Nick Mullendore is the Founder & President of the Vertical Ink Agency, which he established in January 2016 after having worked with its sister agency Loretta Barrett Books since March of 1998. Nick first came to publishing through the acclaimed quarterly literary journal The Missouri Review, where he was a student-intern and then an assistant. He attended the NYU Summer Publishing Institute, and then began his publishing career in publicity at HarperBusiness, the trade business books imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. There, he learned in-depth the world of major publishing before making the leap to the agency side with Barrett Books, where he worked his way up from assistant, to Foreign Rights Director, to Vice President and COO, to Managing Partner and co-owner of the agency, as he is to this day alongside owning and operating Vertical Ink. Over the years, he’s worked with authors such as Ray Kurzweil, Mariah Stewart, Mark Nepo, Jason Bell, Jessica Bird/JR Ward, George Weigel, Betty White, Christopher Kennedy Lawford, Chaz Bono, Phil Plait, Harold Schechter, MJ Rose, Carol Goodman, Jack Kelly, Noah Levine, Dr. James Martin, Wayne Muller, Bill O’Hanlon, Melvin Urofsky, Theresa Rebeck, and many others on a variety of bestselling fiction and nonfiction books. Nick has a wealth of experience selling US, Canadian, UK, translation, audio, and television and film rights for a wide range of fiction and nonfiction books. To varying but my no means prolific extents, you can follow Nick on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. But not on X - we’re done with that.

Senior Agent Reeves Hamilton joined Vertical Ink in 2020. He studied literature and history at the University of Missouri, and over his twenty-plus year career in publishing he has worked at St. Martin’s Press, Harcourt Brace, Penguin Books, and John Wiley & Sons in a variety of editorial and writing positions. You can follow Reeves on Bluesky.