July/August 2016
Michael Szczerban
State:
New York
Four veteran agents talk about the business of books, the secret to a good pitch, and what authors should do in the lead-up to publication.
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The story of the Book Group sounds like the setup for a feel-good comedy directed by Nancy Meyers: Four young women with literary dreams meet in New York at the dawn of their careers. Passionate about books, they become fast friends and professional confidantes. As literary agents, success means long hours, a little self-doubt, and a lot of courage—but they find it, inking deals, launching authors, and building agencies that bear their own names. Finally, fifteen years later, they notice what’s been obvious to the people around them for years: They ought to be in business together.
For Julie Barer, Faye Bender, Brettne Bloom, and Elisabeth Weed, that’s more or less how it all unfolded. Starting their careers as agents just before the turn of the twenty-first century, their paths intertwined for a decade and a half before they formally joined forces as partners in the Book Group in June 2015.
Bloom joined the Kneerim & Williams agency in Boston in 2000, and when she moved to New York a couple of years later, Weed joined her from Curtis Brown. Meanwhile, Bender and Barer, a former bookseller, were first connecting as assistants at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. While Bloom remained at her firm and eventually became a name partner, Bender, Barer, and Weed all moved on from the positions where they initially met to open their own independent agencies.
By the time their partnership became official, all but Bender had come to share common office space, and the quartet often sought one another’s counsel. As Barer says, “Suddenly it became so obvious.” And now, a year in? According to Weed, “It’s a lovefest.”
The partners of the Book Group are joined by agent Rebecca Stead, a Newbery Medal–winning author who is also Bender’s client, and associate agent Dana Murphy. Together, their clients include Kristin Cashore, Stephanie Clifford, Elisabeth Egan, Joshua Ferris, Charles Finch, Charlotte Gordon, Sarah Jio, Lily King, Dan Marshall, Paula McLain, Liane Moriarty, Celeste Ng, Francisco Stork, and J. Courtney Sullivan, among others.
Barer, Bender, Bloom, Weed, and I spoke in the Book Group’s office on West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, a part of town that’s home to several boutique agencies, about how their partnership came to be.
How did each of you get your start in the business?
Bloom: I began my publishing career as an intern at the Atlantic in 1999 and became an assistant agent at Kneerim & Williams in Boston in 2000. I was with them for fifteen years: first as an assistant, then a junior agent, an agent, a partner, and then a name partner. I opened their New York office in 2002. I must say how deeply grateful I am to Ike Williams and Jill Kneerim. To watch them was like watching artists at the peak of their craft. That amazing experience has informed my working here, because I knew the benefits of being around other people who you think of as smarter than you are, and who you learn a lot from.
I probably have the most eclectic list at The Book Group. I work on nonfiction, journalism, psychology, science, history, biography and memoir, cookbooks, design books, and also literary and commercial fiction.
Weed: I started my career in 1999 as well, as an assistant at Curtis Brown. Then I got a call from a very senior agent at Kneerim & Williams named Brettne Bloom. Reagan Arthur [now publisher of Little, Brown] said she should call me. Brettne had just moved from Boston to New York, and as I found out later, Ike and Jill basically felt she needed a friend—so she was allowed to hire me. I may have sold all of two books at the time, but Kneerim & Williams gave me my real start, and I have so much to thank them for.
The agency was predominantly nonfiction and very smart. As my list developed, I became more interested in the commercial side of things and felt like I should go to a more commercial agency. I was at Trident for two years before starting Weed Literary on my own. I did that for six years before joining these guys—although talk of joining together as The Book Group was probably a three- or four-year endeavor.
My list is predominantly commercial and literary fiction. I do some memoir, some investigative journalism, and some self-help.
Bender: I got started in 1996 working for the agent Nick Ellison, who was loosely affiliated with Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. This was back in the day when Nick would go into his office after sending a twenty-five-page partial manuscript to somebody and emerge from his office six minutes later having sold it for $750,000, with another deal for $500,000 in Germany. It was unbelievable. I remember coming home and telling my mom, “This is great! It’s piece of cake.” It was the most misleading introduction to this career.
I worked for Nick for two years and then went to work for Doris Michaels, whose small agency doesn’t exist anymore. She gave me a wonderful start. She had a terrific assistant and a small client list, but hired me as her office manager anyway. I didn’t have much to do except build my list, which was such a beautiful gesture on her part. I didn’t have that bottleneck that so many people have, where you’re assisting someone else while building your own business.
I worked with Doris for a couple of years, and then moved to Anderson Grinberg, which is now two separate agencies run by Kathleen Anderson and Jill Grinberg. That was a short but amazingly informative time for me. Until then I had worked on only adult books. At one point, I had a gut feeling about a novel that I couldn’t let go of, but I also couldn’t sell it. I started to describe the story to Jill, and as far as I got was, “It’s about a sixteen-year-old boy,” before she said, “It’s probably YA—you should send it to young adult editors.” I did, and had an auction for it, and that author has gone on to win awards and is a very meaningful client.
That opened the door to what’s now the bulk of my list. For me, it’s all fiction: about 75 percent YA, children’s, and middle grade, and 25 percent adult.
Barer: My first job in publishing was working at Shakespeare & Co., the bookstore that, RIP, no longer exists. I loved hand-selling books so much that I started to think about doing that earlier in the process. I had no interest or talent in writing, but I loved to edit. But a lot of friends were stuck in junior positions in big houses and were unhappy. Then a friend of my mother’s took me out to lunch and told me, “You don’t want to be an editor. You want to be an agent.” She gave me a list of places to send my resume to, and I got an offer as an assistant at Sanford Greenburger, where I met Faye. I started out with Heidi Lange and then moved over to work for Theresa Park. Theresa was an incredible mentor and boss, and gave me opportunities to pursue my own interests and to watch a master at work.
Bender: Theresa talked me through my first deal even though I had no affiliation with her whatsoever.
Barer: That’s how she was. So generous.
And now she represents huge novelists on her own.
Bender: Nick Sparks, Debbie Macomber, Emily Giffin, Janice Lee. She has an incredible list. The Notebook was the first book she ever sold.
Barer: Elyse Cheney was also there and a great mentor. I started in 1999, and by the end of 2004, Elyse and Theresa had both decided to leave and start their own companies. I was ready to graduate into a more senior position, but I didn’t have the list yet. They offered me an opportunity to leave when they did—to start my own company and do some stuff on the side for them to pay my bills as I found my way. I thought they were totally crazy, but I did it. That was the beginning of Barer Literary.
My list is 99 percent fiction. I do a little bit of narrative nonfiction and memoir when it feels irresistible. The fiction is mostly literary and upmarket women’s fiction. It’s whatever I fall in love with.
You each found role models in agents who had started their own firms.
Barer: One of the great gifts that Theresa and Elyse gave to me was their encouragement. Back in those days, nonfiction was easier to sell, and selling for more money, than fiction. But I didn’t have the eye for it, and they said to me, “You love fiction. Just do fiction. Don’t worry about trying to be good at everything. Do what you’re passionate about and go with what you’re good at.” Thank God.
Bloom: I thought that when I went into publishing I’d be working in fiction, because that’s what you think when you’re twenty-two and going into publishing. I was, and am still, a passionate reader of fiction. But Jill Kneerim opened my eyes to the possibilities of nonfiction. Really good narrative nonfiction can be just as compelling as a wonderful novel. I studied the proposals she developed with some of the leading minds in the world, and they were all written with great authority but drew you in with storytelling, with voice, with all the things we love in great fiction.
Bender: I didn’t have one particular mentor. I got meaningful bits and pieces from different people, like Theresa Park walking through my very first deal and Jill Grinberg opening my eyes to kid lit. But mostly it's been through the three of you—plus my dad. He is a small business owner, doesn’t work in publishing, and isn’t in New York, but he has been a huge influence on how to approach decisions that impact one's business and how to conduct oneself in business.
Weed: I found that experience in these women, too. I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s true. Ever since I worked with Brettne at Kneerim & Williams, she was the person I bounced ideas off and talked to. When I was in an auction or negotiating a deal, I would be calling the women in this room. We would go over our submission lists together. I found mentors in my peers—and they’re now my partners.
You told me that during the photo shoot for this story, you were all coming up with title ideas for one of your clients’ books. Did you have those kinds of conversations before you became partners?
Bloom: We were already collaborating before we officially became the Book Group. Three of us [Bloom, Weed, and Barer] were already sharing office space, and those conversations were happening organically: about titles, about jackets, about book ideas. It happened in the hallways and our offices just as if we were colleagues.
Bender: It’s been happening, to a certain extent, for our whole careers. There have been few other people I’ve called regularly throughout my whole career.
Barer: We’ve known each other since we were assistants.
Bender: It has been the longest vetting process. [Laughter.]
Barer: We have a weekly meeting where we cover a wide range of topics, both personal and professional. It’s the highlight of my week. The opportunity that we have for collaboration is one of the best things about coming together.
Bloom: I will move heaven and earth to be at that meeting.
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Bender: This experience of joining together has been like going from black-and-white TV to color. I was content with black and white until I knew what color was. I was really, really happy having my own agency. But this is so much more vivid. It’s much more engaging, much more rewarding.
Barer: Part of why this arrangement works so well for us is that we’ve each had ten to fifteen years of experience, either at bigger agencies or on our own. We came in with established lists and careers, and we all are equals. That’s why it was a seamless process to work out the nuts and bolts of what the Book Group would look like. We’re lucky that we came together at this time in our lives and careers when we have so much to offer each other.
Weed: A year in, we just had a partners’ meeting. We went around the room and talked about our highs and lows, and we all only had highs. That speaks to what we have: It’s a love fest.
What caused you to join forces?
Barer: Suddenly it just seemed so obvious. It evolved very naturally and then very quickly.
Weed: After we joined forces and sent an email out saying, “Ta-da, world!” Amy Einhorn [the publisher of Flatiron Books] wrote us, saying, “We all knew this was happening already.” It was a natural progress.
I’m imagining a movie montage—one of you looks up, and then another, and another, and all of a sudden you’re all frolicking on a hill.
Bloom: You’re running to the Eiffel tower—“I’m going to meet you there!” The three of us who were already sharing space started talking about it, and it felt like a piece was missing. That was Faye. It wasn’t that we had to convince you. As you say, you were living in your black-and-white world and when we opened the door, you were like Dorothy stepping in. I was like, “Come with us to the kingdom of Oz.”
You made an argument not for the love triangle, but for the business rectangle.
Bloom: I would call it the perfect square. We do have other people who we love who work with us, who are selling books and who we very much consider to be part of The Book Group. But for partners, it was a perfect square.
You’re now running an agency together. Meanwhile, some of the editorial colleagues you met as assistants have reached the tops of their imprints. It’s interesting to consider how editors and agents form a “class” that enters the business and rises together.
Barer: Yes! To see them have their own imprint, or be a publisher, or become an editor in chief. Reagan Arthur, Lee Boudreaux [editorial director of Lee Boudreaux Books at Little, Brown], Marysue Rucci [editor in chief of Simon & Schuster]—were all people we came up with.
Bloom: You wake up, and it’s happened.
Weed: You have to stop referring to yourself as the “young agent.”
Barer: And then someone asks you, “Do you know a young editor?” and you realize everybody you know is over the age of forty.
Bloom: Or when our bright young assistant is like, “We’re going to a party tonight… but it’s only for the young people in publishing.”
Barer: I am the young people!
Weed: But it starts at eleven and it’s in Williamsburg.
Bloom: We can’t do eleven in Williamsburg anymore.
Barer: It’s exciting to be in publishing when you’re young and there are all those fun parties. But publishing is also fairly friendly to women with families, and it does get better as you get older. It’s not without its challenges, but I don’t feel that I'm going to age out of this job.
Part of this idea of a class you grow with is who you learn from. Was your professional education like going to school, where you learn not only from the teachers who are a generation ahead, but also from your fellow students?
Bloom: It’s fluid. We are part of a class, but I don’t think people in a class ahead of us, like Rob McQuilkin and Sally Wofford-Girand, would consider themselves a generation ahead. I was Rob’s assistant, and they’ve all been very generous with their time.
Barer: I modeled my agency on Nicole Aragi. I was like, “She. Is. It.” I wanted to be her when I grew up. Now I consider her a friend and somebody I can go to. Everybody is on the same plane; you don’t have to be older or younger to discover a great book.
Agent Renée Zuckerbrot recently announced that she was joining Lippincott Massie McQuilkin after years on her own. Susan Golomb, who talked in this magazine about running her own agency, joined forces with Writers House shortly before that. Even the biggest agencies are merging: United Talent Agency just bought the Agency Group. It seems that agencies are mirroring publishers by joining together to get bigger. Is the Book Group part of that trend?
Bender: I would rather speak to our situation than the trend, which is to say that one of the factors for each of us is that things are changing. Contracts are changing, the e-book landscape is changing, and to have all of us together with a deeper, bigger footprint is to the benefit of everyone in this room, and in particular to our clients. To come together in numbers can be powerful.
What are some specific benefits? Are you talking about the particulars of book contracts, like rights and royalties?
Barer: I feel very confident in saying that I don’t think there’s anything other agents get from publishers that we don’t get. It’s a small business, and everybody knows what everyone else gets. Beyond that, we have opportunities we didn’t have before. Last week, two great booksellers came to talk to us about what we were excited about, what they were excited about, and what was working in their stores. You get more out of that conversation when you’re not just talking about your own list of forty clients. People I didn’t have a relationship with, because of the narrow focus of my list, are now coming into the office because they work with Elisabeth or they do nonfiction. Maybe there’s an opportunity for one of my clients there, or maybe it’s just great to have those conversations because something intangible comes out of them.
Weed: I’m the social coordinator of the Book Group. We have somebody in the office every week—a film agent, a producer, somebody from a magazine, you name it—that we wouldn’t have met otherwise. It’s interesting to think about the trend question, though. I don’t know the answer to where agents are globally.
Barer: I read the Susan Golomb interview in Poets & Writers Magazine, and she was, like, “I’m a lone wolf, man.” I think she was a lone wolf, which is what I used to say until it felt like I didn’t need to be a lone wolf anymore. I didn’t think I would start my own agency until the exact right circumstances happened, and then I never thought I would join forces with other agents until exactly the right circumstances happened.
Bloom: And I never thought I would leave Kneerim & Williams until the exact right circumstances happened. I’m not sure if the agents’ buying and selling and merging is mirroring the publishers’, but I do think there’s comfort and safety in numbers.
Barer: Certainly, once you join forces with people that you respect and enjoy, you realize how much you get out of it.
Bloom: You feel energized. I read this statistic about how a lot of people burn out in their jobs and start to look at a job change in their mid-forties. I love my job and I want to stay in my job, but I need to shake things up a bit to keep the synapses firing.
You weren’t looking at the state of the business, feeling imperiled, and looking for reinforcement?
Bloom: No. I would add that our clients were absolutely thrilled when they heard about this. We all read each other’s books, our clients read each other’s books, and our lists are very complementary. They were excited to be on the shelves together.
Is there a common level of service you seek to provide your clients?
Barer: We each come at our list from a place of strong editorial input, long-term vision, and deep involvement in every aspect of the publication. One of the things that brought us together was that we were so like-minded about the kind of service we feel we provide to our authors.
Bender: One of the great joys and one of the huge challenges is helping an author navigate his or her career for many years and many, many books. How to help authors find their way through changing audiences and formats and public opinions about content. We are similar in how we do that.
Barer: We take this job so personally. These books and authors are so important to us, which means the joys are joyful and the hard parts can be really painful. You don’t feel like an idiot coming in and being really upset about something because everyone in the room here gets it.
Bloom: Our Tuesday meetings are really about anything and everything that's going on for our books and our authors, whether it's title issues, jacket issues, talking about a new concept for a book, talking about the best time to sell something new. We try to think like publishers. We try to think long term and way ahead.
How would you describe the ideal author-agent relationship at the Book Group?
Bloom: We take on writers. I know it sounds obvious, but we want to fall in love with their voice and style and manage their entire careers.
Bender: My dad reinforced for me some things he had learned through his business. It’s important to have a very open dialogue and follow through on what we say we’re going to do. Those are seemingly simple things that don’t happen as often as they should. The relationship with an author has so many different facets to it, but with the core of honest communication it can nurture and grow.
Weed: Transparency. With the information coming between the publisher and us, that can be hard, but our authors appreciate that dialogue. And since we’re so fiction-heavy, we all do a lot of editing.
Barer: We all value writers who take their job seriously: both the writing of the work and the collaborative process of publishing a book. As an author, when you’re working on your first book alone in your garret, it’s hard to conceive how many people are going to have their hands on those pages by the time it comes out.
I think about that too. Not just the number of people I work with or whom I need to convince of a book’s merit, but what we’re all doing between when the editing is done and the book comes out months later.
Barer: This is on our minds every day.
Bender: Maintaining and nurturing the enthusiasm from acquisition to publication and beyond is the biggest challenge we have. Even if a publisher is thrilled to buy the book and beats out many other bidders, the time between those two events can be tragic.
After you acquire a book you can get even more excited to publish it, but you can also get nervous.
Bender: Buyer’s remorse.
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Barer: Or even if you’re excited, maybe the response you hoped for isn’t coming in. That time is a window of opportunity for us to work with the authors to build their presence in the marketplace.
Weed: We’ve had editors in here who say, “Yes, the blurb game is horrendous. But anytime I get a blurb, I can send it out to everybody in the company and it’s not going to be considered annoying or self-promoting.” If there’s anything we can be doing, we try to do it.
Bender: There’s an idea now that authors need to be savvy with social media. Ideally, they would be, but there are a lot who aren’t. That isn’t a nail in the coffin. It’s something that you work with.
Bloom: Some authors aren’t even aware of whom they know and whom their friends know. It might even just be a matter of building up their mailing list and making sure that you have everything lined up, so that when you are six weeks away from publication you have a time line for the parts of the plan that you are doing on your own.
What else do you tell your authors to do before publication?
Bender: Send presents to their publicists. Not necessarily in a financially burdensome way—a small gesture, like making cookies.
Barer: Small touches are very meaningful. No one is in this business for the glory or the cash.
Weed: I also tell my authors, right at the start, that I will return an e-mail or a phone call within twenty-four hours and I tell them to do the same. I have no ego about them following up with me about something. There’s a lot of playing tag. A lot of that window of time is staying on everybody to make sure they’re doing what they should be doing.
Barer: That fallow period is also a great time to start thinking about what you want to write next.
Bloom: One thing that I learned from all of you is the idea of making sure that the author keeps us in the loop on all communications. Sometimes things start happening and the process kicks in and all of a sudden you have first pass, second pass, galleys, and things are getting away from you.
Barer: The author doesn’t always know what to be looking for and we can say, “You know what, they actually forgot to do this.” Not intentionally. There’s just a lot of stuff going through a lot of hands.
Bloom: We actually have it in our client agreement now. “Please, remember to keep us in the loop.”
Barer: And don’t say yes to anything before we talk about it!
Bloom: Our biggest nightmare is when an author gets a jacket before consulting with us and says, “I love it!” or “I hate it!” We need to talk about these things before you reply.
Oh yes, the jacket conversation.
Barer: Are we there already?
It always comes up! What’s the best way to share a jacket with an author?
Barer: I don’t remember which editor told us this recently, but I thought it was a great idea. They just send it. They don’t say anything about it—they just send it.
Bloom: When we’re anticipating getting a jacket, I tell the author, “We’re probably going to see a jacket soon. Please do not respond and do not show it to anyone until we’ve had a chance to talk about it.” I think what ends up happening is that the author has spent so much time with the book and has a certain vision of what they want the jacket to look like, so the first reaction is often, “Someone else has come up with this vision of my book, and it’s not at all what I was expecting.” It could be amazing, but you’re never going to initially see it.
Do you mean it’s like getting a gift you didn’t want?
Barer: That’s a great way to put it.
Bloom: It could be an amazing engagement ring, but it's not the ring you wanted. It could be a sweater, but not the sweater you had your eye on.
Barer: It’s very easy for an author to turn that experience into something that means more than it actually does. “They don’t get my book,” or “They don’t really like it” or “They see it very differently than I see it.” It’s harder when the jacket comes from the editor with this loaded phrase: “Everybody here loves it”—so you’d better like it too. The author already feels like they have no agency. Sometimes you’re really lucky and the first thing out of the gate is incredible. Other times it’s twenty-five jackets of misery. It’s probably just as hard on your end.
I do lose sleep over jackets. I also get anxious over how many other things there are to get right before a book publishes. There’s always another idea we could explore, another insight we haven’t yet had. No matter how much time you have, it’s limited. You have to prioritize. But it never gets any easier to let go.
Barer: I actually feel like anxiety is what makes you a good editor. I think we would all say we stay up at night thinking about the email we didn't answer, the thing we didn’t do, or the author who is still disappointed.
Bloom: There’s nothing that’s left at the office at this job.
That’s hard to balance. How do you manage that?
Bender: Having kids was a turning point. I don’t want to sound awful, but it helped me become much more mercenary in my decisions. What I mean by that is figuring out what I can and can’t do, and being up-front and honest about it.
Weed: She is so good at that.
Barer: People get disappointed when we aren’t direct about what we or the publisher can deliver on.
Bloom: Often you’re representing something because you love it and you've told the author that you love it. You've made clear to them that you will do anything for their book. They have it in their mind: “My agent loves it! Everything in the world should line up for this book.” So when things don’t go exactly as you hope, there's almost no way to minimize the disappointment.
Barer: Your loving it doesn’t control the outcome.
Bloom: Right, and we all wish that our love would. But you can love your children more than life itself, and they're not necessarily going to want to play the piano. Being a parent has made me a much more compassionate and realistic agent because there are just so many things that are out of your control.
When you get an offer from a publisher, what’s going through your mind?
Weed: Depends on the offer! [Laughter.]
Say it’s for an author I’ve published before and want to continue with. In coming up with my offer, I’m thinking, “How did the last book do? What’s the sales potential for this one? How much special editorial sauce can I slather on this to help make it its best?” What’s your framework for receiving that offer?
Bender: I think we have a number in mind.
Weed: We’re looking at “What is this book? Is this book bigger?”
Barer: Right. Does it reach a broader audience? Has the author won a prize since the last book? What else has changed? It’s also us knowing the marketplace. We know what you paid for so-and-so’s book and how many copies it sold. We know what was just at auction and we know what our authors’ comp titles are doing in the marketplace.
But the foremost thing we think about is the author’s existing relationship with the publisher. Is she happy with the editor and with how her publication went? Do we even want to go down this road or is it better for everyone to start fresh somewhere else?
Everybody likes the new new thing, and competition drives price. That can result in a frustrating situation with an author’s second book, where it feels like the only way to get what you think is a fair advance is to take it out into the marketplace. That competition can get you the money that you think the author deserves, but it’s frustrating because you want, in the best case, to stay with the option publisher.
Bender: There are also realities of writers being people who need an income that counter all of the strategic thinking about what we should do. Human elements come into every decision we make.
Barer: And ideally it’s a conversation. I don’t think that you have to be a hostile negotiator to get a great deal.
Bender: There are specific rules about the information that we share and don’t share.
Barer: It is a game where you’re trying to help editors do their job—
Bender: But part of our job is withholding some of the information.
Some editors get a thrill out of deal making, while others see the effort and gamesmanship around auctions as a necessary evil they must endure to publish the books they love.
Bloom: What we struggle with…is that once the auction is over, there’s a winner, the publisher is thrilled, and it’s the best day ever. But you have to sustain that enthusiasm for eighteen months.
Bender: If an acquisition was fueled by competition alone, that feeling probably will not be sustained through publication unless other forces come in.
Barer: That’s why it is important for authors to know that the books that sell at auction or for high advances are not always the most beloved, and don’t always go on to be the most successful. There really is not a lot of direct correlation.
How does your relationship with an author begin?
Barer: I think the relationship starts with the book. One of the ways I know I’m really passionate about something I’m reading is when I’m rolling up my sleeves and taking out my pen at the same time.
Weed: You’re writing editors’ names in the margins.
Barer: I know that I’m the right agent when I see what the author is trying to do and have a clear vision of how I can help us get there. If we’re not on the same page about that, there is no relationship.
Bender: You’ll do a disservice to your author in the end if you’re not working in concert on that vision.
Bloom: It’s a little bit different for me because I work with a lot of nonfiction writers who often come to me with an idea. And then in talking about that idea, spending a day with them hashing out the proposal, really fleshing it out, there is something intangible. One of my first clients, Charlotte Gordon, wanted to do a biography of America’s first published poet, Anne Bradstreet, who wrote poems late at night in the wilderness while her husband was running the Massachusetts Bay Colony. I had not seen a word that she had written, but she talked about it in a way that got me so excited I fell in love with it. We worked on the proposal; Little, Brown preempted it; and her career was off. But it started with that conversation.
What core values do you bring to your work?
Bloom: Passion.
Weed: And compassion.
Barer: And commitment.
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Bloom: Passion unites the four of us, and everyone in this business, in some way. That love of the written word, the way we get moved by stories told well. It starts there for us. When we come in to tell each other about an exciting new project we're taking on, we always start with, “What is it about?”
Weed: Sometimes we'll be so excited but we’ve never pitched it before, and somebody else will say, “Oh, that's not a good pitch.” It’s great that before I pitch the book to an editor, I can test it out here and they’ll be honest.
Barer: We hear each other’s passion and help home in on the message.
Bender: The path is always so much clearer when it's not for an author you represent or a book you are working on.
Bloom: That’s really true when you’re in the heat of the moment in an auction, and you need perspective.
Weed: Oh, every time! I feel like I’ve never done an auction before and it’s my first time again and again.
Bender: Meanwhile, everyone else is totally calm: “Here’s what you should do.”
Barer: The exciting and challenging thing about being an agent is that you wear so many hats. You’re an editor while you’re getting the proposal or manuscript into shape. You’re a negotiator when you’re doing the deal. And then you’re an advisor. I like to refer to myself as a consigliere, like I’m in The Godfather.
Weed: Not a squeaky wheel?
Barer: Sometimes I feel like a squeaky wheel.
Bloom: My husband calls me Jerry Maguire.
Barer: “Help me help you.”
Bender: All four of us try gracefully to be that squeaky wheel—without being angry, cantankerous, or unreasonable.
Barer: You have to remember to keep the publisher perspective in your mind when you're asking for things. It’s a team effort.
Weed: And the longer we’re in this business, the more we have really good, collaborative relationships with editors. We can call them on the phone and say, “Let’s have an honest talk about this and figure it out together.”
For all the passion, agenting is still a job. What do you enjoy the least?
Bender: Negotiating the actual contract itself, which is why we have a fantastic lawyer who does it for us.
Bloom: Asking for blurbs. I feel like if there's a revolt in publishing it will be to storm the barricades of blurb tyranny. But then you get an amazing one and you’re like, “I love blurbs! Blurbs are amazing!”
Bender: Passing bad news along to authors is incredibly hard. We are so invested in the book that it's bad news for us and then we have the double whammy of having to call the author to pass it along.
Bloom: I have learned to make those hard calls first thing in the morning.
Weed: But sometimes bad news comes in the afternoon!
Bloom: Sometimes it comes on a Friday afternoon and you’re like, “Am I going ruin my author's weekend? Or am I going to ruin my own weekend? Or should we both just suffer together?” That’s hard. It’s also hard saying no to projects that come through, saying no to a good friend. Saying no is hard.
Barer: Another hard part is that this is a business with a budget and a bottom line and advances and salaries. Books are art, but when they go out into the marketplace, they’re also products you’re asking people to pay for. Sometimes having the conversation about art and commerce is uncomfortable. “Why do they want to make my book look like this other book?” Well, because people like to buy things that look like other things that they liked. I wish it wasn’t true but it is. Or, “Why are we all listening to the person at Barnes & Noble?” Well, because Barnes & Noble is a huge part of our marketplace and we kind of have to. Some writers aren’t very comfortable with the notion of commodifying their work. I respect that. But if you want to be published and read, we are part of an industry.
Bloom: This goes back to why the jacket is such a conundrum. It’s the first time you're seeing the commodification of your work. I think that’s the psychological reason these discussions tend to be so fraught. We’re not just talking about a book jacket, we’re talking about selling something. It’s the difference between calling a book a “unit” instead of a “copy.”
Let’s talk more about that. Some of the most difficult conversations are the most necessary, and the jacket is a prime example.
Bloom: I think jackets are becoming even more important than anything else—even blurbs—because we’re in such a visual culture right now.
Barer: We all are informed readers and it's very easy for us to navigate a bookstore. We have a gut instinct about what we like or where it is in the store or how to ask for it. But that’s not how the majority of America feels. I can tell you from having worked in a bookstore: People walk in and say, “What should I read? I have no idea what to read.” It is really important to work a lot on the signifiers in the title and on the jacket and in the jacket copy and blurbs. It’s hard for writers and people in publishing to remember that other people don’t have that internal compass when it comes to picking books, and they don’t all read as much as we do.
There have been a lot of think pieces lately about the use of the word “girl” in a book’s title, and what it means. Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, Luckiest Girl Alive…
Weed: There were several pieces in the last month.
Bloom: I’ve been thinking about this because our assistant just sold a big debut novel called Girl in Snow, and they’re now wondering if they should keep the title or change it. I have a lot of friends who probably read a book a month—mom friends, friends from home, all over the place. To them, the “girl” in the title is a signifier of a certain kind of book. It has become that. It’s undeniable. They’re looking for that next...
Bender: Psychological thriller.
Weed: That goes back to why certain covers might get ripped off again and again.
Bloom: I can see why writers resist those signifiers but I can also see why publishers need them.
Did you ever feel self-doubt about your paths as agents? I’m curious about the difficult moments along the way to where you are now.
Bloom: One was in 2002, when it became clear that for personal reasons I needed to move to New York—my husband’s job was moving here. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to become a full agent. I had been working with Ike Williams and Jill Kneerim for two years, and I’d sold a couple of things. But I was scared to call myself an agent. I didn’t feel like I was ready—I felt an agent was someone much older, much more experienced, and much more successful. Jill sat me down and said, “You have got to start calling yourself an agent. Just take the lunch meetings.” Later, one of the hardest conversations I’ve had in my life was telling Ike and Jill that I was leaving, because I love them so much and am so grateful to them for believing in me and for every opportunity they gave me.
Barer: When I started Barer Literary, I had spent six years saying, “This is Julie Barer calling from Sanford Greenburger Associates.” I was like, “Do I say this is Julie Barer calling from Barer Literary?” That just sounded redundant. And in the beginning I didn’t have an assistant. “When I answer the phone, should I pretend that I'm my assistant or just be me?”
I don’t think there is anybody in this business who hasn’t gone through that period of self-doubt. If they say they didn’t, they’re lying or they forgot. But somewhere along the way I stopped feeling those things. Will I ever have another book to sell? Will I ever do a deal for this much? Will I ever have a best seller? Will I ever sell 100,000 copies? Will I ever sell a million copies? You set all these bars for yourself, but then at a certain point those little things that you think are meaningful stop mattering. Whether you've reached them or not, you just are in it.
It’s great that in books, if you dream it you can become it. But you can feel like an impostor when confidence in your dream wavers.
Barer: We were all there.
Bloom: Yes, it never ends.
Barer: It’s a business built in dreams. It is about a belief in yourself and a little bit of fake-it-till-you-make-it.
Bender: I did the Radcliffe publishing course [now the Columbia Publishing Course] when it was still at Radcliffe. There were ninety of us, I think. I remember watching people defect into other industries, and it was like the peeling off the layers of an onion. More and more people who I felt were my people in this business were leaving and making more money and enjoying success in other places—while I was feeling like I had worked so hard in college to answer someone’s phone and stand at the fax machine. The frustration!
Barer: The years that I was an assistant while my friends had assistants…
Bender: That self-doubt manifests itself differently the further down the path you get and the more success you achieve. It’s never fully gone.
Bloom: I think it helps drive us. That little piece of, “I’m only as good as my last deal.” I think has everybody has been there. Even Jill Kneerim, who is so seasoned and has so many Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, talks about that feeling. I don't think it’s necessarily a female feeling or male feeling, it’s just a feeling when you really love what you do and you want to be taken seriously.
Do you think it’s different starting out in this business now compared to fifteen years ago? Brettne and Elisabeth, you mentioned that your assistant had a great but unusual experience with one of her first books.
Bloom: Her experience is quite unique!
Weed: It’s a really good story. Dana Murphy is our assistant and she had an intern here named Danya Kukafka, who read for us for about a year, and they became good friends. Danya left—we helped her get a job with Sarah McGrath at Riverhead—and then sent Dana the manuscript and she loved it. Dana came to us and said, “Danya’s written a really amazing book, what do you think?”
Barer: It was the first project she sent out, and it sold within forty-eight hours.
Weed: I think she had ten publishers in the auction. I don’t think she had one turndown, at least that we were aware of.
Bloom: It was pre-empted by Simon & Schuster.
Weed: Brettne and I have so enjoyed mentoring Dana in this process. We read it with her, we offered feedback, we helped her with her editor list, we made phone calls to introduce Dana to the editors she was sending it to. Now she’s having lunch with all of them. It’s great—such a success story. But it’s unusual for that to happen. None of us had that.
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What wisdom or practical advice can you give agency assistants coming into the business now?
Barer: The agent path takes many years. It’s a long build before you really have a sense of your taste and what you’re good at, and it takes time to understand the marketplace and all the players in it. It’s several years before you’re selling enough to support yourself. Look, we work on commission. We eat what we kill, so if we don’t sell a book, that’s our salary.
Weed: Unless your first book sells for seven figures, it takes most agents take three to five years of selling before you really can stand on your own two feet.
Bender: There are some differences that would make agenting really fun to get into now. When I was starting out, I tried to find authors by going to the newsstand and coming home with a bag of literary journals. It'd take forever to actually read them, and then I would write a letter. But how would you find the right address for the author? Now you can find people more easily. You can see who's talking about which ideas and more easily get a sense of who the experts are.
Weed: I remember what Dana said when we hired her: “I’m looking at this as an apprenticeship.” I think you have to go into this business with that mindset.
What are some of the best parts?
Barer: It’s an incredibly exciting business to be in, because of the role we get to play in shepherding books through this process to get them into readers’ hands. When you have somebody come up to you at a party or a relative write to you to say they just saw your name in the acknowledgments of a book they loved—that is the best feeling.
Weed: It is the best.
Bloom: What’s a surprise to me is that, when I wanted to be a doctor when I was young, I had a sense of what a doctor was. I interned for a doctor in high school. But I had no idea this career existed. Even when Jill Kneerim offered me the job I was like, “I’m a little unclear about what an agent does, but it sounds cool.”
Bender: It’s so fun to show my kids that I love what I do. I think it’s important and meaningful to provide the role model of someone who loves what she does.
Bloom: I have copies of all the books I’ve ever done at my apartment and my kids love showing people the acknowledgments.
Barer: Note to authors: I never get sick of looking at the acknowledgments.
What is a good pitch, and how do you craft one?
Weed: There’s so much importance that’s been put on the pitching, because that’s how you get an agent.
Bender: It’s really important for an author to demonstrate a certain level of understanding of the business. To say, “I’m pitching my work to you because...”
Barer: It helps if they can contextualize their work in the current landscape.
Bloom: I’ve been thinking about this lately. You all might disagree with me on this, but I don’t think it’s critical that an author be able to pitch his or her own work initially. Eventually they need to understand how to talk about it. But I can think of a number of projects over the years that I fell in love with not because of how they were pitched but because of the writing and the voice. It’s more introducing yourself and communicating in your writing that you have mastery. I go to lots of conferences, and writers always want to know how to pitch their books. I kind of want to say, “Focus on the writing.”
Barer: There’s something intangible that’s important in a query letter, but it isn’t necessarily distilling the elevator pitch for your book.
A writer doesn’t have to grab you in the first two sentences with a perfect description you can put into your submission to editors?
Weed: They don’t have to do that. That’s our job.
Barer: Writers are primarily talented at writing their books. Writing a query letter is a different skill set. When I look at a query letter, I’m more looking at what the story is about and the voice of the letter than I am asking if they nailed the jacket copy. Communicate what the story is about in a compelling way. It’s not whether you have the perfect elevator pitch but about whether you made it sound interesting enough for me to want to see the manuscript.
How do you then take a writer’s work and come up with your pitch to editors?
Barer: Some of it is very instinctive. After being in the business for seventeen years, you know certain editors for a decade and you’re friends with them and you know their kids. Some of it is picking up a phone and just being like, “I know you, this is your kind of book. This is our kind of book,” and telling them a little bit about the story and a little bit about the writer. Some of what we bring as experienced, successful agents is those relationships and that personal knowledge.
Bloom: The matchmaking part of this business is one of our favorite parts. We are so fond of the editors we work with. Getting to know them and their taste and making sure that we stay in touch…that’s why these lunches and everything else we do are so integral. When it comes time for that novel that’s about a horse ranch in Wyoming, you need to know, “Andrea loves horses.” Keeping that information current is very important.
What would you love to change about the business?
Barer: Blurbs. And God, I wish there was a way for authors to still get paid and for all of us to make money and for books to be less expensive, so that literature was more widely accessible. Asking someone to spend almost thirty dollars for a hardcover book is a lot, and for some people it’s just not possible. I wish there was some way to make those metrics work differently.
Weed: The system of making decisions based on track record. I know publishers have to talk to accounts who are saying, “No, we’re not going to take that author because the last book didn’t sell.” But the next book could be the best thing ever! I’ve had to change an author’s name and sell it to a small publisher because of the track, and guess what? It became a best-seller.
Bender: I also think we have to continue the conversation about inclusiveness and diversity, of writers and characters in books and for people in publishing. That’s something we all need to work toward.
Bloom: This isn’t what I would change about the book culture, but there’s so much competing for people’s attention. The Internet, obviously—and TV is having a golden age. TV is taking on the format of novelistic storytelling, in which you get a lot of the satisfaction you get from a novel: great character development, a sort of slow unfolding of a story.
Bender: And a finite start and finish.
Bloom: And you can watch TV easily with someone else, so you can share the experience. We need to remind people that there’s so much value in reading great books and expanding your mind that way, and making sure that stays an integral part of our life. The fact that we have a president who’s a passionate reader and whose favorite book of the year was a literary novel is really something. The culture is heading in a direction where books should remain the centerpiece of our cultural conversation.
Weed: And independent bookstores are having a comeback, so it’s not all doom and gloom.
How do you plan for the future of your business? My naive view is that you think, “I sold this many books and had this amount of money coming into the agency last year. Let’s try to do the same thing this year.”
Bloom: That’s basically about it.
Bender: We’ve all been doing it long enough that we can develop a sense of what seems to happen—the royalties coming in and that kind of thing.
Barer: You also know after this much time that it ebbs and it flows, so hopefully you build in a little bit of room for that in your planning. There are going to be some really good years, hopefully, and some less good years. The economy is going to influence that in ways that are out of our control.
Bender: Royalties are such a beautiful thing. In the leaner years, when you have less to sell, it’s great to have a backlist that can sustain you.
Barer: That’s another reason it’s nice to be partnered with each other. We’re looking out for each other in that way and talking about it with each other. How is this year going? How are you feeling about next year?
Bender: It’s something that I wouldn’t have thought to ask myself, but at our recent partners meeting the question was posed: What are your two-year goals? What are your five-year goals?
Bloom: We did some strategic planning and thinking about our goals and what we are going to do to achieve them. What steps are we taking? It’s helpful to think about the authors you have, where they are in their careers, and how to help them go to the next level. I think our motto is, “Everything in advance.” We’re thinking about what we’re doing tomorrow and what we’re going to do next year.
What’s next?
Barer: An even better year! We would be thrilled if all the joy and success and collaboration and enlightenment that came out of the first year of our partnership continued on and on.
Bloom: We’re always hoping that the next e-mail is something that’s just going to blow our minds. It’s so interesting how it just…happens. You’ll be having just a normal day and the e-mail will bing and there it is: something that’s so perfect for you, you almost couldn’t have dreamed it up. You just roll up your sleeves, get out the pen, your mind starts churning, and the wheels start going.
Michael Szczerban is an executive editor at Little, Brown.