Who am I?
I’m Caro Clarke, the founder and literary agent at Portobello Literary, a boutique literary agency based in Portobello, Edinburgh in the UK. I founded the agency in 2022 after twelve years working in publishing houses – Transworld (PRH) and Canongate Books as a Senior Rights Manager. I was named Rights Professional of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2021 and a Bookseller Rising Star in 2024. I represent adult fiction and non-fiction.
In 2019, I co-founded the Nan Shepherd Prize for underrepresented nature writers, which kickstarted a passion to demystify the publishing industry and help emerging writers to develop their craft and build their writing careers.
I’m the Chair of the Association of Scottish Literary Agents and Portobello Literary is a network member of Publishing Scotland and a member of the Association of Authors’ Agents and endorses the principles of best practice in the Association’s Code of Practice.
Disclaimer: All opinions, terrible jokes and cute pet photos are mine alone and do not reflect the views of any organisation.
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My posts will be a mixture of publishing, writing craft and book news chat so will be mostly relevant to writers, readers, publishing people and anyone interested in the behind-the-scenes of book publishing.
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I am not going to set myself a schedule which I will most likely fail to keep to so they’ll be semi-regular.
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For Paid Subscribers, I do workshops separately on craft. My first one was on getting your book Submission-Ready. I will also do a course on non-fiction proposals starting January 2025.
If you love my free content, please do support my work by supporting my authors. Each post will have links to my authors’ books so go and buy a copy from the independent bookshop link.
Alternatively, here is the agency's page on Bookshop.org to browse all our titles.
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