SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Please be aware that scammers have been impersonating our agency along with many other agencies and publishers, and caution should be exercised when interacting with anyone claiming to be contacting you from Vertical Ink Agency. We are doing everything we can to address this issue, and we never reach out to individuals offering any type of promotion or marketing services. If you receive an email claiming to be from us that does not originate from our [at] verticalinkagency [dot] com domain, it is fraudulent.

***

Vertical Ink Founder & President Nick Mullendore represents a wide variety of nonfiction for general audiences 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 highly selective when it comes to the fiction he takes on, but it’s fair to say 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. He is not seeking fantasy, YA, or children’s projects.

Senior Agent Reeves Hamilton is seeking science fiction, from hard SF and space opera to the weird and speculative and difficult to describe, as long as these stories entertain while interrogating something at humanity’s core. He’s also looking for speculative literary fiction that’s brilliantly written and speaks to our current political moment, like Zachary C. Solomon’s A Brutal Design. Viciously funny satire that points and jokes at American hypocrisy is always welcome, like Dennard Dayle’s Everything Abridged and the upcoming How to Dodge a Cannonball. He would also love to see more literary fiction that is unapologetically antiracist, antifascist, or anticapitalist, and written with the razor-sharp precision of Rachel Cusk or Jessi Jezewska Stevens. Politically radical and underrepresented voices are always welcome. He is not seeking fantasy, YA, children’s, or romance projects.

For ALL queries: It is the author’s responsibility to disclose to agents and publishers the full scope of their AI use, so please be as up front and as detailed as possible in your query about the extent to which you may (or may not) have used AI tools to research, develop, edit, and/or write your query, your proposal, or your manuscript. All authors should note that AI-generated material is not copyrightable, and agents and publishers are using every evolving tool available to them to determine whether proposals and manuscripts, in whole or in part, are human or AI-generated. The fact remains that publishers will not consider even a partially AI-generated work, and they will use tools like Pangram (and others, as they are developed and refined) to check a work for AI use.  Since AI-generated works are not copyrightable, and if they are published, there would be no law stopping them from being copied/pirated and redistributed or resold by anyone, so it is simply untenable from a business standpoint to represent even partially AI-generated work.

For nonfiction queries: Please send an email with the words “Nonfiction Query” in the subject line, and a brief overview or chapter outline for your project. In your query, please include your contact information, any relevant background information on yourself or your project, and a paragraph of description of your project. Also, please include any marketing and promotion information relevant to you and/or your project.  No attachments will be opened, so please include all of this material in the body of your email.

Some advice: Every author writing nonfiction will eventually need a fully-developed proposal for their work in order for an agent or publisher seriously and fully consider it. If you haven’t already developed a proposal for your concept and aren’t sure how to go about doing so, we always recommend this excellent Jane Friedman piece as a great starting point - Start Here: How to Write a Book Proposal + Book Proposal Template. Also, the cold reality of nonfiction publishing today is that it is driven primarily, if not wholly, by an author’s “platform”, and that publishers seek out authors who can be their own “sales engines” for their work. So it’s never too early to start developing your author platform, because it’s always better to be able to say to an agent or a publisher “this is what I’m already doing” that will result in sales of my book, as opposed to “this is what I plan to do” if and when I get a book deal.

For fiction queries: Please send an email with the words “Fiction Query” in the subject line, and a synopsis or chapter outline for your project along with the first three chapters or 50 pages of the work. In your query, please include your contact information, any relevant background information on yourself or your project, and a paragraph of description of your project.  No attachments will be opened, so please include all of this material in the body of your email.

We are currently only accepting submissions via email at VIAQuery [at] Gmail [dot] com. Due to the overwhelming number of electronic submissions we receive, we can unfortunately no longer respond to every query personally, so please understand that we will only reply directly if we are interested in your project. In all cases, we appreciate the privilege of considering your work.