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Sarah's Bookshelves Live

Ep. 40: Byrd Leavell (Literary Agent at United Talent Agency) + Book Recommendations

Sarah's Bookshelves Live

Sarah Dickinson

Arts, Books

4.7 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2019

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In Episode 40, Byrd Leavell (Talent Agent at United Talent Agency) talks about the business of publishing, the truth behind publisher marketing dollars, and shares holiday book recommendations for husbands / dads / sons / boyfriends.

This post contains affiliate links, through which I make a small commission when you make a purchase (at no cost to you!).

Announcement Links

Highlights

  • How Byrd got into the agency business.
  • The differences in working for a bigger (where he is now) vs. smaller agency (where he started).
  • Where in the process the marketing budget is decided on.
  • The truth about publishers' marketing budgets.
  • How book deals for Internet personalities work.
  • The "business" of publishing a book.
  • What do you do as an agent when a book is not selling like you hoped?
  • How Byrd's personal reading taste is different from the types of books he's looking to sign as clients.
  • Sarah's theory of experience living in NYC correlating with liking Fleishman is in Trouble.
  • Byrd's list of books to buy for Dads / husbands / boyfriends / brothers / sons.
  • Our views on memoirists using ghostwriters.
  • If authors / publishers / agents care what format a book sells in.

Byrd's Book Recommendations

Two OLD Books He Loves 

Two NEW Books He Loves

One Book He DIDN'T Love

One NEW RELEASE He's Excited About

Other Books Mentioned

Other Links

About Byrd

Twitter

A literary agent at UTA (United Talent Agency), Byrd Leavell started in book publishing 19 years ago and in that time has overseen major bestsellers across multiple categories.

His clients include Andrew Yang, Guy Raz, Aubrey Marcus, Cat Marnell, Tiffany Haddish, Brian Kilmeade, Matt Taibbi, Drew Magary, Adam Savage, Mat Best, Rich Roll and Julie Piatt, Justin Halpern, Amirah Kassem, and Rob Elliott – whose LOL series has sold more than 2.5 million copies.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to Sarah's Bookshelves Live.

0:12.4

I'm Sarah of the blog Sarah's Bookshelves.

0:15.2

Each week I'm talking with one bookish guest about two old books they love, two new books

0:20.2

they love, one book they don't

0:21.7

love, and one new release they're excited about. We're going to get real and sometimes a bit

0:27.1

snarky about all things books. If you like the show, I'd really love your support. Spread the word

0:33.1

to your reader friends, subscribe to the show, rate and review it wherever you listen to podcasts,

0:38.8

or get bonus podcast episodes by supporting the podcast on Patreon. There's a link in the show

0:45.2

notes and in my Instagram bio to my Patreon page. Let's get rolling. Hey everyone, welcome to the last

0:52.4

episode of Sarah's Bookshelves Live for 2019.

0:56.1

Before we get to today's guest, I've got two quick announcements to make.

1:00.0

First of all, I wanted to let y'all know that the 2020 version of my reading tracker is now

1:05.9

available for purchase on the blog, and that's at www.sbrowselves.com. For those of you that are not familiar with

1:13.7

the reading tracker, this is the third year I've offered it for sale. It's an Excel spreadsheet

1:17.9

where you can track all of your reading for the year along with data about each book,

1:23.0

and the tracker will automatically compile all of your stats into pretty charts for you in real time.

1:29.2

So as the year goes on, you can see how your reading is going throughout the year.

1:33.4

If you have a specific goal for, let's say, books by authors of color, you can see how you're

1:40.4

doing against that goal throughout the year rather than waiting until the end of the

1:44.2

year to calculate your percentage or have to do it manually throughout the year. Stats that we track on

1:49.6

the spreadsheet include books read, pages read, diversity stats, percent successful books,

1:55.8

which is my personal favorite, DNFs, and much, much more. You can get a complete list of what's

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