March/April 2015
Michael Szczerban
State:
New York
Jennifer Joel, whose clients include Chris Cleave, Joe McGinniss Jr., Evan Osnos, and Shonda Rhimes, talks about the difference between selling fiction and nonfiction, what inspires her to go the extra mile for her authors, and what writers should really want out of publishing.
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Last year I was involved in expanding the editorial staff of a new book publisher, and as we looked for the right people to join our team, I reflected on the qualities common to the editors and agents I most admire. I realized that the best description of the job’s requirements is more than a hundred and fifty years old—found in these lines from poet (and publisher) Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Part of what makes the profession of publishing—and working with authors—so satisfying and challenging is that agents and editors are required to try on different personae, tell stories and amplify voices that have not yet been heard, and explore subjects across a spectrum of interests.
Jennifer Joel, a partner and literary agent at ICM Partners, doesn’t contradict herself—she’s too smart for that—but her experience illustrates the way in which the often conflicting forces of commerce and art intertwine in publishing.
After graduating from Harvard with a joint major in literature and history, Joel worked as an entertainment and media analyst at the investment bank Goldman Sachs in New York. After completing her contract, Joel reassessed her professional plans and began working as an assistant at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, a literary agency in New York. Soon thereafter, she caught the notice of one of ICM’s top agents, Amanda “Binky” Urban, and joined her staff. In 2013 Joel was made a partner at the agency. Joel’s clients include Chris Cleave, Ian Caldwell, Kevin Fedarko, Joe McGinniss Jr., Evan Osnos, Shonda Rhimes, Dustin Thomason, and many other novelists and prominent nonfiction writers.
Where did you grow up?
New Jersey, about forty minutes outside New York City. I had an idyllic suburban childhood.
Were you a reader?
I was a reader from what I’m told was a very early age. There is family story about my having memorized a book called Grover and Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum by the time I was two and a half. My parents’ party trick was to invite their friends to have me read a book to them, and I would recite and turn the pages appropriately.
I was a little reading automaton. I had one trick. But I actually did start devouring books not long after that.
What sticks out among your memories of that time?
A lot of my early memories are of movies that I saw or books that I read. They’re experiences linked by storytelling. I'm convinced that the earliest memory I have is of the time my father and grandfather took me to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; it was being revived in the movie theaters. I was so terrified of the Wicked Witch that they had to take me kicking and screaming out of the theater. It took my mother weeks to convince me that Snow White didn't actually die and that everything turned out to be okay.
What were the first books you remember choosing to read?
Well, Grover, for sure. Dr. Seuss. The classic books that most people talk about with fondness. Corduroy and Little Rabbit's Loose Tooth. I still have well-worn copies of those picture books on my shelves now.
And later on? Were there formative books in sixth, seventh, eighth grade, high school?
Much younger than that, even. In my parents’ house there was a closet full of purple-spined Bobbsey Twin books; I read every Bobbsey Twin book that was written several times. And it was not that I was a mystery lover; I didn't have a closet full of Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew. I was really interested in the family dynamic: two sets of twins, a girl and a boy, a girl and a boy. If somebody sent me a book today featuring two sets of twins, I would be very interested to see what they made of it. The potential for drama is just inherent.
What was your family dynamic like? Not two sets of twins...
Not two sets of twins! I have a younger sister and a very small nuclear family.
My mother had been trained as an actress, but from the time that I was born she stayed home and took care of me and later, my sister and me. My father works in the shipping business, which he assures me is as uninteresting as publishing is interesting. But everything is interesting when you start to learn about it—so I disagree with him on that point. I looked at that business a little bit when I was a banker, and I did some consulting work for him.
A friend told me: “Everything becomes more interesting the more you learn about it.” I think that’s true. One of the great things about our business is that you spend your time learning about a lot of different things.
You went to Harvard, ultimately. What did you study there?
I was a history and literature joint major. I picked it for a couple reasons. I thought, “When will I ever have the opportunity to sit around and read books for four years again? Never!” I thought that would be a good way to spend my college years. But I opted against English because it was never interesting to me to think about writing as feminist interpretation of whatever.
Like critical theory?
I wasn't interested in critical theory. I was interested in why people choose to tell the stories they tell. Context was always really interesting to me. One thing I often say when I'm talking to clients or editors about my list—which is eclectic and broad—is that a lot of my books have a foreign element in common, whether it's time or place or some little subculture that you don't encounter on a daily basis. I ask, “Why is it interesting? Why is this person the right person to be the window into that world? What will I be able to know at the end of this book that I didn't know going in?”
Did you have formative teachers who opened up a path for you?
For sure! They weren’t all literature teachers, though. The most formative was probably the drama teacher in my high school.
How were you involved in the theater?
I was an actress, I suppose, although that is a generous way of describing it. I was interested in the theater in the same way I was interested in the combination of history and literature, because you're looking for context when you engage with the text through a character—the questions that you wind up asking yourself and the answers that you wind up coming up with or inventing. He taught me to trust myself and my instincts—and my storytelling instincts—and how to read texts critically and deeply. You make the portrayal of your character your own.
Did you ever desire to act professionally?
Maybe when I was very young. My mother had been trained as an actress. She went to a performing arts high school, so we were constantly in the city seeing some piece of theater. She and my dad love that world and took advantage of our proximity to it. There’s something very glamorous for most young people about being on the stage, but I didn’t think about it in a serious way. That bug had long since been squished when I really started thinking about what I wanted to do.
So college became about books—a time of intellectual exploration.
I was in it for the general education. I really was. I didn’t know what I wanted to do going into school. I had a vague sense that I’d wind up in the entertainment business; I always loved storytelling and good ideas well executed. There are so few really, really good ideas that when you have one, you have to exploit it in all the different ways you can.
Did you ever consider writing?
I never thought about being a writer. The blank page and I are not friends. I love the process of storytelling, but I don’t relish the notion of inventing something from whole cloth.
What else did you do in college?
I was back in the theater a lot. I did a little bit of acting my first couple of years, but by the time I was a little bit more senior, I was looking at the other side of theater and did a lot of work with Hasty Pudding Theatricals. The level of professionalism was a fascinating preview to what the real world would be like.
Tell me about Hasty Pudding.
Hasty Pudding Theatricals is an undergraduate organization at Harvard and one of the oldest running undergraduate institutions in the country. I used to know all these details cold because I was also a tour guide. They do an original student-written musical every year. The company is all men, so the show is done half in drag. It plays for about six weeks in Cambridge, comes to New York, and goes down south for spring break. It’s a massive undertaking with a six-figure budget. We hired out for the director, orchestration, costumes, and set, but the rest was entirely student-produced.
When you're on the team you do a little bit of everything. The year that I was on the business staff, I ran special events and put on a charity event that benefited the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
That experience gave you a taste of what it could be like to develop creative work?
Yes. A script comes in and you get to make the whole thing from there—from the first draft to the final product—and all kinds of things go into that, and all kinds of people and talent are involved. It was fascinating.
How did you come to work at Goldman Sachs, where you went right after Harvard?
I didn’t know how to go about getting a job in the entertainment business. I wanted to work in New York, not L.A. I had taken a bunch of informational meetings with New York film companies and had the sense that it was hard to work in New York at the highest level of that business. I always wanted to work at the highest level.
TV really hadn’t made its resurgence yet, and it didn’t occur to me to work in New York doing that. I’d done some internships with David Letterman, and I loved working at the Late Show, but I was more interested in scripted narrative and that was happening in L.A. I was frustrated by the fact that it didn’t seem that you could do film at the highest level in New York unless you worked at New Line or Miramax. I interned at New Line and knew there wasn’t going to be a job for me coming out of school there. The one other job offer that I had, when I graduated from college, was to be a receptionist at Miramax.
So I could be an investment banker at Goldman Sachs or a receptionist at Miramax. There were a lot of reasons to choose Goldman. One of them was that many of the peers who I thought were really impressive wound up going to places like Goldman. I don’t know that they necessarily saw themselves as career bankers or consultants, but it seemed the logical next way to continue your education outside of academia. I actually had applied to law school, gotten in, and deferred. I felt like I had to get out of school for a little while.
At Goldman, I worked in what was then called the communications and media group, and I was the entertainment specialist. I was trying to learn what drives business in the entertainment space: how people make their money, how they make their decisions, where everything falls in the value chain. I thought that if I could get that skill set, I would distinguish myself from the thousands of other college graduates who are going to be receptionists at Miramax and answer the phones.
At ICM we’ve got great kids who come here right out of college, and they work in the mail room or as floaters and interns, and then they hope to move up to a desk. Had I understood what an apprenticeship business this is, I might have been more receptive to the idea of doing that. But at the time, when my options were Goldman Sachs and answering the phone, answering the phone seemed to be the less productive option.
Did Goldman teach you what you thought you’d learn?
It did in some ways. I do think I have an understanding of the way people who run the big conglomerate entertainment companies think about their businesses that other people just have not seen. I've had access to a perspective that other people haven't had. But none of it is rocket science. In fact, a lot of it is very intuitive, but unless you start to be asked those questions, you don't necessarily think about it in the course of what you do every day.
What are some of the questions you’ve had to ask about the big media conglomerates that your authors might not be asking?
One example is that we looked at the question of synergy at a very high level. Is there synergy in the entertainment business? I'm sure when you were at Simon & Schuster you talked about this because Simon is part of a big entertainment conglomerate. At the time I was at Goldman, they had a film studio and a TV studio and an unbelievable outdoor advertising business. If at Simon & Schuster you buy a book that you love, is it more attractive to CBS or to Paramount? Should it be?
Where do you come down on that? Is that kind of broad synergy achievable?
I think it is. It’s hard, and you have to come from a place where each individual business feels equally passionate and optimistic about the project. But look at Frozen. Disney had this movie that was incredibly successful and now they have spun it off into books, merchandise, theme park attractions. They have nailed synergy, in that respect.
What do you think about publishing companies being able to survive in a world where attention for books is being challenged by a range of different media?
I’m an optimist about the publishing business. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I’ll use myself as an example: I can be in the mood for a book or for a TV show or for a movie. Having an appetite for one doesn’t lessen my appetite for any of the others. You can accomplish certain things in each medium as a storyteller that you can’t accomplish in the other ones.
I relish the challenge both as somebody who helps make that stuff, but also as a consumer. Certainly our business is challenged in a lot of different ways, but I choose to look at the challenges as opportunities. Anybody still working in this business, or wanting to work in this business, has to have the same attitude. If not, go do something else.
Jennifer Joel
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How long were you at Goldman?
A little more than two years. It was a long two years. They were long days.
What were some moments when you were really excited to be there?
First of all, having the opportunity to work with people who are that smart about what they do is incredibly exciting. If investment banking had been my passion, I could not have picked a better firm than Goldman. As it turned out, it was not my life’s passion.
Look, at twenty-two you’re in the room with CEOs of major companies, talking at the highest level about corporate strategy or creating shareholder value. That’s a surreal and pretty interesting opportunity. I don’t even think I realized how lucky I was to be there and to be in those rooms and to have access to those minds, because I wasn’t passionate about it. In fact, I’m much more interested now in deploying the skill set I was building then than I was at the time.
I was so overwhelmed by how much there was to learn and how few hours there were in the day that I didn’t stop to think about the things that I have the perspective to tell you now. I also was frustrated by the fact that I knew immediately that I was on the wrong side of the business, so I spent a lot of my time there wishing I were somewhere else.
How did you make the decision to leave?
I went in thinking I would do two years, which was the typical contract when you join straight out of college as an analyst, and then go back to law school or go work for a client. A lot of people did eventually transition to work for companies that had been clients of the firm. I never thought I would be a career banker. The question was always, What do I use this for?
Having spent some time in New York, were you ready for the West Coast?
I was thinking about it. I had spent a lot of time in LA, and I love it, but I wasn’t convinced at the end of my time at Goldman that I wanted to move there. I was fortunate that a couple of the people that I’d worked with on the client side did offer me positions. I would have thought that greenlighting movies would have been a dream job, but none of it felt exactly right, and neither did law school. I took some time off and went home to think about what the next thing should be, and found that I was spending a lot of time reading books.
Had you had been making time to read while you were an analyst?
Almost never. It’s not that I wasn’t making time; there really wasn’t any time. I could probably count on one hand the number of books I read that were not for work in the time that I was there. But reading one of them was very helpful to me in realizing just how ill suited to working in investment banking I was.
I was sitting out on the plaza one day, which didn’t happen very often, eating my lunch. It was a beautiful summer day. This must have been eighteen months into my two years there. I was reading a novel, and one of the managing directors from my group walked by and asked what it was. I held the book up and I said, “The Count of Monte Cristo.” And he looked very perplexed and said, “Why?” And I said, “Because I haven’t read it before.” He looked even more perplexed and walked off, I think, wondering why I was wasting my time in the middle of a workday. It underscored that I was interested in different things from most people I was surrounded by.
So you’re back at home, reading during your time off. What then?
I had never considered publishing as a business prior to that. In part it was just from ignorance. On the banking side, we did a lot of work with newspapers, but at the time, book publishing was pretty stable. Pearson had bought Penguin, but that had happened prior to my tenure. We did a lot of work in music and television and film and online content, but I hadn’t done any with book publishing. And because I had spent most of my four years in college reading books published prior to 1950, I didn’t have a good sense of what the publishing business was now, with one exception. In my senior year, I had one requirement left, which was an American literature survey course. We read American Pastoral. It was the first contemporary literary novel I had read in some time. It made me think that publishing today was more than commercial best-sellers, that people were still writing real literature. I love that book. And I love Philip Roth.
When, two and a half years later, I found myself spending all my time on novels, I thought: Maybe publishing? A lot of the clients I worked with at Goldman had publishing divisions. I was lucky enough to know some people and to say, “I’m thinking of getting into publishing. Is there anybody you could introduce me to?” I was able to go in for informational interviews with very senior people, and every single person I met with told me I should be an agent.
Why do you think they said that?
Well, I was neither twenty-two nor fresh out of college, and I was probably a little bit more aggressive and entrepreneurial than a lot of the people who walk in to both agencies and publishing houses right after school. I think they thought that the pace for advancement at publishing houses might be frustrating to me, and that my entrepreneurial spirit might be better suited to an agency environment.
It was explained to me that you will do “editorial” work on either side. As an agent, you might spend more of it looking at the ten thousand foot editorial stuff: Does this ending work, does this character work? On the publishing side, it might be more a matter of refinement and on the line level. The first was more attractive. I also learned that on the publishing side, I would be doing editorial plus marketing, but on the agent side I'd be doing editorial plus sales. I didn't know anything about marketing and I knew a lot about sales.
I figured all those smart people couldn’t be wrong and that I should try my hand at agenting.
How did you start?
I applied with no real strategy to a bunch of agencies—though I elected to apply to smaller companies rather than the bigger agencies, thinking that there might be more room to move up more quickly.
I went to work for Nick Ellison at Sanford Greenburger. He said, “This business is not rocket science. I have a feeling that you’ll soon be worth more to me as an agent than as an assistant, and as soon as you and I agree that you understand how a book contract works and the basic rules of the game, you can start building your own list.” That was what I was looking for. I knew from the informational interviews I’d done that it takes two to four years to get promoted even to that first level, whether you’re at a publishing house or at an agency. What I wanted was somebody to say, “I will place no artificial constraints on your ability to advance. It’s entirely up to you.”
How did you develop those skills?
I educated myself as much as I could, reading Publishers Weekly and Poets & Writers Magazine and anything I could find that wrote about the inside perspective on publishing—which houses were which, who the editors were, how people bought books, what they were looking for. I read the slush pile voraciously, and I was very lucky that I knew a bunch of interesting people from different walks of life, many of whom wanted to write books. I took advantage of whatever information and connections I could get access to.
I sold my first book five months after I started, and then I sold another book, and another. Colin Harrison at Scribner bought the first book I ever sold. We had a lovely meeting over drinks, which was my first such meeting in publishing. He called me not too long after that and said that he and his wife, Kathryn, had had dinner with Binky Urban and Ken Auletta; Kathryn is represented by Binky, and Colin is represented here at ICM by my partner Kris Dahl.
Binky had indicated that ICM might be looking to hire a young agent and he put my name on her radar screen. I think I had sold two or three books by then, and not for any significant sum of money.
It didn’t take me long studying the publishing business to know that ICM was where I wanted to be, but I didn’t know how to get here. Colin said, “You’re now on her radar screen. Just keep doing good work and wait for the call.” Not too long after that, I sold a book for an appreciable sum of money and Binky invited me to lunch.
What was that first book you sold to Colin?
Young Men on Fire by Howard Hunt, a novel set in 2001 about a pair of brothers who have gone very different ways in life and are matching their skills against each other during this madcap evening on the town in New York. A lot of the characters worked in big business and really didn’t know what they were doing, but tried to make the most of these crazy opportunities that they had. I recognized that world immediately, intuitively. The book was in the slush pile and I brought it to my boss, Nick. He ultimately said, “It’s not for me, but I’ll support you in your submission if you want this to be your introduction to publishing. Knock yourself out.”
What gave you the idea to send to Colin, who was just then moving from Harper’s magazine to Scribner?
I read an article in Publishers Weekly about his move. I will confess that I hadn’t read a ton of Harper’s at the time, but I looked at the writers he had worked with, and because he is a novelist himself, I also looked at what he wrote and I thought it would be a good match.
Do you regularly do that kind of research?
I do. I’m an information whore. I love information. I read as much as I can, but I don’t remember it off the top of my head as well anymore, so I have to write everything down now. I still consume information about our business and the people in our business, what they like and what they want.
Do you think your approach is different than other agents?
I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t do that, but I think I do have more of an appetite for it than most others.
What was the book that got Binky Urban’s attention?
It was the book that eventually became The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, which at the time was called “The Best and Last.” It was almost two years from the time it was bought to the time it was published, and a lot transpired in that time.
You sold it when you were at Sanford Greenburger, but by the time it came out you were at ICM.
Exactly.
The authors of that novel have an interesting story—weren’t they childhood friends?
They were. They were best friends who were both really interested in writing and storytelling. They were both doing completely different things with their lives but got together at the end of their senior year in college and said, “Why don’t we try to write a novel this summer?” And that’s how it started.
How did you come to be involved?
I went to college with Dustin Thomason and was involved from the first conversations with him and Ian Caldwell. The three of us had a chat at some point about which school the novel should be set in. We decided on Princeton because it was less represented in film and literature and therefore we might have been new things to say.
I knew that they had what it took. They’re both special guys; they’re both incredibly creative and talented and ambitious and diligent and passionate and they were going to figure it out. I went along for the ride, at first in a completely informal capacity. I figured the worst-case scenario was that I’d learn something, and in fact when they first submitted their novel I was still an investment banker.
But it didn’t sell the first time out.
No, it didn't sell originally. Susan Kamil, who eventually bought and published the novel, had seen a lot of potential in it. A lot of people had seen potential in it, and nobody had bought it. But Susan had taken a meeting with them and given them some good perspective and thoughts on how they might make it more commercial. And they did.
When did you get back in touch with them?
We’d been in touch the whole time. I knew their previous agent had left the business and I suggested, “How about me?” They said okay.
What was that first meeting with Binky like?
It was a great lunch. I got to hear her story and I told her a little bit about myself. It turns out we grew up twenty minutes from each other and went to rival high schools. At the end of lunch she said, “You seem great and like you have a great career ahead of you. If I hadn’t thought that you would be a good fit at ICM, I would have still been happy to have met you, and we’d have lunch again in a couple of years. But I do think you’d fit in nicely at ICM. I’d like you to come and meet my partner Esther Newberg.” And then I did.
You arrived as a full agent, but what was it like learning the ropes from them?
Nothing could be better. I’m always hungry for information, and on the first day that I came here I walked into Binky’s office and asked if there was an ICM way of doing things. I don’t think that anybody had asked her that question before. She thought about it for a minute, and what she came up with was, essentially, “Don’t lie.” It’s an easy rule to follow, but I actually think it’s exceptional. There is a lot of presumption—not of lying but of manipulating information. I could not have asked for better teachers and mentors than the two of them. There are certainly no two better agents in the business. But to watch them just be complete straight shooters all the time? It takes any perceived gamesmanship out of the equation.
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Do other agents fail to be that transparent?
I think they do. I say this not because I have direct knowledge of anything but because sometimes when I’m interacting with editors who don’t know me very well, I can tell there’s some skepticism that I’m giving them all the information, or that I’m being truthful. I have to conclude that the reason they’re skeptical is because they’ve been burned by other people in the past, which is really unfortunate. That kind of bad behavior makes it harder for everybody.
Do you find it hard to be honest in your negotiations?
No. I’ve heard horror stories about isolated situations where writers push their agents to use subterfuge because they’re desperate—this is their income. “If you think you can get more by telling a lie, why don’t you just tell the lie?” But I wouldn’t work with somebody like that.
What were some of the hardest things for you at ICM?
The bar is so high. It’s one thing to be the small fish, but I felt like a tadpole. When you look at the kind of business they do on a daily basis you fear that you’ll never be able to swim in the same waters. Getting a good project flow as a young agent is really hard.
How did you do it?
Persistence. I read everything that came in. Most of it wasn’t a match, but every once in a while I found something in the slush that worked. Even if that particular product didn’t work, I tried to be considerate to all of the writers who were appealing to me. Occasionally somebody came back around with something that was viable.
Was this all fiction?
No. In fact, I set a challenge for myself to learn how to do nonfiction. Nick Ellison did almost all fiction, but there were great nonfiction teachers here. Binky does some, Esther does some, Sloan Harris does a ton, Kris Dahl. I looked at the things they were doing and tried to figure it out.
What is the practical difference between the two?
The biggest difference, of course, is that most fiction is sold on completed manuscripts, and most nonfiction is sold on a proposal. As a young agent trying to build a list, not having to wait for a completed manuscript all the time seemed like a good way to spend some of my time and energy. You can evaluate the projects much more efficiently and potentially develop them to the point where you can sell them more efficiently.
What’s your split now between fiction and nonfiction?
It feels evenly split. I think some years feel not quite 50-50 but overall it probably balances out.
When did you first feel like you had created your own space at ICM?
I sold a couple of things here in my first couple of years that people noticed a bit for whatever reason. Not necessarily huge books. The Rule of Four came out and was a monster best-seller, and that helped a lot. I could not overstate the benefits accrued by that book to me personally and to my career.
It was my first really big deal and it was my first great success. It was a novel that I loved passionately. If somebody had to look at that book and say, “This is what Jennifer Joel did,” I’ll be fine with that for my whole career.
What were some of the other books?
The first big nonfiction success that I had was a memoir called The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks. Binky referred it to me; it needed a lot of work before it was ready to be seen by publishers. That book went on to be a New York Times best-seller. I was lucky enough to get to work with Billy Crystal on his book 700 Sundays. He was a client of the agency, and I knew that his play was in development on Broadway. I called his West Coast agent and asked, “Is it adaptable into a book? Would he ever want to write a book?” And he said, “Go see the play in previews and you tell me.”
That was an unbelievable opportunity. I was still pretty young, and he trusted me to tell him whether or not this play by his enormous client could potentially be turned into a book—and then trusted me to make it happen when I said it could.
Chris Cleave’s Little Bee was an amazing project. I learned so much about the business from working on that book. His first book, Incendiary, had not been a commercial success—it was a book about a terrorist attack on London that was published on July 7, 2005, the day of the terrorist attack there, and it was the last thing that anybody there or here wanted to be reading at the time.
Let’s talk about Chris. Do you represent him worldwide or in America only?
I started representing Chris on behalf of a London-based agent named Toby Eady, with whom I do a ton of work. Toby sent me Chris’s manuscript for Incendiary, his first book, as he was submitting it to publishers in London. We’d worked together on a couple of other things, and I called immediately. I thought it was amazing. About five minutes later Sonny Mehta called and agreed; it was an easy sale. He preempted the book immediately. Knopf loved that book and they set it up to be big. They brought Chris over for a prepublication tour. But then the novel was published in London on the same day as the bombings. The entire marketing campaign consisted of posters in the tube stations and on the bus stops, and the next day they went out and took it all down.
That’s horrifying.
The Knopf and Chatto & Windus teams were as supportive of him and of the book as they possibly could have been. And Chris—he didn’t know where his wife was that morning, and he experienced that bombing as everybody else did. Fortunately, she was fine.
We had done everything right up until that point and there was nothing to be done. There was a question of whether it would be in good taste to push the book at that time. The prevailing wisdom in the publishing business says you can’t recover from something like that. The sales were terrible and there was a weird taste in people’s mouths. It’s very hard to get a second chance.
But Chris wrote a phenomenal second book and found a publisher in Simon & Schuster that believed it could do all of the things we’d hoped for Incendiary. With a lot of hard work, Little Bee became a No. 1 best-seller.
Both of those books were published first in the UK. How does the editorial process work when you’re representing the rights to a book in America and someone else is doing it in the rest of the English language world?
In fact Chris had three different English language editors for Little Bee, because the book was sold separately in Canada. It's different in every case. In particular, given what we were up against with this publication, Chris was very open-minded and willing to be led by each of his editors. Everybody had thoughts on what the book might be or could be. There were three separate and simultaneous editorial processes going on. We ultimately decided that there would be slightly different versions of the book for each market, right down to the title. Little Bee is called The Other Hand in London.
One thing publishers push for is a common English edition controlled by one publisher worldwide. What are the repercussions if you fracture that control?
I do think there are books that benefit tremendously from simultaneous publication in the English language in one edition across the world. And then there are books that are just inherently going to be read slightly differently in different places, and I think it’s responsible for each publisher, and each agent when there are different agents, to advocate for their version as long as it doesn’t differ significantly from what the author wants the book to be. If the author is on board, then it’s all about how you tell a story most effectively to the audience that you’re trying to tell it to.
Are there any lessons that you could draw from representing Chris through these ups and downs? In terms of sales, Incendiary was a disaster, Little Bee was a huge success, and his third novel, Gold, was somewhere in between.
One lesson is that you never know what is going to happen next. When success seems a foregone conclusion, or when failure seems likely, the opposite thing can happen.
Chris is the loveliest person. You know; you’ve met him. There aren’t many like him. He is grateful for every nice thing that has happened to him or that anybody has ever done for him. He takes all of the blame on himself when things don’t go right. He’s lucky that he has a wonderful family and three of the cutest kids you’ll ever see, and I think that gives him perspective. Even when things aren’t going well professionally, he knows what’s important in life. He loves to write. He loves to tell stories. Setbacks make him more determined to deliver the next thing.
Are there clients who compel you to do more than you thought you could?
Of course. I’ll give you one more Chris Cleave example. I was determined to make Little Bee work. I was determined to get it on a morning show at a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult to get fiction writers on morning shows. I found a crack in a door and pushed and pushed and pushed until we got him on a morning show.
To answer your question much more generally, yes, people entrust you with their fiscal lives, but they are also entrusting you with their dreams. If you believe in their dreams, this is not just a job. You are inspired to go the extra mile.
How does an agent learn to sell a book?
I don’t know that the process can really be taught. I think we’re a self-selected group of people, and we all think we know it. Success and failure teach you lessons. Nobody is perfect; nobody sells every book. You accumulate different data points and an understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
I generally think that if I’m compelled by someone’s story, I can communicate what I find so appealing and intriguing to other people. As I think and talk about a project, I listen to my thoughts and words, and figure out what people respond to. Before I know it, the pitch has worked itself out.
You can learn certain things. You can learn what not to say, or that there’s not a great market for certain kinds of projects. Even if your project has those elements, maybe don’t describe it that way—it may have other elements that everybody wants. You do learn to speak the language of the business, but if you can articulate what compels you about a certain project, you can communicate that to the right buyers.
Is there a trait that is common to the authors and other people you most respect in the business?
I’m very attracted to self-confidence, people who believe that what they have to say is worthy of being heard.
Do you have a definition of what makes a really good editor?
It’s no different than what I just described. Someone who is self-confident in their taste, who is ambitious in their vision. Ambition is often talked about in negative terms, but to have real ambition for what you can do with a story or a character or a piece of content is really important. You have to fight for everything you get. You have to be willing to do the work and you have to imagine that it’s worthy of other people’s time and attention.
People ask me what’s different about selling a book and a TV show or a film. I say that books are very expensive, in two ways. Certainly when you compare a $24 price point on a hardcover book to a magazine subscription that might be $12 for the whole year, or your HBO subscription, you can look at the price point and say it’s expensive. Obviously, I think it’s cheap relative to what you’re getting, but it may be expensive relative to what you could pay for other forms of entertainment.
But the real way in which a book is expensive is in the time you’re asking someone to invest—for eight to twelve hours of leisure time, you have to believe that you’re giving them a good trade.
You have to make a promise attractive enough for the reader to make that investment.
And then you have to deliver on the promise because the only thing that really makes a book work is word of mouth. People have to love it and tell other people to read it. You have to deliver on the promise.
Which is the hard part.
But that’s why we get up in the morning.
Let’s talk about children’s books.
I have gotten into the kid’s business more broadly, but I started there in the YA space. I think that it’s incredibly exciting for a mature business like publishing to have a growth area like that one.
Said like an analyst.
I suppose there are a few vestiges from my career as an investment banker. One is language. I can say things like that with a straight face and not feel like I’m wearing my father’s suit. A second thing is that I have no problem talking about large sums of money or with people with really big titles.
When I was a banker I went into it with the assumption that because a lot of math was involved, there would be a right answer at the end of the day. The most important lesson that I learned is that nothing really has intrinsic value. Things are only worth what people will pay for them—whether it’s News Corp, this building, or a piece of intellectual property. Because things are only worth what someone else will pay, the value of something is a conversation. Nobody really knows how to make that conversation go exactly the way they want it to every time. Everybody is making it up a little bit.
Tell me a little bit more about that—from the author’s perspective.
The often frustrating but potentially exhilarating thing that some writers don’t understand is what happens when they actually publish their book. For them, they’re at the end of a long road. This thing that they've been working on is finally coming to market. But when you send something out into the world you are beginning a new conversation.
Is there an attitude or strategy that can make an agent’s or publisher’s projects more likely to receive the response they’re looking for?
I love to say we should all be pickier. We can always work harder and be more precise. You really can make the book the best that you can make it, and I don’t know that we always do that. We are under time pressure or exhausted by the first eight rounds of editorial work and you can wind up knowing at the end of the day that it could have been a little better. I don’t know that there’s a way to actually avoid that, because we do get exhausted and it is a business.
Sometimes writers are so relieved by the idea that their book is actually going to get published that we don’t think of taking that extra step toward the readers. There might be a few hanging threads in the plot that you could have tied up with one more pass. The pace could be a little slow. Maybe you went through it six times already, but a seventh could make it tighter. Maybe we’ve been talking about a book one way for eighteen months as the book is acquired and edited and presented, but maybe there’s a better way.
One thing that we’re just not great at as a business is finding readers. We know they’re out there; we know that there are a million people out there who will read a complex literary novel if Oprah tells them to. But we publish complex literary novels every day and we don’t know how to find the people who are willing to read them. We assume they’re not out there—but we know they’re out there. We need to find them. I don’t mean to say that I have the right answer. That’s why I’m on the agent side. Marketing: That’s the publisher’s job. But it’s actually all of our jobs.
Compared to when you first started, is the book business substantively different today?
Well, e-books exist. At a very basic level there were no digital readers when I started. There were more big publishers than there are now. But the real work of selecting a project, developing it, polishing it, selling it, and figuring out how to bring it to market—those basic processes have not changed all that much.
OK, back to young adult books. Tell me about your experiences in that realm.
I got into YA because two clients of mine had gotten some publicity and an editor at a children's publisher called them. They were doing juicy New York City social life stuff, and the editor said it sounded like it would work well for a YA market.
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Who were those people?
Jill Kargman and Carrie Karasyov, who were a team of writers who had written a book called The Right Address that Doubleday/Broadway had published. They wrote a young adult novel called Bittersweet Sixteen about the two most popular girls at a very tony all girls prep school who mistakenly planned their sweet sixteen parties for the same day, and the competition that ensues.
Most publishers are set up to divide the children’s division from the adult division. But is there really any difference in the work that you do?
Not at the creative level. I’ve always really enjoyed working with people who have practiced telling stories in different ways, whether they’ve written for TV or film or theater, even actors. People who know how to use the mechanics outside the words on a page.
There are slightly different tools that you have to use when you're writing for kids. It’s a much more stratified business; you don’t just write for kids, you write intro books or early reader books or chapter books or middle grade or YA. The process of absorbing information is very different when you’re three, six, eight, or sixteen. But fundamentally, it’s all the same: Good stories, well told.
What are you most proud of so far in your career?
I hate questions like that. Number one, it’s an incredible privilege to live a creative life in any capacity and I’m proud that I can do that. I’m more proud that the people who I work with get to do what they get to do, and make a living doing it. I’m proud that I help make things and that they’re permanent objects. I’m certainly proud that when somebody tells me that they’ve appreciated or have been moved by or enjoyed something I had a hand in. I’m proud that my job description is that I come to work and I try and move any number of projects a little bit closer to the finish line.
I think that’s why you see so many piles on my desk. As things move from pile to pile, you know they’re getting closer to the finish line. Maybe I represent that visually on my desk to remind myself that this work is tangible.
How many projects do you have on submission at the same time?
I very rarely have more than two projects on submission and I would say most of the time I have one project on submission at a time.
Is it fairly continuous throughout the year?
Sometimes it feels like I’ve sent nothing out for months and sometimes I feel slightly overwhelmed. The one thing you don’t have a lot of control of as an agent is the timing of delivery. Certainly right after around Christmas I feel inundated. Writers want to get stuff off their desks and it’s easy to set the end of the year as an arbitrary but firm deadline. Then, as your client list matures, the submission process for option books is fundamentally different than when you’re selling someone for the first time or changing publishers.
As an editor I’ve noticed that the mood of the business evolves as the year goes along—from hesitation to confidence, say, and you might argue that advance levels fluctuate as well. Is there an advantage to trying to capitalize on those mood swings?
I’m sure there is but I haven’t figured it out. The most important thing is the project. When I sell things for a lot of money and they go very quickly, it’s because it’s an awesome project, I know it’s awesome, I know the response is going to be awesome, and it is. If there is a secret formula for how you take advantage of an aggressive mood in the business to move product significantly above what its market value should be, I have not discovered it yet.
Either the fish is going to be fresh or it’s going to stink, in other words?
If I have to spend my time either figuring out how to make my projects really good or guessing at the mood of the market, I’m going to spend my time on my projects.
Roughly how many new clients have you taken on in the last year?
Not a ton. Maybe three or four in the last twelve months.
What stood out about their projects?
There was something that made all of them stand out, but it’s so idiosyncratic. I took on a young writer who used to be at Outside magazine. He had written a piece about hot-shot firefighting; he had been a firefighter himself and somebody was going to write a book about that. He was clearly the right person to do it, and he is a great writer. So I took him on.
Most often things come through a referral through someone I represent. Because ICM is a full-service agency, I’m constantly getting in-house referrals, too: Another department represents someone and they want to write a book. For example, I’ve been working with Shonda Rhimes for the past couple of years. We had been talking since the writers’ strike about a book project. She’s a relatively new client to me, but she’s been an ICM client for years.
Tell me about ICM’s partnership structure.
We didn't used to be a partnership. In 2012 we completed a management buyout of our company; it had been held previously by some private equity investors. A group of agents got together and decided to try to raise the money to buy the company back. Now, for the first time in the history of this company, there’s an ownership opportunity for all the people who work here. That has changed the way I think people see their careers here in a really positive way.
And you were recently made a partner yourself. How does it feel different?
You really feel like you own something. I think about it in a couple of different ways. To wear my banker hat, the ownership model for an agency that makes most sense to me is operator owned. It doesn’t make sense for anybody else to really own the company because ownership implies some sort of control and nobody but the agents who work here can control what goes on here on a day to day basis. Logically, it’s the right model, and for that reason alone it's exciting. I also think that any individual who contributes time and labor to a place—especially to a business that is so long-term—wants to know they’re in it for the long haul. To have some control over the true trajectory of your career and your environment: That’s going to nurture the people who are trusting you to take care of their professional lives. I don't know anybody who wouldn't find that attractive.
Do you do anything different day to day?
I do some different things. I've taken on some responsibilities outside the day to day of managing my clients. I run the training program here in New York. I'm a mentor—we've started a mentorship program—and I sit on a couple of different corporate committees. I feel very strongly that we should be growing, so having the opportunity to have a real say in that is exciting to me, and it’s easier for my clients.
When you introduce yourself to a client—say, someone who has written a great novel you have read and loved—what do you say?
The way that I talk about myself to potential clients tends to be specific to the questions they’ve asked or the desires they’ve indicated. I start with my passion for what they’re doing and the reason that I’m sitting at the table. I might make some sort of case for why I think I’m a good partner for them, which may include anything from other clients I represent to other projects I’ve worked on to where I’m from to what my previous work experience was.
I would probably introduce myself by talking about my response to your book—probably leading with the fact that I loved it. Some of my clients tell me that my Achilles’ heel as an agent is that I do the “I love it” part very quickly and get to the “let’s talk about some of the things we might want to look at” perhaps sooner than they would like.
What would you love for writers to know before their work reaches your desk?
I would love writers to do their homework by the time they come to me. There is so much information that is so readily available about who we are and how the business works. Some writers spend so much time working on their books, but so little time thinking about getting an agent and where they want to be published. It’s irresponsible to themselves.
When I speak at a conference, there’s generally somebody sitting in the front row who raises a hand and says, “I don’t need a big advance. I don’t need a publisher that’s going to send me on a national tour”—which is good because nobody is going to do that—“but I just want to be published.” That’s wrong. You want to be read.
Writers need to understand the distinction between wanting to be published and what they really want. Publication is a means to an end. And the end is being read. If you’re looking to get credit, there are easier ways to get credit. But if you feel genuinely that you could make a promise to a reader, and that what you have to say is worth somebody you’ve never met and may have nothing in common with spending ten hours of their time on, that’s the goal.
Does that inform your view on self-publishing?
I don’t know if I’ve developed a view on self-publishing. I’m not opposed to it. There are tons of opportunities. For the right writer and the right project, self-publishing is a huge boon. I certainly don’t think it’s right for every writer because it makes incredible demands outside the actual writing and messaging about the book. Some writers are eager for that, and others would rather stick a fork in their eye than to be not only the writer of the book but the publicist, promoter, marketer, and publisher. Take distribution. It’s a challenge and very time consuming. I obviously continue to believe that publishers add a tremendous amount of value to the process of bringing a story to market. But it’s not the right path for everybody.
You said that when you were at Goldman Sachs, the publishing business was pretty stable. The common view is that it’s now anything but stable.
There is a general mood of hysteria, and a presumption of hysteria, in our business. But if you take a long view, what’s happening now is not wholly different than things that have happened in every entertainment medium before. There is always a tremendous amount of tension between content and distribution, a tug of war about which is the most important and valuable piece of that equation as they fight to split the spoils of the business. These businesses have always consolidated, from the agency business to the television business to the film business. Small companies start, they grow organically, they get bought and absorbed into larger entities, and other small companies start and grow.
One major difference here is that Amazon has created a pretty efficient and effective medium through which to consume the written word. People do want things to be more convenient. They carry around these devices, and being able to put a couple hundred books on one means there are a couple hundred copies of books that are out there.
It used to be that if you wanted to perform a story you did it in a theater. And then all of a sudden you could do it on film, but you had to go to a movie theater and see it projected on a large screen, first with a live accompaniment and then without one. And then all of sudden you can take those stories and put them in a box and send it directly into somebody’s home. There have always been disruptive technologies in our business and there's always been a struggle to attract eyeballs amid all the ways people elect to spend their leisure time. Does the popularity of one medium undermine the viability of another? So far the answer has generally been no.
You’ve mentioned the essential qualities you can get from a book versus a film. Let’s talk about that.
There’s a quality you can only get through each of the storytelling mediums, which is why they’re all viable. What can you get from a book? Often you can go on a much more complete journey with the story with the characters in the world than you can in a film. It is incumbent upon you as a reader to imagine your own version of a lot of the details, which for a lot of us is part of the pleasure of reading a book. A book’s unique qualities lie in its depth and its participatory nature.
We’ve talked a lot about the business at a high level. I want to make sure we distill it down to something concrete an author can act on.
It comes back to all of the things we’ve been talking about. It’s quality. It’s telling a story in the most compelling way possible. It’s being mindful of the fact that you are telling this story for someone to consume—so are you telling a story that somebody wants to consume? It’s being willing to offer that promise: Give me your ten hours and I will deliver an experience that warrants your time and energy.
Going much beyond that is overthinking it. When you try to game the system, the product winds up feeling like a cynical attempt to game the system.
The rule is: Write the very best book you can?
Yes. You write the very best book you can at the time that you’re writing it. I can’t remember who said this—I think it was Michael Cunningham—but when you finish your book is an arbitrary moment. It’s finished at that moment, but if you went back to it in two months, you’ve changed and had new experiences and you may want to keep working on it. All writers would tell you they’d write a different book at thirty than they would at twenty or forty. We’re an accumulation of experiences, and they all inform the stories that we tell.
Michael Szczerban is an executive editor at Little, Brown and Company.