Agents & Editors: PJ Mark

Had you thought about writing?
I wrote a terrible novel. A really, really terrible novel. And no, it is not discoverable. It does not exist in any form digitally. It is buried deep within a drawer in a remote undisclosed location. I discovered very quickly that real writers are those who wake up and believe that they cannot do anything else but write. That they will not survive if they are not writing.

In a way, writers are people who find ways to organize their lives to support their writing.
Yes, I think that’s a terrific way to state that. And very few writers can support themselves completely independently from their writing. That’s because of the nature of payout on a book contract. Even a very lucrative book contract is paid off over the course of two years, and when you’re taking 40 percent of that money to pay an agent and pay taxes, you are working with a very small margin. I do have writers who are fortunate enough to be able to survive on their writing. But most writers are not able to do that.

I didn’t have that drive. While I was writing that novel, it was what I wanted to do, but when it was finished, I saw that I didn’t really have anything to say—or if I did have things to say, I didn’t have the language or experience to say them. The book felt false.

I was able to recognize that and put it aside. But that experience reinforced that I do have this creative instinct, and that I could cultivate those impulses and ideas with other people who were more skilled, and who could actually execute them on the page. I could bring my own creative perspective into shaping the work with the writer.

IMG was an opportunity to be paid a really decent salary, take a lot of risks, and make a lot of failures. I didn’t have a clear mentor or guide, so I learned through trial and error. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. That can only last so long. You have to get it together and step up.

What sort of mistakes did you make?
I took on things that I thought would be financially viable, but which I didn’t really care about. I thought they would sell and that I was employed to make money for the company, and to that end I should just find books that were a commodity. But I quickly learned that if your heart isn’t in a project it’s very difficult to sell it, and people recognize that. I learned that agenting was going to be much harder than I expected, and that I have to really love everything that I take on. I have to be determined to go to thirty-five people even if they keep saying no.

My first writer when I was at Inside.com, Joe Hagan, and I became friends. His wife, Samantha Hunt, was starting to publish in McSweeney’s, and she sent me a seventy-page prose poem called The Seas. And I thought: “This is brilliant! And I have no idea what to do with it!”

Through a very generous relationship she had with Dave Eggers, she worked that book into a novel. Sam was my first fiction client, and her book was the first novel that I sold. We had a lot of firsts together. She was in the first group of writers to be named “Five Under Thirty-Five” by the National Book Foundation. She was the first writer whose work I sold to the New Yorker. We’ve had a lot of nice milestones in our growing up together. 

And you just recently sold a big book by Joe Hagan—a biography of Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone.
Right! I have talked to Joe over the years about many, many projects. The great thing about Joe and our relationship is that we could talk out an idea and very quickly realize that he wasn’t interested in sustaining it over the course of writing the book. We have known each other for fourteen years. Patience is the story of my life.

How long were you at IMG?
A year and a half. And then the writing was on the wall. When [the founder of IMG] Mark McCormack died, it was clear that the company was going to go through a transition. Lisa Queen told me I should reach out to David McCormick. I met with him and Nina Collins, and they said, “You can be a part of our shop, but we don’t have any room, so you would have to work from home.” I did that for about a year, and then Collins McCormick moved to Bond Street and I had my own office.

Did you have a fire in your belly to prove yourself?
The fire in my belly was hunger for food. [Laughs.] I had to work my ass off to make a living. I was not paid a salary and every dime I made was self-generated. Once we moved to Bond Street, I took on foreign rights and that gave me a little bit of an income stream, but I was still unsalaried and trying to develop my list.

The dark secret about agenting is that it takes time to build a list and to get traction. It took three years to feel like I was on my feet. I started as an agent at thirty-two years old, so I already felt I was late to the game. But I had relationships with editors who were very patient with my early submissions, when they weren’t up to par or needed work. They would give my material a read because they wanted me to succeed, and would give generous feedback about what wasn’t working. I learned quickly, and by the time we moved to Bond Street, I had sold books for six figures. I was confident I was on track.

The beautiful thing about being in publishing is that it’s a little like gambling. You never know when your number is coming up and a book is going to hit. The Seas was a novel that was turned down by a lot of people, and MacAdam/Cage bought it for more money than they had spent on a novel previously. Sam got a tremendous amount of attention for that book, and we did well.

Whom did you represent early on?
It was one writer bringing me another. Samantha Hunt brought me Sarah Manguso. Then, because I was working with Sarah, Ed Park came in. People kept connecting me to their friends and my list grew. I took on Rosecrans Baldwin when I was at Collins McCormick.

Then, in 2005, there was a shift in the arrangement between David and Nina Collins and the company folded. It was right before the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was tricky. I went to Frankfurt to represent Amy Williams’s and David McCormick’s lists but I had no idea what I was going to return to. While I was in Frankfurt, I negotiated a deal over the phone, with David and Amy, who wanted to re-form the agency with me as a part of it.

I loved working with David and Amy. I learned so much from both of them, about instincts and business. When to talk, and when not to talk, in a negotiation. What to expect, what to demand. David and Amy were my real first mentors and the people I turned to for advice and for guidance.

One of the first novels that I sold was The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu. I read that in June 2005. I had a sense things were tricky within the agency. Dinaw and I were going back and forth on some revisions for the book, and I decided that it would be good to submit it around Frankfurt. By the time the company was re-forming, I had sold Dinaw’s book. I was standing on the corner of 23rd Street when I did it, because there was no office. I was working with David and Amy in Amy’s apartment, sharing her living room on the Upper West Side.

That set the tone, I felt, for whatever the next step was going to be for me. There were lots of great moments after that. But then at some point my list was becoming bigger, and the work I needed to do as the foreign-rights agent was not sustainable—I couldn’t effectively do both. And that was the moment that an opportunity presented itself at Janklow & Nesbit. My next step was to come here in 2010.

Tell me about making the transition from one place to another.
Moving from an agency like McCormick & Williams to an agency like Janklow was about servicing my clients in the best way possible. I was aware that as my clients received more and more attention and acclaim, they were getting eyed by other agents. I needed to be able to provide them with the kind of attention they deserved.

Not just from you, but institutionally?
Exactly. This company had a history of doing that, from a contracts department negotiating terms that I wouldn’t be able to negotiate independently to a general counsel who is anticipating the changing landscape way ahead of what I could possibly anticipate to a foreign rights department of four engaged, really integrated agents who intimately understand the market. 

Having the opportunity to work with Mort Janklow and Lynn Nesbit and Tina Bennett was really exciting. Tina became a very good friend and a terrific confidante. It was incredibly valuable just to run scenarios by her and to learn from her experience. And my list grew and exploded. That first year I think I sold twenty-three books.

What connects the work of the writers you represent?
There are a few loose associations. I’m interested in explorations of religious identity, probably because I came from a born-again Christian family. My brother converted our family during the seventies campus movement. We had Bible studies in our house and groups of teenagers came in to play the guitar and read Bible verses and converse. I was allowed to be a part of that, and I loved those times. Everything felt safe. It was, weirdly, a joyful part of my life, because it provided a sense of community and belonging. Children were valued in that community and I felt looked after. So, faith is a general theme of books that I like—and the subversive or not obvious ways that faith can be explored.

I’m also interested in sexuality. There is a blurring of binary gender roles, and a fluidity to gender and sexuality, that I’m interested in. There are people who explore that in their nonfiction work, like Maggie Nelson or Wayne Koestenbaum, whose beautiful collection of essays Farrar, Straus and Giroux published last year. He talks about how art and culture influence the man he became. But he looks through a queer eye at these things.

I’m interested in marginalized and underrepresented voices, whether that is related to ethnic or national or cultural identity. Dinaw Mengestu brings a perspective to what the immigrant idea is that subverts the idea of the immigrant narrative. Stuart Nadler’s first collection explored the relationship between fathers and sons and Jewish identity.

All of those books are having a larger cultural conversation and prompting responses, I hope, in readers. I look for that dialogue when I read something. If it doesn’t give me that response, I know it’s not for me. I see plenty of intellectually rigorous, smart, good, ambitious fiction that doesn’t have this kind of heart, and so it’s not for me.