Literary Agent and Author Jenna Satterthwaite on Making it in the Publishing Industry

Ever wondered what it's really like behind the scenes of being a literary agent?

What You'll Learn in this episode:
• Why agents prioritize story over polished prose
• The brutal financial reality of the publishing industry
• What makes manuscripts stand out in queries

Jenna's honesty about the industry might just shift how you approach your writing career. 

Join Jenna's Substack HERE

Get the list of 125+ Literary Agents who rep Thriller, Mystery, Suspense, and Crime Fiction

Study the Opening Paragraphs of the Top Authors Writing Thrillers Right Now

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

David Gwyn 0:00

So Jenna, welcome we're, we're really lucky to have you here.

Jenna Satterthwaite 0:03

Thank you for having me. I remember our last conversation. It was so fun. And I was like, Oh, we should do this again. And here we are. We're doing it.

David Gwyn 0:10

I know it's really exciting. It's always fun to talk to someone who I've talked to before because you get through that like awkwardness so much more easily, much more quickly. It's like

Jenna Satterthwaite 0:18

no awkwardness last time.

David Gwyn 0:19

There you go. Good

Jenna Satterthwaite 0:20

from the start.

David Gwyn 0:21

Good. So I do want to start with the agenting side just briefly, because last time we talked. You had, I think you said you had like five or six deals under wraps that you couldn't talk about clients. And so I'm imagining that time has passed now and now you can talk a little bit about it. So can you just talk like generally about like what it's been like agenting? You're kind of in this new, you're no longer a new agent. You've got people signed. You've got people under deals. Like, what does that feel like? What have you got going on?

Jenna Satterthwaite 0:48

I would say much like the writing side, there's kind of a mix of it's so gratifying to no longer be brand new. I do have eight announced deals at this point. There are five others that are unannounced. I'm in the middle of an auction right now, which is very exciting for one of my clients. So lots of stuff happening, but You know, the payment structure for agents, it's tough to make it add up to like a full salary that would support my husband, who's a stay at home dad, and my three young children, and myself, and get us health care, and so forth. So, from the start, I did my kind of mental calculus of how much do I need to be selling every year to replace my day job that I've been doing. Where I currently work full time as a global sales coordinator. It's a lot, guys. It's a lot. And even though I've made, you know, 13 deals, it's just nowhere close. I am just scritchle scratching the surface. So I think I'm super happy with the deal. Like, I love my authors. I don't want to take any excitement away from these. Deals with the publishers, the editors are great, the authors are great, it's exciting. And yet, it's what I want to do, full time, exclusively. Well, with my authoring on the side. And I just kind of see the long road. So I would say I'm in a place right now of reckoning with that and being like, okay. Okay, what needs to happen for me to kind of level up even from where I'm at now and make it into that bigger league of agents I don't think anyone goes into agenting. You know, just out of the good of their heart, though, there is that there is the love of art and the joy of working with authors. But at the end of the day, I also need to buy like snacks for my kids because they're obsessed with snacks. You know, do my laundry and stuff. So I think there's kind of a big combination of excitement and pleasure in the work. And Oh, a feeling of contentment. I'm doing something I love for the first time in my life. And I'm 41 and it took me this long to finally get into like a career that I love and yet I guess Just wondering like can I get there? I don't know. That's an open question. I don't know if I can I know I have the skill but there's Luck involved and and connections at play and things that I can't always control So we're happy and every now and then we're secretly like a little despairing But then we quickly bounce back and get it together again That's my honest answer.

David Gwyn 3:19

I love that. I think I I've said this to a lot of writers. I really think that a writing career, and I imagine the agenting career is kind of the same thing. It's like, it's a long process to get to one deal or, you know, one, one, your debut. And then it's like a race to 15 novels with the hope that like, one of them is good enough that then people read your backlist. And then the advance gets bigger on the next one. It is, it really feels like that, that the publishing industry is like that. I imagine agenting is a lot like that too. It's like, yeah, I got my first client. Okay. But that doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means, right? Like, it's not, it's not like all of a sudden, you know, you get a paycheck. It's like, now it's the next step and the next step and the next step. And you know that from the writer's side too, it's like, getting an agent is just the first step. It's not the last one. You know, and it feels like that when you're on the other side of it, but it really is just the first step.

Jenna Satterthwaite 4:08

Yeah. And something hilarious that I've shared on my sub stack before. So if you read it, it might not be new to you, but I have to date made only 800 as an agent, eight zero zero. And it's, I start open to queries a year and three weeks ago. Yeah, that's just 800, guys. And it's been full time hours for over a year at this point. That's

Audio Only - All Participants 4:28

crazy. And I'm

Jenna Satterthwaite 4:29

fine with it. I knew that going in, so this wasn't a surprise. I just like to laugh about it sometimes. A bunch of contracts were just finalized in the past, you know. Like, 27, 26, 25 days, so there should be, like, actually a, the whole, a next, the next wave of income headed my way in the near future, but, I just have to laugh, like, from the outside, it looks like I did a lot, and yet, that money has still not showed up, so, welcome to publishing.

David Gwyn 4:59

Yeah. And so, yeah, welcome to publishing is right, right? That's, that's kind of how it, how it seems to go. And, and just, just to kind of get a sense, cause I know last time we talked and, and for people who are listening, if, if you haven't checked out the, the last episode which I know is really insightful, really, really interesting, I'm sure we'll touch on some of the same stuff, but if you haven't checked that out, definitely go check that out. I'll, I'll link that in the description. If you're listening on the podcast. Yeah. And and you mentioned that you were kind of looking for a wide variety of, of submissions. Is that still the case? Have you narrowed?

Jenna Satterthwaite 5:30

No, I am not narrowing. I'm so far from narrowing. Yeah, I started with the idea of I'll start wide. I read widely. I'm very omnivorous as a reader. So we'll just see what happens and see if there's something that ends up being my niche. And the longer I go, the more I'm like, no, I love the variety. You know, if you look at my eight an ounce sales so far in publisher's Marketplace, it's all over the place. It's romantic, spicy, romantic middle grade horror. There's like young adult dystopian, young adult romance, like adult romance. You know, there's, I mean, a huge horror there. Well, actually, all the horror is not announced yet. Sorry. There's a horror that's gonna be announced. But there's just, like, there's no kind of consistency. It's all over the place. And that, I think, really keeps me energized and interested in what I'm doing and reading. I don't want to do just one thing. Some agents do. That's great for them. That's just not me. I want to be switching it up. We're doing, like, a really cute, adorable voice. Now we're doing a really, like, scary as hell voice. Here's some like really gruesome body horror and she's like maybe gonna eat her lover, I don't know. And oh, like here's an adorable moment with like a ghost cat. You know, I, I like to bounce between extremes. I think it keeps me on my toes and keeps me feeling invigorated.

David Gwyn 6:47

Yeah. And so we touched on this a little bit last time we talked, but I want to ask you again, now that you're even further along and you've signed more, more writers, you've got more books under your belt. So if, if genre isn't the thing that you're focused on, what is that? Like, if you look at all your clients, what is the common thread between all of them?

Jenna Satterthwaite 7:05

We talked last time, I think about voice labs in the opening pages and wanting to be surprised, looking for something unusual. That kind of wakes me up. I would say that's still the case, but the common thread is story. I have writers and well, I'll just kind of say this because it's the truth with a variety of prose level skills. I have writers who are so polished that I have not had to touch a thing in like line edits where I'm just like, It's done. Like, I just, I mean, I can try to mess with a comma so that I feel useful, but, why? And then I have writers who, you know, are still on the newer side, where I'm sending a huge edit letter of stylistic notes, and then I'm redlining the crap out of that manuscript. And I, I don't mean that in a mean way, just, like, and I've had that conversation with my authors who are like, you're, you're a newer writer, and like, here are the new writer things that I'm seeing. And I'm gonna help you, like, notice those, and identify the patterns, and the next time you write a book, hopefully, like, you know, we've leveled up a little bit. But prose doesn't tend to hold me back when signing someone. I don't need the most polished sentence of all time. I, I want a great story. I want a strong voice. Because you cannot, an agent can't go in and via, like, redlining a manuscript, create voice. I can't make that for my authors. But I can fix, like, someone who's inconsistent with verb tenses, I can fix some past to present tense stuff. And fix some funky punctuation, that's easy. But the hard part is story. The hard part is pacing. Does it keep me moving forward? Is there a reason to keep turning pages for 300 to 400 pages? And if you can achieve that, I don't care if your tenses are a little like, eh, er, eh, er, like, We can address that, and you can learn, and we can keep going, but everything, the other stuff is just so much harder to fix. Yeah.

David Gwyn 9:06

And it's funny. And we're going to talk about this in a second when we get to talking about made for you. But it's interesting to hear you say that because I, one of the things that came up a lot in the community is like your line level writing. We were, we were reading your, some of your lines aloud and talking about why they were so powerful. And we had a bunch of people in the, in the community kind of mentioned that. And it's interesting that that's the thing that you feel like, okay. Like I can help somebody with that is what it sounds like to me. It's like you're like, I can't help you with voice. I can't necessarily help you with pacing or, you know, because that's that's something that has to be there. But what we can do here is is because that's one of your strengths as a writer, one of your many strengths as a writer that you're like, Okay, I can help you punch up. a little bit at your line level writing. Is that, is that kind of how you think about it?

Jenna Satterthwaite 9:47

I had not thought about it that way, but now that you're saying that, yes, I am, I wouldn't say fastidious at a line level. I'm not someone who agonizes over sentences, and we'll get, we can get into this later with Made For You, but I did not try to make beautiful writing. My goal was to have serviceable to the point commercial prose. And there's more to that, but that was my intention going in stylistically. So yeah, I, I think that how do I say this? It takes, I would say, as much of a learning curve to get to serviceable commercial prose as it might. To getting to more, like, lush, more literary leaning prose. I think they're equally valuable skills. So I don't need all my writers to have my same style, but I am good at, I think, getting those, yeah, getting those lines to be what they need to be for whatever style and voice the writer's going for.

David Gwyn 10:47

I would do want to shift gears here and talk about made for you and your writing. And so this seems like a good time to do that. I know, like we mentioned the, the outset here made for you. It's been a little while since you probably. Talked about made for you and really, really been hands on about it. But can you just give us like. A quick overview of what, what the book is about, and then we'll, we'll dive in a little bit and talk about it.

Jenna Satterthwaite 11:08

Absolutely. Ironically, I did have to talk about Made For You recently, because it's coming out in the UK next month. Oh, nice. Yes. And so, some of the editors there were like, can you write some articles? And I was like, whoa, oh yeah, that, okay, that book. So, I did have a refresher, like, literally last week, because I was putting together some things for that release. But, yeah, it's a thriller, mainly. I did not write a sci fi, even though it is being described sometimes as sci fi. It's a thriller with kind of a sci fi speculative twist. I wanted to write a fun mystery, fun murder mystery. And it's about a synthetic woman who is one of three of her kind. She is created for a reality TV show called The Proposal. Goes on the show. To win the heart of the Bachelor, but she's competing against human contestants who don't actually know she's synthetic at first. So she kind of has that edge, but also that fear of, you know, when are they going to find out? Should I reveal this and at what point? Over the course of the show this is not spoiling anything, but she ends up with the Bachelor. She wins! Yay! And they go off into bliss, except it's not so blissful. They have a baby. He disappears. And she is accused of murdering him so she has to go on a little investigative adventure to clear her name and along the way deal with lots of drama and haters and her weird dynamics with her creator.

David Gwyn 12:37

Yeah, that's a great that's a great summary of it. And, yeah, we, we are the storyteller society read it for our book club and we really enjoyed it. We had some really interesting conversations that I know they're going to get to ask you some questions here in a little bit, but I, one of the things that came up and one of the things that, that I wanted to talk about and that wasn't claimed by somebody else on the meeting already was, was the structure here with the now versus then chapters. You see this a lot where there's multi points of view, timeline, things like that. But one of the things that struck me a lot with yours was how different in terms of tone they were like the then chapter her like waking up and she's wearing like a sequined dress and she's going in a limo and like all of these kind of like bright shiny feel and then the the now chapter is like her waking up hung over in sweatpants and like how different those are and then it kind of maintains as the as the scene as the scenes continue and I won't give anything away but like Was that intentional? Was that something that you just kind of wrote in right away? Or is that something you had to go back and think like, do I want to describe this in this way? Or hey, this is my now chapter. I have to describe it in a different way.

Jenna Satterthwaite 13:52

So I didn't think about it. I guess going in. Like, ooh, I have to really try to make these different. They kind of just came out that way. Wow, that's a terrible answer. But, let me try to elaborate and make it more interesting sounding.

David Gwyn 14:07

I think it goes, I think it goes back to, to how you write. I know you've mentioned this before, like, you're, at least with this, this first book, like, it kind of just came out of you, right? Like, you were just like, it just, and I know you mentioned this, in our last interview, that the way that it's published is very similar to the way that it, It was written originally in a, I'm just so, I feel like, well, actually, let me, let me ask this question. Maybe this will answer it. Like. You, did you write it the way we read it, or did you write it, like, all the then chapters, all the now chapters?

Jenna Satterthwaite 14:33

Oh my gosh, so my plan was to do all the now chapters, because when we started writing it, I didn't actually know what the murder mystery was going to be. Literally, I was like, ooh, synthetic woman, ooh, like The Bachelor, that sounds fun, murder. But I literally wrote that first scene where she wakes up without knowing, like, who's gonna die, who did it, I don't know it just felt like a compelling idea and I wanted to kind of start and see what happened. I did have to figure that out before going too far, but I started without knowing where it was headed. So my plan was to discover that through writing all the now chapters in a row. So the present timeline murder mystery. And then I was like, once I know who dies and why, then I'll go back and plant the right clues and da da da da da. But I finished that first the first couple chapters, she wakes up, and then, you know. There's the scene where she wakes up again, but in the now timeline, hungover, hearing her baby cry. And then I reached the end of that chapter and I was like, I don't know, let's like, do the, the limo. I don't know, we'll just do the limo. And then literally I wrote it in sequential order, even though my plan had been the opposite. My plan was to do the two chunks. But it just came out sequentially, so all of the then chapters that take place on the show were not planned at all. They were just kind of spontaneous little moments. And it all just kind

Audio Only - All Participants 15:59

of

Jenna Satterthwaite 16:00

worked. I feel terrible saying that because I hate it when I hear creatives be like, Oh, like what I just said, it just came out of me. Okay. Okay, lady. Like, that's so annoying. But I, I do want to say, I had been writing at that point for eight and a half years. This was like my 8th or 9th novel. None of the previous ones sold. And I was actively reading in kind of the thriller space a lot, which I had not been reading in, I think I was in the fantasy space before because I was writing a fantasy, an epic fantasy, which I still hope to sell, gosh darn it. But, you know, I would say the ability to do that didn't come out of nowhere, there was kind of a long history of thinking about plot and pacing and how to piece things together that I'm sure played into The ability to be able to just do that, and also, not all books are like that. It's also not like, oh, you build this ability over the years, and then you just write a book. Oh no, the book that I just finished, that's gonna be the option book for my publisher, where they'll decide if they want another of my books or not. That is a whole different story, and I won't go on too long about it, but I wrote it, I got an idea for it like three years ago, four years ago, from a friend. I was so inspired that I immediately wrote multiple scenes. Then I got stuck, like, a week later, and then it sat for a year. Then, a year later, I was like, I gotta write this book! The idea's there, the characters are there. I tried again, I got like 30, 000 words in. I got stuck. I did not know what I was doing. It sat for another year. And I finished it the next year. And

Audio Only - All Participants 17:36

then,

Jenna Satterthwaite 17:38

I finished writing it, thought it was crap, and then it sat for another year, you guys. I'm not kidding. So it didn't even come out of the hard drive until my agent was like, What are you working on? Are you working on anything? And I was like, No. She's like, Well, don't you have anything kicking around? I was like, Oh, this terrible book that I never told you about because it sucks. It took me three years to write. So, long story short, well, or long story long I, not all books come out that easily, and I don't think that being able to write Made for You sequentially, first draft fast, that was kind of its final form, I don't expect that to happen necessarily ever again, honestly. Each book is really its own battle. Yeah, that's my huge disclaimer with like, this is not now my life

David Gwyn 18:25

Yeah, that's so cool. And so let's kind of transition to that, which is what is coming up for you next as on the writer side, on the author side.

Jenna Satterthwaite 18:34

So many books. So fun. So I have a pen name book So this is A Killer Getaway. It's coming out in the UK under the title Beach Bodies in June. And then this is the US release, which comes out in August. And it's a little different. It's a thriller romance. And it really, it delivers on both. It's a, it's a full romance. Happy ending, and it's a full thriller. So yeah, that's kind of like a little different genre stream I have going on, and I'm hoping there will be more fun news in the future for that. Can't talk about now. And then on the, my real name side, I have a book coming in November in the U. S. and December in the U. K., called The New Year's Party. And it's a locked room murder mystery that takes place in 24 hours during a New Year's party. And it was inspired by a real New Year's party that my husband and I did with friends for like a decade. Every year we would go to this party, and You know, then we started getting older, and having problems, and having children. And the party kind of fell apart. But, it always stuck with me once I started writing mysteries and thrillers. Like, wouldn't that be a great Setting, kind of that concept of friends who, you know, see each other once a year. Then there's a hiatus. Come back a certain number of years later and it's time to kill someone! Because we're pissed about very many secrets and shenanigans. So yeah, that's coming soon. And that was really fun to write. Yeah, that's super exciting. It's a single timeline, but lots of POVs. So very different from Made for You.

David Gwyn 20:07

Nice. So you, you do have a lot going on, on the writing side as well, which is good. You get the nice balance of the writing and the agent thing. That's very cool. So Jenna, we're, we're gonna do a Q and a with the, with the group here in a little bit, but I do want to just have you share if people are listening and want to get in touch with you, definitely your sub stack too. I know a bunch of people from the storyteller society, they, when I mentioned that we were going to be doing this and talked about your book, they were like, Wait, I know her because of her sub stack. So if you want to talk a little bit about that and tell people where they can find you.

Jenna Satterthwaite 20:37

Yeah, my sub stack is my newsletter. I publish once a week on Tuesdays. And it's about all things authoring and agenting. There's probably more about agenting because that is, you know, one of my full time jobs currently. But yeah, there's authoring stuff too. It's a lot of industry kind of insider stuff that you just might not know, depending on where you're at in the publishing path. And I'm all about, like, disclosing whatever I can. Like, my 800 story. Like, this is how much money I made! Let's all laugh about how small it is. I love, like, you know Pulling the curtain back because it's a very secretive industry and we all try to appear very successful. What does that mean? What does that look like? What's actually going on? What are the numbers? I, I love getting into that stuff. I'm also on, well, I'm still on X. Hmm, we'll see how much longer I'm there. But I am there! Under Jenna Schmena and on Blue Sky under Jenna Schmena. I'm on Instagram as jenna. sadofweight. author. I should have done a shorter name for that, but at the time I wasn't thinking.

Audio Only - All Participants 21:44

That's all

David Gwyn 21:44

right. People will find you.

Jenna Satterthwaite 21:45

They'll find me. Yes. Yeah. So I'm kind of all over the internet. Nice. Very happy to kind of engage via all those platforms.

David Gwyn 21:54

Yeah, so if you're listening to this, I'll link to some of that stuff. Definitely the sub stack down in the description. And Jenna, this is, this is really fun. Always great a chat with you.