LITERARY AGENCY / PART-TIME, UNPAID ONE-SEMESTER INTERNSHIP
The Mendel Media Group is a literary agency in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Its proprietor, Scott Mendel, is a former academic and magazine editor who became a literary agent in the 1990s. The agency’s clientele includes both fiction and nonfiction writers, among them professional journalists, diplomats and senior academics writing for the broadest possible trade readership, and author-experts writing prescriptive books. We also represent some companies and institutions—the National Football League and Reason magazine are among our clients, for example.
The agency seeks smart, detail-oriented and creative people interested in learning about the work of a literary agency and about the book publishing industry generally. The semester-long internship is flexible enough to accommodate a student’s classroom or part-time work schedule. Ideally, interns are in the office two days each week for fourteen weeks.
Duties include:
(1) reading and evaluating unsolicited inquiries from writers seeking representation, (2) reading and editing drafts of book proposals and manuscripts under development by clients
(3) some filing and mailing duties
(4) occasional errands related to the work of the office (to the post office, etc), and (5) other light clerical work.
Interns will:
(1) learn to evaluate pitches and queries
(2) improve their editorial skills
(3) practice thinking about literary material like people who work on the business end of the publishing industry—by, for example, learning to judge the long-term commercial value of a particular project’s subsidiary rights.
Additional information about the agency is available at: www.mendelmedia.com. The internship is unpaid, but most interns with Scott Mendel have arranged for academic credit through their colleges, and some have gone on to paid positions at various trade and academic publishing jobs.
Please email your cover letter and resume or c.v., all in the body of an email (not as an attachment), to Prof. Jane Kinney-Denning at jdenning@pace.edu.