“Publishing is a marathon—from the actual writing to beyond the sale. There are many larger forces at play at every stage, so don’t despair and practice patience.” -Marin Takikawa (The Friedrich Agency)
The 2025 Agents Symposium is a year-long program of monthly events with literary agents – taking writers step by step along the journey to publication. We’re happy to share Q&As with some of our featured agents here. To register for Marin Takikawa’s presentation on May 31st on “Comparison Titles” click here.
An Interview with Marin Takikawa
Marin Takikawa is an agent and foreign rights director at The Friedrich Agency. Born in Tokyo and raised in Singapore and NYC, she joined TFA in early 2021 after getting her start as an assistant to three agents at Foundry Literary + Media. She’s looking for subversive, genre-bending literary/upmarket fiction (including but not limited to speculative concepts, family sagas, anything that plays with myth and folklore), intersectional narrative nonfiction, and voice-driven and literary-leaning YA. Her clients include National Endowment for the Arts, We Need Diverse Books, Tin House, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and New York Foundation for the Arts fellows.
Scribe: How would you describe your personal approach to working with an author?
Marin Takikawa: I’m a pretty involved agent—both editorially and otherwise. I go through multiple rounds of edits with my writers before going on submission. And obviously the editorial process looks very different for each book and writer, and that’s something I give careful thought and adjust as needed, after conversing with my client of course. One writer could get a structural overhaul, while another writer could get my thoughts/suggestions on how to tweak the concept for a more marketable hook, for example. Even after the book has sold, I make sure to stay involved and remain a resource to both the editor and my writer—that could mean many different things, but in a nutshell, I’m with my author every step of the way, making sure to translate everything that’s going on in the very nebulous publishing process.
Scribe: What do you look for in a debut author?
MT: It’s really exciting when I meet a writer who’s given serious thought about what they want their career to look like—this constitutes so many things: what other books do they see themselves writing? What writerly goals do they have and want to aim for? Do they have particular imprints that are their “dream imprints”? Of course, this is all on top of having already done the work of writing a novel, honing their craft, revising.
Scribe: What’s one piece of advice you find yourself giving to others time and time again?
MT: (This is advice that I give myself too!) Publishing is a marathon—from the actual writing to beyond the sale. There are many larger forces at play at every stage, so don’t despair and practice patience. There are times when you sprint, yes, but don’t sprint the whole way or you’re going to burnout.
Scribe: What excites you the most about the publishing industry today?
MT: I’m not going to lie, there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding the industry—and larger world—with tariffs, AI, book bans, and so that does sort of dampen the collective mood. But even in an uncertain time, I still strongly believe that storytelling will never die out. So rather than excitement, I would say it’s resolve and a deep belief that the work that we’re all doing is important.
Scribe: Tell us about a recent book/project that you worked on that excited you and you want everyone to know about?
MT: I recently sold, in a very competitive auction, a YA speculative thriller that I pitched as Firekeeper’s Daughter meets Moana. It’s about a Polynesian girl who tries to clear her brother’s name when he’s wrongfully accused of killing his girlfriend. Unbeknownst to everyone (save her brother), our protagonist is actually a child of the sea, meaning to say she can hear the ocean’s voice and see its prophecies—our narrator, though, has a contentious relationship with the ocean, because of a past prophecy that affected her family, but in order to save her brother and to stop the actual killer, she has to rely on this dreaded gift. There’s a deeper thematic arc in the story, where the novel is set against the backdrop of mounting anger and tension over the impact of France’s nuclear tests on the people of Mā’ohi Nui (French Polynesia). So while it has all the satisfying components of a pacey, twisty thriller, it’s also very much a love letter from my author to her people, which to me, makes this book really special and important.
The novel is called Salt Water Blood (written by Manuia Heinrich) and is publishing in 2026 under Sarah Barley Books/S&S. I hope you keep an eye out for it!
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Thanks, Marin!
Click here for more information on the 2025 Agents Symposium, an event that focuses on the craft of writing, the business of publishing, and building a literary community.
