May/June 2014
Michael Szczerban
State:
New York
Susan Golomb, whose clients include Jonathan Franzen, Rachel Kushner, and William T. Vollmann, talks about the ebb and flow of submission season, the art of the preemptive offer, and the gems she finds in her slush pile.
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To a beginning writer, the business of publishing can seem driven more by who knows whom than the quality of work that makes it into print. Part of the problem may be the way agents and editors sometimes talk about the slush pile—that never-ending supply of query letters and unsolicited manuscripts from aspiring authors—as if they were addressing a patch of stubborn basement mold. The fact is, slush is essential, which is why those same agents and editors keep reading it in the hope of discovering new voices and fresh ideas.
The slush pile affords unknown authors the opportunity to grab the attention of publishing professionals with their writing alone. While most authors I know think of slush as something to be avoided at all costs—a nightmarish wasteland policed by twenty-year-old interns—it’s also where some of today’s most interesting and successful writers got their start.
Take agent Susan Golomb’s slush pile, for instance. That’s where she discovered Jonathan Franzen’s first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (FSG, 1988), and Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking, 2006), and Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists (Dial Press, 2010). In addition to referrals, she still takes on new clients from among the twenty to thirty unsolicited submissions that she receives daily.
Golomb graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a theatrical production coordinator and story editor before starting her literary agency in 1988. Franzen was her first client, along with Gwyn Hyman Rubio, author of Icy Sparks (Viking, 1998); she also represents Yvon Chouinard, Harry Dent, Joshua Max Feldman, Glen David Gold, Rachel Kushner, Krys Lee, and William T. Vollmann, among many others.
This past February I waded through the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, in a different kind of slush—the weather condition called “wintry mix”—to meet with Golomb at her office in the Brooklyn Creative League, a community work space on the edge of Park Slope. She moved there from her previous office, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirty-First Street, in 2010.
Why did you move to Brooklyn a few years ago?
I had moved to Park Slope, and I had a young child. The commute was just awful. I’d get home late, and that interfered with my son’s schedule—he would want to stay up much later because he hadn’t seen me all day. And then somebody told me about this space and I thought, “It doesn’t really matter where my office is.” Plenty of agents work in Long Island or California. And the agent David Black moved to Brooklyn around the same time I did. Now I live a fifteen-minute walk from here. My apartment is at the top of the slope. I drop my son off at his school partway down and then I come here. It’s easy.
Is being an agent a more family-friendly job than being an editor? I occasionally daydream about one day becoming a work-at-home dad, which seems easier to manage as an agent.
When I first started my agency I did start it in my apartment, and it was just me. But it’s demanding work. You need to be accessible. Our iPhones are very freeing, but it’s not like I can hang out poolside.
Why stay in the New York City area?
When I bought my house upstate, which I’m selling, it was with the intention of possibly working from up there. But in the end I didn’t think I would be able to find an adequate staff up in the country, and it remains so important to have lunches and meetings with people in the city. I would have been three hours away—not an easy commute.
Who are the people you look to hire and what do they do?
You want somebody who is very intelligent, who’s a very good writer and reader, who is also well read. Then it gets personal, because of my particular taste. I need someone who gets the books that I do. I’ve only had one assistant who read exactly as I did. He commented on the same issues and loved the same parts. It was amazing; he was like my double, and I miss that.
Some of my books are kind of out there. They are ambitious in ways that are not the nicely crafted domestic novel. It’s hard to find assistants or interns who can pick up on the same potential that I see. I call some of the books that I represent my shaggy dogs. They’re exuberant and they try to do all kinds of things, but they may also have whole parts that need to be deleted or characters that need to disappear. They need a lot of grooming before they go out. I enjoy that process, and when I go out with those manuscripts, they’re so fresh and inventive and exciting that I do well with them.
How did you develop your taste?
I was the kind of kid who would read the cereal box. I couldn’t sit still without reading. And then when I got to college, I was an English major with a theater concentration. I found expository reports very boring, so I would write instead in Shakespearean English—for instance, a piece imagining the Dark Lady in his sonnets, working the necessary facts into a creative frame. They were really fun to write. I was always kind of out of the box.
How was that received? You were at the University of Pennsylvania.
My teachers liked it. I graduated summa cum laude and won the thesis prize.
What did you want to do after graduation?
I wanted to work in the theater. My first job out of college in the early eighties was with Arthur Cantor, one of a dying breed of independent theater producers in New York. He was like Max Bialystock, Zero Mostel’s character in The Producers. It was a miserable experience. I worked on his switchboard and I dropped calls all the time.
But you gained exposure to the world of theater.
I also worked for WNET’s Great Performances series. I was the production coordinator for a version of Alice in Wonderland they did with Richard Burton and Nathan Lane before he was Nathan Lane. Kate Burton, Richard’s daughter, played Alice. It was an all-star cast. One day when Kate was sick I got to read her lines in a scene with Colleen Dewhurst and Maureen Stapleton. That will be one of the five best memories I will take to my grave.
I loved the three-dimensionality of theater and television and films. But I ended up agenting because I found that you needed to be an actor or director to have creative satisfaction in that arena. Producing wasn’t creative; it was about logistics and getting things done yesterday for half the price. I wasn’t interested in that.
When did you start agenting?
My early career was a little bit checkered. I would work on a production, then at an agency, and then I’d leave to work on another production. I was in my twenties, feeling it all out. Then I landed at Rosenstone/Wender, an agency that handled film and television writers as well as authors.
Howard Rosenstone was the preeminent theatrical agent. He represented David Mamet and Peter Parnell and all these great playwrights. And Phyllis Wender represented some British playwrights and some television writers and also sold books. It’s there that I found Jonathan Franzen’s The Twenty-Seventh City.
Tell me more about that.
The novel came in unsolicited, and I read it and worked on it with Jonathan for a while. When I sold the book, it got a lot of attention because Jonathan Galassi, on the heels of the huge success of Presumed Innocent, said that it was the best book he had ever acquired. The scouts and the foreign publishers descended upon the agency.
It was exciting, but I was in a no-growth job situation. I looked around at other agencies to see if there were positions where I could do contracts or subsidiary rights while developing my own list, but there weren’t any opportunities at the time. So I started my agency in my apartment while I waited for Jonathan’s second novel.
That story reminds me of what Michael Crichton told Lynn Nesbit when he chose her as his agent. He said, “Let’s grow up in the business together.”
Yes! Jonathan and I are very close in age—he’s exactly six months older than I. We really did grow up together. I remember sitting with him and Jonathan Galassi at our table at the National Book Awards the year The Corrections had been nominated. Before the prize was announced, someone had let it be known that Jonathan had won, and we just sat and looked at each other, beaming. It felt beautiful. Jonathan Galassi had been quite new at Farrar, Straus, after he had been fired from Random House, so Jonathan Franzen was an early success of his as well.
Was Franzen the first author you represented on your own?
There were two. Gwyn Rubio and Jonathan Franzen. Both of those authors became Oprah picks many years later. That was really fun.
What made you want to represent Franzen?
It was the ambition and brilliance on the page. I was quite intimidated by the editing process with him. He was stunningly articulate, but he also had a breadth of knowledge of local government and civil planning and engineering and tax reform and corporate finance. I was just in such awe. But I also knew that the book really should start in chapter four, and that’s what I said: “Let’s make chapter four the beginning, and weave in the rest of it.”
As a reader, you have an instinct for the story that’s going to carry you along. Sometimes the writer takes you by the hand from the very start and sometimes that happens down the road of the book. Jonathan was a shaggy dog at the very beginning. [Laughs.] He needed some grooming.
How does it feel for you to know that a thing isn’t right the way it is, but would be right a different way? Do you get a particular sensation?
I think it’s a spark. Certain things jump out because they’re fascinating and fresh and compelling. It’s about pulling more of that material out of the mass of pages. It’s very energizing. Many of my authors don’t need any work at all, but the ones who do need work often require a lot of creativity.
Would you give me an example?
Rachel Kushner was a student of Jonathan Franzen’s when she first came to me. She wanted to write a memoir of her mother and aunt, who had spent some time as teenagers in Cuba before the revolution. They lived in an expat community near the United Fruit Company, and their parents worked for the government in nickel mining. And up in the hills, Raúl Castro was organizing for the revolution. Nothing really happened to them, but I thought: “What an incredible premise for a novel! What if we could actually have the revolution come down and descend on this expat community?”
I suggested to Rachel that she write her story as a novel. She asked, “Do you think I could do that?” I said, “Sure, why not?” I could see that she had talent. And then she disappeared for four years. She went to Cuba and did research and had started these different story lines, and we worked together to make them all fit. There was a lot about narrative momentum that she needed to learn, which was the challenge with that material: The book, Telex From Cuba, is from three different points of view. Of course, it was all her work. I don’t do any writing. I guide and suggest.
An editor’s job is often to help a writer see and evaluate the decisions the writer is making, sometimes unconsciously.
Exactly. When I take on a writer, if the book needs work, I ask, “What do you want your book to be?” I am here to make the book the writer wants, and not the book that I think is most marketable. I can say, “If you do this, I think it’ll sell more copies.” But it’s up to the writer. My role is to be a midwife to the birth of the book.
Did you pose that specific question to Rachel?
I probably did.
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What energizes a writer to disappear for four whole years, trusting in what just one agent said?
I know! [Laughs.] I was just at a party for one of my authors, Joshua Max Feldman, whose book Amazon has featured as a debut for February. He had sent me material that I thought was very well written, but his story was too slight. His talents were so much greater than his content.
I told him, “I think you're a great writer, but I don't think I can sell this and I don't know how to make it salable. Go write something else and send it to me.” And he did! He kept sending me stuff until he wrote this novel, The Book of Jonah, and now it's getting a great response. I hope that it does really well.
My authors all take huge risks. It's amazing that they trust me the way they do. But I have been doing this long enough to sense of what a book needs and what makes something stand out in the marketplace, because not everything does.
Part of your work is to give authors faith in themselves—that they can do the work.
Right.
How much of your job is coaching your writers to achieve beyond what they thought they could?
It depends on the writer. Many of my writers do need an injection of confidence, and others are more secure in what they are doing. It’s a different relationship with each one. As an agent, you wear many different hats. There’s your maternal hat, and your editor’s hat, and your businessperson’s hat, and your lawyer’s hat, and your accountant’s hat.
What’s the most challenging part of managing an author’s career for you?
My math skills. I know how to calculate 15 percent! [Laughs.] But royalty statements still strike the fear of God in me. That part is challenging. But I have good bookkeepers to take care of that.
Was it 1990 when you started your agency?
I was just going through a garage full of papers and discovered that I started it in 1988. I sold a nonfiction book about the coming collapse of Japan.
Was this when Japan’s economy was slowing because of its aging population?
This was before then, at a time when it looked like the Japanese were dominating the world. Sony had bought Rockefeller Center and every business book was how to do it the Japanese way. But this man thought the whole thing was going to collapse. His reasons were social and cultural as well as economic, and he told me about a guy he met who also felt the same way, but was basing it all on demographics. Japan had an aging population, and because of the war, they had a big age gap and no young people to fuel an economy. That person was Harry Dent, who became one of my big bestselling authors. He has a book just out now called The Demographic Cliff.
What kinds of books do you seek to represent?
I always want a book to tell me something new. I love a paradigm-shifting nonfiction book. And in fiction I want to be shown a world, or an insight into human nature, that I haven’t seen before. With nonfiction I think of myself as a general reader. If something seems new and interesting to me I assume it will be to others. With a novel, it’s an intuitive sense and an instinct for something fresh, which is what publishers always say they want. That can be frustrating. I’ll think something’s fresh and then they’ll say, “It’s not fresh enough!” [Laughs.] I love it when publishers say they want something they’ve never seen before, but when you send it to them, they say, “I have no comps for this.”
Would you explain why nonfiction tends to sell on the basis of a proposal, and why fiction needs to be sold with a full manuscript?
The reason that nonfiction has been traditionally sold on proposal is that the author needs the money to write the book, because it involves research and travel and expenses. And for fiction, I’m sure you’ve read countless novels that start off wonderfully, but they bore and disappoint you by the end. Publishers have the same concerns. The first novel really has to show your command of the whole arc of your story. I often sell the second and third novel from an author on nothing more than a piece of paper, because the publisher knows that that author can deliver.
You have an intense editorial relationship with many of your clients. How does that relationship change when you sell, say, Rachel Kushner’s Telex From Cuba to Nan Graham at Scribner?
You know, that novel was called “The Americanos,” but we found out that another book was called that. I loved that first title, and we struggled to replace it.
The first novel definitely represents the biggest commitment of my time and energy, because it’s so hard to sell first novels. Publishers are so risk-averse that the book has to be nearly perfect. Of course, some editors still edit, and some don’t. Nan is a great editor, and she adds her contributions.
I’m often less involved in the second book. Rachel went off and wrote The Flamethrowers, and I was the first reader on that, and I was just stunned. Telex was amazing, but this was leaps and bounds beyond Telex. It was an extraordinary document, with its muscular writing and incredible dialogue and milieu. I gave her some fairly minor edits, and I think Nan’s were pretty minor as well.
Sometimes the author really learns how to write a book from that first experience, and is able to go off and do the second one on her own. But that second novel can be hard. It’s like musicians who put everything about their life through their early twenties in their first album. And then they have two years to write the next one and don’t have the same breadth of experience to call upon.
What distinguishes the authors who are able to write a good follow-up novel or nonfiction book?
I think it’s different for all of them. The muse is fickle. So sometimes the second novel requires working with the author to ask, “What’s new here? What can you say that hasn't been said before? How can we make this novel work in terms of its narrative and its complexity and its characterizations?”
Did you ever want to be a book editor?
In college, when I was interested in theater and television, I was also interested in editing. The opportunities were always at the literary agencies. But now, agents are doing more and more editing. I am editing. I am an editor.
If you discover that an editor doesn’t put in the time, do you cross that person off your list?
I’ll think twice about sending something else to that person. I can take an author only so far and then usually the author’s like, “Let’s get this book out there.” We often get to a point where I feel it’s ready to go, but sometimes I still think that it needs more work. I hope and pray the editor will do that work, because if not, a reviewer is going to take the writer to task.
Is the lack of editing an epidemic? I really want to know more about these publishers who allow their editors not to do their jobs.
[Laughs.] Well, we’re all so overworked, and there’s so much pressure on the editors to acquire. It’s true for agents, too. A lot of writers coming out of writing programs are querying several agents at a time. I’ll ask to see a manuscript and say I need six weeks to get back to you. Then I get an e-mail saying the writer has an offer for representation, and can I read the book in four days, and I have to drop everything to read this book when I have my own clients who are delivering their own manuscripts that I should be reading.
Agents are experiencing what editors have been dealing with. They have all these books they need to edit and they have to drop it and read these submissions from agents overnight so that they can get the next great thing. We all should have twenty pairs of eyes so that we can do everything at once.
So it’s not editors per se, but the challenge of being in the book business at this particular moment in time?
Yes. That’s how the business has evolved. I mean, we work so hard. It’s a little unsustainable. I’m sure you’re constantly reading and editing and then you have the meetings and the lunches….
In order to figure out what’s really going on inside a book, I think you need to hold the entire thing in your head all at once. That’s not something I can do at 10:30 at night, after I’ve been writing copy and talking with my business office all day.
Exactly. I don't like to read during the week. If my attention starts to fail, I don't know if it's the fault of the book or if I’m tired.
You represent some writers who make serious demands of their readers, because of the length of their books or the leaps they require a reader to make. Do you think about the payoff a reader gets for his or her investment in a book?
I’m sure you’ve heard of the sweet spot, a book that’s very accessible to read but pays dividends of depth of characterization and insight and emotional heft and payoff. Those books demand less of the reader than the more literary books on my list. I have a spectrum. Bill Vollmann is way out there on the very literary side, and is very demanding of the reader. His language is extraordinary and very dense. And then there are Jonathan and Rachel and other more commercial writers who are still literary and deal with sophisticated ideas and themes, but there’s more of a pure-entertainment aspect to their writing.
Some people distinguish between “literary” and “upmarket” and “commercial” books. “Literary” is about the language and “upmarket” is about the characters and “commercial” is about the plot—when “literary” should really be all three of those things. Every book should be.
There are certain points in a year that you might want to sell a really big new novel. Would you talk about the ebb and flow of submission season, and why you might send something to editors at one point in the year versus another?
There are certain dead times in publishing. The summer is never a great time to be sending out something big, mainly because people are on vacation and you want everybody in the house available to read the book and get behind it. And if you’re planning on holding an auction, you want as many players as possible.
I find the best times to sell are September and October, especially leading up to the Frankfurt Book Fair. A lot of people will wait till the week before Frankfurt to send a book out to create buzz, and ride that into the fair. The same thing happens in April for London. January is a good month too. People are back from vacation, they’re hungry, and it’s a new fiscal year.
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I haven’t really seen the phenomenon of the one “big Frankfurt book” in the past several years. What’s your take on that?
The international publishers are really suffering right now, and they have less money. Several publishers in Holland laid off whole swaths of employees and their book industry is really in trouble. The Dutch sale used to be a very reliable foreign sale. Now it’s gotten trickier.
Once upon a time, before I started going to the fairs, people would run to their hotel rooms to read things. There was pressure on them to buy right then and there. A lot of them took a bath because they were caught up in the frenzy of the competition. Now people have learned their lesson, so they’re more cautious. Fairs can create buzz about a book, and everyone will be aware of it. But they’ll read it when they get back home.
Has the weakness in foreign markets had a real impact on authors’ incomes?
Yes and no. There was serious money in the foreign markets. Five years ago you could get six-figure advances routinely. Now you’re getting five figures, sometimes four figures, so that really does affect authors. On the other hand, some U.S. sales are inflated, because publishers are all looking for that same book. They may say no to a lot of pretty good books, and then just decide, “This is the one.” They all throw down on it, and it goes for millions of dollars just because it was the one book everyone agreed on in a given week. It’s so arbitrary!
As an agent, can you engineer that kind of frenzy?
The best thing is to have the strongest book. It always comes down to the product. There are so many agents, and there’s no way to know what else is on submission or that editors are reading part of your book and putting it down because something else came in from Eric Simonoff. The most control comes from having the best product, getting it to the right editors, and getting their attention on it. That involves a lot of follow-up e-mails and calls and being a nudge without being too annoying.
The ideal circumstance is when you send something out on a Tuesday afternoon, and a handful of editors call you on Wednesday morning to say they love it.
Yes, and that’s what’s happening with one of my books right now. I sent it out late, around six o’clock on Monday, and people started calling Wednesday. Now somebody is asking if I’ll take a preemptive offer. I’m not sure what I’ll do. But the happiest scenario is when the house that you really feel the book would be best at makes a large preempt. [Laughs.]
How many editors did you send that book to?
I went to twenty editors with it.
Is that common for you?
I can’t speak for other agents, but I'll do up a list. Basically, when you're doing an auction you need editors from the different houses.
You need somebody from Simon & Schuster, and somebody from HarperCollins…
Right, and somebody from Macmillan and so on. In this instance, I thought there were four really good editors at Penguin who I could see the book with, so I submitted to them all and only one of them will be able to bid—they have to work it out among themselves.
Sometimes if I think there might be an issue with the book it, I'll tell the author, “Let’s go to ten people, and if we get a consensus in the rejections, then you have an opportunity to revise and we’ll go to ten different people.” It’s often hard to go back to the well.
Would you explain what a preemptive offer is?
It’s an offer that is big enough to take a book off the table. You take it if you think the money in the offer is equal to or greater than what you would get if you actually had an auction. It’s very hard to know what the right number is, because individual editors could love a book but they might not get support in-house. When an editor calls you with a preempt, and you have the book out with twenty other editors, you take a risk if you decline the offer because other people are loving it. But the more people who are loving the book, the more confident you’ll be that you’re going to get to a certain level.
Of course, seven-figure offers are taken very seriously. And sometimes, if you’re starting to get rejections and you know that you only have so many viable players left, it’s best to take the preempt. Auctions are much more straightforward and let the market decide.
Have you ever regretted not taking a preempt?
I don’t think so. I had a book by Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, called Let My People Go Surfing. I had a great deal of interest in it—something like twenty publishers all wanting this book. One of them made me a preemptive offer that I turned down because I thought I was going to get a much higher figure. And I went about this auction and at the end, the one who wanted to preempt won, for the figure that they wanted to preempt at. Nonfiction publishers will often look at comps: how the Ben & Jerry’s book did, how the Starbucks book did. They all had the same number in mind. It’s wilder with fiction.
When you bring an author to meet publishers before an auction, what do you look for?
It’s always appealing when the publisher has a real plan for the book and can present it in both a specific and a wide-ranging way.
In Jonathan Franzen’s speech accepting the National Book Award for The Corrections, he thanked you and said that you were the smartest and toughest agent in New York City. What are the toughest things you have to do as an agent?
There’s a fine line that you walk as an agent between your relationship to your author and your relationships to the editors. You want editors to like you because you want them to buy your books. But you work for your author.
I once had a situation in which an author was late with a book and the publisher wanted to renegotiate the advance. I was just not going to let that happen. I consider that kind of publisher very shortsighted, when something like The Corrections took ten years and its publisher waited—and look what he got. But when the business wasn’t doing well, publishers wanted to cut their losses and were looking for excuses to trickle down their advances. That was an instance where I really took a stand, and it took months of push-back and some personnel changes to result in us keeping that advance. Now, the book came out, and it’s nominated for an Edgar Award.
Myriad issues come up that you have to fight for. You have to pick your battles, and sometimes just let go because you can’t control the outcome.
What is the hardest thing you have to talk to your clients about?
Calling them to tell them that no one is going to buy their book. That it has gone to forty editors and has been rejected.
Does that happen to you, even now?
I used to think that there were certain agents who always sold their books. Then somebody told me, no, even the Binky Urbans of the world sometimes can’t sell their books. It happens. It’s a tough market.
Have you had to part ways with authors before?
I have with some. It’s usually consensual. An old boss once told me that the author-client relationship is like a marriage: If it’s not working for one person, then it’s not working for both people. You have to listen to that. Sometimes I feel that I can't help an author anymore. It’s painful when an author whom you have a good relationship with delivers a book that’s bad and you have to tell them you don’t want to submit it. At that point, it’s up to them to shelve that book and write something else, or to seek another agent. You become very close with your clients, and even if it’s a bad book, you want to do what they want you to do because they’re your friend. But sometimes you have to say no.
You mentioned that The Corrections took ten years to write and that FSG was supportive of Jonathan Franzen during that period. Meanwhile, you had started your agency and needed income. How did you support yourself while you waited for his big book?
It takes about five years to really start to get royalties, and that’s the best. It’s passive income—you don’t have to work for that. I was fortunate enough to have two six-figure deals when I started. But I kept my overhead really low. I remember when I first took a commercial lease in Manhattan, it was scary because commercial leases are five years and it was expensive rent. But I had two Oprah books at the time. That was wind beneath my sails.
When did you feel you were ready to commit to agenting as a lifelong career?
I think it was early on, with those books that I sold when I first started. I felt I knew what I was doing. But I also knew that there were going to be lots of fallow periods.
My father was a physician, and he was very inspiring to me. He showed me a chart of his income: how he had started and how it went up. That happened to me as well, though I grew very conservatively. I hired people slowly. The agency is still a very small ship. It’s just me, my assistant, and my rights director and bookkeeper. It’s very cozy and efficient.
Would you ever want to be a bigger shop?
I’m more into a list of quality than one of quantity. To be a big shop, you need a lot of books because they’re not all going to be big books. I like for my list to be manageable and not to feel that there’s runaway growth. You might feel as if you’re on the treadmill and you can’t catch up.
How many books did you go out with last year?
Very few. The feeling in the industry right now is that editors want big books, and that the midlist has been shrinking for so long that it is nonexistent. I was looking for big books and wasn’t finding them.
How do you seek out new writers?
I get a lot of referrals, and I have an amazing slush pile. Both Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists and Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics were slush. The book I’m going out with right now was slush.
My assistant or intern will look through the slush first. I get twenty to thirty queries a day. My assistant will cull those that are worth pursuing and I’ll ask to see some material, and then I have to make a decision on it.
In that first concentrated moment of introduction, how does a writer get to the next step?
With a really well-written query letter that is compelling, that shows me the writer knows the book and is a good enough writer to intrigue me.
Some aspiring writers focus on the formula of the query letter: what the first paragraph says, and the second, and so on. But it sounds like you respond to letters full of voice and interest—that, for whatever reason, make you want to read more.
Exactly, and I look also at the authors and whether they come out of a solid program or if they’ve been published in magazines.
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Getting back to your early years in television and theater, do you represent those rights on your own?
I use co-agents for that. There are a variety of them, and I match the books with the temperaments and tastes of the agents. I’ve had so many books optioned, and so many books have even had the rights exercised, where the big money is paid. But not one of them has seen the light of day. The closest was when HBO optioned The Corrections and there was a pilot, but then they didn’t do it. Tom Rachman’s book was optioned by Plan B and they let the option lapse, and now both the BBC and HBO are newly interested in it. Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold continues to be optioned by Warner Brothers, so there’s hope for that book.
I think a lot of my books get optioned because of my attraction to theater and film and television—there’s something in my brain that is drawn to manuscripts that have something filmic about them. That’s what appeals to me. Also, I have such nice clients. [Laughs.] Even if they’re writing about really awful people. I am very blessed to have terrific authors who are real mensches. Many of them become good friends.
I’m curious about those relationships. There’s an awful lot of snark directed at Jonathan Franzen. How much of that do you feel?
Oh, I feel it terribly. It’s very painful. The whole Oprah thing was particularly painful because he is such a great guy and he was so misunderstood. What Jonathan said was taken out of context, late at night. 9/11 had just happened, and his book had just been published. Everybody canceled their author tours but Jonathan. His book had so many great reviews when it came out of the gate that it was just gigantic, and then Oprah picked it. He didn’t have to go on tour—that book was going to make a lot of money anyway—but he cares about readers and bookstores and he decided to get on a million planes when everyone was terrified of flying.
By the end of the tour, people were coming up to him and saying, “I don’t feel like your book is an Oprah book. How do you feel about that?” He was receiving feedback that caused him to question what he had done. Late at night, he expressed some ambivalence about it and, of course, it got picked up by every paper and it ballooned into a real sideshow.
If you read The Corrections, it’s all about ambivalence. That he was ambivalent is no surprise. And that’s why the night of the National Book Awards was very special.
Does it feel sometimes that these authors are a part of your family?
Yes. Some of them are real confidants whom I’m very close to.
Do you have an eye for picking up the people that you’re going to develop a real relationship with?
Well, the book comes first. I make a decision based on the book. I haven’t met or spoken to the author when I decide I want to take it on. It’s usually a happy coincidence that the author’s a nice person. I have some clients who are more professional—more cut and dry and it’s primarily a business relationship. But there are others who I would count as some of my best friends.
Are there books that you come back to time and again, to recenter yourself or to remind yourself what you’re looking for?
I know there are some editors who do that. I don’t. I tend to be neurotic and feel guilty that I’m not getting to my clients’ work.
When I first get a manuscript, I always have a pencil in hand because even though I might not take it on, I don’t want to have to mark it up again if I do. I print manuscripts and read that way. But to read non-critically, which is the great pleasure of reading books that are not your own, is a much different experience. I have read some books and thought, “This should be edited. Why did they let this author get away with this?” It’s hard to turn off that faculty.
Are there editors you haven’t worked with but would love to find a book with?
I’d love to have a book with Kate Medina. I think I’d love to have a book with lots of editors. I’ll stop there. I don’t want to leave anyone out. [Laughs.]
What defines a great editor?
I had The Imperfectionists with Susan Kamil. I think she is a wonderful line editor, and such a passionate and devoted advocate for her books. She is super smart and really understands publishing. I always feel in good hands with her.
Who are the younger editors who represent the best of the next generation?
I don’t have many books with the youngest editors. I think Millicent Bennett is very good; I have a book with her, Brando Skyhorse’s Take This Man, that she inherited. He did The Madonnas of Echo Park with the editor who acquired him, Amber Qureshi, and then Millicent inherited his memoir and she did a lot of work on it. It was already a very good book, but she was really, really meticulous. Lindsey Sagnette at Crown—I’d like to do a book with her. She’s very sharp. I just met Liese Mayer at Scribner, who I was charmed by. There are a lot of smart young people out there.
So how does a smart, young person catch your attention? What prevents you from sending a book only to the most established editors and publishers?
I do have my usual suspects. It really takes young editors asking me to lunch so that I can get to know them, because otherwise I won't think of them. There’s always the tradeoff that the more high-powered the editor is, the greater influence they’re going to have within their organization, so my tendency is to go to them. But there’s also the little engine that could, with the younger editors who throw themselves into the editing process and bring enthusiasm that somebody more seasoned might not.
Who are the agents you most admire now?
Early on, Henry Dunow was very nice to me, and Deborah Schneider referred some authors to me. Theresa Park is someone I really admire, even though her list is very different from mine, and I've called her when I've had questions. Julie Barer has great taste; I've often traded information with her. Sometimes I feel like Eric Simonoff and I are friendly rivals in a way, but I admire and respect him. Tina Bennett. Binky Urban, Sloan Harris, Esther Newberg. I respect Nicole Aragi a lot.
Is there a specific issue in the business that bothers you?
If writers do not have enough money to subsist on, they’re not going to be writing great books. The whole mess of relying on track record really gets to me.
If a first novel doesn’t sell well, those numbers are public. They are part of Nielsen BookScan and any editor can look them up. It used to be that editors wouldn’t have a clue and they would buy books based on the quality of the manuscript. Now, they’ll look at the track record and if it’s poor, no matter how good a book is, they won’t buy it. That’s because the bookstores will order half that many copies and it won’t make sense from a production standpoint.
Some writers can overcome a bad track record by writing in a different genre or they can write something so spectacular that it just cries out to be bought. But usually you won’t get much of an advance. It’s a real concern. A lot of times when books don’t do well, mistakes have been made, mistakes that publishers have made—and it’s not the fault of the book at all. And there are books that the publisher has done amazing things for that just don’t take hold. The track record just seems not to be a reflection of the quality of the writer’s work.
At some writers conferences the people on staff are really experienced writers who can’t sell their books, or are getting very small advances. And then there are these bright young things that come to the conference and pick up an agent and their books sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s a weird imbalance.
How do you prepare your agency for how the business might change?
We’re all daunted by that question. You just don’t know. For me, it will always go back to the quality of the book. It’s hard to know whether there will be gatekeepers or curators in the future. It’s unfortunate that writers have to do so much social media. So many of them are just not equipped to do it. And social media still doesn’t really work unless a book has been anointed by one of the traditional platforms. And then of course it can build. But for some small book just published, an author tweeting about it is not going to sell copies.
Are there publishers you see today that are enabling writers to find audiences better than others?
There are some publishers who have more hits than others, but it’s a chicken-and-egg question. Take Knopf. They have the money and the reputation to get the best authors, but they publish very well, also. They do spectacular covers and when they really get behind a book, they have really smart campaigns. FSG has a very distinct personality, and because it’s a house that doesn’t publish in all areas their imprimatur can be valuable. But everybody is up against the same questions and the same struggle.
Tell me about some good news in the business.
Book Court [an independent bookstore in Brooklyn] recently said that they had had their best year ever, and that they sold more hardcovers than they had ever sold before. This may sound Pollyannaish, but while the Barnes & Noble chain getting smaller is not necessarily good for publishing, it could move book buyers to the independents and the independents could grow. We could go back to a time where books are hand sold and it is about the passion of the bookseller and the community between the neighborhood and their bookstore.
What do you love about your job?
I love the discovery of new writers. I love changing people’s lives. There’s nothing better than giving life-changing money to a poor, struggling person who’s never made more than twenty-five thousand dollars a year working at some minimum-wage job. It’s wonderful. I love reading whatever Jonathan Franzen sends me; I know that I will have an incredible experience. I love going out to lunch with smart people. It’s a lot of fun to go out with the nonfiction editors in election years because they always have political insights. It’s really good to be an agent. It’s tough, it’s stressful, and it requires a lot of work, but it’s very gratifying.
Do you have any advice for agents who are just starting out in the business?
When I started out, I didn’t have a mentor and I was a babe in the wilderness. I didn’t know a lot of the editors. I decided that the way to make it was to handle only good stuff and always send it to the appropriate editor. If that editor sees they are getting something that is right for them, even if they don’t ultimately buy it, they'll know the agent is reliable.
For young agents, it goes back to the book. It just keeps going back to the book. You have to find those good books, somehow. Make those books, if you have to, and do the editing work.
Michael Szczerban is a senior editor at Regan Arts.
Scheduled pub date:
April 16, 2014 (All day)