Kick off the new year with Literary Agent, Heather Jackson!

According to her website, Heather Jackson decided to vault over the desk to the agent side in 2016 after a highly successful career as a trade editor.  In her 20+ years as an editor she acted as the creative midwife to multiple dozens of New York Times bestselling authors and titles. Now the successful principal of the Heather Jackson Literary Agency, Heather sports (or at least, approved) possibly the best landing-page graphic for a literary agency that I’ve ever seen. It would be the best graphic for lots of things writer-focused, and it gives me a frisson of excitement that she’s the industry expert we’re going to kick off 2025 with.

But wait, there’s more: “The selective client list she and we are cultivating has one unifying theme: to represent authors and books that entertain, elevate, inform, or make some type of positive difference to the individual reader or our larger society. Works that make you want to press the pause button on everything else—ditch the screens, the duties, the worries—to sit down and read for hours. Books that can ignite or shift a conversation and that might unite us rather than divide us further.  And, most importantly, books that can connect deeply and widely with masses of readers.”

There are several clues in this paragraph that make me think she would be a great guest for us. First of all, she is actively acquiring. “Cultivating” is in present tense. She’s working on this list, even if it’s little by little, one delectable title at a time. “Delectable.” I could be accused of mixing my metaphors. With “cultivating” shouldn’t I be alluding to “fragrant,” as in hot-house flowers? But we often go back to what we know deeply, or at least I do: and I cultivate things that grow and come together in Le Creuset pots and All Clad pans.

We, in this group, usually focus on fiction, but Heather is especially strong in non-fiction, both narrative and prescriptive. All you non-fiction writers rejoice! (Yes you, George Sorensen!) For all of you novelists though, I’d linger a moment on some of the fiction titles she has on her list. BONFIRE NIGHT by Anna Bliss has been compared to Ian McEwan and Graham Swift. You know me and my goal to be Booker-Prize-Worthy. Both those gentlemen did one better: they won. Ian pulled it off two times. (Oops, Mr. McEwan to me.)

And, there is an aspiration here. A manifesto? No! So much better—a much looser and more accepting allusion to ideals, to pitching books against screens and coming out the winner, to the immersive joy of reading, to the love of conversation that can unite instead of divide (and here I insert what I hear between the lines), not because it echoes similarity but because it airs respectful difference. Not only respectful difference, thoughtful difference; INTERESTING difference.

I have to fess up here: I know Heather Jackson, at least a little. In our very first conversation, she proved exactly the thinking mind that can truly love “narratives that share insights into unseen aspects of our culture, subcultures, and the function or workings of our world…big ideas and groundbreaking big think books.” And she coined the most beautiful metaphor about helping her authors to set the table. A metaphor I warned her to be prepared to explain on January 23rd.

So, if you want to know the DOs and DON’Ts of querying, the mistakes writers make, the how-to-pitch, I intend to have that covered. But if, even more, you want to meet an agent who once told me that she saw part of her job as lying down on the floor next to her authors when they got rejected, you have to come to this chat.

Thursday, January 23rd, 5:30-7:00pm PT via Zoom.
Register here to save your seat.

I must tell you, I can barely wait.

Happy new year, everybody!
And thank you, most profoundly, Heather.

Shirin

Also, if you missed last month’s (last year’s?) interview with group-favorite Ginny Rorby, who takes us on a completely frank (how else would Ginny do it?) tour of the Big Five, Also-Big, Book Club, Boutique, and Small/Hybrid(?) publishing options she has experienced in thirty years and eight novels, here is the recording. I hope watching it is as much fun as I had recording it!