How it works
Phrasemill matches authors to literary agents from what those agents and their agencies publish on their public websites.
A friendly crawler, like Google's
Search engines send bots to read public pages so people can find them. Phrasemill does a similar job for querying authors. Our crawler visits agent and agency websites we already know about, reads the public text, and updates Phrasemill from that.
It identifies itself as Phrasemill. If you run a site and see PhrasemillSourceTextBot in your logs, that is us — reading pages that are already public, the way Googlebot does.
About once a week
We recrawl on a weekly cadence. When an agent or agency updates their site, the change typically shows up in Phrasemill after the next weekly pass.
Agents keep their own websites
There is nothing extra for agents to update on Phrasemill. Keep your own site current; we read it from there.
Then we match your book
You can select tags that best describe your book on the search screen. Phrasemill's tags are updated from the text from agent and agency websites. We keep the snippet of text and link back to the origin so you can see why we chose that tag for that agent.
The same crawled pages name authors and books agents mention when describing what they want — including titles they say they have enjoyed, not only books labelled as comparables. Find agents by authors they mention.