Thank you Lindsay Haverslew, Julie Neches, Allison Hong Merrill, Joshua Irving Gershick, Homi Hormasji, and many others for tuning into my live video with literary agent + author Jenna Satterthwaite! This was an insight-packed hour, as Jenna guided us through her career as author and literary agent, navigating the uncertainty of the publishing world today. Jenna also generously shared meaningful intel about her practices when submitting manuscripts and negotiating deals.
Jenna Satterthwaite is an agent at Storm Literary Agency and the author of Made for You and New Year’s Party (under her own name) and the Sienna Sharpe thrillers. She writes the Substack Jenna's Substack - Author + Agent + Human.
Watch the recording of the entire hour above, and/or skim Jenna’s major takeaways below.
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Publishing Today with Jenna Satterthwaite
Jenna juggles a corporate day job, agenting, authoring, and raising three children — none of which she treats as secondary. Her corporate role pays the bills while agenting builds slowly; industry estimates put the timeline to a full-time agenting income at seven to ten years. She credits a stay-at-home spouse, genuine efficiency at her day job (gained over eighteen years), and a tolerance for multitasking as the keys to making it work. Her honest bottom line: this particular balance is not replicable for most people, and she doesn’t pretend otherwise. But it’s working for her and her clients!
“I got really excited about strategy and just how to play within the bounds of the system the best way you can. . . . I think going through grief always makes you reevaluate your life.”
On the Path to Becoming an Agent
Jenna came to agenting through years in the query trenches and on submission as an author. She watched five of her own books die on submission before finally selling her sixth in a two-book deal. That painful education — learning which imprints suit which genres, absorbing editor feedback, and developing a feel for publishing strategy — made agenting feel like a natural next step. A personal loss (the death of her youngest sister) and the approaching milestone of turning forty catalyzed the leap. She started with internships and used them as a litmus test before committing fully.
On the Selection of Genres to Represent
Jenna opened to queries very broadly when she started — fiction, nonfiction, all age groups — on the advice of more experienced agents who told her not to pigeonhole herself too quickly. That turned out to be good advice, because she ended up gravitating toward genres she hadn’t expected.
Her biggest selling categories have been romance and horror, which surprised her since she hadn’t been well-read in either before becoming an agent. She has also sold thrillers (her own writing background), science fiction, and some literary and upmarket fiction. She mentioned having a harder time finding upmarket projects that successfully blend literary writing with a propulsive commercial plot — she described that combination as “the needle in the haystack” but said she’s hungry for more of it.
On the children’s side, she signed three YA authors last year, though the market has made those very difficult to sell at the moment.
Her general approach to deciding what to represent is to think of herself as a general reader: if something speaks to her broadly, she trusts that it will speak to others too, even if she’s not deeply versed in that particular genre.
It’s worth noting she is not currently open to queries, but plans to open again at some point later in the year. Her wishlist is on the Storm Literary Agency website.
On the Author’s Life Being Financially Precarious
Jenna views her own writing career as “a cherry on top” rather than a financial foundation. She describes successful long-term authors as squirrels who must leap from branch to branch — pivoting across genres, formats, and opportunities rather than betting everything on a single strand of work. She herself writes under both her own name and the pen name Sienna Sharp to access different markets and maximize income. Her advice: do not expect to rest financially on an authoring career unless you are among the rare exceptions.
“If you’re going to continue to stay active as a writer, as an author, you’ve got to leap from opportunity to opportunity and to different branches.”
On Pen Names
Jenna’s Sienna Sharpe pen name arose from a specific contractual situation: she was already under contract with HarperCollins when a UK publisher (Penguin Random House UK) came looking for someone to write a beachy thriller-romance. A pen name let her take the opportunity without violating option clauses and non-compete agreements. It also served a positioning function — the Sienna Sharpe books are lighter and require a guaranteed happy romantic ending, distinguishing them from her darker Jenna Satterthwaite thrillers. Crucially, the pen name is not a secret; both publishers know about each other, and Jenna promotes both lines openly.
“I don’t officially declare anything dead, even though in practicality there is a time when the well has dried up. . . . I’ve just heard too many stories of books selling after multiple years, and it pains me to give up all hope.”
On Submission Timelines and Persistence
Jenna tracks every submission in a shared Excel spreadsheet and does not officially pull books from submission. Her philosophy is to keep going until the editor pool is genuinely exhausted. From her first year of selling, she shared actual data: the number of days between going on submission and receiving a first offer ranged from as few as ten days to as many as 471.
One book went nearly a full year without an offer, then sold at auction — with the winning bid coming from an editor who had held it for twelve months. The unpredictable timeline is the only honest answer she can give authors who ask how long it takes.
Side note: Aimee mentioned a friend whose book had gone out on submission twenty-five years earlier without selling. Then, years later, there was a cultural revival of interest in Margaret Mead, and an editor remembered having seen this book — which was about Margaret Mead's young sex life — a quarter century prior. The editor tracked it down, and the book was ultimately published just a few years ago.
On When to Revise Between Rounds
Jenna recommends manuscript revision between submission rounds only when feedback from multiple editors is strikingly consistent and specific. She has done it once: a genre-blending book kept receiving the same critique from four or five houses, which she treated as a resounding signal. Otherwise, editorial feedback from acquisition editors tends to be inconsistent.
“Editors will reject the same book for wildly different reasons within the same day. It’s happened to me. I see it all the time with my authors. So I think it’s quite rare to get consistent, actionable editorial feedback.”
On Choosing an Agent
Her advice, which she acknowledges other agents dispute: query widely rather than obsessively vetting every agent up front. The real due diligence should happen when an offer is on the table. At that point, tap your network — writers’ communities, represented authors, private Discord groups — because the most valuable information about agents circulates through informal channels rather than public profiles. She also recommends the Authors Guild as a resource for understanding what a standard agency contract should look like.
“Only worry about the research once you get an offer. . . . It’s when there’s an offer on the line that you really should do a deep dive. And if you have whisper networks, tap those.”
One notable caution about high-profile agencies: agents at larger, more prestigious firms often submit exclusively to the Big Five, which means a book can exhaust its list of potential editors very quickly. For many authors, a newer or mid-sized agent with a broader submission strategy may actually serve them better.
On the Current State of Publishing
Multiple children’s imprints have closed or restructured in recent months — Dial Press for Young Readers, Roaring Brook at Macmillan, Little Brown for Young Readers, and several Simon & Schuster kidlit imprints among them. Young adult sales are down. Jenna signed three YA authors in the past year and has not yet sold any of their work.
“Publishing is always yapping about needing diverse voices, which is great. That is accurate and true. We need them. And then you see the buying decisions that are being made, and they just don’t always match up with the lip service.”
On the question of political pressure and book bans: Jenna believes publishers are quietly adjusting their acquisition decisions in response, but that no editor will say so openly. The dynamic is that editors are often personally committed to diversity in publishing, but they are not the final word — the sales team has significant influence over acquisitions, and if a book cannot be sold into libraries or bookstores because of banning campaigns, publishers will register that commercially. The result is a gap between stated values and actual buying patterns that she finds discouraging but honest to name.
And yet, there’s still hope! Jenna’s client Alex Rittany’s young adult novel Maybe Tomorrow I’ll Know is about to come out from Norton Books for Young Readers. It’s a trans romance featuring a time loop and a body swap.
Jenna was particularly enthusiastic about the editor pairing — Kristen Allard at Norton — calling it one of the most stellar editor-author matches she had been able to bring together, saying Kristen “just gets it” and that the publisher was fully behind the book. She held this up as hopeful evidence that editors and agents are still actively championing books with diverse representation even in a difficult climate.
Bonus! Agent phrases, fyi:
Sub= Submission to editors and publishers.
Dead on sub= a submitted book fails to sell to any publisher
R&R= Review & revise instructions from an agent or editor who’s interested but needs changes in a manuscript before committing.
Whisper network= a community of industry insiders or well-connected writers who will tell you — off the record—the truth about agents, editors, and publishers.
