After more than 30 years in the bookselling business, Pete Mulvihill knows how to spot a good story. From his sunny office in the Richmond District, the Green Apple Books co-owner has kept a close eye on the Bay Area’s evolving literary scenes and appetites, stocking the shelves across the bookstore chain with titles and authors he knows will sell.
All summer, he’s also been quietly applying his hard-won knowledge of bookselling to selling manuscripts to publishers as a literary agent for The Watermark Agency.
“There’s like this BS detector, you can just smell whether a book can sell or not,” Mulvihill said playfully. “Of course, I’m used to seeing them when they’re done, with a title and a cover. So now when I see a proposal or manuscript, I have to envision a better title or what this book is going to look like when it’s done. That’s the kind of leap I have to make in this new role.”
Mulvihill’s hiring in late June, which was announced yesterday, is part of a larger expansion at Watermark, a San Francisco-based company founded by Mark Tauber. Tauber, who ran the West Coast division of HarperCollins from 2002 to 2017, also brought on Lynn Grady as the agency’s vice president and Lily McMahon as a literary associate, making Watermark now a four-person team.
As an agent, Mulvihill will have to translate his Bay Area-centric literary expertise into identifying titles that might resonate with a national or even international audience. Tauber noted that the literary tastes on the West Coast are frequently one step ahead of other markets, including New York.
“Quite often, the stories that start here become national stories,” Tauber said, noting how categories like tech, spirituality, and wellness were mostly overlooked by mainstream publishers until the late ‘90s, long after they’d permeated West Coast culture. “It was only around 2000, when [those industries] started booming that all of a sudden publishers said, ‘Wait a minute, there’s something going on here.’”
Tauber referenced one of Watermark’s latest titles to hit shelves, Last Night in San Francisco: Tech’s Lost Promise and the Killing of Bob Lee, by journalist Scott Alan Lucas, a true crime story about the 2023 Rincon Hill area murder of the Cash App co-founder, as a hyperlocal story that nonetheless drew national attention for weeks straight.
It’s those sorts of stories, the ones that have a specific SF flavor but can capture readers across the country, that Mulvihill is on the lookout for.
Since he signed onto the agency, Mulvihill had been tinkering behind the scenes until Tauber onboarded Grady and McMahon and could announce their hirings together. In the meantime, Mulvihill browsed the stacks at Green Apple for unrepresented authors until he thought could clinch a big contract. He eventually sold a children’s board book called ABC Dim Sum by Karen Wong to Penguin Workshop, an imprint of Penguin Random House and one of the “Big Five” US publishers — his first sale, just in time for yesterday’s announcement that he’d officially joined the team.
It was a big win for Mulvihill and a “dream story,” as Tauber called it, for the author, a self-taught illustrator who had originally sold a few self-published copies of ABC Dim Sum to Green Apple on consignment. Mulvihill noticed how well the book had been selling locally and successfully made his case to the team at Penguin.
Mulvihill is also representing a memoir by Pia Hinckle, the daughter of Warren Hinckle (1938-2016), the gonzo editor of Ramparts and Scanlan’s and a longtime muckraking columnist for San Francisco papers.
Mulvihill is staying on at Green Apple as a co-owner but says he is trying to step back and “trust [his] management team to run things day to day.” As he adds more authors to his client roster, he’ll still have the power to give them some spotlight in the bookstore, but he said he doesn’t see a conflict of interest.
“Every employee at Green Apple is empowered and encouraged to promote the books they love, whether they’ve worked there for six months or 30 years,” Mulvihill said. “That could mean featuring it on our display tables, writing a ‘shelf talker,’ adding it to our email newsletter, facing it out in the section, etc.”
As he balances this new endeavor with continuing his duties at Green Apple, Mulvihill is still curating his client pool and figuring out his agenting strategy. At times, he says he “lacks confidence” in his agenting skills in this nascent stage, but Tauber is confident in his new hire.
“Green Apple Books is a legendary independent chain. Everybody across the country knows it in the publishing industry,” Tauber said. “So yes, taste and experience and all that is great, but part of it is that this is a guy who spent 30 years there, not only working there but owning it, publishers are going to pay attention to what he sends them. That’s very valuable as an agent.”
“He convinced me that I have taste,” Mulvihill said of Tauber.
That taste, in Mulvihill’s words, is “eclectic.”
“I’m interested in economics, social justice, politics. I like open water swimming and rowing, so anything that’s adjacent to those. And then I look for holes, like, what’s the book I want to read that isn’t there yet? I'm trying to broaden the variety of publications I read a little bit to sniff out voices that might not have a mainstream platform yet,” he said.
“Mostly, I just love writers who love San Francisco.”
