July/August 2013
Michael Szczerban
State:
New York
A heavy-hitting agent who for twenty-two years has represented some of the biggest literary writers in the country, Eric Simonoff discusses recent changes in the publishing industry, the pitfalls of self-publishing, and what he's learned about staying creative.
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When I first entered the offices of Simon & Schuster as an intern seven years ago, I half expected to find rooms heavy with pipe smoke and equipped with decanters of whiskey, their inhabitants ensconced in the quiet seriousness of a library. Instead, I found an ordinary office in midtown Manhattan alive with the ringing of phones, endless photocopying, and assistants scurrying from cubicle to cubicle. An ordinary office, yes—except that it was teeming with books. They were everywhere. They spilled off of shelves and hid in the corners of conference rooms. Boxes of them obstructed hallways. Their jacket art adorned every wall.
I soon learned that books are the magic dust that turns an ordinary building into a publishing house: a place where writers can feel at home.
This spring I spoke with Eric Simonoff, one of the wizards who casts such dust around the hallways of New York City publishers, to learn some of his spells. He is a literary agent at William Morris Endeavor (WME) known for representing some of the most impressive writers—and for making some of the most lucrative deals—in the business.
Visiting WME’s office is different from visiting a publishing house: It feels more like walking into an investment bank. The reception area is sleek and modern, and the place hums with quiet efficiency. Insofar as one sees books lining its corridors, they are tastefully displayed. Everything about WME seems designed to say, “This is where serious creative careers are made.”
The literary agents at WME work in an estimated $300 million enterprise that includes talent agents in Beverly Hills, California; Nashville; Miami Beach, Florida; and London. Like all agents, they are charged with their clients’ economic and professional livelihoods. No wonder, then, that so many prominent writers choose to work with WME, which is both the oldest talent agency in America and one of the most powerful.
When Simonoff and I met, it became clear that the bank comparison stopped at his door. He wore a sweater and canvas shoes, and we sat on a comfortable leather couch inside his office, which is decorated with sports memorabilia, historical artifacts, and the prizewinning books whose authors he has represented. We had never met in person before, and as we shook hands I thought, “Now here’s someone who loves to read.”
Simonoff began his career as an editorial assistant at W. W. Norton in 1989. Two years later, he moved to Janklow & Nesbit Associates as an agent. He became a director of the firm sixteen years later, in 2007, and was widely expected to take its reins one day with his colleague Tina Bennett. Then, in 2009, Simonoff departed for William Morris, where Bennett joined him three years later. Simonoff’s list of clients includes Pulitzer Prize winners Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Stacy Schiff, as well as Jonathan Lethem, Lincoln Child, Douglas Preston, ZZ Packer, Philipp Meyer, Bill O’Reilly, Daniel Alarcón, Alexander Maksik, and Karen Thompson Walker.
For Simonoff, the business always comes back to the books. That’s where we began.
Did you grow up around New York City?
I grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia, but my parents were from New York City and my grandmother lived in Brooklyn. The entire time I was growing up, I spent all of my vacations with her in her tiny little studio. They were the best memories of my childhood.
It was New York in the 1970s, but I had no idea how bad New York in the ’70s was. To me it was a magical place. We’d go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the top of the Empire State Building, and always, always, always to Gotham Book Mart, which was a legendary used bookstore in the Forties. I never left empty-handed. I still have all the books my grandmother bought me over all those vacations from Gotham Book Mart, which is sadly no longer there.
You were a bookish kid.
It was what I did best. That’s probably still what I do best: sit quietly and read. It defined my childhood. I was never not reading. My parents could bring me anywhere. So long as I had a book, I’d be quiet and well behaved and happy. And that’s still the case.
You went to college at Princeton, where you studied classics. What did you anticipate doing afterward?
I applied to law school and got in. I had worked in three different law firms during the summers in college, and I suppose I should be grateful that I did, because working in those law firms made me realize that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I deferred admission for two years and sent résumés to the editors in chief of every trade house in New York City. It wasn’t until very near graduation that I got a job as legendary fiction editor Gerry Howard’s assistant at Norton.
Did you aspire to be an editor?
Yes. I didn’t know what literary agents were. So I thought, “Max Perkins, that’s what you do.” Gerry was certainly the closest thing—probably still is the closest thing—to Max Perkins out there. It was thrilling to get to work at a house as venerable and recognizable as Norton, and for an editor as groundbreaking and yet old-school as Gerry.
Gerry wrote incredible editorial letters, longhand, on yellow legal pads, that I would then have to type. Observing his relationship with a text, and also the relationships that unfolded in his correspondence with his many writers and friends, was an incredible and valuable education.
How do you think people learn how to edit today?
I wonder about that. Depending on a boss’s relationship with an assistant, there’s a permeability of e-mail that makes it possible for an assistant to track all of the professional correspondence in real time. That is, to see what’s coming in and to see what’s going out, and to learn the rhythm of a relationship—with a client or with editors, if you’re an agent. So it’s evolving. It’s not the same as Gerry dropping off four or five single-spaced legal-sized handwritten pages and asking me to type them, but I think there’s a substitute for it.
Have the types of publishing relationships that you saw Gerry cultivate changed over the years?
Probably not. It is still fundamentally a business of relationships, as it was then. It probably has always been a business of relationships.
One of the things I marvel at is that so many of the people who were assistants when I was an assistant, or who had recently been an assistant, are running publishing companies today. At the time, it seemed like a complete impossibility that the people with whom you had relationships that were built primarily around swapping books would someday be the heads of houses.
But I think it’s those relationships that are forged at every step of your tenure in publishing that are the ones that ultimately bear the greatest fruit, both in terms of friendship and in terms of business.
Who are some of the people you met at Norton and have stayed in touch with?
There are a lot. I’m not sure I met them all at Norton, but Bill Thomas, who’s at Doubleday; Jordan Pavlin at Knopf; Reagan Arthur, who was then at St. Martin’s; Jon Karp, who was Kate Medina’s assistant at Random House. Molly Stern came a little bit later. We were all assistants at one point. Almost everyone you encounter will have been someone’s assistant at some point.
You were at Norton for two years. Why did you leave?
Norton still is a terrifically stable place, which is to its credit—it’s an employee- owned company. But it was a long wait to become an acquiring editor, and there were people who had already been there four and five years answering phones and typing their boss’s mail. They were beginning to acquire their own books but were not really editors yet. I asked myself, “How many years can I do this before I become hopelessly restless and fail to believe it could be possible?” And at the end of two years I began to mention to my friends that I was looking for a job as an assistant editor at another house.
Jenny McPhee, who was Ash Green’s assistant at Knopf, said, “A friend of mine, Lydia Wills, tells me that Janklow & Nesbit are looking for a young agent.” So I reached out to Lydia. We had a drink, we hit it off, and she gave a favorable report to Mort Janklow and Lynn Nesbit. They had me in to meet them shortly thereafter, and on the basis of a single conversation with Mort and a conversation with Lynn, they hired me to be a junior agent doing magazine work, selling audio rights, taking the movie meetings when development people came through town, and then eventually building my own list.
I was twenty-three years old, and I went from being an assistant in a cubicle to having an office with an assistant in a cubicle. It was a shock, to say the least.
Had you edited any books on your own at Norton?
There was a book that Gerry and I jointly acquired called The Wives’ Tale by a terrific writer named Alix Wilber. The book was a wonderful work of rural magical realism. All the pieces were there but it was a complete jumble.
Gerry said, “Look, if you think you know how to fix this, we’ll buy it and fix it.” It was a question of taking a pair of scissors and cutting it up and putting it back together again, and working with Alix very closely.
That’s the only book I can claim I really left my fingerprints on. It was a thrilling experience. The agent was Sally Wofford, now Sally Wofford-Girand, who was with Elaine Markson at the time.
You took your taste from one building to another. What else did you bring from Norton into your life as an agent?
It was hard to shake the notion that I wasn’t going to become an editor. It was a relatively recent dream, but my dream was that I’d be an editor someday.
There are some agents who edit, and there are some agents who don’t edit. I came to agenting at a time when editing became a lot more common among the agents. It was still that relationship to the text that I found thrilling, and that is probably the main thing that I brought with me from one building to the other. The other is the realization that I had been completely and utterly bitten by the publishing bug, and I couldn’t imagine working in any other industry.
I’m imagining what it would have been like to join Mort and Lynn.
What impressed me right off the bat was how incredibly comfortable they were with their clients—all of whom, to me, were giants. The notion of being the longtime agent and friend of Joan Didion was so completely outside my experience that it was awe-inspiring. Or David McCullough, or Michael Crichton, or Tom Wolfe, or any of these people.
Lynn Nesbit has represented Tom Wolfe for his entire career. I found that incredibly inspiring, and I thought, “So, I could do that? I could find some bright young journalist and say, ‘Hey, you don’t know me, but let me be your agent,’ and wake up several years later with a superstar client?” Working with Mort and Lynn made it seem achievable.
Who was the first writer you represented on your own?
There was a playwright named John Jiler who proposed a book about Hurricane Gloria hitting Fire Island in 1985. He had summered for his whole life on Fire Island, and in advance of the hurricane the entire island was evacuated by the Coast Guard. John huddled in a school shelter for the duration of the storm, but later heard that ten people had refused to leave. He went back and found the ten people who weathered this unbelievable storm, and told their individual stories alongside the natural history of Fire Island.
What about that proposal attracted your attention?
I remember being struck immediately by the voice. The accessibility of it, the gentleness of it, the sophistication of it, the broadness of it. There was a feeling like, “Okay, this is someone who can tell me a story. He seems to know what story he wants to tell me, the story is a compelling one, the story has not been told before.” That is so often at the heart of what strikes us both in fiction and nonfiction.
After you made your first sale, you continued to sell subsidiary rights for Mort and Lynn. When did the focus shift to your own authors?
I think it happened about three years in. The books I was taking on were beginning to make some decent income, and it made more sense to focus as much time on that as on the subrights. So we hired another agent to help with that.
She was a young woman who at the time had no publishing experience, not a day of it. She had been a graduate student at Yale in English. Her name was Tina Bennett, and we hired her to do the rest of the subrights work. That was a good hire. [Laughs.]
She ended up going on to not just become one of my closest friends in the world but represented Seabiscuit and Unbroken and Fast Food Nation and Malcolm Gladwell’s books and Atul Gawande and you name it.
What about Janklow & Nesbit appealed to you?
There was a very, very strong ethos to the place, from the top down. It was always an extremely dignified office, with a very clear sense of itself, and very focused on wanting to be in the highest of the high end, both in terms of literary merit and commercial possibility. It was never a volume business. It was really about curation.
Did you always see eye to eye about the quality of the books you took on?
I can’t remember disagreeing about quality, and it was a fairly independent process. In the very early days I would run by Mort or Lynn what I wanted to take on, so they had some sense of what was going out under their name. When you’re the name partners in the company you like to know what’s being sent out under your letterhead. But they were great at trusting Tina and me not to embarrass them.
What kinds of risks did you take as a young agent?
When you are young and building a list, you’re able to roll the dice on new talent and think, “I’ve only read three stories by this person, but they’re three of the best stories I’ve seen all year. I have to believe this person is capable of contributing another seven stories to a collection and eventually writing a novel,” and then say to them, “Yes. I want to be your agent.”
In the time that I was coming up in the business, there were many fewer agents than there are now. I felt tremendous amounts of competition from my peers—that if I didn’t take the plunge and say “yes” to a writer, someone else would be there in the next five minutes to say “yes.” And today, it’s unimaginably more competitive than it was then.
There’s always a risk when you call the seven or ten editors with whom you have the best relationships and say, “I’ve read the most extraordinary novel.” Every time you do that, you’re putting your reputation on the line. You send it out and you hold your breath.
No matter how many years you do it, you still sometimes think, “What if I’m crazy? What if the three people who love this book most are me, the author, and the author’s mother?” [Laughs.] And then when the phone rings the next day, and the first person says, “Oh my God, I was up all night reading this, I can’t believe how great this is,” you exhale.
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One of the things that now distinguishes you is how quickly your submissions are read. That wasn’t always the case.
No, it was not. Agents don’t have magical powers. The truth is, editors are tremendously hungry for good books. The writer who’s outside of the business views the business as this fortress designed to keep him or her out. And in fact, what I see is an industry in which we want nothing more than to discover an amazing new voice. Who wouldn’t? If you actually have a great book, it matters who sends it out, because you want someone who understands the business, who has the best possible relationships, and who can negotiate the right deal for you as a client. But your book will get discovered regardless. It might just be a question of when.
That said, it’s much nicer to have things get read overnight than have to call three weeks later and say, “Hey, have you had a chance to read that book I sent you three weeks ago?”
How did you distinguish yourself from other agents at first? Was there ever a writer you really had to fight for?
I don’t recall going head to head all that often. I used to go visit the Iowa Writers’ Workshop every couple of years. The first time I went I was twenty-eight, and it was incredibly heady to get out of New York City and to arrive at this hotbed of literary creativity and competition.
Students would sign up to meet with a real live literary agent and talk about the state of the business and whether people buy short stories or not, and I would give a talk about the state of the business and what exactly it is literary agents do. One year I went and kept hearing this name, ZZ Packer. People kept saying, “Have you met ZZ Packer? You’ve got to meet ZZ Packer. Have you read ZZ Packer?”
And ZZ Packer did not come to my talk. ZZ Packer did not sign up for a meeting. And if she hadn’t attended a party for a writer who was in town reading at Prairie Lights, I never would have met ZZ Packer. But I finally met her and I said, “Oh my God, you’re ZZ Packer! You’re the person everyone keeps talking about. Can I read some of your stuff?”
She was surprised, and a little reluctant. Even after that, I had to chase her and say, “No, really, please, please send me anything you want to send me.” That was almost more of a challenge than being up against another young agent. She was just not thinking in those terms, which is also quaint when you think about it in this day and age. There are some writers who write one story and think, “Okay, time to get an agent.”
You were twenty-eight when you first went out there? What else had you accomplished by then?
I can’t remember if had accomplished anything by the time I was twenty-eight. [Laughs.] I do remember vowing when I was twenty-eight that I would have a New York Times bestseller by the time I was thirty.
Did that work out?
I did not, no. I can’t to this day tell you what my first New York Times bestseller was; I don’t remember. But that was the goal I set for myself, and failed at.
It’s funny, there was an Observer piece around that time, in which Nick Paumgarten, who’s now at The New Yorker, was tasked with writing about the up-and-coming young agents. I found it when I was moving offices four years ago, and was interested to note first of all what a good job he’d done picking the young agents of that day, and secondly how little I accomplished by the time I was twenty-eight.
You were among them?
Yes, but I hadn’t really done anything to merit being among them.
Who else was in that list?
The only person who isn’t a literary agent anymore is David Chalfant, but Sarah Chalfant, Kim Witherspoon, Sloan Harris, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Nicole Aragi, and me, I think.
Do you feel competitive with those people today?
I don’t, strangely enough.
Are there other people you feel competitive with?
I don’t think that way, I guess. In fact, many of those people are very, very close friends, and have been for years and years and years.
Did I feel competitive with them? I’d rather my books succeed, I’d rather WME’s books succeed, than anyone else’s books, insofar as I feel competitive.
Publishing is doing surprisingly well given all the reports of its demise, and yet I feel that it’s still challenged enough that any time there’s a great success story, it’s good for all of us. That mitigates the feelings of competition.
Did you set other goals for yourself after the bestseller deadline passed?
I don’t really remember. One thing that you learn by doing is what you’re good at, and what you’re not good at. It’s certainly possible to have beginner’s luck in certain categories. But part of the learning process, of maturing as an agent, is recognizing that there are certain categories that you’ll never really understand.
I remember having a lunch with Jennifer Enderlin when I was a young agent, and she was talking about how much she loved women’s fiction and romance. She undeniably has an eye for it, and it comes from genuine passion, love, and understanding of it. She can tell a good one from a bad one. And I realized I will never be able to tell a good one from a bad one. It’s not where my passion lies. I have huge admiration and respect for her, and still do, because she is really good at something I will ever be good at.
Was that a tough lesson to learn?
Sure. The complicated thing about commercial fiction, especially, is that there’s well written commercial fiction, which I get, and then there’s badly written commercial fiction, which I don’t get. I wish I got badly written commercial fiction. I wish I understood what made a badly written thriller a million-copy seller. But I don’t.
What other lessons did you learn as you were launching yourself?
I think as an agent you have to remember that you have many clients and they all have one agent.
Tell me more about that.
It’s a lonely job being a writer. Years ago, a client said to me, “You’re the only person I’ve spoken to today.” That was a very sobering moment, and I realized what a lifeline an agent can be to an author. I probably spoke to fifty people that day, and this client spoke to one person, and the one person he spoke to was his agent.
I’ve had clients say, “Five years ago you said something that really stayed with me,” and had them repeat that trenchant piece of advice back to me, and I thought, “Wow, that’s a really good piece of advice! I have no recollection of giving it to you, but I’m glad that it helped.”
You’re talking about the importance of the relationships between you and your authors.
Exactly.
Can you characterize the ideal relationship between author and agent?
Everybody’s different. There are some authors who are very clear about what they are looking for, and there are some authors who say, “I don’t need any hand-holding, I don’t need any therapy, I just want you to go out and kill for me and get the best deal possible.” And then there are authors who need a lot of editorial give-and-take, need to contextualize where their work fits into their personal lives, need to know that you know when to give them a pep talk, and when to let them down easy.
When authors are picking an agent, it’s easy to be dazzled by a big name, whereas in many cases, the bright, sharp up-and-coming agent—especially if he or she has the support of a mentor—understands the work better, understands the writer better, can kill for the writer, can devote more hours of the day to the writer, and might be a better fit.
There’s no rule covering all of it. But it’s a relationship worth getting right.
Every relationship is different, but at a place like William Morris Endeavor, you’re probably looking for some uniform level of excellence.
True.
How do you define excellence as an agent?
First and foremost, communication. That is, if you can’t adequately communicate to the community—not just to the publishers and editors, but to the wider world—your passion and commitment to the writer, you probably won’t be able to follow through with the rest. You have to understand the value in the writer and the work, and to encapsulate it in as compelling and cogent a way as possible. That’s a lot of what we do: crafting the pitch. If you understand the work that you’re representing correctly, half the time you’ll end up seeing your own words in the flap copy of the book. There’s also being a member of the community. That is, not sitting behind your desk all the time, but being out there in the world, engaging with all kinds of people. Engaging with editors and publishers, but also with writers, literary festivals, MFA programs, the much wider world of letters.
WME does these amazing retreats every January, in California, where they bring incredible speakers to talk to the assembled offices. London, New York, Nashville, Miami, Beverly Hills—they all convene on this site in California. One of the speakers was talking about collisions—the number of times you bump into somebody serendipitously, and how hugely stimulating to creativity that is.
I find it to be true. Bumping into colleagues and getting out into the world and having those lunches and bumping into people at the lunch spot that you didn’t expect to see tends to be where the real work happens.
What have your writers taught you about staying creative?
If you’re a writer, and you’re working on a book, your job is to wake up in the morning and tackle that which you have set out for yourself, whether it’s solving the problem of chapter three, or getting your character from point A to point B, or starting at page one and meticulously improving the language of every sentence. The dangerous thing about almost any office job is that it’s very easy to become merely reactive. If I’ve learned anything from my clients, it’s that you do have to make your own day.
How involved do you get in helping writers work out a writing problem?
I get involved, but mostly in the form of belief. That is, I believe fundamentally in the talent of my writers and that they will find their way out of the thicket. Also, there are so many examples of writers, even recently, who have gone into the wilderness for ten or more years and returned with masterpieces. Look at the lag time between The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, for instance, or the lag time between Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. You can tell a writer, “You know what, it’s been a while, but look at these other guys. They did okay.”
How much editing do you do? Is that something you feel in your gut, or is it an intellectual decision?
I do think a good agent edits, but he edits only when he knows that he can make a book significantly better. The last thing I would want to do is screw up a perfectly good book. It is something you feel in your gut. I take on very little in the way of new clients these days. Even so, there are times when you read a story and you think, “I can’t not offer this person representation.” Usually it’s a gut impulse that’s then bolstered by a meeting, or by further exploration of the author’s work. I’ve taken on three first-time writers in the past four or five years.
Can you take me through your experience with one of them?
One of them was Karen Thompson Walker, formerly an editor at Simon & Schuster, as you are now.
A terrific writer.
Terrific writer.
Beautiful person, too.
Lovely person. And that doesn’t hurt, by the way, that she’s a nice person. She sent me a query pretty much out of the blue, saying that she graduated from the Columbia MFA program and that she was working on a novel. There was a line about the premise of the novel, which sounded incredibly compelling, the first forty pages of the novel, and maybe three excellent short stories. I read the forty pages of the novel first, because there’s still a bias in favor of novels in the industry, and you could love the stories but it’s going to be an uphill slog if the novel isn’t working. I was completely blown away by the first forty pages. Those pages exist in her first novel, The Age of Miracles, largely untouched from when they crossed my desk. They were absolutely arresting.
You meet her, you love her, you take her on. Then what?
Then I wait. And I wait, and I wait, and I wait. I waited for four years, I think. A couple of great things happened bam, bam, bam. One was she was promoted to full editor at Simon & Schuster. The other was that she won the Sirenland Fellowship, an all-expenses-paid trip to Positano, Italy, to hobnob with other notable writers. And shortly thereafter she sent me the whole manuscript. I held my breath, thinking, “I really, really hope she pulled it off,” hoping beyond hope that she really did pull it off, and then, as page after page went by, recognizing that she absolutely had pulled it off. When I sent it out into the world, it was greeted with exactly the same reaction that I experienced: jaw-dropping appreciation for what a marvelous writer she is, and what an amazing novel she’d created.
Did you know her book was going to be big? You are known for selling big fiction, and big nonfiction, too—books that garner advances with life-changing numbers of zeros. A lot of people want to know how you do it.
Yes. I knew that book was going to be big. The answer to the question “How do you do it?” may sound facile, but I would ask you, or anyone who’s a serious reader, this question: How many great books do you read a year? How many books do you read that you would recommend to almost anyone you know? For most people the answer is a relatively small number.
If as an agent you read a book and recognize it as that, a book that you know the people you give it to are going to want to give it to other people…those are the big books. Good isn’t enough.
When you have a book that’s truly extraordinary, and you realize the money is going to be significant, do you ever caution writers not to take the money?
No. And you can put this in parentheses after that: “He didn’t hesitate while saying that.” No.
Walk me through the consequences.
I think there are no consequences. Maybe that’s a terrible thing to say. I would rather my client have the money than CBS [which owns Simon & Schuster] have the money. [Laughs.] And this is not to single out CBS. I love my colleagues at Hachette and News Corp. and Bertelsmann and Macmillan. But I’d rather my authors have the money. No one puts a gun to a publisher’s head and makes the publisher pay this money. They pay large advances because they can’t bear the idea of not publishing a particular book. They go in with their eyes open. What’s the worst that happens? You’re paid way too much money for a book that then gets an enormous amount of attention that it probably wouldn’t have gotten if you hadn’t gotten a huge amount of money for it. These enormous advances, which are fewer and farther between than they were prerecession, are still, as you described them, life changing. They are that rare thing that enables someone to say, “I’m a writer,” and mean it. That is, not a writer slash teacher slash freelance editor slash anything else. To say, “This is what I do because I am able to sock away enough money from that crazy first advance to spend my days writing my second and third books.” Not a bad thing.
The writer who’s outside of the business views the business as this fortress designed to keep him or her out. And in fact, what I see is an industry in which we want nothing more than to discover an amazing new voice. Who wouldn’t?
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That will be gratifying for people to hear.
For the few people who get paid too much money?
Everybody aspires! And as you said, those are the books that publishers want to take a crack at too. But when a publisher really takes a bath, it doesn’t feel very good.
Let me say this. If a publisher overpays for a really good book, and that really good book garners rave reviews and does really well by almost every other standard other than the giant advance, they don’t feel good about it, but they don’t feel bad about it.
Every publisher I’ve spoken to who has been in that situation has said, “I’m steadfastly proud of the job we did on that book. I’m proud to have had anything to do with that book,” whatever that book may be.
And then there are the books that earn out, the ones that actually become the sensations that they were destined to be in the first place. And you think, “Wow, I should have gotten more money for that one.”
Do you think the short story collection is in a commercial renaissance?
I certainly hope so. It’s a great American art form. In terms of WME’s ability to sell them in translation, we have a big foreign rights department, and we never sell translation rights to publishers. We reserve those rights to the clients and sell them internationally. There are territories that we find it very difficult to sell short stories in, in which it is very easy to sell novels. Some of the best short story collections do find a lot of foreign pickup, but it usually takes a certain amount of massaging to get publishers on board internationally.
Domestically, I think publishers would still say that in the aggregate, novels far outsell story collections. Every year there are notable exceptions. The question is, how many? In recent years, between Daniyal Mueenuddin and George Saunders, and Junot Díaz, Nam Le, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward Jones, there have been a number of commercially successful short story writers. But each year probably doesn’t allow more than four or five.
In the case of George Saunders, or in the case of Sam Lipsyte, who’s a new client of mine—he used to be with Ira Silverberg, a friend and a phenomenal agent who left agenting—there’s a feeling almost of, “Now it’s time.” In the case of George Saunders, or in the case of Sam Lipsyte, who’s a new client of mine—he used to be with Ira Silverberg, a friend and a phenomenal agent who left agenting—there’s a feeling almost of, “Now it’s time.”
You’d think that in a short-attention-span age, it’d be much easier to sell story collections than novels. Yet the initial investment a reader makes in establishing where he is in a fictional landscape is only made once in a novel, but is made ten times in a story collection. Short story collections ask a bit more of the reader than novels do.
In literary fiction, there is usually work associated with figuring out where you are in each short story, who is telling the story, what the parameters of the world being described are. In a novel, once you get your feet wet in the first fifty pages or so, you can kind of glide on through.
What do the words “literary fiction” mean to you?
People outside the business ask that question on occasion, and it took me a while to figure out how to respond. When you’re in the business, it’s one of those you-know-it-when-you-see-it sorts of things.
When you have to actually put some thought into it, you realize that what defines literary fiction is an attention to language on a word by word and sentence by sentence level that is equal to or greater than attention to plot. How’s that for a definition?
I’m probably going to steal it.
And then in purely commercial fiction, plot is paramount. You have to have a ripping good plot in commercial fiction to hold the reader every sentence and every paragraph. Regardless of the craft of the writing, it’s really about transmitting a story. Pure, unadulterated storytelling. With literary fiction, yes, it’s storytelling to a greater or lesser degree, but it is as much about reaching the reader through the nuance of word, rather than merely getting the reader from point A to point B.
Earlier you said that you respond first to voice. It’s easy to see how that relates to the craft of sentences in literary fiction. But you also represent commercial writers. What does voice have to with, say, your attraction to Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston?
What Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston’s books bristle with is intelligence. There’s an incredibly strong voice that comes through their work because there are these two enormous intelligences operating in it. In the same way that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works tend not to be described as literary fiction, there is an intensity of purpose, care, and attention to characters and character development, and yes, plot, in the works of Preston & Child. It makes you think, “Ah, I’m not wasting my time. My mind is being engaged by this work, because I know that I’m in the hands of two incredibly smart writers who are taking me someplace I’ve never been before.”
Are you somebody who prefers a linear narrative, or kind of a curlicue one that hops around in time?
It really depends on the book. I’ve certainly encountered clients’ novels, I can’t think of any particular titles off the top of my head, that in draft were clearly linear books that were made into curlicue books unnecessarily. Sometimes the only editorial note you need to say is, “You know what, just tell this one chronologically. It’ll be fine.”
There’s a tendency to think it’ll be more literary if it’s structurally complex. And in fact that’s not necessarily the case.
Does poetry have a role in your professional reading life?
When you’re a publishing professional and you’re consuming huge amounts of text, both professionally and for pleasure, reading poetry slows everything down. There’s a speed at which you can consume prose, even the densest prose, that poetry just does not allow you.
For me, reading poetry is like putting the brakes on. It’s a conscious act. It requires you to truly stop what you’re doing, and focus not just on the paragraph, but on the word. I feel like it stimulates a different part of my reading brain than reading prose does.
Is it sort of a recalibration of your reading mind?
That’s a good way to put it. I think it is that.
When do you need to recalibrate?
I still read submissions and everything my own clients write, which is a lot. I also read a lot for pleasure, and I encourage all the agents here to read for pleasure, which is paradoxical in an industry in which we’re just absolutely overwhelmed with work reading.
In the same way that you use a different critical faculty reading poetry, I think you use a different critical faculty doing pleasure reading than work reading. You can turn off bits and pieces of the critical apparatus that, when you’re reading for work, are saying things like, “Can I fix this? Can I sell this? What’s the editor going to make of this?” You can dial those down and think, “I’m just a reader engaging with a good book.”
Poetry serves a parallel function. I can’t say that I reserve any particular time of day to read poetry or manuscripts, but as you can imagine, I have an apartment littered with books. Sometimes it’s just a question of picking up one that’s been lying there for a while.
What was the last truly magnificent book that you read that is not on your list?
That’s not on my list?
If you want to choose, okay, but I figured you would say, “I couldn’t possibly. All of my children are tall and handsome.”
I was blown away by Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Wow. It’s both very sly and readable but packs an unbelievable emotional punch. I think everything he writes is incredible.
Anything else?
There’s an amazing biography of Talleyrand by Duff Cooper, written in 1932, that biographers still talk about. I just read that, finally, after years of meaning to, and it was phenomenal. I was tweeting about it.
In your pleasure reading, how far back do you dip? Do you ever go back and say, “It’s time for my Milton fix?”
Absolutely. I have a thing for Dante, so I read a lot of different translations and attempt the Italian. I finally read Lydia Davis’s Madame Bovary translation last summer, which was fantastic. I’m never finished with the past, but I like to mix it up between what’s coming out now and what came out some time ago.
Are there any books that you’re embarrassed not to have read?
Sure, don’t we all have books that we’re embarrassed not to have read? Do you want me to name some?
Well, it might be interesting.
I have never read The Faerie Queene. And I’ve never read The Golden Notebook. How about that? Have you?
No! I haven’t read either one.
OK, then I feel a little bit better.
But then again I’ve been around for a lot less time.
[Laughs.] That’s true, I’ve had more time to catch up. I haven’t finished Proust. I’ve only read three of the six, I think. How volumes are there? Six? I don’t know. Someday.
I ask because some readers expect gatekeepers like agents and editors to maintain an extraordinarily vast knowledge of letters from the beginning of recorded time. Yet few of us could live up to that expectation. Do you see yourself as a gatekeeper?
Yes. I think we all are. And I would argue, without any grandiosity, that agents, editors, and publishers are performing a public good. I’m sure that one of your questions is going to be about self-publishing, and I think the opportunity that digital self-publishing offers writers is enormously to the good in terms of breaking down those barriers. But I think that most consumers are actually looking to gatekeepers, though I think gatekeeper is probably the wrong word.
What word would you use instead?
The word I would use is “curator,” in the same way that, coming from outside the music industry, I’m looking for people who spend all their time listening to music to help me identify which bands I want to listen to. People who read for pleasure are looking to people who spend all of their time reading books to tell them what books they might be interested in reading. It’s not crazy to expect that people who have developed expertise over many years as to what makes a really good read would be in a position to help consumers make that decision.
I often hear the word “curator” in context of someone arguing that books are merely “content.” Would you say that we’re in the book business, or the content industry?
Well, they’re certainly not mutually exclusive. I’ve been at WME for four years and part of what’s thrilling about it is being a part of a much larger entertainment industry and field. There are so many creative people passing through this office. Some of them write books and some of them write plays and some of them write music and some of them write movies and some of them direct movies. But they’re all in the content creation business. I don’t see it as a pejorative at all, nor am I such a purist as to say that the only form of intellectual appreciation is that for books.
I wouldn’t much want to meet someone who only ever read books and never listened to music and never went to see plays and never saw movies. There’s no shame in contextualizing books as part of a larger content universe. And yet I think book lovers are sentimentalists. I know I am.
I love books, first and foremost. That’s why I’m in the book department at WME and not in the motion picture department. But I love interacting with my colleagues who are in those other businesses because they feel absolutely as passionately about what they’re doing as I do about what I’m doing.
You mentioned stacks of books around your apartment. Do you prefer to read print books, or digitally?
It’s funny, I went largely digital when the first Kindle was introduced however many years ago. I was really enamored of it, especially for work, and then my pleasure reading migrated to a device for four or five years. And then I went back.
I realized that I missed the experience of reading paper, and I missed having the trophy around afterward. I was also influenced by my kids, who are biased very much in favor of paper. They’re big readers. My daughter, who’s ten, will read on a device in a pinch, but still prefers the physical book. And my thirteen-year-old son simply refuses to read on devices. He will not do it. Do you read on a device?
I do, but mostly for submissions. It’s much easier to hold an iPad on the subway than it is to hold four hundred pages of manuscript. But the reading experience is something so richly textured, and the print book is a piece of technology so deeply refined, that an e-reader can feel rude in comparison to a print book for pleasure reading. It’ll do, but…
Yes, and I think there still is a divide for me, and apparently among the larger world of consumers, between a kind of book you feel you need to own, and a kind of book that you can perfectly well read on the device without missing afterward.
Do you have any thoughts on how magazines and newspapers have managed their transition online and on devices?
I exist on the periphery of the magazine and newspaper business, and our authors and clients interact with them much more directly. There’s probably not quite the degree of sentimentality around print newspapers and print magazines as there is around print books, in part because they’re less permanent objects.
I still own every book that my grandmother bought me at Gotham Book Mart, but I don’t own every newspaper I’ve ever read—otherwise I’d be one of the Collyer brothers. It’s the same with magazines, although God knows my parents had stacks and stacks of National Geographic that they never got rid of.
Having switched to reading The New York Times on the iPad, it feels different to me. I don’t have that feeling of starting at page A1 and looking at every single page in the newspaper until I get to the end, and knowing that I have at least read every headline. It’s a different engagement with the information.
From a business point of view, I wouldn’t presume to speak for the future of the newspaper and magazine industries, but as a consumer, it’s somehow more different engaging digitally with magazines and newspapers than I find it is with books.
There are lots of debates going on in the publishing business about e-book royalty rates, the value of digital editions, how e-books may be sold, and so on. How much should an author actually pay attention to?
It’s good to be informed about your business. If you’re a writer and you want to make writing more than an avocation, it makes sense to have some understanding of the industry. I don’t think writers should obsess about it. But it’s fair to know how all the different pieces fit together.
I’m always a little surprised by how much ink is spilled by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about our business, seeing as it’s dwarfed by other entertainment businesses. If a million people read a book in America, it’s a huge bestseller. If a million people go to see a movie, it’s a disaster. It’s just the nature of the numbers. There are many more moviegoers and TV watchers than there are readers.
It’s good to be informed about your business. If you’re a writer and you want to make writing more than an avocation, it makes sense to have some understanding of the industry. I don’t think writers should obsess about it. But it’s fair to know how all the different pieces fit together.
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What about the upcoming merger of Random House and Penguin? What do you think the fallout’s going to be?
It’s impossible to know until it’s here, which is why we here spend very little time even thinking about it. Those of us who have been doing this for a while remember when Si Newhouse owned Random House, and when there was a separate company called Bantam Doubleday Dell. We woke up one day to discover that Si Newhouse was essentially selling Random House to “the Germans.” It was as if the sky was falling. Now, it’s inconceivable to think of Random House as anything other than Bertelsmann. In a very short period of time people will forget that Random House and Penguin were not always Random Penguin or Penguin Random or whatever they’re going to call it.
There will be a lot of difficult decisions and a lot of growing pains in the meantime. There will probably be other mergers. And there will probably be just enough competition for the really, really big books and the really, really good books to enable writers and agents to continue doing what they do.
Do you think that there’s a similar pattern in the agenting world? For instance, the merger of William Morris and Endeavor, but also the combination of boutique agencies. You moved from a smaller agency to a much larger one.
It probably is a trend, and it’s a trend across a lot of different industries. Many people credit the real motivation of the Random House–Penguin merger being less about market share and more about pushback against Amazon, who have such an enormous position of strength in the retail end of things.
We’re entering an era where being in a very stable, big boat with a very powerful engine, and with an extremely well-trained crew all pulling in the same direction, is a very nice place to be. When a multinational publishing company comes out of the blue and dictates unreasonable terms to its authors, it’s very nice to be able to say, “That’s nice, but you can’t do that to us, because we have too many of your authors. We’ll simply take the better part of your content and go elsewhere.” That position is a very attractive one, both for the agents and for the clients of that agency.
Let’s get back to relationships. An agent’s relationship to a book doesn’t end when you sell it.
Well, some not very good agents’ relationship to the book ends when they sell it.
What are the ways in which you end up being involved?
If you’re a good agent, it doesn’t end. You should be a part of the process every step of the way. And not an intrusive part of the process. A good agent is additive to the process.
I’ve heard editors say that working with an agent who is constructive, who actually contributes positively to the experience rather than merely as an irritant, is value added. They will pay more money for that agent’s books than they would otherwise—or at least more than they would for an agent who they know will be a distraction from the process of bringing the book to market.
A good agent is involved in all the major decisions, from the titling to the jacket to the marketing to the publicity. And in many cases, it’s merely the function of reminding the publisher that someone’s watching.
It’s very easy, especially if the author does not live in New York City—and most authors don’t—to forget that the author is even a human being. If you’re the editor, you have a direct relationship. If you’re the art department, or the marketing people, or any number of other people who are working in support of the book, there’s a chance you’ve never spoken to the author, let alone met the author, and it’s easy to depersonalize the process. Part of what the agent is responsible for doing is making sure that book and that author are not forgotten.
The best, most clarifying thing, to do is to ask for a marketing meeting several months before publication—to bring the author into the publishing house, sit down with the editor, the publisher, the head of marketing, the head of publicity, and say, “What’s your plan?” for the simple reason that it forms a connection between the author and the various people in the room, and it requires preparation before the meeting. The people in that room have to think, “Oh, Simonoff’s coming in with his author, I guess we’d better come up with a marketing plan.”
There have to be things that make you roll your eyes when you hear publishers say them.
I despair that the old line some publishers still trot out—“We don’t publish individual books, we publish authors”—is less and less true. Take Cormac McCarthy. He had an enormously supportive editor in Albert Erskine, who would publish almost anything McCarthy wrote. And McCarthy did not sell particularly well. For his first few books, I’d be surprised if he sold more than in the four digits. But the feeling was, “He’s our guy, and we will keep at it.” It really wasn’t until All the Pretty Horses that he blew up. The question is: Can you have a Cormac McCarthy today? Can you have someone who publishes even three, or four, or five brilliant works that don’t sell particularly well, and have a publisher hang in and say, “We can’t pay him very much, but he’s got a slot on our list regardless of what he writes”?
I’m sympathetic to what publishers are up against, but it&rs