April, as the first full month of spring, often symbolizes new beginnings, renewal, and hope, with Christian traditions also associating it with the Resurrection of the Lord.
Our highlights below include new releases, contracts signed, notable reviews and PR events, new authors to the agency and other news of note by clients and agents.
Releases
Congratulations to Carrie Rogers-Whitehead and Rowman & Littlefield Publishers for the Aprill 15th release of Technology for Littles.
An easy-to-implement guide to help parents raise tech-savvy children with healthy and safe online habits from the start.
Today’s youngest children are experiencing technology more intensely than any generation before them. The opportunities are great—but so are the dangers. How do parents and educators prepare this new generation to be safe and responsible online? How can they raise young children with a healthy digital balance?
In Technology for Littles, parent, practitioner, and founder of Digital Respons-Ability Carrie Rogers-Whitehead combines decades of research on child development with practical tools for parents to help them raise healthy, responsible, and safe internet users at home. And because schools don’t typically start digital literacy until third grade or older, this book focuses on helping parents of younger children implement online safety at home from the time a toddler first picks up a smart phone.
Packed full of songs, strategies, resource lists, and more, Technology for Littles equips parents to fearlessly tackle tech and create habits and routines that will help children grow to be healthy yet tech-savvy humans in a digital world.
Congratulations to David Sunde and NavPress for May 6ths release of Homegrown Disciples.
Christian parents long to instill a lasting faith in our children, but the challenge of balancing spiritual teaching with academic, extracurricular, and social demands can be overwhelming. Many feel inadequate or unqualified to lead their children spiritually. In Homegrown Disciples, David Sunde offers seven rhythms to help disciplemaking parents know God better, experience him more fully, and leverage their faith for the benefit of their children.
Find out how to reproduce a living faith in your kids’ lives through the seven rhythms of apprenticing, renewal, hospitality, community, compassion, generosity, and gratitude.
Learn how to:
Experience God’s presence and grace through the highs and lows of raising children,
Create a nurturing environment where faith can grow naturally,
Use everyday interactions to reveal God’s heart and truth to your children,
Embrace the idea that both you and your children are learning and growing together in faith.
Contracts
Barry H. Corey and John S. Townsend signed with Whitaker Corporation for the May 2026 release of Thirteen Burdens: What They Are and How Leaders Bear Them Bravely.
Cristóbal Krusen signed with Baker Publishing for the July 2027 release of They Were Christians Volume 2.
Paul Anleitner signed with HarperCollins Christian Publishing for the June 2026 release of Return to Meaning.
Jennifer Rosner signed with Baylor University Press for the December 2026 release of The Jewish Gospel and Christian Identity.
New Clients
Abby Maddox recently signed with WordServe. Welcome!
What We’re Celebrating
Congratulations to Naomi Cramer Overton, General Editor; Misty Arterburn, Assoc. Editor; Stephen Arterburn, and Tricia Lott Williford and Jana Richardson. — The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) has named them finalist for the 2025 Christian Book Award program. The finalists represent the year’s best in Christian publishing among 12 book and Bible categories.
Naomi and Misty are recognized for their Bible, NLT Every Woman’s Bible. and Tricia Lott Williford and Jana Richardson for their book You Are Safe Now.
From the Desk of Emma Fulenwider
As a new agent, one of my biggest mistakes was signing clients because I believed in them.
Americans love an underdog success story, especially when their success is attributed to passion. We love to tell the legends of famous books that found their way to bookstore shelves through the author’s relentless determination in the face of rejection until they found a single devotee on the other side of the table. The Lord of the Rings, Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Help.
For years, my insatiable passion for books fueled little more than my own spending habits. Becoming an agent gave me a thrill of empowerment. Finally, I was ready to put the force of my conviction behind authors who just needed a wind in their sails to overcome what their business plan lacked.
Suddenly, I had the Midas touch. I could pick a project that no one else on “team gatekeeper” understood and use my sales superpowers to remove the scales from their eyes.
And then a terrible thing happened. It worked.
A young woman came to us with a memoir about surviving a toxic childhood with her horse by her side. My boss and colleague passed on it for fair reasons, but I jumped on it because I believed in it. Everyone in the industry knows memoir isn’t selling well these days unless you’re a celebrity, so what I did was out of reckless passion for this story. That questionable decision led to… my first book sale. I will forever be sad that there wasn’t a hidden camera pointed at my desk to capture the world’s most awkward happy dance when that offer hit my inbox.
Invigorated, I went out and signed a handful of other passion projects, convinced that I had an intuition for this stuff. Boy, the Tolkeins of today are sure lucky that I’m around.
One by one, they failed to sell. Instead of being an elevator to the top, I was more like a human shield for the volley of rejection that landed on my clients.
A few of them quit me. One of them took a hiatus to reconsider whether she wanted to continue writing at all. They didn’t look back on our year of working passionately side by side as a success, they saw it for what it was – a waste of time. And I was the one who put us through it, knowing it would likely end up this way.
Apparently, my passion does not carry a project any further than the author’s passion. An agent’s job is to balance the author’s passion with business sense, and I wasn’t doing my job.
If you recall the full story of the Midas touch, King Midas soon realized that his golden touch brought him endless gold, but robbed him of food, drink, a soft pillow and a warm blanket. When his own daughter ran to embrace him and became a gold statue, he realized that gold was not his greatest joy after all. On the contrary, acquiring gold had cost him his greatest joy and his daily essentials for living.
I meet a lot of authors in a year, and many of them are convinced that signing with an agent is what they want most. The announcement on social media that you’re represented by an agency, replying to emails with the line “I’ve CC’d my agent,” adding your agent’s email to your author website – all fun, sexy accessories to the author life.
But slaving over a proposal and a manuscript that go nowhere wastes a lot of time, attention and emotional energy – things that are essential to living. The crushing disappointment of having a book “die on submission” has the potential to cost an author the joy of writing itself.
As a writer myself, given the choice between a book deal or the love of writing, I would keep the love of writing.
I still believe in authors, but I have learned to champion them differently depending on where they’re at in their journey and what they need most.
Agents have more to offer than representation. We validate good writing, we make introductions between potential collaborators, we help authors make a plan to get where they want to go. In that sense, there’s no harm in talking to an agent. A 15-minute appointment at a conference is not a pass/fail audition, it’s an opportunity for mentorship. Most people aren’t ready for a book deal, but everyone needs encouragement and the best encouragers I’ve met in this business are agents.
Here’s where you can get encouraged by a WordServe Agent this year:
Writing Day Workshop Phoenix (May 2) – Greg Johnson
Write to Publish Wheaton (June 10-13) – Emma Fulenwider and Keely Boeving
Historical Novel Society Conference Las Vegas (June 26-28) – Greg Johnson (virtual appointments)
COMPEL Pro Publishing Week – Emma Fulenwider (virtual appointments)
WordServe Water Cooler 