Episode 50: Jessica Faust
Jessica Faust, President of BookEnds Literary Agency, details her 26-year career as a literary agent, growing the company from a small boutique firm to a large agency representing fiction and nonfiction for adult and children's markets. Listen in as she shares insights on current publishing trends, including the resurgence of romance, the reimagining of the cozy mystery genre, and the challenges facing the middle grade and young adult markets.
TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE 50 with Jessica Faust:
Mary Kole (00:02):
Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Mary Kole, and this is the Thriving Writers Podcast for writers poised to achieve their next big breakthrough. Please enjoy this episode and consider joining us over at the Thriving Writers community.
Welcome, everybody. With me I have Jessica Faust from BookEnds Literary, a giant in the field. You have been at this for quite a while. I usually hate it when people introduce me and I have to sit there just smiling through it. So why don't you tell us a little bit about where it all started for you and your agency is just huge. You have so many people working with you, so many wonderful clients, illustrators, authors, you represent everything. Tell us more about just how it all came together and what your mission is as an agent and an agency president.
Jessica Faust (01:04):
Sure. So we opened our doors, it was 25 years ago last year, so we're in our 26th year. I had started on the publishing side of publishing, so I worked for Berkley Publishing at the time, made a couple transitions to Wiley and Macmillan and ultimately just thought I would go out on my own, realized I could have more fun and do a larger variety of books, sort of everything that interested me instead of what I always say instead of be confined by what that particular publishing house could publish. And I think that at some point, BookEnds just started growing on its own. So I think we're now at 12 agents and we do represent fiction and nonfiction for adults and children's markets. Pretty much everything. I think there are a few genres we don't tap into, but board books, picture books, middle grade, YA and adults on all sides. We have a full-service global rights market, performance rights. So in addition to our agents, we have a support staff and rights departments and things like that. So we don't just represent the books, we represent all licensing possibilities for the books.
Mary Kole (02:39):
So I'm actually putting together a course right now about how to work with your agent, how to be a good client, how to weather the ups and downs, so all of this stuff that happens after. And that's actually something that has come up there, which is some agencies outsource to co-agents for film, for foreign rights merchandising, all of these things. But it can be a real boon to have those people within an agency sort of working synergistically to exploit all of the possible rights, which is something a lot of writers don't think about when they're just on the hunt for an agent.
Jessica Faust (03:17):
Right. And we do use co-agents, I think most agents do. It's just that we have one person who has all those relationships with the co-agents who travels to all the fairs. When we were a smaller agency, the agents did that themselves, the working with the co-agents. So I think we have, now that we've grown, a larger focus on the importance of those rights and the ability to hold onto them and sell them. I think even for us when we were a smaller agency, it was harder for individual agents to be selling the primary rights, the original book rights that we all think of when we're making a book deal and then also handle those. I know some agencies do it really well, but I do think that's important to know how those rights are handled when you sign with an agent. Yeah.
Mary Kole (04:13):
And you said, so obviously when you are at Wiley or whatever, you are beholden to the imprint, the publisher's discretion, the direction of the list. When you struck out on your own, what did you find yourself suddenly free to pursue and have fun with and have your tastes changed over the years? What is your specific sweet spot as an agent? And do you still take clients at this point or do you just preside?
Jessica Faust (04:44):
Yeah, no. So when I started out at Berkley, Berkley was primarily a mass market publisher at the time. I did a lot of romance and mystery and I was able to do some mass market nonfiction, which no longer exists at all in the world anymore. And when I moved over to Wiley and Macmillan, it was only nonfiction. So I had given up my fiction list to make that move and I liked all of it. So I liked the ability to do a lot of it, which means that as an agent, I am doing romance, I'm doing mystery, I'm doing suspense, I'm doing thrillers. But I also have a strong business book list, which even if I was at a publisher that did fiction and nonfiction, which doesn't exist as much anymore, a business book list is very specific, tends to be very specific business imprints. So I wouldn't be able to do that.
And then my list has changed. I mean when I started out as an agent, I was doing primarily mystery and romance and a variety of different nonfiction. I had inroads into the Dummies Guide series and the Complete Idiot’s Guide series. And a lot of those books really helped us establish the agency. We sold a lot of 'em. The authors were great. From a financial perspective, it really gave us a base to work from. So I actually took a hiatus from romance for a number of years and I'm back. So yes, I am in addition to running the company, very actively taking on new clients. This year, I have sort of some big goals to take on some new clients. I think I've taken on, I have a list over there. I think I've taken on four this year already. And I think especially because I had taken that break from romance, I have some holes in my list there.
Mary Kole (06:48):
Well, romance is back to your point, and I feel like I over-talked you just as you were about to go there. But romance is now not just a mass market like Pulp Fiction type of grocery store book. Now these are heavy hitters.
Jessica Faust (07:07):
Yes. And within the romance market they always have been. But I think we're seeing a little bit more of a crossover in the romance world. So the audience has broadened a little bit with things like romantasy and even the rom-coms and we're seeing publishers that wouldn't have typically thought of themselves as romance publishers taking it on. We're also seeing crossover in the mystery market where we're seeing sort of a rom-com/mystery crossover. So those have been fun areas for me to explore.
Mary Kole (07:40):
So we have just blasted over 30 years of career here. And while we're talking about the current market, so you're noticing more legitimacy and kind of more front listing of romance and rom-com, you are noticing maybe mystery, rom-com crossovers and kind of genre blends. What else are you noticing in the publishing space that is maybe trendy but not a flash in the pan? Maybe something with a little more longevity. And what about the differences between maybe the adult market and the Kidlit market?
Jessica Faust (08:51):
I'm not always the expert on the Kidlit market, but I will speak to what I know. As for the adult market, romantasy right now is probably one of the hottest trends we're seeing and that's fantasy meets romance. But there are different variants of that. There's sort of, I feel like there the typically expected romantasy, which leans a little more fantasy with a really strong romance, we're seeing cozy romantasy, which I think used be called Paranormal romance truthfully. And that tends to be a little bit lighter on the fantasy aspects. It might be more real world with speculative elements. So we're seeing a lot of that and we are seeing that fantasy that's speculative in all aspects in women's fiction, in mystery, in all different aspects of the genres. Suspense I think is always big and popular, probably a little less of the traditional husband/wife, domestic suspense. I think we're seeing fewer unreliable narrators. I think that's a little tougher these days. I think that the unreliable narrator is hard to be unreliable because I think it's hard to do it in a way that still keeps it unexpected for the reader.
I think what we're seeing most in Kidlit is the markets have become a little tougher across the board: picture book, YA, middle grade. It's just been, I think that publishers have pretty strong lists right now, so it's really getting harder to sell in a debut author or somebody new. I think that comes and goes in all genres. So if it doesn't say anything permanent about where those markets, those are books that are always going to be around. But we are seeing that a little bit across the board and a lot of our Kidlit agents while still doing kidlit, have maybe been expanding their lists into the adult market a little bit.
Mary Kole (10:51):
And we're seeing the same thing on the author front. A lot of YA authors are going and making their adult debuts to try and diversify their own practices, their own careers and their own income streams. I mean let's be honest here. Do you feel like the Barnes and Noble decision that's I think two years old now has had a chilling effect on middle grades specifically? Is that maybe to blame for some of that contraction?
Jessica Faust (11:18):
It could be. I mean I am not so sure I know for sure if that is the absolute cause of it other than I do think with Kidlit you get a little bit of the market grows up so fast that you're constantly sort of chasing it a little. And I think to be really honest, TikTok is probably a problem with that market. Things like the social media in general.
Mary Kole (11:46):
So what do you mean, it is driving the audience into, or I mean should say it's not where kids are congregating on mass legally or are allowed to be. So BookTok has more boosted adult titles?
Jessica Faust (12:03):
Well I think actually kids are distracted. They're not reading as much. Middle grade kids would sort of voraciously read and now I think maybe a kid who read 12 books a year might only be reading six because they're lost in TikTok and others. There's just other things to pull their attention away from books a little bit. Do you think that plays into it? I do think BookTok has been incredibly successful across the board. It definitely seems to play into more of the YA romantasy. There are certain markets that seem to have more success with BookTok.
Mary Kole (12:44):
It's always tougher to market to those younger audiences. Anyway. So somebody asked me in private (Claire), so two years ago now Barnes and Noble announced that they would stop across the board acquiring hardcover middle grade. They would leave it up to the discretion of individual buyers and individual stores. And that had a really chilling effect I've found on pickup and buy-in for middle grade. And that has been born out in sales numbers. But that's a really good point about—we'll get off of Kidlit because I know it is not necessarily your wheelhouse. But I do want to also say that I think it's important to note that with middle grade and younger, we don't really get a chance to advertise or engage directly with the readership. The readership are not the buyers. There are gatekeepers there, whether they're teachers, parents, grandparents, librarians, they're usually making the purchasing decisions and transmitting messaging about books to those younger audiences. Okay. So I had actually in the chat somebody asked about Kidlit trends, but I'm going to expand this out. In publishing how long do trends really last? I mean I've been around long enough that things are very cyclical to me. I've seen things come back around and back around and back around like vampires are back, for example. So what is the life cycle of a publishing trend in just general terms?
Jessica Faust (14:18):
No idea. I think it depends on the trend. I mean, I think we have things that come along as a trend and they could, vampires were around for years and years and years and then there was a huge drop off where it was nobody was buying them. But I think that back when I was still working at publishing houses, chicklit came along and was a huge trend but really died out very fast compared to something like vampires. But then it also reinvents itself. I think chicklit has become new adult—
Mary Kole (14:52):
New adult and kind of upmarket women's fiction.
Jessica Faust (14:54):
Paranormal romance has now become cozy romantasy. So there is no sort of defining time of the trend. And you have to remember so much of this depends on the readers and other things in the zeitgeist. A movie could come out that all of a sudden sparks a trend in books or something like that. That's why we always say don't write to the trends. We don't know how long they last. We don't know when they'll come back, all of those things. But yeah, there's no real timeline cause everything’s so different.
Mary Kole (15:34):
Which is a perfect segue into something I've really wanted to ask you because we were already sort of talking about it. What do you make from the zeitgeist about this focus on cozy, lower stakes? I have my theories, but I would love to hear what you attribute the cozy lean to.
Jessica Faust (15:55):
I think that honestly where we are in the United States as a country and politically and sort of the general mood of people, honestly politics, world events play a lot into our reading. And you saw it during the pandemic too, and people were really reading a lot. I think when people perceive that we're living in darker times when the economy is struggling, people tend to read more and people often go to lighter things. They want joy, they want happiness. They want things that aren't as dark and bloody and gory. It's not always an exact predictor, but they do say that I believe about car colors too during certain economic times. Colored cars sell more versus black and white cars.
Mary Kole (16:49):
Because people just need that color in their lives no matter how they get it.
Jessica Faust (16:55):
Yeah. So I think that if anything, what we're seeing this year is people sort of gravitating towards joyful, peaceful things.
Mary Kole (17:06):
Although conversely, I have also seen kind of a mini bump toward dystopian as well. So it could also be a way of processing some of those anxieties and feelings.
Jessica Faust (17:18):
Well, horror is really big right now and we're seeing horror having a revival in a way that we probably haven't seen in 25 years. In fact, houses, publishers are starting horror imprints. So yes, I think it can go both ways at the same time.
Mary Kole (17:40):
So we are talking about trends and I know that a lot of writers feel like agents they read, they scout in the slush pile, but a lot of your work is actually getting to know various imprint tastes, various individual editor tastes, scouting the zeitgeist so to speak, keeping an eye on other media to sort of always keep refining your idea of what you can sell and what you should maybe keep an eye out for in the slush pile. So can you talk a little bit more about your future forecasting activities?
Jessica Faust (18:22):
Yeah, I don't know if it's so much future forecasting, but yeah, we're always keeping an eye on trends in all media, movies, books, tv, and knowing what people are talking about and what's big. It's important for us, especially if we're hearing from editors a lot of comps, to know what those comps are. We say that as agents we have to be reading all the time. If I hear from editors, two, three different people tell me they want something similar to one particular book, and I don't know that book or haven't read that book, I need to at least read a section of it. I need to understand what that book is and what the appeal is.
And then those are conversations I'm going to be having with my authors, but also what's not working anymore, what editors are saying they're not looking for more of right now. I have historically represented a lot of cozy mystery authors and the cozy mystery is sort of the modern Agatha Christie. They typically had hooks that were like a librarian or a cupcake owner or a bookshop owner, whatever it was, but cozy. I always said it was people who liked to drink tea and sit under the Afghan that they crocheted with their cat by their side and all of these lovely cozy things. And that market for the last few years has been shifting.
And so as I've been watching that happen, I've been having conversations with my clients who write that about, Hey listen, I've been looking at your numbers. I see your numbers are dropping. I think we're going to have to start thinking about what's going to be next. I think we, we make a slight shift. We need to look at what sort of the remake of the cozy is. Do you want to go in that direction? Do you want to, so it's always not just paying attention to what's happening on the outside, but what's happening to my client's careers individually and how I can be preparing us for what we would do next. And for every client that would be different. Some may want to do a complete shift, some might not be able to, some might really feel this is my zone, this is where I belong. So there's a lot of sort of things that go into those conversations. I think it's really hard what we can do in terms of predicting what's next is it's what we're selling now is what's next because what we're selling now isn't going to show up in the market for another year or two. So from a reader's perspective and even from an author's perspective, if you're not following current deals, that's what's going to be next.
Mary Kole (21:02):
Yeah, Publisher's Marketplace really is an incredible investment. I am a customer. I am not in any way compensated for recommending it, but it is one of our great predictors of what'll be happening a year or two years from now. So this client-steering role that you play is something else that a lot of writers don't think about. How early and how involved do you get when an author brings you, oh, here's what I'm thinking about in terms of my next idea. Do you help them at that idea stage? Do you wait until they have a draft? How do you handle follow-up projects?
Jessica Faust (21:46):
Yeah, I mean every agent's going to be different, but I think at our core, our job as agents is to be career managers. And that starts from that first book that we submit. Even our negotiations in the contract have to be part of a discussion of what's your vision, how can we make all of that happen so that we're not contractually locking you into something that's going to make it difficult farther down the road. And then, yes, I like to know what your ideas are. I don't want my clients writing things if I don't think it's something I can sell. So from an idea stage, I like to know right upfront, yeah, that sounds great, let's do that. And then there will be different areas of how much do we need to write, where do we go with this? That being said, I like to sort of give my stamp of approval for lack of a better term on that idea before you start writing.
But I don't want to see whatever product we need, whether it's a full manuscript or a partial, until the author feels it's, I always say ready to go on bookshelves. I don't want to see a draft. It should go through the entirely same process you've done with your first works, your critique groups, your beta readers, your editors, whoever is on your team that made that first manuscript happen should do the same before you send me your next one because I think it's really important to know I'm not an editor. I'm not your editor. My job is to prepare your manuscript for submission and that means polish an already nearly perfect work. So that when I'm looking at it, and this is the same when I'm taking on a client for the first time, I'm looking at a manuscript that I feel if this author said I refuse to do any more work on it, I would be proud to send this out to editors.
If it needs so much work that I can't send it to editors, then I typically won't offer representation. But what I'm doing now is going through it with you and saying, I think this could be a tad stronger. I think we should remove this. I think an editor might reject it based on these couple things that aren't working. That's really my goal is what am I taking out so that if we get a rejection, I'm not beating myself over the head thinking, I knew we were going to get a rejection on that? That wasn't working. And so the same with my clients. I don't want to see that work until it's in that kind of shape.
Mary Kole (24:13):
There is a great big spectrum, right. A lot of agents are very hands-on editorial, but you can get into those blurred boundaries. You can become their editor, their critique partner if you are that hands-on and some people like you say, Hey, I love saying bring it to me if you think it's ready for the shelf. Is that different between fiction and nonfiction? I see that attitude more in nonfiction agents.
Jessica Faust (24:44):
Nonfiction, we sell on proposal typically, and I might spend a little bit more time with it because what you're bringing primarily isn't your writing, it's really your platform. And then the idea that goes along with the platform, and I am an editorial agent, it's just that I've only got about two rounds in me. So that's the max. And I think something that's really important that gets lost in the conversation is your agent works for free until they sell your book. So for a lot of people who are really trying to establish themselves in the business and want to make a career out of this, to spend six months on a client manuscript with a client is six—and if you're doing it with multiple clients—that's six months of free labor and none of us are going to last in a career if we're doing months and months and months of free labor in any career. So that is something that we talk about here a lot. What's that balance of how much work we can do versus and what is our role in that? I think most everybody here is editorial agents, but there's a limit to how much editorial work we can do.
Mary Kole (25:53):
Yeah, that's actually why I left agenting because I was like, wait a minute, I love doing editorial work, but I can get paid to do editorial work? This is crazy.
Jessica Faust (26:04):
Yeah, Karen Solem, who was a real mentor of mine, worked at Harper Collins for years and then became an agent. And I remember she said, I don't want to do the editorial work anymore. That's why I became an agent. And for me at the time I was an editor. I was really shocked by that. But then as I learned the business, that made more and more sense to me.
Mary Kole (26:26):
A lot of writers in the slush have these, I think unmet expectations that it is the agent's job to respond to their query and give them feedback because that's a complaint that I've heard over and over: They rejected me, but they didn't even help me. But that is not the job.
Jessica Faust (26:49):
It's not the job and it's actually not practical. And I will say it's also not in the best interest of the author. So I do believe that it is maybe not a responsibility, but I do believe agents should respond to queries. It's a policy here at BookEnds. All queries should be responded to, I hope, within a timely manner, but I know some agents struggle with that, but it is a policy that we respond to everything. I just think that it's part of relationship building. It's generally what I ask, and it's really not that hard, especially with Query Manager. It's a pop down. It can be sent however, even if we request a submission, and I will do that, I think rejecting on a query is really, we can just say a lot of it's personal. A lot of it's just pitched in Grimmy, and I always compare it to shopping in the bookstore, why didn't you buy that book? Can you imagine if you had to explain to every author why you picked their book up off the shelf and then didn't buy it? It would be the same thing.
But for submissions, I understand where authors get frustrated, but the truth is, I could give you one little nugget of why I rejected something. And I think when I first started out in the business, I felt that I tried to do that because I thought it was the nice thing to do. But the truth is what I saw was that those little nuggets authors were grasping onto and it was just a little nugget. I might say the pacing was off. Well, what does that mean? And they're so expansive. But also if I say something simple, I didn't like the character, the author will say, well, I could fix that, but it's more than that because if I just thought it was something you could fix, I would've asked you to do that.
The truth is, I didn't like the character, but also the dynamics with the characters weren't working. And there are tons of different things. So I think that a lot of us have stopped trying to give feedback because what we see then is authors spending a lot of time trying to fix something little when it's much bigger. And I also believe that it's not always in the author's best interest to be spending so much time on one book. What you should be doing is writing your next book, which should be a better book, because every book you write should be better than the last. And if you are getting any sort of feedback that resonates, even if it's from critique partners or something later, take that and put it into your next book, but you got to move on. The author has been working on one book for 10 years? I'm looking at that and going, well, how are we going to have a career with this?
Mary Kole (29:36):
I couldn't agree more. My big reserves of empathy are for people who come to me for editorial advice, but they're like, I've been working on this for 20 years. At the same time, ooh, that is such a tough situation.
Jessica Faust (29:54):
Yeah, I compare it to baking a cake. I'm a baker. Well, I used to be, I don't bake as much as I used to, but when you bake a cake and all of a sudden you realize you've put in a tablespoon of baking powder instead of a teaspoon, you can't fix it. You can try, you can try to scoop it out, or you can try to add a little bit more flour and an extra half an egg and you can try to do all these things. But really what you should do is dump the cake out and make a new cake and learn from the mistake you made. And I think working on a book is the same thing. At some point you have to go, this either just has to go into the bed or this has to go out and query. And it's time for me to start that new one, that new book, that new recipe with what I've learned from this one.
Mary Kole (30:42):
So I am a bit of a swearer and I had my graphic designer make a sticker with a lovely floral motif and that wedding font that was everywhere like five years ago. And it says, don't be fucking precious because I do want writers to sort of stand up for themselves and believe in their projects. But at the same time, if you cling … that cake's not going to be very good to eat and you are not going to be learning and growing as much as humanly possible. So it's really, I love the image of just the cookie isn't meant to go, abandon and start anew.
Jessica Faust (31:26):
And one of my policies, personal policies as an agent, and this doesn't necessarily stand for all the BookEnds, and I know this is different from a lot of different agencies policies or agents' policies is, and I will say to all my clients, if we get a revise and resubmit request from the editor or we're getting a lot of the same feedback, we're not going to do revisions. I really feel, first of all, 99% of revise and resubmits don't get bought. That's true. I feel like it's become a new thing. When I started out in this business, it was not something, I didn't even know what an R & R was. People would come to me and go, I got an R & R, and I was like, I have no idea what that even is. That's how new that is to the business. But my belief is that editors want to be nice, so they give an R & R, but what they're doing is having the author do free work that's not usually amounting.
And then what's happening is authors are putting aside the book that I could submit next, that's now not ready because we've spent all this time in R & R that I don't sell anyway. But I believe what we have to say is, I will take all the feedback we get from editors and I will say, Hey, while you're working on that next book, keep in mind that what we're getting from a lot of people is the pacing's too slow. So we need to keep that in mind with your next book. But I am not going to keep doing a big cycle. And the other thing is we've already gotten five rejections on this book, so we're going to do an R & R and for two people we can send out or whatever the numbers are. I know a lot of agents who will jump into the R & R, and there might be times where I say, I think this is a good point. I think maybe we could consider this, but most of the time I'm going to say no, we're not going to. And the same thing I said about agents not giving feedback earlier, we're not going to spend all of this time on one nugget and try to recreate this book.
Mary Kole (33:21):
That is so fascinating. It's like you read my mind because as I was listening to you talk about feedback. I was like, I'm going to ask her if she ever extends an R & R to a writer.
Jessica Faust (33:35):
I probably have done, I do have a client right now that I did an R & R with, honestly, that's probably two that I've ever done. So typically no. If I feel, for me, if I think somebody's good enough to offer on, I want to jump on that. I don't want to. And we've certainly had experiences where we've done R & Rs and then they get another agent and use our R & Rs with that person. But at the end of the day, if I feel strongly enough to do an R & R, I will just offer, and sometimes I do feel strongly enough to give some feedback and we'll say, if you want to resubmit later, you can. But it's not a real strict R & R. If I'm really attached to something I just offer.
Mary Kole (34:23):
That's a really good point because as you say, most R & Rs, whether it's the agent giving the writer a revise and resubmit letter, whether it's the acquisitions editor giving the agent and writer a revise and resubmit, they don't end up panning out. And I would imagine that any agent who values a writer's time won't want to see them go and make a huge revision based on one perspective. Maybe it takes them a year and a half, they did all this work and then what? You're like, eh, I'm still on the fence. Sorry about that.
Jessica Faust (35:01):
Well, the other problem is I could have found that book somewhere else. So let's say I was really excited by your cozy romantasy that was set in, I dunno what, a coffee shop. I just sold something like that. Gave you an R & R, but then two months later, I get that same idea from somebody else. Obviously it's a different book. By the time you come back, I could be like, oh, I just sold something too similar to this, or the market has shifted so much that I can't sell this anymore. And now you've spent a lot of time on a book that is now not marketable. Not that I'm fully against R & Rs. I think you just have to be really smart if somebody sends you one. I think this is a really good opportunity for an author. I think every author jumps on it because they think, oh, this is my chance.
But I think that the author really has to take a step back, look at the notes, and think, do I think I can take these notes? Do I see in these notes what the agent or the editor sees that's going to make my book better? Or am I just trying to do exactly what they say to try to sell the book? Because with any revision, whether it's your editor, your agent, or an R & R, if you don't see how to make that work in your book, it's not going to work. And I think too many people just grab onto this must be the magic thing. I need to make this happen. And that's not always the case. Often it's not the case.
Mary Kole (36:39):
I have seen editorial clients and clients when I was agenting, get one piece of feedback from one editor or one agent or whoever they're on submission to, and it says, maybe we need to add some conflict with the best friend character. And that email has been read for two minutes and they're already going spelunking in their manuscript. They're like, okay, let's do this. I have my revision hat on. And sometimes it's about the sum total of the feedback, and it's what you resonate with. You don't have to jump the second a gatekeeper says jump and revise.
Jessica Faust (37:21):
I would also say none of those revisions are one scene. A lot of people think, oh, if I just added to this one scene, if somebody is asking for a revision like that, it's the whole book you need to consider how will this change work in the whole book? If you're not making a full whole book revision, especially for an R & R, then you're not doing enough to get it sold.
Mary Kole (37:47):
That's really, really an excellent point. One of the types of writers that I struggle with personally are the box checkers. The ones that complete the Save the Cat beat sheet, for example, not to pick on Jessica or Save the Cat, right? It's an amazing resource. But they do the thing, they tick all the boxes, they are the perfect student on a roll, gold star, all of that. But they don't do more than that. They don't pull the natural extension of the revision through.
Jessica Faust (38:22):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Mary Kole (38:25):
Revision is sort of, you do have the letter of the law when you get feedback, but I think you're saying zoom out to the spirit and try to understand what the spirit of the feedback is telling you.
Jessica Faust (38:36):
Exactly. Exactly. And have the vision. And if you don't have the vision for what that feedback is going to do for your book, then you can't do it. It's as simple as that. Don't do it. Don't waste your time. Move on to your next book, let it go.
Mary Kole (38:50):
So going back to cozy actually is one of our questions. Lori was wanting to know what direction is cozy shifting in? And I heard you say, oh, cozy is kind of on the up and up, it's being trendy. But then cozy mystery specifically seems to be sunsetting a little bit. So can you dive into that seam a little bit?
Jessica Faust (39:11):
So cozy romantasy, which is more of a paranormal fun, light in this world, is rising. The word cozy is okay, but the cozy mystery, as we've known it has really the only authors as far as I can see, who are really still writing are the ones with really established series. It's really hard for anybody to do anything more or continue on. It has to be super established. So I'm calling it the Re-Imagining of the Cozy Mystery. And the comps I'm using are the Richard Osmond Thursday Murder Club. These are the comps that are also coming from editors. The Maid is one that has sort of been part of this re-imagining also, books like the Finlay Donovan series, which are fun. But I think at the end of the day, the big difference with all of these is these are books that the main point of the story isn't all 100% the mystery and then the cute town its set in. These books tend to have sort of richer storylines.
The rom-com/cozy mashup is something I'm seeing a lot where the romance plays almost as big of a role as the mystery solving. So the traditional cozy mystery as we know it, I think was very much like the category romance, the Harlequin category romance. It had one mission, which is there is a dead body, and our amateur sleuth is going to pair up with their quirky friends and solve the mystery. The category romance were very much, we have our romance trope, we have our hero and our heroine, and they're going to hate each other, fight, fall in love and the end. But I think when you look at the single title romance, there's a lot more going on. There's the character's own personal journey along with the romantic journey. I think this is what we're seeing, the re-imagining of the cozy. There tends to be more of this personal journey, these expanded storylines in addition to the mystery. So I hope that explains it. But I think the best thing I can say is read the comp titles. If you've read them, don't just tell me you don't like them, but also read them with an eye towards how is the story built different than what the traditional mysteries or cozies that we've known?
Mary Kole (41:44):
So what you're alluding to is something that I love to ask this of all gatekeepers because it's personally a question that I hate and I always kind of go deer in headlights around it. But this kind of layering, this genre mashup, the internal story, the external story, that kind of hints to me at the question of what is high concept? That is something everybody says that they want, but what in practical terms means high concept?
Jessica Faust (42:14):
In one sentence, you can tell me what the concept of your book is, and every person you tell it to is going to go, oh! That's high concept. It's something that some books, some authors have been told they have to do sort of a tagline. I'm not a big fan of the tagline. I feel like that's a movie thing, not a book thing. However, that tagline is sort of the high concept in truth, if you are at a cocktail party with your neighbors, which might be hellish but could happen, and everybody goes, oh, you're a writer. What do you write? In a very judgmental way, they always say it in a very judgey way. You have maybe three sentences tops before they are completely disinterested. They're usually disinterested to start because they want to know if you know famous people and then after that they don't. But you have about two, maybe three sentences to be able to tell them what your book is. If you can do it in two to three sentences, you have a high concept. If you're falling right into a plot description, you don't have high concept, you have a plot.
Mary Kole (43:29):
It's about a woman. And she's been going through some life changes.
Jessica Faust (43:36):
Yes, that is not a concept, that is a plot. But a high concept … see, this is where you put me on the spot when I have to try to come up with examples. And since we've been talking about cozy mysteries, I'll just do a cozy mystery high concept. But it's a woman who inherits her aunt's failing bookstore and finds that the neighbor who owned the croissant shop dead in the nonfiction section of her bookstore. Now she has to solve the murder. Something like that is immediately like, oh, if I'm a cozy mystery reader, I'm like, oh, I love bookstores and dead croissant people. This is great. So something like that is a high concept and really look in the bestseller list and do not look at the authors who've been on the bestseller list before. Look at the new books, the debut titles on the bestseller list, or look at the way Publishers Marketplace shows the deals. Go into Publishers Marketplace, look at the deals for the genre you write in. If it's somebody who's been published before, it's just going to say, next book by so-and-so. But if it's a brand new, if it's a debut, there's going to be one sentence in there that's going to pitch the book as the high concept.
Mary Kole (44:50):
That is just chef's kiss advice because those deal memos are a sentence or two at the very maximum. And you get to read how professional pitch people are pitching their pitches.
Jessica Faust (45:08):
And keep in mind that's not just, that's how you're pitching the book to us. We're pitching the book to editors. Editors is pitching to their marketing team and their sales team. The sales team is using that to pitch to bookstores and it's going on the cover to pitch to readers.
Mary Kole (45:22):
It's this unbroken chain of pitch.
Jessica Faust (45:27):
Yep, yep.
Mary Kole (45:28):
I also think we should call that cozy. The only good croissant person is a dead croissant.
Jessica Faust (45: 35)
That would be perfect.
Mary Kole (45: 39)
That was so gratifying. Thank you. So as we sort of, I can't believe time so has flown so quickly for us, let's go ahead and go to some questions that people have submitted. Before we do that, I want to speak for someone from our group who said, this isn't a question, but a quick note of appreciation. Some years back in my earliest query days, Jessica and one of her other agents, Kim, both read a full manuscript of mine. Though they both ultimately passed, we had some very motivating correspondence that helped keep me moving forward. I'll always be grateful for the time they spent on my fledgling story.
Jessica Faust (46:21):
That's great. Thank you.
Mary Kole (46:24):
I'm glad I could share that with you. So Diane's question has been waiting for a while. Do agents pick up books or authors that have been indie published? Now this, there's a distinction between picking up a book that has been previously indie published and an author who has previously been indie published.
Jessica Faust (46:45):
Yeah, we have represented quite a number of indie published authors. And again, to make it easy, Publishers Marketplace, if you look through Publishers Marketplace, you can see we've done quite a few deals for indie published authors. In some case selling their next book in some case, being able to take their indie published works. Traditional sales are a big portion of that. You have to have the sales. If you publish an indie book, your sales aren't good and you think you should get an agent now because it didn't do as well as you want. I'd work on your next book. You're not going to be able to take that book out. You've already sort of proven it doesn't have a market. The author is getting the deals for their indie published books to move them traditional are getting huge sales.
And I will say right now, I don't have a magic number for what those huge sales are. It kind of depends on the book, the timeline, a million different things. I will add a caveat though. A lot of audio publishers and even foreign publishers are tapping indie authors to license the rights to their books. Get an agent if you can, to handle those deals. If you get an audio publisher who calls you and says, Hey, we want to buy, we want to license the rights, the audio rights to your indie book, we've seen a lot of really crummy contracts and a lot of really that had they tapped an agent and said, Hey, would you represent this deal for me? Probably would've, well, it would've easily paid the agent's commission if not more. So that's my one sort of warning that I'm giving to indie authors right now. We've also seen some really poor translation rights deals that have really gotten them stuck in situations where if they had just called, gotten an agent on board, they probably could have done a lot better. And a lot of agents are picking up indie authors and handling those kinds of deals. Some in the hopes that maybe down the line we could do a traditional deal together. But that's not always the only expectation.
Mary Kole (48:55):
And this has been kind of rapidly changing more recently because imprints like Bloom Books have been scooping up print rights for indie successes who have already proven themselves. And I think maybe even five years ago, agents would be less invested in this kind of hybrid publishing. To be clear, not hybrid publisher, vanity publisher, but hybrid indie and traditional publishing model where certain creators exist in both worlds.
Jessica Faust (49:28):
It changed a lot when KDP started about 15 years ago, there was an attempt to snap up the indie publish books and it didn't work. They weren't selling in the traditional market. So everybody kind of backed up on that, off on that. But things have changed and now they are working. They are able to work by moving to indie or traditional, but again, the sales are ridiculous. And that's when the traditional publishers are taking them on.
Mary Kole (50:00):
And I mean with all due respect, somebody who sells a couple hundred copies has done well in terms of indie publishing on the whole, because a lot of those books don't sell any copies outside of the author's immediate family. We're not talking about hundreds of copies here.
So Claire wants to know, does it ever happen that an author will write a book for one age group and you tell them to rewrite it, tweak it to be aimed at a different age group? Claire's example was middle grade to YA or vice versa. But since you do more adult, maybe we can talk about YA to new adult or new adult to older adult.
Jessica Faust (50:42):
It does happen. But in all of those, whether it's middle grade, YA, new adult, adult, the voice has to be there. So it's not just, I can take your middle grade, your middle grade should be YA because the middle grade market is tougher right now. The truth is you have to be able to write in the YA voice, which is different from the middle grade voice. So that might happen. But at least when we make that recommendation here are always conscious of whether the author can do that from a voice perspective.
Mary Kole (51:15):
It's not just the number on the character's birth certificate, right? The age of the protagonist, but they're also plotting gradients. Maybe you can get into darker more serious stuff in YA or of course in adult than you would in middle grade naturally. And so it's an inexact science determining age category, but it's not just you doing a search find and replace for the character's age.
Jessica Faust (51:45):
Typically when we do it, it's because they've written, let's say YA, but the voice is fitting for something else. So we might say, Hey, this YA actually feels more like middle grade or this adult actually feels more like YA. So you're rewriting the plot and stuff to what the voice already feels like. That's typically when we would do that.
Mary Kole (52:06):
That's a really, really good point. And that's just something that you internalize the conventions for each age category. The more you read, the more you exist in the marketplace. Right now there's actually a pretty big debate about younger YA and there not being a lot of books because YA is trending, I think on the whole a little bit older, a little bit saucier, darker, and it's leaving some of those 14, 15-year-old readers behind.
Jessica Faust (52:37):
I think we discussed briefly earlier, you had brought up that who were marketing middle grade/YA to are actually typically the adults, the parents, the teachers and things like that. So sometimes I wonder if that's an adult theory versus a kid theory, but that's just me.
Mary Kole (52:55):
No, that's true. The parent are like, no, this is too dark and sassy. My teen needs something cleaner. And they're like, no mom.
Jessica Faust (53:04):
Right. But I was a Judy Blume kid when everybody at 12 was reading Forever on the mom's version of Forever on the Playground. But the moms had found out we would've been in big trouble.
Mary Kole (53:19):
Well, thank you so much for your time, expertise, sense of humor and for being so open and real with our group. If anybody has one last question, I will ask it. But unless anything comes in, you are still actively looking for clients, you have goals for this year. What are you especially looking for right now?
Jessica Faust (53:46):
I'm looking for my usuals. I'm looking for romance. I'm looking for mystery, suspense. I really am loving speculative and everything, but that doesn't mean it has to have speculative. So yeah, I'm looking for really everything in my genres, which are suspense, thriller, mystery, romance, women's fiction, upmarket fiction. I think I got it all. Those were my main categories I'm looking for.
Mary Kole (54:18):
And you also work with, you said 12 other agents at your agency. I was reviewing your website and it really is a wealth of information. You even have a How do I decide which agent is right for me? area. So feel free to head over to the website. I will put it in the notes alongside this conversation. And are there any other initiatives that you are championing this year?
Jessica Faust (54:47):
No, no. I think this year we are just reminding everybody that we are still very much on an agency that's supports diversity, equity, and inclusion. And we continue to stand by marginalized authors and stories and believe those stories need to be told. So I don't think we're doing anything new. We're just continuing to do what we've always done and done well.
Mary Kole (55:13):
Amazing. Jessica Faust from BookEnds Literary, thank you so much. Thank you for us sharing your wisdom and expertise. It was a joy to have you.
Jessica Faust (55:24):
Well thank you. Thank you everyone for the questions. Bye bye.
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