Nick Mullendore is the Founder & President of the Vertical Ink Agency, which he established in 2016, and he is also a co-owner and the Managing Partner of Loretta Barrett Books, Inc., where he started in 1998, and which he now operates as Vertical Ink’s sister agency. A member of the Association of American Literary Agents (AALA), 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. 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 wide variety of bestselling fiction and nonfiction books, and he has a wealth of experience selling US, Canadian, UK, translation, audio, and television and film rights. You can follow Nick on Bluesky.

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.