Agent Spotlight Series: Danielle Bukowski

Danielle: My background in foreign rights – I came up in publishing in rights, which means I am very good at pitching and selling books (a colleague and I sell foreign rights on behalf of all World English and North American deals done at SLL), I am very good at contracts, and I do a lot of networking within the industry. 

I am also not the type of agent who sells the book and moves on – I’m my authors’ advocate throughout the entire process, and I look at the big picture within publishing. Once the sale is made, can we start thinking about film/tv rights, start the list of people to ask for blurbs, and start thinking of publishing as a lifelong endeavor rather than a one-off sale?

Danielle: I will say that at least once a week I receive a query in which the protagonist’s relative dies and leaves them a piece of property; they have to return home to sort that out, and in the process, fall in love with their high school sweetheart, who is now successful. Unless you’ve come up with a big, clever twist on this trope, these types of books aren’t for me.

My general advice is don’t write into a trend. If you see a lot of books with a particular similarity, by the time you’ve finished your book with that similarity, publishers and readers will be tired of it. Write the book that you feel you need to write, not what you think the market wants.

Danielle: Publishers want books that feel timely, so books with hooks that are “ripped from the headlines” or are speaking to an issue of the day get more attention now. I am really, really hoping that publishing continues to realize that white readers aren’t the only readers, and that diverse stories that don’t center on trauma necessarily can be popular with lots of readers.

Danielle: Nancy Johnson’s The Kindest Lie was published on February 2 (order a copy if you haven’t read it! It’s excellent). I “liked” her Twitter pitch during a contest, and she sent me a draft of her novel; I felt it needed more editing, so I gave her some editorial feedback, and then she resubmitted months later with an edited manuscript – and I loved that draft! I signed her, we did another round of edits, and then I sold The Kindest Lie to Liz Stein at William Morrow/HarperCollins. The book got a lot of buzz around publication and will be the type of novel that I think people buy and read and recommend to friends for a long time. 

Danielle: I often see queries with summaries that are just set-up: who the characters are, where they are, what they’re dealing with. Often this is just what the reader will get within the first 10, 20 pages. But what is at stake for these characters? What is the thing that is going to propel the novel forward? How are the characters going to react and change? It really helps an agent to know the stakes within the query. I also think it’s helpful to writers, because a lack of stakes is often what causes me to turn a book down. Make sure your novel has stakes, and make sure you include those stakes within your query summary.

Danielle: I think there are these dual myths that we’re all just here to make big sales and rake in cash, or that we’re just reading on cute couches each day. There are certainly big-shot agents that make a lot of sales and don’t focus as much on an author’s career or the personal aspects of the relationship, like guiding them through publication, but many do – and that’s worth asking about explicitly on the call. I do a lot of that guidance work. And on the flip side, most reading is done on nights and weekends. So, if an agent has taken a long time to respond to your query or full request, the most likely scenario is not that they read and hated it and are trying to figure out how to tell you most bluntly. We are all very busy, managing current clients and going to meetings and doing admin work and vetting contracts, etc., etc. Some communication lags are red flags, but sometimes the days really do just run away from us.