About

Lukeman Literary Management Ltd is a New York literary agency founded in 1996, representing a broad range of authors, journalists, politicians and celebrities, among them winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award finalists, the PEN Award, the American Book Award and many others. Since our inception we have represented authors in hundreds of book deals with all of the major publishers, as well as dozens of foreign rights deals and options to film and television.

Noah Lukeman, the President and founder, first entered the publishing industry in 1993, at age 19, as an intern in the Editorial Department of William Morrow. The following years brought internships at Farrar, Straus, Giroux and Delphinium Books (working for Bill Thompson, the editor who discovered Stephen King and John Grisham). Noah graduated from Brandeis University (Cum Laude, High Honors, with a double major in English and Creative Writing, where he was also Editor in Chief of their literary magazine), and entered the publishing industry full time in 1995, at age 21, accepting an assistant literary agent position with a literary agency. Within six months Noah had represented seven figures in sales, and in 1996, at age 22, Noah founded his own literary agency.

After several years of representing bestsellers, Noah was approached by Michael Ovitz’ multi-talent management company, AMG, one of Hollywood’s first major management companies, and asked to head their New York publishing office. During his years at AMG, Noah represented many more New York Times Bestsellers and spent more time in L.A., gaining exposure to many different branches of the entertainment industry and of the corporate agency world. After several successful years at AMG, Noah decided to go back on his own and switch his focus away from large corporate life and back to a boutique agency approach, where he could focus more on his authors and on editorial.

Along the way, Noah created PrePub.com, one of the publishing industry’s first rights websites (in 1998), which eventually became the “Booktracker” division of Inside.com.

Noah was one of the first literary agents (in 2008) to embrace the seismic shift that the digital ebook revolution would bring to the publishing industry; he has, since then, shifted his focus away from agenting and instead towards embracing the rapidly evolving ebook frontier, aspiring to remain on the forefront of digital change.

Noah is also an accomplished author, playwright and screenwriter himself. His best-selling The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying out of the Rejection Pile (Simon & Schuster, 1999), was a selection of many of Writer’s Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers and is now part of the curriculum in many universities. His The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life (St. Martins Press, 2002) was a National Bestseller, a BookSense 76 Selection, a Publishers Weekly Daily pick, a selection of the Writers Digest Book Club, and a selection of many of Writer’s Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers. His A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation (W.W. Norton, 2006 and Oxford University Press in the UK, 2007) was critically-acclaimed, a selection of the Writers Digest Book Club and the Forbes Book Club, was profiled on NPR, and is now part of the curriculum in dozens universities and writing programs. His play The Tragedy of Macbeth, Part II (Pegasus, 2008) was critically-acclaimed and chosen as Recommended Reading in New York Magazine‘s Fall preview. His screenplay Brothers in Arms was sold to a film studio and hit the Black List, selected as one of the top Hollywood screenplays of the year in 2007. Noah has also worked as a collaborator, and is co-author, with the late Lieutenant General Michael “Rifle” Delong, USMC, Ret., of Inside Centcom (Regnery, 2005), a selection of the Military Book Club. His Op-Eds co-authored with General Delong appeared in the Sunday New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Dallas Morning News.

Noah has contributed articles about the publishing industry and the craft of writing to several magazines, including Poets & Writers, Writers Digest, The Writer, the AWP Chronicle and the Writers Market, and has been anthologized in The Practical Writer (Viking, 2004). As a literary agent, he has been written up in media ranging from The New York Times to Variety (Page 1).

Noah has been a guest speaker on the subjects of writing and publishing in numerous forums, including Harvard University, the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, the graduate writing program at Stanford University, the graduate playwrighting division of the Juilliard School, The Hotchkiss School, the Writers Digest Panel at Book Expo America, the MFA at Northern Michigan University, the National Society of Newspaper Columnist’s annual Boston conference, George Mason’s Fall for the Book Festival in Washington, D.C., writing conferences in New York City, Portland, Oregon, Seattle, San Diego, North Carolina, Columbus, Ohio, and in Riker’s Island Penitentiary.

Most recently, Noah was featured in the new Apple Books for Authors site (launched in 2020), appearing in several Apple videos offering writing and publishing advice.

Noah also devotes as much time as he can to charitable work, and in this regard, he has served on the board of the BedStuy Campaign Against Hunger, one of New York City’s largest food pantries. He organizes annual fundraisers, Project Oatmeal and Project Turkey, to help raise money for Thanksgiving turkeys for families in BedStuy, Brownsville and adjacent neighborhoods in Brooklyn. A long-time resident of Brooklyn, in 2019 Noah was honored with a Planter Award for his 15 years of work to help feed the hungry in Brooklyn. Noah has also donated thousands of free books and audiobooks to those who cannot afford it and to those suffering from various hardship, and he continues to do so. To this end, he founded Read and Recover, a charity which purchases e-readers and donates them to childrens’ hospitals. He speaks annually to the sixth grade class at Byram Hills school in Armonk about the importance of giving back.

Noah is no longer taking on new clients as a literary agent, but he has always devoted much of his time to giving back to the writing community and to helping aspiring writers in any way he can. To this end, he gives away for free the audiobook editions of two of his bestselling books on the craft of writing (The First Five Pages and The Plot Thickens) to help the writing community. The rights recently reverted for The Plot Thickens, and he has decided to make it free. The Audiobook edition is free, the Ebook edition is free, and the paperback edition is now set to a price ($4.99) that just recoups printing costs and nets a $0 profit. (If the publishers ever revert this rights to The First Five Pages and A Dash of Style, he will also make those free in ebook and paperback.) He also gives away for free his two books How to Write a Great Query Letter and How to Land (and Keep) a Literary Agent, along with his book Ask a Literary Agent, a 100 page compendium of questions and answers from his former blog. He has heard back from countless authors over the years that his advice has made the difference in their becoming successful authors, and nothing gives him greater joy. So, while he does not have time to answer query letters and emails individually, please feel free to read (and listen to) his many free books and audiobooks. And if you would like him to speak to your writing group or university, if he has availability, then he will (for free—he does not accept any fees).

If you are suffering from any sort of hardship (and/ or if you serve in the military), please email Noah and let him know, and he will send you all of his published books for free. Email him at Noah{AT}Lukeman.com (replace the {AT} with an @ symbol).

As a way to give back, Noah also answers specific questions about getting published. He cannot answer every question, but if you have a publishing-related question (and if you have already read his free ebooks which answer most questions and still have a question), then email him at Noah{AT}Lukeman.com (replace the {AT} with an @ symbol).

If you have a rights inquiry or wish to contact him for some other matter, email him at Noah{AT}Lukeman.com (replace the {AT} with an @ symbol).