Welcome to Debutiful’s Agent Week! We gathered some of our favorite literary agents representing the most exciting debut books and asked them questions about what makes them love a submission, their agenting style, and the books they’re working on.
Mariah Stovall is the author of I Love You So Much, It’s Killing Us Both, one of Debutiful’s Best Debut Books of 2024 (and our conversation remains a Top 10 most-listened to podcast episode in our history). She’s also a literary agent with Trellis Literary Management, where she represents everything from literary and upmarket fiction to narrative nonfiction covering arts, history, STEM, linguistics, sports, and philosophy, including Oye by Melissa Mogollon, another Best Debut Book of 2024.
We dug into a long list of what pitches are oversaturated, how publishing isn’t meritocracy nor a circle jerk, and how she balances writing fiction as an author and representing it as an agent.
What types of projects are you most interested in right now? What feels oversaturated in your inbox?
I love books that are different. They subvert expectations, take risks, or have something to say, but resist easy interpretation. I don’t require a crazy premise or for every aspect of a book to be unusual. The book can just be uncommon in one way or another.
I’m looking for clever twists or fresh takes on familiar archetypes or paradigms, or books that play with form and structure, or books that simply depict people, places, things, and ideas that are underrepresented in their genre—often in tones or voices that are also different than their peers.
And they have to be commercially viable, unfortunately. I also have to like the prose. If the rhythm is off or the writing feels bland to me, I’m out.
These feel oversaturated:
- Academia satire
- Disaffected, aimless but privileged women in major coastal cities with artistic ambitions and poor discernment regarding sexual partners
- Estranged friends reunited by a fresh tragedy or a resurfaced tragedy from their past
- Female body horror focused on beauty/wellness companies and cults, cannibalism-appetite metaphors, killing men, and pregnancy/motherhood
- Genre-bending story collections, often rooted in a specific culture and/or feminism
- Ghost-intergenerational haunting metaphors
- GRIEF
- Memory loss and memory-erasing technology
- Reckonings with sexual assault and abuse, especially grooming
- Silicon Valley and evil AI/tech companies
- Time travel
- “Weird girl” fiction that isn’t actually that weird (quirk for quirk’s sake)
- White, upper-middle-class, heterosexual affairs, divorces, and insincere experiments in polyamory
One very specific thing I’d like to see in fiction is people who have sworn off tech/social media right when it would solve the problem they’re facing. Maybe it’s a group of young people with dumb phones who can’t solve the mystery of what happened at that party because there’s no TikTok trail of evidence. Maybe it’s a middle-aged divorcee who rejects dating apps and finds new love and a new community the old-fashioned way, but can’t digitally stalk someone who’s hiding something.
I’d also like to see more novels that involve music—but only if they are not about rock musicians’ careers. I think that’s the most obvious route for a music novel. I want the roads and characters and genres less traveled.
And I’m always interested in narrative nonfiction (no memoirs, sorry!) that makes me rethink a topic or gets me to think about a topic for the first time. One of my favorite books is Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman. It’s about rust.
Kate McKean recently told me, “I want to forget I’m reading a query.” What makes you gobble up a submission? What makes you stop dead in your tracks once you start?
I gobble up confident, stylish writing. It also needs momentum. It doesn’t have to start with a bang, but give me something—a mystery, a relationship dynamic, a worldbuilding detail—to keep me reading, no matter how lovely the prose is.
I stop when the writing isn’t confident or its confidence is misplaced. Maybe it’s trying so hard to have a literary voice that I’m too distracted mentally editing it to get lost in the story. Maybe it’s so sure that its high-concept premise can carry the whole story that it didn’t put much care into its dialogue or descriptive language.
I also stop when I’m just not interested in the people or the plot, and that can have more to do with me than the project. And sometimes the project is just too similar to something else I’m already working on. That’s happening more and more now that my client list is pretty full.
What should all first-time authors know about the publishing industry? Either submitting, or selling, or marketing, or… anything!
Publishing is neither a meritocracy nor a circle jerk. It’s somewhere in between.
With that in mind, they should know as much about the industry as they can figure out on their own for free. Then they should figure out what they want their relationship to the industry to be.
What do they really mean when they say they want to be traditionally published? What will success look like for them if they are? What are they hoping for, outside of getting free copies of their books? Because that’s sort of the only guarantee. When you realize how many books are published every Tuesday, you develop some perspective. Being published, even by a Big 5 imprint, doesn’t mean your mom is going to be able to buy your book at Barnes & Noble or the Economist is going to review it or the Hugo Awards are going to nominate it or schoolboards are going to add it to their curricula or Romantasytok is going to make it a bestseller or David Fincher is going to write and direct the movie adaptation or it’s going to be translated into Japanese.
Writers, you need readers and you need to understand how to reach them. Think about your audience, editorially and beyond. Pay close attention to which books are being published and in what ways. How does someone hear about a book like yours? What makes them buy it? Who reviews it, and do they review it on Reddit or in the newspaper? Who leaves a five-star Goodreads rating? What about a one-star rating? Who leaves an Instagram media comment? Who picks it for their book club? Who tells their coworker about it? Who buys it for whom as a Christmas gift? Who comes to the reading at the bookstore if there is one, and does it really matter if there is one? (No, probably not.)
Presumably, you’re readers. (If you aren’t, please don’t query me.) So ask yourselves these questions about the books you read, and go from there. Find a writer whose career you want to emulate. Study the steps they took and the opportunities given to them, whether they started small and grew steadily, or blew up out of nowhere, or quietly sweep all the indie awards. Know your ecosystem and your inspiration and your competition so that your agent can keep a straight face when they tell an editor how easily you’re going to stand out from the crowd, and your editor can do the same for your publishing team.
Who are some recent debut clients you represented in the last few years? Any upcoming ones you can brag about?
Some that published last year:
A magical reimagining of the life of the Mexican Indigenous woman La Malinche, called Malinalli by Veronica Chapa.
A cuttingly funny and vulnerable memoir about falling into and escaping from a Mormon self-help cult, called The True Happiness Company by Veena Dinavahi.
A queer, tragicomic Palestinian reimagining of Mrs. Dalloway called Three Parties by Ziyad Saadi.
A delightfully neurotic speculative climate mystery called The Extremities! by Samantha Kimmey.
Coming up this year:
In June, Hannah Soyer’s genre-bending memoir in essays Dreams in Which I’m Almost Human is coming from Red Hen Press. Hannah’s lyrical work is grappling with language and love and disability and mermaids and so much more.
In September, Roxane Gay Books is publishing Lydia Mathis’ story collection, Desperate Bodies, which tackles the real and surreal problems of Black women who are security guards, sex workers, and lonely misfits.
You released one of my absolute favorite debuts in 2024. How do you balance writing fiction and representing writers? Do they coexist, or are they two separate parts of your life?
Thank you! Your support of the book was so meaningful.
I did the majority of writing for my debut before I represented writers or did editorial work professionally (though I did work in publishing in other roles). I got into publishing to be an editor and then that didn’t happen. I think that failure was why I tried writing, specifically writing the kind of book that I wanted to edit. I had no idea what I was doing and I learned as I went. That took a lot of time, but it was my free time.
I did start working at literary agencies while I was trying to sell my book. Getting to read so many writers’ work and give them feedback is the closest thing I have to an MFA, and I consider it an ongoing education and a huge privilege, even if it is part of my job. Consciously and consciously, I use what I learn from giving feedback to make my own writing better, and I hope that in turn makes me better at giving feedback.
When my debut was published—between obligations for it and my job as an agent and trying to have a personal life—I was often working extremely long hours. It was, in that way, one of the worst times of my life. I was deeply stressed out and not taking care of myself and it took a long time to get back to normal. If I do write another book, I’m not looking forward to that part of it, but at least I’ll be better prepared next time.
If an author I work with or am considering working with initiates a conversation about my experiences as a writer, I’m an open book. But I never bring those things up. Two years after my pub date, I still have a bunch of extremely kind and moving emails and message from my readers that I need to respond to. I feel horrible about it, but I have to do things in my own time. So I try very hard to make sure my agenting doesn’t suffer for my writing, but whether it does is for my clients to decide.
The thing is, I’m not really a writer. I obviously don’t mean that literally. I mean that if I were to never write—not publish but just write—another word for the rest of my life, I’d be fine. But if I could never read anything again, then my life would be over.
You previously also worked “on the other side of things” at FSG and Gallery. How did working in editorial prepare you for being an agent?
I never actually worked in editorial. I tried very, very hard for a few years, but I wasn’t wanted in those roles for whatever reason. I switched to working at an agency because that was a job with an editorial component that I was able to get. I’m very grateful to Susan Golomb at Writers House for taking me on as her assistant.
I went to Writers House from FSG, where I worked in publicity. So I understand what publicist can and can’t do for a client, and what a client can do on their own. Occasionally, I do a little bit of pitching to try and help get my clients’ books more attention, primarily if they’re publishing with an indie press with limited resources. But I also strongly encourage my clients to be proactive and have their own attainable, effective ideas for publicity that may not be on their publicist’s radar.
I went to FSG from Gallery, where I worked in the Publisher’s Office. Basically, that meant I was a project manager. I helped with a lot of scheduling, logistics, and making sure editors were turning things in on time—and figuring out Plan B’s when needed. It was lots of checking and updating databases and running reports and delivering information to managing editorial and sales and art and marketing and publicity and production and other departments so they could do their jobs on time. I sat in on so many meetings and learned by listening. I actually think it’s the best first publishing job you can have.