Rachel has worked in the book trade for more than 30 years, mainly as a literary agent. She started her publishing career as a dogsbody in various publishing offices, including Jonathan Cape, Victor Gollancz and Virago, and worked in the publicity department for Andre Deutsch before becoming a literary agent at Curtis Brown and, finally, the Tessa Sayle Agency. In addition to agenting, she has taught and supervised writing and publishing MA students and gives regular talks to creative writing students about how to prepare their manuscripts for submission and approach agents and editors. She has also been a Trustee of Writers’ Centre Norwich and the Cambridge Literary Festival.
A Masters degree in History at the OU and a deep interest in book trade history led Rachel to undertake a part-time Phd at UCL. Her research explores the structures and forces acting on the Victorian book trade and evaluates the impact of Joseph Whitaker and his publications, primarily The Bookseller, on the Victorian bookselling trade and concludes that many of them remain in place in today’s trade.
Her teaching practice encourages students to learn using practical, hands-on methods, trial and error, and applying scrutiny to real-world situations in the messy and sometimes opaque world of publishing and bookselling so writers can fully appreciate the active role that they can take in helping their books reach as wide a readership as possible.
