Introducing literary agent Danielle Bukowski, our new columnist!

👀 2 days only: take 10% off | 3 Questions + 5 Agents | Literary Agents For You (01.19.26)

Happy Monday, everyone!

As y’all might already know, last week was the wonderful Kailey Brennan DelloRusso’s final agents column for us. You can catch here in case you missed it:

---

8 New Agents Building Their Lists Right Now

---

This week, I’m stoked to share that we’ve got a new columnist taking over and she is none other than the brilliant literary agent Danielle Bukowski. I’ve been reading Danielle’s Subtack Just Reading All Day for a while now and each time she manages to share genuinely informative stuff with heart and humor. I sorta can’t believe we’ll get to work with her regularly and she’ll be a part of Sub Club for the forseeable future.

Now, nothing much changes for you, except that it all only gets better. Danielle will be doing a biweekly column featuring:

• 3 questions asked by YOU, our Sub Club subscribers on anything related to agents, books, publishing, etc.

• 3 detailed answers for each question

• 5 agents open for querying that week across multiple genres

✦ Ask your question to Danielle here: https://forms.chillsubs.com/questions-for-danielle ✦

One question and answer will always be free to read in full, while the remaining 2 along with the handpicked list of 5 agents will be paywalled. Before I pass it off to Danielle soon so she can introduce herself and also share a free sneak preview of what’s to come, here’s 10% off a paid subscription!

Alright, Danielle, take it away!

Hello! My name is Danielle Bukowski, and I am a literary agent. I represent an incredibly talented roster of clients at Sterling Lord Literistic. I also have a Substack about what a literary agent does, called Just Reading All Day:

On the best days of my job, I get to help make a writer’s dream come true. And then all of the other days are helping those writers navigate the realities of the dream, which don’t always match what the writer expected the process of publishing a book to be. But I recognize that I’m lucky enough to have a job where—even if I can’t actually just sit around and read all day—I get to read books and work with writers to bring great books into the world.

Still, the publishing industry is opaque. And literary agents can seem like gatekeepers to a magical world that will solve all of a writer’s problems if only they can convince an agent to let them through. If my Substack aims to demystify agenting and give advice to writers curious about the industry, this regular column at SubClub will be aimed more specifically at writers on their querying journey.

As an earnest, curious person I like giving advice, and I will answer all questions with earnest seriousness (but not without some humor.) I’ve spent nearly a dozen years reading queries and evaluating submissions from writers; I know how much courage it takes to put your work out there, and I hope I can be a helpful captain on the little boat to publishing’s shores. So let’s set off –

Is it a bad idea to have your manuscript professionally edited before querying? I am wondering if this would give agents the idea that you can’t write a good enough book without help? And if you do hire an editor, is that something you would have to disclose in your query letter?

No it’s a great idea to have your manuscript professionally edited. You are showing the agent that you are serious about the business of publishing. This level of seriousness will give you an advantage over other queries. In the queries I take seriously, I am assuming that I am not reading any writer’s first draft, that the writer has edited their own work several times and received editorial feedback from others (whether that’s your MFA cohort, your writing group, a few trusted friends, or a professional freelance editor.)

No great book is written without help. And it’s worth remembering that you’re going to have to edit your book with your agent before submission, and edit with your editor several times before publication.

This is how you can phrase this in your query: “this manuscript has been professionally edited” in the bio where you’re showing how else you are taking your writing life seriously (your MFA, the courses you’ve taken, conferences you’ve attended, etc.) If you worked with a notable editor, include their name.

When signing with an agent, which is more important, prestige/clout or your connection?

It’s everyone’s least favorite answer: both matter. But connection is more important: you’re going to be working with this person for, hopefully, years, so if you find their communication style offputting or something about the editorial part of your call doesn’t click, it doesn’t really matter if they look good on paper. We all get emails from or hear stories about writers who picked the biggest name and then came to regret it because they didn’t pay attention to the lack of connection when making their decision.

Prestige and clout matter in that respect matters. Editors read submissions from agents they know and respect more quickly than submissions by agents they don’t know, or don’t respect. If your agent is newer, but at a prestigious agency, or somewhere small and respected for the kind of work you’re doing, that bumps them up on the list. Something that the agents with clout at my office say to newer agents when they lost books in beauty contests to other agents is, ‘an agent alone can’t sell a book.’ Nobody’s buying [insert agent name here]’s books because they’re [insert name.] The book still has to be good.

You could ask how quickly editors respond to this agent’s submission, on The Call, if you wanted.

Is it true that nobody buys books? Is it true that the publishing industry is tiny and nobody makes any money and publishers aren’t looking for interesting new voices, they’re just looking for easy money? Am I wasting my time trying to be an author? What’s the point?

What is the point of LIFE my friends!!!

I am actually not being facetious here. And I am going to answer this with the earnestness that I do genuinely bring to this job. (Look, if I didn’t think it was worthwhile to write and publish books, I’d have made my parents proud and pivoted careers by now.)

There are four sentence questions in the above but they all have the same driving force behind them, a question that you as a writer need to answer for yourself, first: why do you want your book published and what do you want to get out of this experience?

Why did you write the book? Why do you want other people to read it? What reaction do you want readers to have? What do you want this book to achieve?

I call these questions “therapy questions.” I can’t answer them for you and I can’t suggest that there are correct/incorrect answers. But I do think that some of the anxiety behind the block-quoted questions is because there’s a disconnect between what a writer wants out of the experience of book publishing and what the book publishing industry is for.

The book publishing industry is a business and as a business it publishes books into a marketplace. Books are consumer goods. The book publishing industry chooses which consumer goods they think will make them a profit, and they acquire and sell those types of books. (Nonprofit publishing and independent presses do operate outside of this model a bit, although everyone needs to turn a profit to stay in business at the end of the day. But I suspect that most people asking these questions aren’t the ones reading books published by Graywolf and Deep Vellum.)

Your book not being selected by the marketplace does not mean it is bad, nor that you are a bad writer. It means that you have not created a consumer good that a corporation believes they can sell for profit.

If you, as a writer, answer the “therapy questions” with some aspect of “I wrote this book for myself and I don’t care what anyone else thinks of it,” then you probably don’t actually want to go through the business of book publishing; that’s fine.

If you answer the therapy questions with something like “I wrote this book to become [insert name of hugely successful author of the previous century]”, which is what I suspect a lot of writers secretly want, then you are going to be disappointed by the book publishing industry. There are very few household-name authors. There are very few authors who make their living off their book advances and royalty checks. Most authors have day jobs, or their job is writing (i.e., speaking engagements and conferences, teaching, editing, maybe ghostwriting.)

I think a lot of writers have a romanticized, unrealistic idea of what publishing a book will mean to them and/or do for their life/career. I’m not judging that. There’s no way a writer can really know what the publishing process is going to be like until they go through it. But I think that ‘what’s the point’ defeatism comes when those writers start trying to get work published, or querying agents, and get rejected with market concerns on a book they never actually considered fitting in to the marketplace. And then the romantic/reality disconnect gets them down.

If writing is pleasure, necessity, hobby, then Publishing is reality manifest. Do you want to monetize your joy? Do you want to turn what you like doing into something that I explain to soon-to-be-published authors is about as much work as a part-time job? Is the thing you’ve wanted for so long worth what it takes to achieve? I actually think it’s fine to say No.

But if you’re clear-eyed about it, here are some publishing truism: “we need you more than you need us” (agents and editors need new writers for the whole thing to work) and “it only takes one” (agent and/or editor to say Yes on your book for it to get published.)

And now, five agents open to submissions this week:

1. Ashley Lopez, Massie McQuilkin & Altman – open to queries for literary and book club fiction, grounded speculative, horror, thrillers, narrative and practical nonfiction, as well as select poetry and YA. She recently moved to MMQA from WLA Books.

2. Sarah Khalil, Calligraph – open to queries for serious nonfiction and memoir with a lens toward social, economic and environmental justice, anti-imperialist thought, pop/cultural criticism and histories, and cross-cultural narratives; plus select fiction in the same space.

3. Gabriella Melendez, Great Dog Literary – open to queries for genre and commercial fiction, primarily: fantasy, romantasy, family saga, commercial, LGBTQ+, New Adult, romance (contemporary and paranormal), speculative, and Young Adult (Contemporary, Fantasy, Historical, Literary, Mystery, Paranormal, Paranormal Romance, Romance, Science Fiction.)

4. Jemiscoe Chambers-Black, Starling Literary + Media – open to queries for adult fiction (thriller, horror, romance, upmarket, bookclub fiction, mystery and cozy mystery); nonfiction (untold and reframed history, science, nature, culture, high-stakes ideas, cookbooks) and young adult (romance, thriller, horror, graphic novels.) She recently founded this agency after several years at Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

5. Andrianna deLone, CAA – open to queries for a wide range of fiction and nonfiction authors, including cookbook, food/beverage, how-to, health/medicine.