We recently connected with Lizz and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Lizz thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you share a customer success story with us?
2. Is your team able to work remotely? If so, how have you made it work? What, if any, have been the pitfalls? What have been the non-obvious benefits?
a. Because of the internet and Zoom, my entire team is able to work remotely. Victress is a bi-coastal agency. My partner, Associate Agent Alisha West, is in Washington State near Spokane and I am just north of Philadelphia in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Our clients are spread out all over the country, and onto other continents as well. We like to joke that Victress is trying to take over the world. We meet regularly with each other for staff meetings . We connect with our clients for information sessions, Open Mic nights, critique groups, to give feedback, and get on the same page with our authors. All revisions to manuscripts are done remotely. By utilizing virtual face-to-face time over Zoom, Victress feels like a family and a community that thrives on collaboration. When everyone comes together, whether for work or for play, we are strengthening our communication and building up our community. The publishing industry can be daunting for authors due to rejections and passes on their projects. At Victress we support each other through the turbulent times, through the waiting game, and are supportive of one another in all stages of the publishing process.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
a. I’m Lizz Nagle, CEO and Senior Agent at Victress Literary. We are here to spark creativity and to cheerlead and pilot writers in both career and craft. Our authors write everything from middle grade to adult fiction and nonfiction. We represent many fiction genres including but not limited to: mystery, thriller, historical, general and contemporary, sci-fi and fantasy, romance, horror, and magical realism. We also represent adult narrative nonfiction, memoir and biography.
As a literary agent, I take on many roles. My main job is to represent authors and sell their books to publishers. But I am also their first editor, career counselor, publicist, financial negotiator and accountant, advocate, therapist, and friend.
As an agent I need to have great networking and matchmaking skills. I need to be up on current publishing trends and great at brainstorming new ideas. I’m also a client’s first editor to give feedback and critique on manuscripts. My negotiating skills come into play once a contract is offered by a publisher. And sometimes I am like a therapist to clients as I coach them and support them through the submission process which can be long, daunting, and difficult. I need to be well-versed in the genres I represent and be able to spot real talent and fresh ideas. It is also my job to pay authors from advances and royalties from their publishers. I am the go-between for author and publisher as I advocate for my clients.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I started at Victress when it was founded in 2018. It was an entirely new career path for me. Before that I had been an office manager at a chiropractic clinic, server, substitute teacher, aspiring author, and mother. The publishing world was new territory for me, but I was excited to put my English degree to work. Plus, I felt like I had to find a use all the books I’d read my entire life. Which was a lot of books.
Shannon Orso was my mentor and business partner. We were also best friends and in constant contact with each other. She helped me immensely with my grief over losing my brother Danny. We complimented each other perfectly. Where she was fiction and fantasy, I was nonfiction and memoir. Where she was slightly scatterbrained, I was organized. When my words failed, she found them for me. We were a perfect team creatively. We had a knack for brainstorming ideas with each other and were the greatest of colleagues.
Then one day I woke up to an email from her mom. Shannon had passed away unexpectedly in the night. My mentor was gone. My best friend was gone. My world was shattered. I was crushed. And I didn’t know how I was going to continue at Victress without her.
But I couldn’t leave our clients and the entire agency hanging. So, I took the helm and became CEO of Victress Literary. If I wouldn’t have taken over, almost 30 authors would have had to start the search over for a new agent. But I kept the ship afloat.
Some days, it was difficult to continue on and the grief was overwhelming. But I had my Victress family to lean on and help get me through. It was only due to resilience that I kept going. And then I found what Victress needed most… A mentee for me. I met Alisha as an author at a conference, and she inquired about getting started in a publishing career. She became my mentee and junior (now associate) agent and helped me re-establish protocols and procedures at Victress. She was my biggest blessing during my darkest time . Now we are the best business partners.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
I met my first business partner, Shannon, on Facebook. We were in some common true crime podcast discussion groups and quickly became friends due to our similar senses of humor. We also discovered that we work together well by managing Facebook groups together. When I found out what she did for work and that she was looking for an intern, I figured I would try working with my best friend. And we made a phenomenal team. I fell in love with editing client books and writing pitches. I became passionate about finding publishing homes for the manuscripts.
When Shannon passed away unexpectedly, I was left working by myself for a while. Until I met Alisha at a writing conference. One conversation led to her becoming my editorial assistant. Now we work together, share clients together, pitch books together, and run Victress together. I am forever grateful I found someone as passionate about selling these books and cultivating authors’ careers as I am. Alisha is an incredible asset to the Victress Literary community.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.victressliterary.com
- Instagram: @victresslizz
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizz-nagle-50a345b5/
- Twitter: @victresslizz
- Other: I’m also on Bluesky and TikTok as VictressLizz.
