Kelly Van Sant has a decade of experience in the publishing industry. She cut her teeth in New York working at esteemed literary agencies such as Writers House and Harold Ober Associates. After relocating to Minnesota, Kelly joined Llewellyn Worldwide as their Contracts Manager across all three imprints and then moved to Quarto Publishing Group USA where she led the contract department. She has worked as a freelance editor and is a teaching artist at the Loft Literary Center. She also blogs about writing and the publishing industry at Pub(lishing) Crawl and co-hosts their weekly podcast. Kelly’s career came full circle when she realized that her true passion was advocating on behalf of authors. She is now an agent at KT Literary and actively building a client list. You can learn more about her and what she’s looking for on her website www.penandparsley.com
First of all, a special thank you to Manuscript Academy and Kelly for agreeing to do a speciality live critique of my snyopsis. Kelly Van Sant dove deep into my plot and helped me show the world of the main character before the inciting incident. She also encouraged me to bring up the main theme of the novel earlier. I’m so grateful for her assistance in making my snyopsis as polished as possible before a conference submission to an editor.
Kelly was kind and professional in her feedback. She helped me see my first 10 pages from a new perspective!
My consultation with Kelly was fantastic. She helped confirm for me a problem I saw in the work and gave me great advice for moving forward. I came out of the meeting knowing I had a lot of work to do but feeling confident about my project and eager to get back to it.
Kelly was very helpful and kind! She gave me a lot of good advice for editing my query letter with a lot of practical tips that I can follow. Her advice was both specific to my letter and general for edits that I can make when fixing it. I’m feeling a lot more confident for my query letter and am very grateful for her help!
Kelly was generous, detailed, specific, and eager to brainstorm solutions. I appreciated the practical recommendations she offered. As a writer, I personally appreciated how she listened and asked follow up questions. She wasn’t stuck on script, but wanted to be a partner in craft even in the limited moment that we were working together.
Work with Kelly
LIVE Meetings: Meet face-to-face, from home. Choose Zoom, Google Meet, or phone, and speak for the appointed time about your query, first page, and/or first ten pages (for longer meetings). Does not include written notes, but is a chance to have an honest discussion about your work, and to ask follow-up questions. International meetings welcomed.
HYBRID is a live meeting at the appointment time, with written notes.
WRITTEN Critiques: Get detailed, thoughtful notes on your work. Comes with large-scale edits (character, world, plot, tension, concept, conflict, and similar as needed) in an editorial letter and small-scale, line-by-line notes as needed (for longer critiques, an average of three per page). Work arrives in your inbox within 24 hours of thedate on the calendar.