New Dealmakers

Publishers Marketplace, an on-line resource about the publishing industry, features many wonderful bits of information. One of them is a list of the top 15 new dealmakers in the mystery/thriller field. Strictly speaking, these are people new to PM, but they also seem to be people fairly new to the business. I was intrigued, and looked up the top three. (You can get a one-month subscription to PM for $25.)

 Joanna Kaliszewska at The BKS Agency in London. She has the distinction of being the one new dealmaker that has a six-figure deal. She has spent more than two decades in the publishing industry, mainly working in the rights department at Hachette, but seems new to agenting. She was involved in the sale of Nicola Whyte’s debut 10 MARCHFIELD SQUARE, in which a minor criminal and his wife are murdered in the smallest residential square in London, so an elderly heiress and landlady recruits two of her tenants to investigate. Sounds fun to me.

Alisha West at Victress Literary in the U.S. Alisha West is a Junior Agent who is drawn to messy, resilient characters who question the status quo and drive the show. A good place to get info on West is on Manuscript Wish List.

Danielle Binks (Jacinta di Mase Agency) in Australia. Binks was involved in the sale of Kelly Gardiner and Sharmini Kumar’s MISS CAROLINE BINGLEY, PRIVATE DETECTIVE, a historical cozy pitched as breathing new life into the much-misunderstood character from Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. How interesting does that sound? (She does not seem to be accepting queries now, but looks like that will change in future.)

In case you’re wondering who is the number one mystery dealmaker is the mystery field (at the moment), that would be Jessica Faust at BookEnds. She’s sold 9 mysteries in the last 12 months, and 119 overall. And she’s open to submissions!

How about you? Do you read Publishers Marketplace? What’s your favorite part to look at?

SUSAN BREEN is the award-winning author of The Fiction Class and the Maggie Dove mystery series. Her short stories have been published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and she is the 2024 winner of the Margery Allingham Short Mystery Competition. She teaches novel-writing at Gotham Writers and is on the staff of the New York Write to Pitch Workshop. Her new novel, MERRY, is forthcoming from Alcove Press in Fall 2025.