First Cup of Coffee – May 12, 2026

What writing schedule works for you? I'm considering going to writing four days/week with a day for business - two days writing/business/two days writing or...? I'm also doing a deep dive into agents and busting a myth I loathe: that picking an agent is a till-death-do-us-part commitment.

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Transcript

00:00.92
Jeffe Kennedy
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy. Also writing is Jennifer K. Lambert, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee.

00:16.60
Jeffe Kennedy
Today is Tuesday, May 12th, 2026, and I'm back from a short trip to Tucson to visit my mother.

00:27.77
Jeffe Kennedy
ah spent Mother's Day with her and you know it was it was so nice. ah My stepsister and brother-in-law came along to Hope and Galen and the four of us went to this really a nice resort where we had a fantastic brunch And then we went, well, we tried to go shopping. We tried to go to our very favorite place, ah our two favorite stores, and both were closed. Both were closed on Mother's Day, which seemed like a big miss to us. And it was sad because I was ready to spend some money. I want new clothes. Like, you know how like

01:12.70
Jeffe Kennedy
Maybe you don't. But for me, it's like all of a sudden everything in your wardrobe is old and you have nothing that feels newer than a few years old to wear. And that's how I was feeling. So we tried to go to those stores and had our pretty woman moment. They would not let us shop.

01:30.39
Jeffe Kennedy
And my brother-in-law had been designated driver, chauffeur, um delightful of him. And he had dropped us off. We'd said, we're going to be a while and he could come back. So Hope had to call him and say, have come back already. Fortunately, he'd only gotten like a block away. So then he took us over to La Encantada Mall and we we finally got to shop.

01:54.81
Jeffe Kennedy
So I got to use the gift, you know, big mistake, huge. Yeah. So it ended up just being a really nice day of shopping, brunch and shopping. And ah my mom lasted really well through the whole time. And it was great to see her.

02:15.13
Jeffe Kennedy
feeling good. And for those of you who have been following the saga all of this time, ah you know, getting her in assisted living was really difficult. And I've got other friends who are going through this now too. And it's just, um, really great to be at this place six months later where she's really happy at the assisted living place. She's happy in her schedule.

02:44.60
Jeffe Kennedy
And it's, um, yeah, just really good to have that settled down. So I am in a place, good place, writing wise, ah successfully uploaded blades books on the bandit and it will be out on Thursday.

03:05.11
Jeffe Kennedy
so I'm taking a breather right now. I'm going to take this week and next week off of writing, um, as I prepare to write, Never the Roses 3.

03:17.21
Jeffe Kennedy
Ah, very exciting. Uh, contract isn't signed yet, but I need to get started writing it and we all know I'm going to be blabbing about writing it. So I'm taking a little time to refill the well and think about what I want to write in this story. I want to take my time on it.

03:36.66
Jeffe Kennedy
And I'm, I'm excited about that. I'm considering changing up my schedule. I'm considering just writing four days a week and using one day a week for business so that I can then take weekends off Um, I'm trying to decide I, how I want to do that. If I want to do like Monday and Tuesday, take Wednesday eyes off and write Thursday and Friday, if that would be good for like not tiring my brain out.

04:08.63
Jeffe Kennedy
I think a lot about, What was it a long time ago? I think it was Jewel Parker Rose. I heard her talking and she was saying that she worked on the novel a little bit every day because if she didn't, it would go feral in her absence.

04:27.74
Jeffe Kennedy
And, you know, be coming back would be like, whoa, now like, and I think there's truth to that. But I also think there's something to be said for taking the interim days off to refill the well.

04:41.66
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, and so I've got to decide what my pattern is going to be for that. If anybody out there has, um, experience recommendations, I would be interested to hear your comments. Let's discuss.

04:55.77
Jeffe Kennedy
ah The other thing I want to talk about today is agents. I was having a conversation. In fact, I paused to have part of this conversation in one of my author groups about one of the myths I loathe. ah When people ask me about publishing industry myths that I think need to die or what I hate, advice I hate most, that kind of thing, I never seem to be able to think of it offhand.

05:25.40
Jeffe Kennedy
But here's one that I really loathe is this whole myth that you get the perfect agent and you live together happily ever after. And I do know authors like this.

05:39.16
Jeffe Kennedy
I do. um I can think of one in particular offhand, but I think there's several who say things like, I've been with my agent for my entire career and it's been amazing and it's wonderful. And it's, it's kind of like the people who married their high school sweetheart and it works right. Because, know,

06:01.66
Jeffe Kennedy
I mean, it's great for them. It's wonderful for them. um You know, find that love, find your person early on. But it doesn't work that way for most people. You know, it doesn't work that way for like, what, 99% of high school romances are not lifelong romances.

06:20.73
Jeffe Kennedy
relationships or love affairs or marriages or what have you, right? Um, people have to shop around, sleep around, kiss a lot of frogs, pick your metaphor.

06:34.97
Jeffe Kennedy
um and there's, there's nothing wrong with that. That that's okay. Um, Um, the, the reality, the, it would be interesting to do an actual survey on this, but the reality is, is that most authors, we could put whatever 99% of authors, um, especially career authors who are in it for a long time,

07:01.46
Jeffe Kennedy
ah have several agents along the way for various reasons. And let's talk about the various reasons because this is a reality of the business. And for some reason it's treated like, um,

07:19.35
Jeffe Kennedy
I want to say like a, I don't know, not the norm. You know, it's like, Oh, you broke up with your agent. Oh, your agent left the business. oh you know, it's like, no, this is actually how the business works just as in traditional publishing,

07:35.62
Jeffe Kennedy
Editors move around a lot, too. People get orphaned at publishing houses all the time. So this romantic idea of the happily ever after of the agent and editor that I don't know, like in movies, right? You know that that you go to lunch with them in fancy New York restaurants and they read your manuscript information.

07:54.84
Jeffe Kennedy
like at the table, you know, the author's setting down the pile of pages and declaring, ah you know, and the, and they sit there and read it and, you know, like these things don't happen. It's, it's a business. And so anybody has worked in any kind of business world knows that business relationships take finagling, right? You don't,

08:19.67
Jeffe Kennedy
work with one boss for your entire life. You don't have the same set of employees for your entire career. Um, very few people work for the same company for their entire career anymore. This, this is all this sort of lingering mythology. And I'm actually like foaming at the mouth talking about this.

08:42.42
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, So, okay, so there's a number of reasons. Let's go back to this. Um, in no particular order, even though I am going to number them, but this isn't in any kind of order. Yeah, that's why I said no particular order. Yeah, stick with me here. ah Um, one is that agents come and go.

09:04.71
Jeffe Kennedy
Agents leave the business all the time. Uh, they move around. Uh, they might decide to become writers. They might decide to move on to other professions.

09:18.33
Jeffe Kennedy
Being an agent takes a very particular kind of persistence and skill set and it's not for everybody. And a lot of people get into it thinking that they're going really like being an agent and they don't. It doesn't work for them. It's a stressful job. There are a lot of stressful things. about being an agent and it takes a particular combination of skills. Um, a lot of people skills, um, with the, ferocity of a of a lawyer. i I was trying to think of what is it, a prosecuting lawyer, a courtroom lawyer, trial lawyer, the ferocity of a trial lawyer, uh,

10:00.73
Jeffe Kennedy
They are called upon to manage fragile author feelings and also fight to the death. Right. Um, and there are deadlines and things are pile up and there's a lot of email and it takes organization, So all of these things are reasons why agents might not stick with it. Uh, very often I see, um authors become agents because I think my personal theory is that it gives them a feeling of power and control in a business where they otherwise don't have it.

10:40.89
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, yeah. I think people also think, you know, that they love books and they want to sell books and that that it'll be fun and it doesn't always work that way.

10:54.74
Jeffe Kennedy
So, um, other reasons. This is probably a subset of that same reason. This is why we're not going in any particular order.

11:06.58
Jeffe Kennedy
ah Sometimes agents change agencies. And one thing that not everybody knows about the business is when you sign with an agent, you actually sign with the agency, not the individual agent.

11:23.38
Jeffe Kennedy
So for example, my very first agent will use her as an example of several things here. Um, she left the agency and so I had the option to either go with her or stick with the agency and the head of the agency invited me to stay with the agency. Um, my agent invited me to go with her. So I had a choice to make. um I didn't like the agency that my agent went to. I didn't like their contract. And there were other things that I didn't like about it. Also, my agent was going through, part of the reason she left to go to a different agency was because she wanted to go she was going scorched earth on a lot of her life. And I was not confident in her emotional stability or ability to do the job.

12:18.90
Jeffe Kennedy
And that's the business relationship. So I thought better to stay at the agency that I'd already signed with. ah this This happens all the time.

12:32.98
Jeffe Kennedy
um I know another agent who, ah a really terrific agent, who ended up leaving one agency where she was really unhappy. She didn't like the way the agency was run. She didn't like how she was treated.

12:49.34
Jeffe Kennedy
She moved to a different agency that had a scandal and, um, there was a problem with the head of the agency there and they ended up closing the agency. She moved to a third agency um,

13:05.21
Jeffe Kennedy
ah where there was a mismatch of expectations. And she ended up at that point, after going through several really difficult career traumas, leaving agency for a while.

13:18.23
Jeffe Kennedy
um And that's often how it happens, right? So all of her authors, even, you know, like there were some who followed her from agency to agency, they then had to find other representation, right? Because Yeah, this happens a lot.

13:37.62
Jeffe Kennedy
Okay. Other reasons. Uh, and I think this is going to be under the big umbrella of sometimes there's just a mismatch. Uh, it is ultimately a business relationship, right?

13:53.18
Jeffe Kennedy
And it's the kind of business relationship where you learn by doing. You don't necessarily know what you want before you go in. And I realize that this is frustrating for those of you out there querying because there is so much information on you know, do your research, figure out what kind of agent you want, um you know, have your list and everything.

14:20.44
Jeffe Kennedy
You know, me a copa, I absolutely give this advice and it's not bad advice. Um, you know, make your list, figure out the agents you want, know the questions you want to ask. If you get to the point where you have the, representation cost conversation with them, ah and give them, um you know, give them what you want because you will have that conversation. met

14:52.38
Jeffe Kennedy
ah Sorry, I'm not being articulate today. You will have that conversation eventually and you will both talk about your expectations for the relationship and you will have done your research and you will have listened to podcasts like this or you will have gotten your information in other places and it's all very earnest and above board but it's kind of One of those things where you don't know what you want from the relationship until you're actually in it. And that's why it's dangerous to think that your first agent is your forever agent. And I certainly know plenty of authors who will not part ways with their agent, even though I think their agent's not doing a great job by them, even though they feel that way.

15:40.27
Jeffe Kennedy
querying is awful. And also they feel like they have to stick with this relationship in some way.

15:51.74
Jeffe Kennedy
So, um, things that you don't know, you can talk about things like communication. What the things that I think end up going wrong a whole lot are uh,

16:07.93
Jeffe Kennedy
how you communicate, how frequently you communicate, the tone and style of the communication and how responsive they are and how quickly they move on things that are important to you is in your career. And there's just a, a wide variety here, a huge spectrum here of things of,

16:35.77
Jeffe Kennedy
various kinds of communication styles like, you know, do you text you email? How do they respond to your email? I've heard authors say that they're afraid to ask their agents questions.

16:49.40
Jeffe Kennedy
Gary to stop taking their phone calls. Um, sometimes agents do things like, uh, you know, forget about things or they sit on manuscripts.

17:03.16
Jeffe Kennedy
Not out of being, well, maybe it's overwhelmed, but sometimes they, they don't get to stuff. Or I know of agents who say they submitted a manuscript to editors and it turns out they didn't, they forgot.

17:15.77
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, the whole balance of how much a writer tells their agent, how much a writer um interacts with their agent, how much collaboration they do, how much planning they do together for um writing books. it's It varies. And it's Partly up to the author. There are some authors who want to simply write their books without any input and hand it to their agent and their agencies if they can sell it. And then there are agents that are incredibly collaborative to the point of like helping edit the manuscript. And sometimes you don't know these things until you get into doing it.

17:59.86
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, also agents lives change. So what starts out with them doing things a particular way they might have to change because they've had children or other things have happened and they become less communicative.

18:14.20
Jeffe Kennedy
Uh, and then something that else that can happen is you might score a big deal agent who has bigger deal authors and they start paying more attention to them and they don't need you anymore.

18:26.56
Jeffe Kennedy
Uh, You know, we talk about wanting the agent who's young and hungry, which can be great, but that can also mean an experience. And are they listening to other people? And it's really not until you are in this relationship with them that you get a real feel for how it is. And at which point, if it's not working, you part ways and you go to another agent.

18:54.33
Jeffe Kennedy
And there's nothing wrong with that. I am on my third agent for a reason. I already told you about the first. The second one didn't work out. we He didn't do things at the speed I wanted him to do them. ah I felt like he actually sandbagged my career for a couple of years there. My third agent, Sarah Younger at Nancy Yost Literary, is amazing. I love her.

19:23.00
Jeffe Kennedy
But even she and I have had to work things out over the years where it's like, well, this communication didn't work for me. But it's we've been together almost 10 years now. It will be 10 years next year. We were just figuring that out.

19:37.91
Jeffe Kennedy
So um these are things about agents. I'm happy to answer questions. You know how to find me. aye And I'll answer them on Friday.

19:50.68
Jeffe Kennedy
Talk you all then. Bye-bye.