Amy Tannenbaum

Dec 29, 2024
11 min read

Updated: Dec 23, 2025

During her years at Atria Books, Amy Tannenbaum helped turn a self-published college romance into one of the defining crossover stories of the digital era. In 2012, she acquired world English rights to Jamie McGuire’s Beautiful Disaster and its sequel Walking Disaster, after a bidding war, at a point when the novel had already sold more than two hundred thousand copies on its own and reached the New York Times list. A year later, now working as McGuire’s agent at Jane Rotrosen, she was back at the table as Atria signed McGuire to a further three-novel and one-novella deal, locking in a program that carried the author from indie success into a sustained run on a major commercial list.

Amy Tannenbaum has built a career that links in-house editing and literary representation with clear continuity. After studying English at Wesleyan University, she began in editorial at Harlequin, working on category romance before moving to Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. At Atria, she spent years shaping a commercial list of fiction and nonfiction, including breakout and bestselling projects that grew from strong reader communities and independently originated work. That experience gave her a close view of how books move from acquisition through publication and how editorial decisions interact with marketing, positioning, and long-term sales.

In 2013, she joined the Jane Rotrosen Agency as a literary agent, carrying that editorial training into a role centered on advocacy, strategy, and rights management. At Jane Rotrosen, an independent New York agency known for commercially successful and upmarket fiction, she represents authors in women’s fiction, historical fiction, grounded speculative work, contemporary romance, thriller, psychological suspense, and narrative nonfiction. She is especially drawn to projects that straddle the literary and commercial spheres and to work by marginalized voices. Her list reflects the through line of her career, focusing on commercially minded storytelling with clear emotional stakes for readers who care about both narrative drive and craft.

Over two decades in publishing, she has become known as an author-focused agent who understands how decisions are made on both sides of the table. She uses her experience in acquisitions meetings and launch planning to shape submission strategies, refine pitches, and set expectations around editorial and marketing timelines. The same dual vantage point guides her approach to contracts, foreign and audio rights, and other subsidiary opportunities, so that authors work with someone who can connect the editorial life of a book to its business life in a coherent way from first pages through long-tail sales.

Editorial Training and Background

Tannenbaum’s editorial training sits at the center of how she works with manuscripts. At Atria, she took books through deep structural and line editing, including projects that arrived with online readership or self-publishing traction. That work sharpened her sense of when a narrative frame can support a full-length book, when character arcs carry enough emotional force to sustain a series, and when a voice can anchor a writer’s career across multiple projects.

As an agent, she applies the same scrutiny to early drafts. She reads line by line, asks authors to sharpen stakes on the page, and pushes for tighter pacing and clearer thematic throughlines before a project goes into submission. Authors who sign with her can expect detailed, practical notes. For debut writers, this often involves multiple revision cycles until the manuscript meets the demands of large commercial lists at major houses while preserving the core of the writer’s voice.

Her taste stays within a defined band. She looks for women’s fiction and contemporary romance that treat emotional arcs with seriousness, psychological suspense that keeps tension rooted in credible character choices, and commercial novels that fall between literary and genre, with direct plots carried by layered interior lives. She also considers narrative nonfiction and memoir when the material marries a strong story to a clearly defined readership and an author platform capable of sustaining attention after publication.

Through all of this, she keeps her focus on the reader. Whether she is talking through chapter structure, sentence rhythm, or jacket positioning, she tracks where attention will quicken, where it may slip, and which images, turns, and choices a reader is likely to remember well after the book has been set down.

A Client List Built for Scale

Agency listings, deal announcements, and author bios identify Amy Tannenbaum as the agent, past and present, for a cluster of high-output commercial and upmarket writers in romance, crime, and women’s fiction. Clients and former clients associated with her list include Jamie McGuire, Emma Chase, Audrey Carlan, Kelly Rimmer, Kylie Scott, T. R. Ragan, Robert Bryndza, Loreth Anne White, Jason Pinter, and Carol Wyer. Their books appear across major houses and strong digital-first and independent imprints, and many are published in translation, audio, and film or television development as their readerships grow across formats and territories.

One clear example of her deal-making is the four-book agreement for Jamie McGuire at Atria, covering three new novels and a novella after the breakout of Beautiful Disaster. That contract, negotiated by Atria vice president and senior editor Greer Hendricks with Tannenbaum acting as McGuire’s literary agent, shifted a self-published success into a multi-book World English and audio program on a major commercial list and helped consolidate McGuire’s position as a long-running frontlist and backlist presence.

Taken together, the careers of these authors highlight two traits on her list that matter to serious writers considering representation. The first is a comfort with career-scale work. Many of the authors she represents publish regularly, write in series, and require coordinated planning across releases, formats, and territories. Thriller writers such as T. R. Ragan and crime and suspense authors such as Loreth Anne White and Carol Wyer build out multi-book arcs with Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer, Montlake, and Bookouture, while writers like Jason Pinter move between imprints with continuing protagonists. That pattern points to an agent used to managing overlapping publication schedules and understanding how each title contributes to a long-term brand rather than standing alone as a one-off success.

The second is range inside a tightly defined commercial space. Her clients sit across contemporary romance, domestic and psychological suspense, commercial and upmarket women’s fiction, and cross-genre crime and mystery. Emma Chase’s contemporary romances, known for their sharp, often male-point-of-view narration and publication in over twenty languages, occupy one part of that spectrum; Audrey Carlan’s globally translated series, including Calendar Girl and International Guy, occupy another. In suspense and women’s fiction, writers such as Kelly Rimmer, Kylie Scott, and others move between emotionally driven, issue-driven narratives and high-concept hooks. For editors, this means submissions from Tannenbaum can land credibly on romance, crime, or general trade lists, while still fitting a recognizable band of voice-driven, commercially oriented storytelling.

Industry estimates often place the share of traditionally published books that earn out their advances in the low minority of titles, with many analyses clustering around the one-in-four mark. Against that backdrop, an agent whose roster tilts toward multi-book agreements, active foreign and audio rights programs, and series-friendly work offers a concrete advantage. The pattern across Tannenbaum’s list suggests an emphasis on building repeatable readership and multi-format careers. This orientation directly affects how an individual's deal can grow into a durable publishing life rather than a single moment on the schedule.

Editorial Judgment and Rights Strategy

In agency and conference bios, Tannenbaum is described as a committed author advocate with over twenty years of publishing experience, someone who combines an editor’s line-by-line attention with an agent’s command of the market. At Jane Rotrosen, she represents fiction that often falls between literary and commercial categories, alongside projects by writers from underrepresented backgrounds, and she approaches that list with an unusually integrated view of craft, positioning, and rights.

Contract work sits at the center of that advocacy. The agreements she negotiates now typically extend well beyond print and fundamental ebook rights to include audio, foreign, and film or television clauses, along with detailed provisions on options, non-compete language, and reversion. She spends time on the parts of a contract most writers are tempted to skim: clauses that can slow or block a new series, tie up characters across formats, or keep rights from reverting even when active sales have faded. For authors in heavily optioned categories such as romance, suspense, and book club fiction, those paragraphs determine how much control they keep over their own work and how flexible their careers can be a few books down the line.

Her public commentary mirrors this focus. In a Kobo Writing Life conversation about working with agents, she describes submissions as a strategic process rather than a scattershot send-out, urges writers to treat advances as one element of a longer income curve instead of a verdict on their worth, and returns repeatedly to the question of who controls which rights, for how long, and on what terms. The picture that emerges is of an agent who treats each deal as a piece of a writer’s business plan, not a discrete event.

Audio is part of that plan. The audiobook market has posted double-digit revenue growth for more than a decade, with United States audiobook sales rising by roughly ten percent in 2022 alone and crossing the billion-dollar mark years earlier. In that climate, she treats audio as a core format, negotiating audio rights alongside print and pushing, where it makes sense, for publication schedules that allow readers and listeners to encounter a new book at nearly the same moment. Coordinated print and audio releases give authors a better chance at concentrated visibility and align with how many readers now move between formats.

Her rights work extends across borders and into adaptation. Recent studies from the European Audiovisual Observatory and other research groups show that scripted series and films increasingly originate in books, with literary properties accounting for a significant share of new fiction on European screens. For the categories where Tannenbaum is most active, that environment makes foreign editions and screen rights a practical question. She works with co-agents and producers to structure these rights so that each new edition, translation, or adaptation strengthens the author’s position for the next negotiation.

Influence Beyond Her Own List

Tannenbaum’s presence in publishing extends beyond the authors she represents. She appears in public forums where the industry thinks aloud about what it publishes, who it reaches, and how careers are built, and she tends to take the role of translator between house logic and writer realities.

At events that examine emerging categories and market shifts, she has spoken with particular clarity about how readership shapes opportunity. On a Publishers Advertising and Marketing Association panel devoted to New Adult, she traced the pull of stories centered on late-teen and twenty-something protagonists to a gap between young adult and traditional adult lists. She talked about the way those books capture characters moving through first real jobs, early relationships, and financial independence, and about why editors and marketers needed a category that acknowledged those lives instead of folding them into existing shelves by default.

She brings the same interpretive mode to interviews and podcasts. In conversations with programs such as Kobo Writing Life, she walks writers through what happens to a manuscript once it leaves the author’s inbox, how editors at large houses build their lists, and where agents add value in that process. She tends to strip away the mythology around gatekeepers. She focuses instead on practical questions, such as which projects belong in a traditional pipeline, when a hybrid or independent route might make more sense, how to think about advances as part of a longer earnings curve, and how to treat subrights as levers.

Inside the professional community, she takes on roles that surface new voices. As a final-round judge for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association Rising Star contest, she reads work from unpublished authors. She evaluates it with the same standard she applies to her own list. The bio attached to that role mirrors her agency description: women’s fiction, contemporary romance, thriller and psychological suspense, narrative nonfiction, and particular attention to writers from underrepresented backgrounds and to fiction that lives between literary and commercial territory. The judging itself is a small, concrete way to move those priorities into the pipeline.

Her equity interest sits against a stark backdrop. The Diversity Baseline Survey series from Lee and Low has shown that the North American publishing workforce remains overwhelmingly white, with only modest movement across nearly a decade. The shift from 79 percent white staff in 2015 to 72.5 percent in the most recent survey marks progress, but also underscores the distance between stated commitments and structural change. Within that context, an agent who actively invites work from marginalized writers and operates inside an intensely commercial agency has more than symbolic influence over which stories reach wide readerships.

Tannenbaum also works in categories that sit at the center of digital discovery. Analyses of BookTok’s influence on sales credit the platform with driving a sharp rise in print units in 2021, including a surge in adult fiction, and with pushing backlist romance and book club titles into the front of the store. Many of the authors she represents write in those exact lanes. That reality shapes the guidance she gives clients on how to approach audience building: treating virality as an accelerant rather than a plan, sustaining reader attention once a spike fades, and aligning online energy with the slower, more deliberate timelines of traditional publishing.

The Authors Who Fit Her List Best

Writers who tend to thrive with Amy Tannenbaum are working in or near her core territory. Their books fall into commercial or upmarket women’s fiction, contemporary romance, historical and grounded speculative fiction with strong emotional through lines, and psychological or domestic suspense that keeps character and voice at the center. She is also a match for authors whose work sits between literary and commercial shelves, and for those writing narrative nonfiction with a clear narrative spine and a readership the book can realistically reach.

These writers want an editorial partner rather than a simple broker. Her years in-house mean she expects to discuss structure, pacing, and line-level prose well before a project goes on submission. Authors who are willing to revise deeply in response to detailed notes, who think in terms of a multi-book arc instead of a single launch, and who value rigorous, back-and-forth conversation about the work tend to align with how she runs her list.

They also pay close attention to the business architecture around their books. Tannenbaum’s focus on multi-book agreements, foreign editions, audio programs, and possible adaptations favors authors who are prepared to think in multiple formats and territories, not only in first-format publication. Writers who care how their contracts handle reversion, format splits, and option language, and who want someone tracking those clauses as carefully as pages, are the ones most likely to make full use of what she offers.

Underlying all of this is an understanding that representation is a selective partnership. Agency materials emphasize that she looks for writers with both strong work on the page and the potential for long-term development. Authors approaching her are best served when they treat the relationship as a professional collaboration that requires revision, patience, and a clear sense of where their manuscripts sit in the market they hope to enter.

How to Query Amy Tannenbaum

According to Jane Rotrosen’s current guidelines, writers contact Amy by email rather than through forms or portals. Queries go to atannenbaum@janerotrosen.com. All material should be in the body of the email, and attachments should not be opened for security reasons.

Before reaching out, writers should make sure their projects belong in the territory she actually represents. Her list centers on commercial and upmarket women’s fiction, contemporary romance, historical and grounded speculative work with strong emotional stakes, and psychological or domestic suspense that keeps character and voice at the forefront. She also considers select narrative nonfiction when there is a strong story, a defined readership, and an author whose platform can support the book.

For fiction, writers are best served by including the following in a single email.

A brief description of the novel that names its category and approximate word count.
A short author bio that mentions prior publications or relevant background.
A synopsis that carries the story from opening to ending.
The first three chapters pasted beneath the letter so they can be read without opening files.

For narrative nonfiction, writers should send:

A concise description of the project and its focus.
A short bio that includes audience reach and any relevant expertise.
An overview, a chapter outline, and one or two sample chapters pasted into the email.

Response times vary with workload and with the volume of incoming queries. As with many established agencies, silence over a reasonable span usually signals that the project will not move forward. Writers who decide to approach Amy should send work that has already been revised as fully as they can manage on their own, along with a letter that makes a grounded case for where their book sits on her list and in the wider market.

FOR THE WRITERS