Marc Mikulich Literary Agency LLC

Once upon a time, I was a  recent NYU film school graduate who found work as an assistant at what was then the most prestigious boutique agency in the world: The Lantz Office. Our author clients ran the gamut from novelists, poets, and playwrights to Supreme Court Justices and rock and roll stars.  My next career move took me about a half-mile downtown to Simon & Schuster. There I entered the agency within the publishing house: the subsidiary rights department. My Lantz experience served me well when working with the offices of authors as diverse as Richard Nixon and Frank Zappa (sometimes directly with the author, like Arnold Schwarzenegger), as well as working with our sub-agents all over the world. My experiences there, including at the Frankfurt Book Fair, lead me to my next job. From Manhattan I went to northern California. IDG Books Worldwide was a tiny start-up division of the world's largest publisher of information about information technology, International Data Group. I was IDG Books employee #9, and the entire rights department. Six months after my start we published the book that put us on the map and had me building a publishing network all over the world: DOS For Dummies.  The success of that title and the subsequent series went from IT phenomenon to household name after a book I suggested got us on the cover of USA Today: Sex For Dummies by Dr. Ruth Westheimer.  My work now extended into brand management as I oversaw licensing for television, video, film options, and consumer products. IDG Books was so successful that our parent company spin us off with an IPO;  and 10 years after I'd joined the start-up we were acquired by one of the oldest publishers in America: John Wiley & Sons. I went with the sale to Wiley, moving back to the east coast, and overseeing international rights, licensing, and brand management. This included For Dummies® publishing by Wiley outside the US.  After leaving Wiley, I took on consulting work before joining another start-up. This time it was in the area of digital educational publishing, using Artificial Intelligence, and algorithms developed at MIT. Today that project is a company called Learnswell.  I then consulted on a project for Miles Futurense which brought me to the business schools of universities across America. I was meeting thought leaders at the intersection of business, technology and society, and a desire to share their ideas.  I decided it was time to return to my roots and open this agency.