agent...
Liv Ivanov has always had a passion for reading wildly immersive, character-driven novels and developed a love for storytelling when her next-door neighbor introduced her to NaNoWriMo back in 2010. After graduating from the University of Missouri and working in operations and video game development for several years, Liv returned to her first love and began volunteering as a reader and fiction editor for literary magazines before starting her internships at Triada US and Creative Media Agency in 2023. Now stepping into her role as an Associate Agent at CMA, Liv is excited to both discover refreshing, compelling, and fantastical stories and champion new creative voices in the industry. In her free time, Liv loves to go hiking in the Rocky Mountains near her home in Colorado Springs, as well as collect books as she slowly works toward making her home office a 1,000-book library.
submissions
what i'd like to represent...
adult
All genres can include romance, but I like when a story is multi-faceted
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- Coming-of-age (The Death of Vivek Oji, Where the Crawdads Sing)
- Women’s Fiction (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo)
- Contemporary/Upmarket Fiction (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow)
- Mystery/Thriller
- Spies & Espionage
- Small-town settings and eerie atmospheres (Sharp Objects, Verity)
- Race against time (No Country for Old Men)
- Wodunits (Hallowe’en Party, stories like Glass Onion, Knives Out, and The White Lotus)
- Dark Academia
- LGBTQ+
- Sci-Fi
- Anything from a light touch of sci-fi to dystopian to space-based settings to a full on space opera (Project Hail Mary, Fahrenheit 451, A Darker Shade of Magic)
- Multiple Timelines (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
- Sci-Fantasy (Gideon the Ninth and The Fifth Season are my all time favorite books)
- Sci-Fi Thrillers (Recursion, Dark Matter, Saturn Run)
- Slipstream
- Magical Realism (chronicle of a Death Foretold)
- Fantasy
- Light Fantasy (The House in the Cerulean Sea, Under the Whispering Door)
- Urban and Paranormal Fantasy (Ninth House)
- Romantasy (Fourth Wing, Assistant to the Villain)
- Different worlds and high fantasy (Foundryside, Mistborn)
- Historical Fantasy (The Poppy War, Babel)
- Nonfiction
- Nature-Related Memoir
young adult/children's
All genres can include romance, but I like when a story is multi-faceted
- Young Adult
- Contemporary/Upmarket
- LGBTQ+
- Mystery/Thriller
- Small-town settings and eerie atmospheres
- Race against time
- Whodunits and inheritance-based mysteries (The Inheritance Games)
- Dark Academia
- Mythological/Fairy Tale/Classics Retellings and Reimaginings (These Violent Delights)
- Sci-Fi
- Anything from a light touch of sci-fi to dystopian to space-based settings (Skyward, Scythe)
- Adventures and races against time (Ready Player One)
- Fantasy
- Light Touch and Urban Fantasy
- Paranormal/Supernatural (The Bone Houses, Cemetery Boys)
- Different worlds, Low and some High Fantasy (Six of Crows, Shadow & Bone, Strange the Dreamer)
- Young Adult
I especially love heist books, compelling characters and immersive settings, as well as books that involve characters unraveling a puzzle or a conspiracy. I’m also really interested in representing stories that focus on and/or are written by underrepresented voices and authors from a diverse set of cultures and backgrounds, including POC, LGBTQ+, neurodivergent, disability, and mental health issues.
I’m not looking for children’s picture or chapter books, military thrillers, self-help and how-to nonfiction, or business books.
some of my favorite (non-client) authors
N.K. Jemisin, Tamsyn Muir, Brandon Sanderson, Laini Taylor, Aidan Thomas, Neal Shusterman, Leigh Bardugo, Gillian Flynn, TJ Klune, Stephen King, Robert Jackson Bennett, Blake Crouch, Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone, Rebecca Yarros, Andy Weir, John Sandford, R.F. Kuang, Rick Riordan, Hannah Nicole Maehrer, Gabrielle Zevin, Laura Ruby, Cormac McCarthy, Ray Bradbury.
what kind of writing inspires me?
As an agent, I’m looking for character-driven stories, compelling premises, fantastically immersive settings, and most of all — I want to find that next unputdownable story I can’t stop raving to my friends and family about! I’m particularly interested in:
- Well-developed, complex, and/or flawed main characters
- Enthralling, robustly-structured plots that are full of twists and tension
- A strong voice, witty banter, and well-written dialogue
- Prose that makes me want to laugh, cry, or think about life more deeply
- For SFF — creative, well-thought-out magic systems, as well as unique sci-fi elements that really make a story stand out in the genre
what I love about my job...
As someone who reads books voraciously and who loves writing stories of their own in their freetime, I’m absolutely ecstatic that I now have a chance to champion new voices in the industry who have the potential to make an impact on other people’s lives. Nothing makes me happier than when I find a manuscript that I just can’t stop thinking about — and stay up way too late at night reading. I can’t wait to develop long-lasting relationships with my authors and help them share their stories with the rest of the world!