Established Literary Agent Actively Seeking New Clients

Updated 11/14/24

Katie Reed of Andrea Hurst Literary Management

For over 20 years, Andrea Hurst Literary Management has represented high-profile and up-and-coming authors, successfully placing titles throughout the worldwide publishing market. Katie Reed began her career in publishing with Andrea Hurst Literary Management while pursuing her Bachelor of Arts in English and has worked in the publishing field for over a decade. As a literary agent, Katie loves discovering new talent, building lasting connections with her authors, and working diligently to represent books readers will love.

Katie currently works as an agent and literary scout, and is looking for compelling, standout projects to champion. Make sure you go to the website and read the submission guidelines carefully.

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Katie is actively building her client list and looking for standout projects to champion. She is interested in stories that hit that sweet spot between commercial and literary—where strong, poignant prose, complex characters, and a twisty, high stakes plot intersect. Katie is especially drawn to books with universal human themes that resonate with readers and characters that reach through the pages and grab hold of her heart. She is a sucker for popular tropes and can’t resist anything with a high concept hook she hasn’t seen before, or a twist she doesn’t see coming. Across genres, she tends to prefer edgy, emotional, and sharp to sweet and light. Katie is looking for underrepresented voices in publishing in any genre.

Katie is open for submissions in the following genres:

• Upmarket and Commercial Women’s Fiction with a fresh, magnetic voice, emotionally complex narrative, and fast pace (think Boo Walker, Barbara Davis)
• Book Club Fiction—particularly drawn to anything with a unique concept or fresh spin, like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. The Echo of Old Books by Barbara Davis was her favorite book of 2023.
• Historical Fiction akin to Taylor Jenkins Reid, Ruta Sepyts, Kristin Hannah, Kate Quinn. She loved Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll and, of course, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by TJR.
• Suspense/Psychological Thriller (in the vein of Ruth Ware, Lucy Foley, Lisa Jewell, Stacey Willingham); she will also look at thrillers with genre blending elements, like Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter or Gillian McAllister’s Wrong Place, Wrong Time.
• Fiction with a fantastical angle (a la The Midnight Library by Matt Haig or The Measure by Nikki Erlick) or an interesting spin (Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt or Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman)
• Retellings, similar to Circe by Madeline Miller or Lies We Sing to the Sea by Sarah Underwood

Katie is also interested in select speculative fiction (for her list, she is looking for “accessible fantasy,” meaning that readers who think they don’t love fantasy would pick it up and enjoy it. In accessible fantasy, there is still imaginative and enchanting world-building, but usually the plot and characters lean more commercial and take center stage, and the book is not buried in heavy concepts. She converted her lifetime best friend to fantasy via Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros, to give an example.) Subgenres include:

• Fantasy with a strong dash of romance (can be classified as “romantasy” like Sarah J. Maas’s ACOTAR, or more fantasy focused but with a strong romance included
• Anything with dragons, time travel, fae, and medieval or epic fantasy (prefers a faster pace)
• Stories set in our world but with a fantasy twist (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab)
• Urban Fantasy/Paranormal (again, must have a fast plot)
• Dystopian, but only if it has a completely new and different story concept
• Limited YA (currently only looking at fantasy that has crossover potential to the adult audience) 

Under the romance umbrella:

• Contemporary Romance or “Rom-Coms”—favorite authors include Emily Henry and Abby Jiminez (must be voice driven)
• Edgy romance with series potential (loved The Ravenhood Series by Kate Stewart)
• Steamy, small-town romance similar to Things We Never Got Over by Lucy Score
• Other subgenres she enjoys include historical, paranormal, fantasy, and suspense

A note on romance submissions: Katie is open to considering a range of heat levels in the romance genre but does not accept submissions that are classified as full erotica. She generally prefers slow burn, delayed gratification, with lots of buildup of tension and angst. If you refer to this guide on heat levels in romance, she tends to read somewhere between heat levels three and five, avoiding wholesome/clean/sweet or excessive smut bordering on erotica. If your book falls in the middle of these two ends, it’s probably a good match for her taste.

Please keep in mind, Katie is not a right fit for Heavy Sci-fi, Space Opera, Spy/Military/Government/Conspiracy/Eco Thrillers, Middle-Grade, Chapter or Picture books, Memoir, or Nonfiction.

How to submit: To query Katie, submit by email only to querykatie@andreahurst.com

Please include a query letter and paste the first five pages into the email. Due to the high volume of queries received, Katie will only respond to those she is interested in.