Project Person // Profile #10

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Meet Joy Eggerichs Reed // Project Person #10

What project are you currently working on?  Punchline: We are currently representing several authors for the traditional publishing route (think imprints of Harper Collins, Penguin, Hachette, etc.) as well as helping people early on in the stage of getting their ideas clearly laid out to make the writing or speaking process easier.

I personally help speakers with crafting or improving keynotes (which I love to do), and together with my colleague Amelia who is an incredible developmental editor, we help people take huge strides in their writing through our writing cohorts, workshops, and individual assistance.

What did it take to get started? I was taking a sabbatical from my own career as a writer and speaker and feeling like I wanted to move away from being forward facing to being the cheerleader for other people I felt were incredible communicators and whose voices I wanted to see in the world.

I am an activator by nature, so getting started was not the hard part. Rather, the hardest part over the eight years of Punchline has been fine tuning it to work best not only for my clients but for my actual skill sets—not just what people want me to do for them.

What’s your most impressive or favorite stat? I first realized I loved friendly-firm negotiating when I bought a car in my mid-twenties and the dealership offered me a job to sell cars.

What’s something that never would have happened for you without this project? After negotiating my own book deal (more on that below), the process is what gave me empathy for authors in a way I would not have otherwise. Being an agent is sort of like being an emotional support dog—or perhaps an emotional support BULL DOG.

What keeps you up at night? My children

What are some of your other projects? Previously, Love & Respect Now and The Illumination Project. Currently, a fun networking group in Paris called Women, Work and Wine that scratches my itch for communication and connecting people and helping them find solutions to their creative ideas or career obstacles.

Joy’s career is all about getting words into the world. 

But, ironically, it was birthed from some pretty gnarly words—unfortunate platitudes from church-ladies like, “Don’t worry, you’re pretty. You’ll get married soon.” 

At that point in time, Joy was newly single, having just gone through a big breakup.

...Like broken-engagement-big.

She was also directing her parents’ marriage ministry 🫠

Her parents had written a book on marriage that had become THE book on marriage—it’s sold over two million copies!—and as Joy spent her workdays entrenched in the world of couplescouplescouples, she personally navigated heartache and then singleness, two topics rarely addressed in such a sphere. 

And then as she entered her thirties, single, the well-meaning knee-pats moved from, “You’re pretty” to “You’re picky”. In her frustration (“That’s some pretty bad theology, church lady!”), Joy found her own message taking shape. 

She told her father she had something to say to her own generation, and he gave her a much more helpful platitude: Go hone that message, for both the stage and the page. 

“No one was asking me to speak on stages though,” she joked, so she channeled her energy where she didn’t need permission: writing. 

Joy had never considered herself a writer, but she knew she loved communication. In fact, taking classes in her Communications major showed her that she “wasn’t dumb”, as she had felt at times growing up; she just hadn’t been taking the right classes. 

After graduation, she studied the communication styles of different pastors, took improv classes, and began to write, eventually honing this message of her own focusing on marriage, dating, and singleness for her generation. 

And then as her writing took shape, she began pursuing speaking opportunities. 

In fact, that’s where I was first introduced to Joy. I heard her speak at a Plywood Presents event nearly ten years ago, and of all the incredible speakers that year, she was the one I remembered most. She was authentic, funny, and just so refreshing. 

Publishers thought so too, and she was approached for a book deal. 

(As someone who has been in the process of pursuing a book deal, let me call out how wild that is!) 

She served as her own agent, negotiated a contract and advance, and completed the manuscript in full. 

But then she gave the advance back. 

(I’m sorry, what?!) 

It just wasn’t feeling right. She wanted an editor who would dig deep with her, but she felt as though they were just okay-ing everything and passing along the manuscript for quick print, as if they were just leaning on her parents’ names. 

And, that breakup?! That guy was releasing a book around the same time Joy’s was set to release, turning the excitement of that process into apprehension instead. 

Instead of moving forward with something that felt inauthentic and off, she pulled out of the book deal and returned the money. 

(The book lives in its entirety in a word doc on her computer somewhere, Godblessit.)

“It looked like a failed experience, but I had no idea what it was shaping me for,” she told me as she recounted that season. With this book-that-never-was, Joy got to be an agent, negotiate a contract, work with an editor and publishing house, write and edit an entire manuscript…

Her father understood the value of the experience, and he asked her to be his agent. Friends and colleagues took note too, asking her to represent them. 

A vague idea for a business began to form. 

Also forming? A love story! Joy met a guy named Matthew, they got married, and he was offered a job in Paris (wow that sentence covered a lot of ground). 

Matthew’s company kept asking questions about Joy’s plans for Paris, as they had been burned in the past by spouses who did not acclimate well to such a move. Did she have a job or something to keep her busy?! 

Joy took that as the final bit of permission she needed. In 2017, just one week before Joy and her newlywed husband moved to France, she launched Punchline, focusing on clients who are good “on the stage and on the page”. 

“We can pay a bunch of money for a business degree,” her husband told her, “or you can give this a shot, see what you can learn, and maybe even make a little money.” 

(When I asked her later what advice she would give to people starting their careers, she said, “Maybe don’t start a business the week you move to a new continent?!”) 

For the first few years, she focused on booking speaking gigs for her clients, growing her roster to over 60 speakers. 

She hired some people but didn’t love management, she did some coaching and dabbled in the literary side of things, and she even independently published two books: one called Get to the Publishing Punchline: A Fun (and Slightly Aggressive) 30 Day Guide to Get Your Book Ready for the World (I even got to blurb this one! see below) along with Writing with Bernard the Baguette: A Kids (Fun and Silly) Guide to Discover the Joys of Writing. 

Joy assimilated well to married life in France, she and Matthew had a couple of kids (which she gave alter egos, receipts below), and she told herself that she would know exactly what she wanted Punchline Agency to be by the time she turned 40. 

…But then she turned 40. 

Nearing the end of maternity leave with her third bébé, Joy decided to invest in herself a bit, and with the hope of finding some clarity, she signed up for a multiple day life planning intensive. 

I Marco Polo-ed her not long after the intensive, telling her all about my manuscript and asking if she would be my agent. I’ve always loved Joy’s fresh approach to the antiqued publishing industry, and I knew she was a history nerd. Surely she’d be all over this book! 

But unfortunately* (*only for me), that life planning intensive had given her the clarity she was searching for. 

She decided to focus on “helping creative communicators get their words into the world” through (1) coaching/consulting and (2) creating Punchline Publishers, a hybrid publishing alternative to the traditional publishing route. 

(She would also continue to traditionally represent non-fiction authors, but representing fiction didn’t make into her life plan. However, sweet Joy connected me to the guy who ended up becoming my agent, and I am forever grateful!) 

The speaker agency did not make it into the plan either, but that side of the business was rolling! She easily could have sold that business or kept it going under someone else’s management.

But instead, she gave the business away. 

This is one of the things I love most about Joy. Like she did when she returned her first book’s advance, she listened to her mother’s advice (a much more helpful and sound platitude): “Don’t lose your peace.” 

Instead of following money or pride, Joy followed her peace and gave the business to the gal who had been running it. 

I kept digging at this decision. “Be free to be free,” Joy told me with a laugh and a shrug. 

The Punchline of today now offers month long writing cohorts twice a year, allowing Joy to really focus on what she loves most: coaching writers and getting them the clarity and connections they need to move forward. 

(“I love telling people what to do,” she says with a smirk in the little marketing video on her website.) 

These small groups are chosen from a group of applicants and meet together via the asynchronous video app Marco Polo for thirty days, learning from Joy and her developmental editor Amelia, as well as from each other. 

The cohort members are a mix of fiction and non-fiction writers. Some come to the cohort with a complete manuscript and a proposal in progress; others come with just a vague idea of what they think they want to get into the world. 

In four weeks, the cohort members walk away with a finished book proposal. Punchline even typesets it, “making it beautiful”, and Joy says this is her favorite part of the process: watching people open up their completed proposal and see that they do, in fact, have something ready to share. 

Her other favorite part is watching the relationships form between the cohort members. In just a month, they go deep with one another. “They were telling each other ‘I love you!’ at the end of the last cohort!” she remembered with a laugh. 

At the end of the month, in addition to the finalized proposal, Joy also gives a personalized next steps doc to each participant, even including lists of people to reach out to. Then the group “graduates” and often continues to meet on their own, continuing to invest in these deep relationships. 

“It fills up my soul to see what people are capable of doing,” she said. 

Having followed Joy’s journey as she’s built Punchline, I’ve watched her bravely try the things the world told her she should be doing (“I kept shoulding myself!” she joked), and I’ve watched her confidently step away from those things when they felt inauthentic. I so admire her intentionality.

“Anything else you took away from that life planning experience?” I asked her as we were finishing up this interview. 

She took a little detour, telling me about a way she now approaches purposeful time with her kids (scheduling 1:1 time with them and treating those blocks like you would a client!) but then she said something that summed up her journey so well.

“I just want to delight in them, you know?” 

That’s the overarching feeling you get from Joy: delight.

She delights in her family, her work, the communicators she gets to coach… 

It’s not lost on me that her name is Joy, but “delight” is more of an action, a verb. I have joy, I am happy, I … delight.

It’s a single word that represents so much—being intentional, taking risks, making choices. 

And in a world that is frustrating and hard and confusing sometimes, this seems to be the message behind all of Joy’s other messages, the one word behind all the others.

Delight. 

Her punchline. 

-Callie

p.s. Punchline is accepting applications for their next writing cohort! You can learn more and apply here.

Next week, I’ll dive into a hack Joy created called DCS which actually helped me make two of the biggest decisions related to my book publishing journey. (You can take a guess at what that stands for, but I promise you you’ll never get it.) Stay tuned!

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