Thank you to everyone who suggested a question to put to Curtis Brown‘s Children’s Literary Agent, Stephanie Thwaites.  Here are her responses.  I’ve tried to keep the questions general so they’ll be useful to everyone, and where questions were similar I put them together into one query.  I think you’ll agree there’s some great tips here from Stephanie.

1. What puts you off the most when reading a query letter?

There are a few things! Letters not addressed to anyone in particular or Dear Sir/ Mr. Curtis Brown. This tells me the person submitting hasn’t taken any time to research who would be the best person to represent them and this suggests that they are not serious about writing or treating writing in a professional way. It’s important when approaching an agent to identify who the most appropriate person is within an agency, it’s easy to google and…