Publishers Marketplace vs Manuscript Wish List
- Publishers Marketplace: paid subscription around $25 per month, deal listings and agent sales records.
- Manuscript Wish List: free, agent-written descriptions of what they are seeking, plus the MSWL hashtag.
- Deal reports show genre, publisher, and rough advance range, which no wish list does.
- Wish lists go stale; agents change interests faster than they update their profiles.
- Neither replaces reading an agent's actual client list.
Publishers Marketplace shows deals agents have actually closed, including publisher and rough advance level, which is evidence. Manuscript Wish List is free and shows what agents say they want, which is intent. Use the wish list to build a target list and Publishers Marketplace to verify the agent sells in your genre.
Chapter i·Why it matters
Wish lists are aspirational. An agent who wrote in 2023 that she wanted upmarket book club fiction may have sold nothing but romantasy since. Deal data corrects for that. Querying on stated interest alone is how writers end up with 80 rejections from agents who have never sold anything resembling their book.
Chapter ii·What to include
- The agent's deals in your genre in the last 24 months, not lifetime.
- Which publishers they sell to, which tells you where your book would land.
- Whether they are actively selling at all, since some listings go quiet.
- Wish list recency, checked by date rather than assumed.
- Client list read directly from the agency site.
- A short note on why each agent is on your list, written before you query.
Chapter iii·Example
A writer with a speculative thriller cut nine agents from her list after checking deal data: their wish lists mentioned the genre, but none had sold one in three years. The remaining fourteen produced five full requests.
In WriteLoom
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