“I’ve been involved with helping people get published at, what seems like, all stages of my life,” Taryn Fagerness emailed us yesterday. “High school newspaper editor. College literary magazine editor. Various publishing related internships. Agenting has long been my dream job.” Five years ago, she got her break in the mail room (okay, we suspect it’s probably more like a desk) of San Diego-based über-agent Sandra Dijkstra, and was soon promoted to subsidiary rights manager chair. “I love being a link in what I call the ‘chain of enthusiasm,'” Fagerness continued. “An author must get an agent enthusiastic about her manuscript. The agent gets an editor excited. The editor gets the marketing department on board. All the way down to the bookseller and reader. Selling foreign rights is the ultimate link in that chain—the branching out point. I get people in Holland, Japan, Estonia, etc. excited about books.”
And she’s gotten good enough at creating that excitement that she’s ready to start her own agency, where she’s already picked up a fair amount of work handling foreign rights for other literary agents (and, in a few cases, audiobook and film rights, too). According to her website, Fagerness takes on “nearly all genres, including literary fiction, thriller/suspense, commercial fiction, romance, history, self-help, business, and children’s,” and her clients include the Marsal Lyon Literary Agency, the Andrea Brown Literary Agency and Martin Literary Management. She also has a handful of authors as clients for domestic book deals, but is not accepting any unsolicited submissions.