Noah Lukeman is a New York literary agent, founder and president of Lukeman Literary Management Ltd. (1996), and the author of four widely adopted craft books that are written from the perspective of the person on the other side of the slush pile. His agency has represented winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, finalists for the National Book Award, multiple New York Times bestsellers, major political and celebrity authors including the Dalai Lama and Gene Hackman, and faculty from universities ranging from Harvard to Stanford.
The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying out of the Rejection Pile (Simon and Schuster, 1999) is structured around the specific manuscript problems that cause agents and editors to stop reading in the first few pages: presentation, adjectives, adverbs, dialogue tics, sound, comparison, style, tone, focus, and setting. The book is part of the curriculum in dozens of university creative writing programs and is one of the most-cited modern submission references.
The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life (St. Martin's Press, 2002) was a national bestseller, a BookSense 76 Selection, a Publishers Weekly Daily Pick, and a Writer's Digest Book Club selection. It treats character as the engine of plot, working through eight successive techniques for building stories that emerge from fresh, alive characters rather than abstract idea. A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation (W.W. Norton, 2006; Oxford University Press UK, 2007) treats the comma, semicolon, dash, colon, parenthesis, question mark, and period not as rules to follow but as tools of voice and pacing. The book was a Writer's Digest Book Club and Forbes Book Club selection, was profiled on NPR, and is part of the curriculum in more than fifty universities and writing programs.
He gives away as free audiobook downloads two additional ebooks for writers: How to Write a Great Query Letter and How to Land (and Keep) a Literary Agent, drawn directly from his sixteen-plus years reading queries and manuscripts and managing client relationships. He also co-wrote Inside CentCom (Regnery, 2004) with Lieutenant General Michael 'Rifle' DeLong, USMC Retired, a Military Book Club main selection, and has published op-eds with General DeLong in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Lukeman is also a playwright and screenwriter.
