It is with great sadness that we have made the decision to close the agency at the end of March.

We are no longer accepting submissions. If you submitted to us in 2024 you should have now received your response and feedback, if you did not please email info@thegoodliteraryagency.org and we will look into this for you.

We have given 9000 writers who submitted to us feedback in the seven years we’ve been operating and worked with over 200 clients. We are sorry our journey is stopping here.

Keep writing no matter what. Your words are needed. You are needed. 

 

TGLA came about because we wanted to change two things: for there to be more opportunities for marginalised writers to break through, and for accountability for the industry’s shortcomings on diverse publishing to shift, ensuring that no one could say that they didn’t publish more diversely because the writers weren’t there. We believe we have more than achieved those.

Alongside that we wanted to provide a place where authors could submit and know they would be seen (and responded to), to invest in agents and create career pathways to vitally increase the diversity of the gatekeeping workforce and to collaborate with the industry to implement lasting change across the board. We know the work we wanted to do is not complete and we are heartbroken at having to make this very difficult decision to stop doing this work at a time when it continues to be so needed.

Though we continue to have funding from Arts Council England as a National Portfolio Organisation and their full ongoing support, we have been feeling the effects of investment in authors becoming more and more stretched and squeezed each year we’ve been operating and thus decreasing what we have been able to earn in commission which we need to match ACE’s funding. We’ve applied for funding elsewhere but not been successful. We’ve cut back and restructured as much as we could but we’ve now come to a decision point that realises that it is time for TGLA to pass the baton of the work that we do firmly back to the publishing industry as a whole and we believe in the ability of the industry to pick that work up.

We are immensely proud to have played our small part in an incredible informal collective of organisations and individuals who have prioritised helping drive change across the industry. The work is far from done and we are so sad we no longer have the ability to keep doing our bit in this way but we are ever hopeful and excited to see the change that still needs to happen keeping driving on.