Thursdays with Amanda: Visiting Minneapolis Publishers

Amanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent. Her author marketing book, The Extroverted Writer, is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Last week I did a few publisher visits in Minneapolis, and I thought it would be fun to show some of the pictures from my visit.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

In today’s publishing world, publisher visits are really a rarity for those of us agents who don’t live in NYC. So it’s always great fun to meet up with publishing friends and make new ones.

Minneapolis has a handful of houses that are quite well known and successful (It’s funny…we think of NYC or Nashville or Colorado Springs as being the main pub hubs, but in reality, there are publishers all over the US!). So I was thrilled to be able to visit with a few of them.

One of the features of The Loft Literary Center

These in-person visits really help build relationships. Most tend to think that it’s during these visits that business is done and deals made, but that’s quite rare. I’m just as successful doing deals with editors I’ve never met as I am doing them with my editor friends. But still, it’s great to deepen professional and even personal relationships, so that’s why these visits are important.

Display shelf at Milkweed Editions

My first stop was literary house Milkweed Editions. They’re a small nonprofit operation, but very respected and quite successful. Located in the beautiful Loft Literary Center in downtown Minneapolis, Milkweed is surrounded by likeminded businesses and people. The area is a pocket of literary-ness that really does inspire. The editor there, Daniel Slager, is proud of what they do and he has every reason to be.

Due to weather delays, I didn’t have a chance to meet with Greywolf or Coffee House Press, but I did make it over to Bethany House Publishers.

Bethany House is many times thought of as the first Christian fiction publisher. I spent some time with my friends on the fiction side, and then spent time meeting and strengthening my relationships with the nonfiction people.

And then…this happened:

Mandi & Snowball

Yes, that is me with Snowball the cat. If you don’t know, Snowball was a supporting character in the Mandie Books by Lois Gladys Leppard. I LOVED these books as a kid. Probably because my nickname was “Mandi.” For some time I’ve heard about this giant Snowball cat that makes its way around the BHP offices…and I can’t tell you how excited I was to meet him (Or her? Can’t remember Snowball’s gender!).

So there you have it. My brief Minneapolis tour. Lots of business was discussed, but also lots of fun was had. And that’s how I like it!