Danny Yanez became president and sole proprietor of Franklin Siegal & Yanez on January 1, becoming only the third leader in the literary scouting agency's 50-year history.
Founded as Lynn C. Franklin Associates in 1976, the company became Franklin & Siegal Associates in 1992 when Franklin partnered with Todd R. Siegal, who retired at the end of 2025. Yanez joined the agency in 2012 after editorial positions at Vintage Books, Alfred A. Knopf, and the University of Chicago Press, where he worked as a translation fiction editor.
We talked with Yanez about continuity, competition, and what it takes to succeed in one of publishing's most specialized professions.
You're only the third person to lead this company in half a century. What does that mean to you?
It's a big deal filling those shoes. Lynn Franklin started the company in 1976 when she was 30 years old. Todd started working with Lynn in 1986 when he was 30, and they split into two agencies in 1992—she continued as a literary agent with her own list of authors under Lynn C. Franklin, and Todd ran the scouting part as Franklin & Siegal. Lynn retired in 2016 and passed away in 2021.
One of the special things about FSY—which I'm still getting used to calling it—is we've had clients that have been with us nearly from the start, in Finland, Japan, Germany, the U.K. Our relationship to WSOY Finland goes back to 1978, I believe. Heyne in Germany goes back to 1983. Hodder [in the U.K.] is around that time too. We've managed to keep these clients for a really long time, which speaks to everything Lynn and Todd built.
How many people work at the company now?
There are 10 of us, which is pretty big for a scouting agency. All except our business manager and two assistants are full-time scouts. We have a film and TV department—we've been exclusive with Universal Studios for going on 26 years, which I think is maybe the longest New York-Hollywood scouting relationship at this point. We were working with Paramount Studios on the TV side, but that shuttered at the end of 2024—so, you know, we’re looking for another client. And we have a robust children's list on the foreign publishing side.
How do you define the role of a scout, and how has it evolved?
We sit at the intersection of domestic and international publishing. We're not agents, not salespeople—we're not selling or buying anything. We're advisors, consultants, relationship builders, and connectors. At the end of the day, publishing is a very people-centric business, in spite of everything we're reading about AI and technology. We help maintain that ecosystem between editors, agents, and publishers around the world.
Our publishers abroad are just like publishers here—they're looking to publish books that fit their markets, their particular lists, their companies' strengths. Our job is to drill down, really get to know them at a granular level, and make recommendations that are editorially neutral. We're looking for things that will be commercially successful, award winners, passion projects—but we're not trying to sell anything. My whole job is to advocate for a roster of editors around the world, finding books they want to publish that their readers want to read, without any other agenda.
How has technology changed your work?
During 2019 and 2020, I recognized that our biggest clients are very commercial houses. Yes, they also have incredible literary imprints, but they're by and large big commercial houses with names like Stephen King and John Grisham. A lot of scouts focus on the glittering debut literary novel, and that's important, but I wanted to make sure we were covering everything.
It started with Wattpad. After the success of Fifty Shades, [Anna Todd’s] After series became a huge bestseller. We found that book early because someone in our office was following the story online. We latched onto it, got in touch, and two of our clients bought it. It was their #1 bestseller that year. I thought, We should really have a person in the office in charge of this. That's morphed over the years, and now we’re closely following social media discussions and trends, trying to stay on top of them as much as any agent or editor is. We talk about them weekly and discuss them with our clients.
How has Zoom changed your relationships with clients?
We used to see our clients twice a year at the book fairs in London and Frankfurt. Now with Zoom, we can have regular check-ins to discuss strategy, trends, what's working and what's not. When it comes to rapid-fire, TikTok-driven publishing, that's really important. At the same time, things haven't changed entirely. We still get together—there are still groups of editors and agents who meet for happy hours. We try to fill our schedules with lunches, drinks, coffees, dinners. We go to their offices. It's still very social.
What's the biggest misconception about scouts?
I don't think it's as mysterious as people imagine. We have conversations, read books, try to make things happen. We're book people reading all the time. Yes, we're competitive like most people in publishing, but it's all in service of the same goal—finding good books and getting them into readers' hands in every format possible.
