The Agent World
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I recently joined Eric Smith at Neighborhood Literary as my new literary agency home in March 2025, so I’ll no longer be calling my own shots at Palisade Literary. I’m writing this just to update my small group of followers and other connections so they know what’s been going on. For all intent and purposes,…
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Happy 2025 everyone. We are officially a quarter-way through the 21st century. Frankly, I am just grateful humanity has made it this far… But jokes aside, I’m glad it’s a new year. I can’t wait to dive into new projects and see more published works out on the market. This past year had a lot…
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I know, I know, Taylor Swift has been in headlines about everything in 2024. Music, football, politics; she’s everywhere, and this time, she’s subverted the publishing world, and we may have to talk about it. Taylor Swift is undeniably a massive influence; her concert tickets for the Eras tour alone sold so much that Europe…
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HarperCollins recently inked a deal with artificial intelligence (AI) technology companies to allow backlisted books (or, published works that have been out for more than one year) to be used for AI training purposes, with the author’s express permission. The details of the deal are still a bit unclear, but so far it appears that…
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Today’s topic actually crosses over with a topic that I’ve been in frequent discussions with many of my clients lately, and that is: promotion strategy. Promotion is obviously a big deal when it comes to publishing, not to reduce literature to marketing and ads or anything like that, but at some point, the publishers need…
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Steamboat Willie’s copyright just expired. If you’re not familiar, Steamboat Willie was the world’s first introduction to the most iconic animated character perhaps in history: Mickie Mouse. In the United States, copyright law is extremely strict. It is one of only a handful of countries where the copyright for an original IP does not expire…
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118 long days for screenwriters, actors, filmmakers, and film crews all over the US. That’s how long the Hollywood actor strike lasted. At midnight on November 9th, 2023, a tentative agreement between the studios and the guild was reached. During these 118 days, major Hollywood studios and film productions were on hold – including major…
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P&L sheets (in the publishing industry) are profit-and-loss statements based on the revenue gained and lost from comparative titles of a book undergoing the submission process. Say you have a book that’s already written, edited, submitted to an agent, edited by the agent, and sent from the agent to the editor, and we finally move…
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There was a bizarre story that erupted in the publishing industry earlier this year about Filippo Bernardini, an Italian citizen and former publishing employee who “stole” over 1,000 unpublished manuscripts by impersonating real publishing editors. This wasn’t just smaller, unknown authors either – although he did rouse them as well – but even big-time authors…
Donovan Levine | Agent, Writer, Copyeditor 