
She represents New York Times bestselling, award-winning authors, journalists, illustrators and graphic novelists, as well as actors, stuntwomen, makeup artists, and many other pioneering creative thinkers and leaders in their fields. She is actively acquiring all genres for all age groups with a penchant for edgy, dark, quirky voices, unique settings, and everyman stories told with a new spin. She loves gritty, realistic, true-to-life stories with conflicts based in the real world; women’s fiction and nonfiction; accessible, pop nonfiction in science, history, and craft; and smart, fresh, genre-bending works for children.
She lives in Brooklyn with her crazy-talkative cat Piggy, has many tattoos, and is an evangelical fan of the X-Files.
Submissions:
To submit a project, please send a query letter along with a 50-page writing sample (for fiction) or a detailed proposal (for nonfiction) to queries@wolflit.com. Samples may be submitted as an attachment or embedded in the body of the email.
We would prefer to receive electronic queries over mailed submissions whenever possible.
Adriann was kind enough to answer a few of our questions which should help querying authors get to know her and what she's looking for a little better...
1. What are you looking for in YA submissions right now?
I’m especially looking for contemporary YA, but am loving anything realistic, set in the real world. Historicals, thrillers, mysteries, psychological suspense, adventure, romance, etc. I’m also looking for a great sci-fi, but it needs to be accessible to non-genre buffs too.
2. What's an immediate turn-off in a query, something guaranteed to get the author rejected?
It drives me crazy when queries start off with “My goal in writing this book,” or “As a parent/counselor/educator, I realized there are no books that”… To me, these are red flags that you wrote this book because you wanted to address an issue rather than write an arresting, heart-felt, page-turning story. Kids (really, readers in general) hate being talked down to. Let the story come first.
3. What's the story got to have to make you want to represent it?
Voice! An original, jumps-off-the-page, authentic, empathetic voice.
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