Peter Rubie

Peter Rubie has been in New York publishing as an agent, editor, and published writer for nearly forty years. He is the CEO of FinePrint Literary Management, a NYC based literary agency​ with 5 active agents, and began in publishing working as a freelance reader and freelance editor for major “Big Six” publishers (as they were then) before becoming the adult fiction editor at Walker & Co., from 1985 to 1991. He became an agent in 1992, and formed his own agency in 1998. Besides working in publishing as agent and editor, he was also an adjunct professor in the New York University publishing faculty for 10 years, where he taught the only university-level course in the country on how to become a literary agent, andc for a couple of years ran the book publishing part of NYU’s Summer Publishing Institute.

In the 1970s, in the U.K., Peter worked as a journalist and editor on Fleet Street before becoming one of the youngest news editors for BBC Radio News. In the U.S., before becoming involved in publishing, he was the editor-in-chief of a Manhattan local newspaper, and later a regular reviewer for the international trade magazine Publishers Weekly. He has lectured and written widely and often on publishing and the craft of writing. He is the author of two published novels and close to a dozen nonfiction books.

He is known for working closely, editorially, with his clients in order to bring projects to a fuller potential before submitting them. Over the years, several of his authors have become NY Times bestselling authors, and a number are also award winning writers.

Peter represents a broad range of high-quality fiction and non-fiction.  He handles children’s books, particularly middle grade, and some picture books.

In adult books he specializes in narrative non-fiction such as memoirs, biographies, history and current affairs, as well as books on business, popular science and technology, parenting, music, food, and in adult fiction, crime novels, thrillers, commercial women’s fiction, fantasy, science fiction, and some literary fiction.

What many people do not know about Peter is that he is also an active professional jazz musician. In any given week, he can be heard playing guitar around jazz venues in New York City—and occasionally in London.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be emailed to submissions@fineprintlit.com

Please DO NOT submit to more than one agent at FinePrint at a time. Multiple agent submissions will be discarded unread.
Which agent should you choose? ​Read each agent’s bio and see which one represents the type of book closest to the one you are submitting.  Then, send a query as noted at the bottom of that agent’s page. 

Submitting FICTION to Peter:  Send a query letter with a synopsis of your book, your bio, and the opening 3 or 4 pages embedded in the body of your email — DO NOT SEND AN ATTACHMENT WITHOUT A REQUEST TO DO SO, or else your submission attachment will simply be discarded. If interested, your manuscript will be requested.

Guidelines & Details