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.
Keeping submission status current
Whether an agent is open to submissions is the most time-sensitive thing on their page, so each agent profile says when we last checked it and links to the page we read. There are two ways that date gets set, and the profile tells you which.
Automatically.About once a week we re-read the agent's own submission page and record what it says. We keep the sentence we took it from, so you can see exactly what the entry was based on.
Editor-checked.Sometimes a person at Phrasemill opens the agent's page and confirms a detail themselves — usually where an automatic read was ambiguous. When that has happened recently the profile says so.
If we could not read an agent's page at all — the site was down or it blocked us — the profile says that too, rather than showing a recent date for a check that did not happen. We do not rate agents, rank them by quality, or record anything an agent has not published. Their own submission page is always the last word.
Then we match your book
Describe your book in your own words on Search, or pick the tags yourself with Search by tag. 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.