Our Team
Gordon Warnock, Partner
Gordon Warnock is a founding partner at Fuse Literary representing New York Times bestsellers and debut authors alike. He seeks to amplify historically marginalized voices and grow sustainable, long-term writing careers with an eye on actively creating change in the publishing industry and the culture as a whole. His years of experience as a senior agent, marketing director, editor for independent publishers, publishing consultant, and author coach inform his approach as a comprehensive business partner through the many lives of a book and the many stages of an author’s career. He frequently teaches workshops and gives keynote speeches at conferences and MFA programs in the US and Canada. He is an honors graduate of CSUS with a degree in Creative and Professional Writing.
With a zest for fresh, new voices and a deep love of the classics, Gordon actively seeks out both the timely and the timeless. In that spirit, he establishes involved, long-term working relationships with talented and dedicated authors of many genres. For a better idea of what he represents, he often posts about his clients on Twitter.
Submission Guidelines:
Please query via email at querygordon@fuseliterary.com or via any of the conferences he attends. Unsolicited submissions via paper mail and social media will be discarded unread.
Note that, due to the volume of submissions, he can not offer lengthy responses or detailed critiques outlining why your work was not selected.
For information on how to write a query letter, read The Short Fuse Guide to Query Letters.
For how to write a book proposal, read The Short Fuse Guide to Book Proposals.
Non-fiction:
Gordon seeks large-platform projects in which the book represents something bigger than the book itself, of which you are the expert, the one best fit to bring it to the page. He prefers to work with socially-responsible books that ask difficult questions, raising new issues or illuminating common issues in new ways. For memoir, please paste in the first chapter below your query. For graphic nonfiction, please attach a 10-page sequential PDF excerpt of the finished artwork, not to exceed 50 MB. For all other genres, please email your query letter only. He considers the following genres:
• Memoir and Biography
• Food Narrative/Studies/History
• Graphic and Illustrated Nonfiction
• Essays on Social Issues
• Pop-Science
• Pop/Punk/Geek Culture
• Self-Help
• Historical Narrative
• Humor
• How-To
• Business and Career
Some of his favorites are: Wreck This Journal, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Corporation, All They Will Call You, Bad Feminist, Digging Up Mother, Hawking, Drinking at the Movies, and Paper: Paging through History.
Fiction:
Gordon is looking for fresh concepts that excite him before he even starts reading and tension-filled prose that won’t let him stop. Novels must be completed, polished, and between 60,000 and 100,000 words long. For all text-based works, please paste in the first chapter below your query. For graphic novels, please attach a 10-page sequential PDF excerpt of the finished artwork, not to exceed 50 MB. He considers the following genres:
• High-Concept Suspense
• Book Club Women’s Fiction
• Literary Fiction
• Verse Novels for YA and MG
• Graphic Novels for Adults, YA, and MG
Some of his favorites are: The Good Girl, Gaijin, Gretchen, Beneath a Scarlet Sky, Pines, The Weight of Lies, Freakboy, Real Friends, and We the Animals.
Not looking for:
• Genre Fiction (Western, Romance, Sci-Fi)
• Satire
• Legal Thrillers
• Spy Thrillers
• New Age
• Children’s and MG
• Novellas
• Screenplays
• Collections of short fiction or poetry (unless you also write novel-length works)
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