Agent Trade Secrets

In this episode of Agent Trade Secrets, I sit down with literary agent bestie and comp queen, Jessica Berg. Jessica is the founder of Rosecliff Literary and has made an audience educating authors about the publishing business on her instagram account with her cat, Larry.

I first met Jessica by sliding into her DMs as a fan of her content and how she was running her agency with the aim to make publishing more inclusive and subvert the “gatekeeper” label agents frequently have that we both strongly dislike. She advertises herself to be everyone’s “literary agent bestie,” and I can personally attest that she lives what she preaches.

Jessica and I talk candidly about something the publishing industry lives and dies by, yet authors so often get so wrong—comp titles. We chat about all things comp titles: what they are, why they drive the industry, how agents use them for positioning, where authors commonly use them incorrectly, and how choosing the wrong ones creates confusions and costs potential publication deals.

Larry the Cat also makes a prominent appearance in iconic zoom fashion, and I struggle to be a professional and not laugh. You won’t want to miss.

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You can follow Jessica at https://www.instagram.com/jessica_berg and visit Rosecliff Literary to see if Jessica and her colleagues are open to queries and what’s on their MSWL: https://www.rosecliffliterary.com/

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This is Agent Trade Secrets, signing off for the week.

In this episode of Agent Trade Secrets, I sit down with one of my earliest clients and dear friend, Dawn, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of her book, Trailer Park CEO, and reflect on the journey from an idea to publication and the ultramarathon of being an authorpreneuer that came afterward.

I first met Dawn when I was bringing my dog to a movie audition (yup, you read that correctly). I brought her with me to an alumni event at my undergraduate alma matter where I had just joined the alumni association. Dawn was the professional speaker that day giving business leadership advice to us young professionals. I was immediately struck by the leadership principles she was speaking about and her ability to instantly connect with everyone in the room. Afterward, I sent her a simple DM: “Have you ever thought about writing a book?” As it turned out, she had been thinking about it for nearly a decade. That message became the beginning of both our professional partnership and friendship.

At the heart of Trailer Park CEO is Dawn’s remarkable journey from generational poverty in a rural Louisiana trailer park to becoming a successful corporate executive. But what made the project compelling to me was that we weren’t simply telling Dawn’s life story. We built the book around a speaking and coaching platform she’d already developed utilizing 12 transformational leadership “stones” women could apply to their own lives to become leaders with influence regardless of the circumstances they were born into.

The metaphor comes directly from Dawn’s childhood. Growing up amid poverty, addiction, and abuse in a rural Louisiana trailer park, she would escape into the woods surrounding the trailer park, collecting rocks and using them to mark paths. Those childhood stones eventually became a metaphor for the lessons, mentors, relationships, and choices that helped her create a different path for herself.

Working on this book with her, I realize how badly I wish I’d had it when I was in college and first starting out in the professional world. Real world tools that could be applied to help women increase their sphere of influence, learn how to communicate better in male-dominated spheres, negotiate better for themselves, and, one of my favorite principles: Dawn’s approach to failing forward. She reframes FAIL as Forgive, Accept, Inspect, and Learn—turning failure from something that stops us into information that helps us move forward. That principle has genuinely influenced how I approach my own career and agency.

We also talk candidly about something aspiring authors often underestimate: the work doesn’t stop when your book is published. Selling a book is an ultramarathon. Publishers can provide publicity, but ultimately authors must continue creating opportunities, building relationships, speaking, marketing, and championing their own work. A year later, that work has taken Dawn around the world and helped launch the next chapter of her career in speaking, coaching, and consulting. And perhaps that’s the biggest lesson of her story: leadership isn’t an exclusive club and where you start doesn’t dictate where you finish.

If you enjoyed this interview, please like, comment, share, and subscribe to Agent Trade Secrets AND follow Dawn on instagram @dawncazedessus. You can also join the Top Secret paid tier for exclusive looks into my Agent Inbox, an Agent’s POV to the Trending Stories in Publishing, Suggest Article Topics ask Questions for me to answer, and more.

This is Agent Trade Secrets, signing off for the week.

Welcome to the first of Agent Trade Secrets’ vlog series. Every month, I will have a guest come on to talk shop and, there was no better first guest than my friend, colleague, and client, the incomparable literary fiction author, memoirist, and substacker, Jennifer Steil.

Jennifer and I met in our annual research cohort at the University of Birmingham for distance learning PhDs. She was doing hers in creative writing, and I was doing mine in Narratology. Before I even knew Jennifer was an author, I was drawn to her incredible storytelling ability as she spoke of an adventurous life living in countries around the globe that nobody else I knew visited: Yemen, Bolivia, Uzbekistan—to name a few. When I found out she was an author, I had to buy her books.

In her memoir, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, Jennifer writes about uprooting her life for a career running a newspaper in the Middle East. Her debut fiction novel, The Ambassador’s Wife, is loosely based on her own real-life account of being kidnapped while pregnant with her daughter, and her sophomore novel, Exile Music, is one of my favorite novels of all time. A historical, literary fiction set during WWII in Austria and Bolivia, she writes it with an immersive musicality and lyricism to her prose that is richly atmospheric and stunning.

Her third novel, The Underside, coming in Spring of 2028 from Regal House, is a literary fiction novel, once again inspired from her time living in La Paz, Bolivia as well as five years of intense doctoral research into the country’s underground LGBTQIA+ scene. While Jennifer talks about how it is “legal” to be gay in Bolivia, it is far from accepted, often leading to violent targeting and severed family ties. A braided narrative that follows three lesbian characters of different ages and backgrounds, The Underside, depicts what it is like for them to find freedom living in abandoned underground mining caves until an outsider brings the outside world to their threshold in a way that demands action.

Recently Jennifer has also been published in The New York Times’ Modern Love column and she writes a weekly substack entitled Liminal where she discusses her battle with cancer and the liminal state in which she often finds and has found herself living.

In this month’s Agent Trade Secret vlog, Jennifer and I talk about her incredible career as a journalist, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and former actress. We discuss our shared love of literary fiction and the challenge of selling it in today’s market, our shared frustration of how the industry categorizes genre, and what inspired her to writer her newest novel that is a drastic departure from her usual style with a minimalist urgency that is un-put-downable.

If you enjoyed this interview, please like, comment, share, and subscribe to Agent Trade Secrets AND Liminal. You can also join the Top Secret paid tier for exclusive looks into my Agent Inbox, an Agent’s POV to the Trending Stories in Publishing, Suggest Article Topics ask Questions for me to answer, and more.

This is Agent Trade Secrets, signing off for the week.