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 still is to this day while also 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. He specializes in nonfiction, particularly in the genres of Narrative Nonfiction, Popular Science & Psychology, Mind/Body/Spirit, Health & Wellness, Business & Leadership, Inspiration & Motivation, Current Events & Politics, Pop Culture, Memoir, Humor, History, and Sports, and is willing to consider proposals in other nonfiction genres as well. Nick is more selective when it comes to the fiction he takes on, but it’s fair to say that he loves fiction that successfully rides the line between literary and commercial, while anything darkly funny and somewhat perverse or unexpected will always gets his attention.

For now, you can follow Nick on X (though he has some serious misgivings about hanging around there anymore). Also, at least to some extent, on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, and Facebook.

In 2020, Vertical Ink added Senior Agent Reeves Hamilton, a twenty-plus year veteran of the publishing industry, to specialize in science fiction, broadly defined as hard Sci-Fi and space opera, but also as Sci-Fi-adjacent and genre-bending upmarket commercial fiction. He is not seeking adult fantasy or young adult fiction. You can follow Reeves on X.