Lauren Khan is now a Florida Space Coast literary agent representing over a dozen clients across fiction and non-fiction, a career she had formally abandoned at 31, eight months pregnant, while still living in Manhattan.
Her path from Big Law associate to literary agent ran through a decision most New Yorkers would find counterintuitive: moving back to the small beach town on Brevard County’s Space Coast where she grew up, a street away from her parents’ house.
From Big Law to a Florida Space Coast Literary Agent
Khan attended law school in Manhattan and worked her way up through corporate law after graduating. The work was stable, she has written, but it was never what she wanted. Over time she became convinced that literary agenting was the right fit: she had an editorial eye, and her legal work had sharpened her negotiation and client-management skills.
She spent a year learning the publishing industry while working full-time. A workshop on becoming an agent confirmed the likely route: an internship or assistant role first. For a Big Law associate in New York City, neither was realistic. There were not enough hours in the day, and the financial exposure of starting over as an assistant, while saving for a new baby in one of the world’s most expensive cities, was too great.
So she let the idea go. Then her son was born in October 2023, and proximity to family suddenly outweighed her attachment to Manhattan.
A week before her due date, she and her husband made an offer on a house in her hometown. Her husband’s job was already remote, which gave them the flexibility to move. Once in Florida, without the cost pressures of New York, she could afford to take time away from paid work.
How Lower Costs Changed the Calculation
The financial shift was real. According to Florida Realtors data cited by Living Space Coast, median list prices in the most affordable parts of Brevard County have held in the high $200s to low $300s for much of the past year, a sharp contrast to Manhattan’s property market.
The broader Space Coast market has also stabilised. According to Cocoa Beach Insider, Brevard County carried an average of approximately 5,431 listings over the five months to June 2025, ending that month at 5,426 and representing roughly a five-month supply of inventory.
For Khan, the lower cost of living meant she could pursue an unpaid publishing internship. Her mother helped with childcare. The internship deepened her commitment to the career path, and when it ended, while pregnant with her second child, she began emailing literary agencies seeking a full-time agenting role.
One morning she woke to an email from the chief executive of her target agency. A family trip to New York allowed her to follow up with an in-person meeting with the agency’s vice-president. By the end of that meeting, she had a remote offer.
Two weeks after her daughter was born in July 2025, she opened to queries from writers seeking representation. The agency told her to take her time; she did not wait.
She spent her postpartum months reading manuscripts and signing clients. A year on, she represents over a dozen clients, with multiple book deals closed or in progress, while managing life as a mother of two children under two.
She is also an agented author herself, writing the kinds of stories she had spent a decade hoping to represent.
A Recognised Route From Law to Publishing
Khan is not the first lawyer to take this road. The Former Lawyer podcast featured Lilly Ghahremani, a literary agent who moved from law school directly into literary representation, in a December 2024 interview, illustrating that the transition has a recognised, if unconventional, shape.
The infrastructure for remote agenting has also expanded. Wave Literary was advertising for a US-based remote literary agent as recently as 2024 to 2025, a sign that agencies outside the traditional New York hiring model are looking for talent wherever it lives.
For Khan, geography was the constraint that had made the career impossible in New York and the enabler that made it possible on the Space Coast. The next test is whether the clients she has signed, and the books she is writing, can make that journey worthwhile on a longer timeline.