One of the foundational parts of my Literary Agents and Acquisitions class as part of the Book Publishing master’s program at Portland State University was learning to write Reader Reports.
A Reader Report is when someone reads a manuscript that’s been submitted to an agent or publisher and writes up an analysis. This report looks at the strengths and weakness of the story as well as how it fits in the market, then makes a recommendation for the publisher or agent to either accept or pass on the submission.
For this project, we were given the first 7000 words of a 63k-word original manuscript that was submitted to a literary agency. It was titled simply Untitled RomCom.
Here’s my Reader Report:
If you read my Reader Report and think, Hmm, this sounds oddly familiar, it’s because this was a draft from a real manuscript which was published as The Matzah Ball by Jean Meltzer. I figured that out while researching comparative titles for the market positioning portion of the Reader Report.
Chrys Buckley 