Update as of 9/19/21: Weronika has opened up to queries after being closed for awhile and is actively looking for submissions. She is now also seeking picture books, graphic novel, and illistrator submissions.
Hi Weronika! Thanks so much for joining us.
About Weronika:
1. Tell us how you became an agent, how long you’ve been
one, and what you’ve been doing as an agent.
Oh,
this is—in my case—a bit of an interesting answer!
I
broke into publishing when I was in high school, as part of a work-study, and
then went on to intern with a series of agents—Jenny Bent at The Bent Agency,
Kathleen Anderson at Anderson Literary Management, and Mary Kole, formerly with
the Andrea Brown Literary Agency—before connecting with Bob Diforio at D4EO
Literary Agency.
I
worked with him and one other agency from 2010-2012, while still an
undergraduate at NYU, during which I represented a slew of talented and
award-winning projects, including Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead (Tor/Macmillan) and Sekret by Lindsay Smith (Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan). I then
departed publishing to make space to cope with the passing of my mom, among
other things—and, six years later, in the summer of 2018, following work in the
non-profit realm, I returned to build a comprehensive list of fiction and
non-fiction writers along a wide spectrum.
In
the fall of 2019, I started my own agency, and returned to work after the
unexpected passing of my dad in the late spring of 2020, having sold Zoe Hana
Mikuta’s Gearbreakers to Feiwel &
Friends/Macmillan (2021), and Hayley Stone’s Render Up the Ghost to Aethon (forthcoming), in the months since
returning. I’m excited to be building and re-building a list, with one client
in Francesca Niewiadomski, who writes YA fantasy.
About the Agency:
2. Share a bit about your agency and what it offers to its
authors.
I love the boutique
feel of smaller agencies: agents and writers who enter into deeply personal,
collaborative relationships, and who through and within those relationships
manage to become deep friends and partners in business. The agency’s mission is to identify and
nurture the best writers, looking to build lifelong careers. We offer literary
representation for print and digital media, and partner with the best agents to
place translation, film/TV, and other subsidiary rights for our authors and
their projects.
What She’s Looking For:
3. What age groups do you represent—picture books, MG,
and/or YA? What genres do you represent and what are you looking for in
submissions for these genres?
I represent a whole
gamut of genres:
·
young adult
·
fantasy & sci-fi
·
literary fiction
·
commercial fiction
·
women’s fiction
·
romance
·
crime, mystery &
thrillers
·
memoir
·
non-fiction (innovative
ideas & research; projects with a potential for social & cultural impact,
etc.)
I am not actively
open to queries, at least for the time being, for picture books or MG, but
would certainly represent those for writers of YA or adult fiction.
In general, I
look—across genres—for the strongest writers, with the greatest intuitive
awareness of as well as practice in craft: their building of scenes, their
world-building, their precision in vocabulary and syntax; a general
intelligibility that is clever and fun, etc. I love writers who possess their
own writing, and demonstrate great maturity and consideration. This means that
I have a general preference for voice-driven fiction, and fiction with a more
literary bent, as well as commercial fiction that rides the fine line.
For a more
extended description of my wish list, you can see my submissions page.
4. Is there anything
you would be especially excited to seeing in the genres you are interested in?
I’m—to be entirely
honest—not an agent who is overly concerned with tropes or categories. The best
stories transcend those categories, or break them apart, or bring something so
captivating to them that you forget why you hated the trope in the first place.
I, simply, have a
heart for remarkably told stories, and writing proportionate to those stories.
In my first round
of agenting, certain writers that I signed did
have a debut novel that editors found “too similar” to something on the market,
or didn’t add anything to a niche “too flooded.” Fine! This is part of the
risk, and the puzzle, and the hard work! It so happens that most went on to
write novels that sold, and sold brilliantly, and (in one or two cases) debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. All
those that sold have also built sustainable, ongoing careers, and this to me is
the essential marker of any worthwhile success. To give a specific example: I
never thought I’d love a novel about zombies…but signed a former client, now a USA Today bestseller, who wrote the most
delicious literary zombie novel, which didn’t go on to publish but helped break
her into serious publishing—and, boy, I still hope to this day she’ll have a
chance to place it, when people don’t feel tired of zombies.
Novelists who know
their craft I will sign and work with, over long periods of time, any day.
What She Isn’t Looking For:
5. What types of submissions are you not interested in?
As noted above, I’m
not—for the moment—looking to start with picture books or middle grade for
writers, nor am I in the market for graphic novels. I also stray away from
overly-explicit romance (i.e., erotica), and—as alluded to—genre novels that
don’t capture the need in me for a voice that sparks and captivates my mind and
heart.
Agent Philosophy:
6. What is your philosophy as an agent both in terms of the
authors you want to work with and the books you want to represent?
Where I and my clients agree that it is necessary and good,
I am a heavily editorial agent, with much experience and background in
structural editorial work. My task is also to be a writer’s expert in
contracts, with the support of the agency and its multi-decade experience in
high-quality negotiations; the sale of translation rights, where applicable;
and working on additional dimensions, rights- and platform-wise.
Beyond this, I agent very personally: in transparency, my
task is to set a writer up for a writing career–ideally, one in which writing
full-time or part-time becomes easy and reasonable, and earns back the
necessary profit. This means close work on the manuscript, to prepare it, as
well as marketing, teaching writers the nature of the field, and placing
writers well for growth and success. I am also of the mind that, where there is
something personally shared, we’ll love and do our mutual work with greater joy
and freedom. It is not rare, and much preferred, for this work to become
friendship.
Editorial Agent:
7. Are you an editorial agent? If so, what is your process
like when you’re working with your authors before submitting to editors?
As per above, yes!
Very much so!
We work through
editorial letters of different lengths—anything from 3-15 pages has been my
average—as well as editorial feedback at the level of the manuscript itself.
This will always include strengthening anything that is important, from the
depth of characterization and the character development arcs, to the plot arc
and the rise in/fall of tension, to the world-building, to the pacing, to the
structure of scenes (how they begin, proceed, and end).
I, ultimately, see
myself as a mentor for the writers with which I work—part of building careers
is ever-improving craft, and receiving and internalizing editorial challenge.
Query Methods and Submission Guidelines: (Always verify
before submitting)
8. How should authors query you and what do you want to see
with the query letter?
9. Do you have any
specific dislikes in query letters or the first pages submitted to you?
There are millions
of mistakes that can be made—my only
recommendation, overall, as this is important for learning to grow in the craft
long-term, is that writers find and work with critique partners in one
dimension or another.
Don’t send your
query or your pages out without vetting them deeply. Most importantly, don’t
vet your first 250 words or your first ten pages without vetting the rest of
the manuscript—so much work, to build long careers, requires intentional
craft-learning and -practicing, over and over and over.
Response Time:
10. What’s your
response time to queries and requests for more pages of a manuscript?
I’m averaging 24-48
hours at this point on queries, and anywhere from 3-30 days or so for partial
or full manuscripts.
Self-Published and Small Press Authors:
11. Are you open to
representing authors who have self-published or been published by smaller
presses? What advice do you have for them if they want to try to find an agent
to represent them?
Yes, of course.
As above, however,
I need writers to demonstrate a capacity for craft—so, ultimately, this is a
sort of “neutral” point (to be honest), as is having a former agent, or having
a writing degree, or having won awards. Great, fine—but show me that you can write very well, and that you can own your crafting. Just because you
have any/all the above doesn’t mean that you can do the latter.
12. With all the changes in publishing—self-publishing,
hybrid authors, more small publishers—do you see the role of agents changing at
all? Why?
On the most part,
in the core way, no—agents serve as editorial guides, as guides in business, as
gatekeepers, and as managers in a way that editors don’t and—considering the
breadth of their own responsibility—never will. The challenge on the agents’
end is to allow their own business/agenting model to evolve with the
industry—helping writers learn to support their traditional publishing with,
for example, novellas or self-published smaller works; maximizing e-publishing
platforms as well as seeking out innovative ways to market; and more.
Clients:
13. Who are some of the authors you represent?
My publishing
background is explained
here, including the novelists with whom I have worked.
My two current, new
clients include YA novelist Jill MacKenzie—author of Spin
the Sky (2016) and the forthcoming Breathe
the Dragon (2019), from Sky Pony Press/Skyhorse—as well as debut novelist
Zoe Makuta.
Interviews and Guest Posts:
14. Please share the links to any interviews and guest
posts you think would be helpful to writers interested in querying you.
This interview will
be the most recent/updated one, but most of these older interviews apply
entirely in terms of the bulk of content:
·
Hippocampus Magazine·
Victoria Mixon·
Pitch Wars
Links and Contact Info:
15. Please share how writers should contact you to submit a
query and your links on the Web.
Follow the link
above for the remainder of my blog, and find me on Twitter
@weronikajanczuk.
Thanks for sharing
all your advice, Weronika.
Weronika
is generously offering a query critique to one lucky winner.
To enter,
all you need to do is be a follower (just click the follower button if you're
not a follower) and leave a comment through December 8th. If your e-mail is not on your Google Profile, you
must leave it in the comments to enter either contest. If you do not want
to enter the contest, that's okay. Just let me know in the comments.
If you
mention this contest on Twitter, Facebook, or your blog, mention this in the
comments and I'll give you an extra entry. This is an international giveaway.
Profile Details:
Last updated: 5/12/20
Agent Contacted For Review? Yes.
Last Reviewed By Agent? 5/12/20
Have any
experience with this agent? See something that needs updating? Please leave a
comment or e-mail me at natalieiaguirre7@gmail.com
Note:
These agent profiles and interviews presently focus on agents who accept
children's fiction. Please take the time to verify anything you might use here
before querying an agent. The information found here is subject to change.