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We take as much pride in placing a first-time author with a small press as
we do a long-term client for a lucrative contract with a major house. Our goal
is still the same: to provide our clients the best possible editorial guidance,
contractual advice, career planning, financial accounting and support.
The agency was founded with several authors Jane Chelius had edited and
published at Pocket Books prior. While the agency initially featured a core of
mystery writers, it has since grown to represent popular and literary fiction,
suspense, women’s literature, and narrative and how-to non-fiction.
Despite its growth, the Jane Chelius Literary Agency, Inc. still maintains its
individual focus and is dedicated to cultivating new writers as well as
working hard for its established clients.
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Jane Chelius is a native New Yorker. Her first full-time job after
graduation was at Fawcett Gold Medal Books, publishers of original
paperbacks by the likes of John D. MacDonald, Lawrence Block, and Donald
Westlake. After several years there, she dropped out briefly to have her first
child (Mark) and buy and renovate a brownstone (where the offices are now
located). She put in quite a few years freelancing for various houses while
rearing young children, and returned to work full-time as an acquisitions
editor in the mid eighties at NAL. She then moved to Pocket Books/Simon
and Schuster to found a mystery program, as well as acquire and edit
projects for their new hardcover list; there she acquired not only mysteries,
but thrillers, women’s fiction, parenting, humor, biography and other
narrative non-fiction. After nearly ten years, and an increasing frustration with
the corporate nature of big publishing houses, she left in 1995 to found her
own literary agency, now representing many of the same authors she
published as an editor. She is a member of AAR, Women's Media Group,
Mystery Writers of America, and International Association of Crime Writers.
Mark Chelius has decided that his career lies in another field and has
departed the agency after four years. He would like to thank each and every
client, author and editor with whom he has had the good fortune to work
Second Street in the
Park Slope
neighborhood of
Brooklyn, New York
