Agents & Editors: Tanya McKinnon

I’d love to hear your thoughts on comps, both when a writer comes to you and when you pitch to editors and what that means for the marketplace.
I have my own feelings about comps. There are the comps as we understand them in the marketplace. An editor might ask, “Can you comp with a book that’s high-selling so that it helps our P&L [profit and loss report]? Can we comp with something that gives us more ammunition to give you a more aggressive advance?” That’s what editors are asking me when they ask for comps; they’re trying to help me. They’re trying to get to a number that makes us both happy. So I understand it as part of the business model, and I try to be helpful in thinking about how we can comp it and how we can comp it creatively if it’s something a little different than what we’ve seen before.

Tanya McKinnon of McKinnon Literary. (Credit: Andres Hernandez)

Then there’s my work with clients where we use comps, and I also ask my clients to use work that has done well because I think that work has something to teach us. And we use comps sometimes in a slightly different way—to say, “What has this author done, and how does that work with what you are doing?”

I like what you say about how you use comps in your client work—that it is also a lineage of writing. I’d love to hear how you see your work as an agent adding to that lineage.
There’s a wonderful book I have coming out by a women’s reproductive justice advocate, and we looked at our comps for the publisher but also for ourselves: What writing has come before on this subject matter? Where do you fit in the line of work that has been produced about women’s reproductive justice? What are you telling us that’s new? Why is your book important? This is the way in which comps can also be very useful—and not just massive, explosive sellers, which isn’t a productive exercise. You want good working comps that allow editors and a house to realistically assess where a book might fall and that you can use to talk about its potential and why it’s necessary.

Look, there’s a hole here. We think readers will want to know: They can’t get it in book X and they can’t get it in book Y, but right here in my book, they’re going to be able to [find it in] this. It’s a rich treatment, and it’s a wonderful exploration, and it adds to books X and Y. I think that’s when literature is exciting and connective and makes our worlds bigger.

Nonfiction writers are saying, “Oh, I just saw this other book come out that is about what I’m writing about. How do I stand out?” What do you have to say to writers when they bring that up?
When a work has come out before, I use that as an opportunity to say, “Well, now you have to gird your loins more strongly than you did before. If you thought you knew what you were writing about, now you have to simultaneously be clearer, more powerful, and more expansive than you were before.” So I don’t think of competition in the marketplace as Oh, woe is me, my idea is taken. I see it as opportunity. You now have a crisis in your life that allows you to think in deeper, richer, broader, more complex ways about what you’re interested in than you did before, because now there’s a fire under you. And I think that leads to good things.

I love that idea of seeing another book and using it as an opportunity to refine a project, to gain more clarity.
Let’s also be careful because we know that there are nine thousand books about Abraham Lincoln, but sometimes when you represent people of color or you’re dealing with work that has to do with feminism or LGBTQ issues, there is also this added sense that there can only be one. And we have to fight against that because our experiences are not monolithic. We have a rich presence in this country. We are impacting culture in all sorts of ways, and there’s not just one person of color perspective on a given topic. So we also have to be a little bit careful about some of the coding of another book that has come out that’s like ours when it pertains specifically to more marginalized voices in publishing.

As a visible woman of color in an agency where you are working and representing writers who are writing in these more progressive ways, how was that kind of environment when you were selling these titles prior to 2020 versus now?
I think advances were more modest before—that’s something everyone knows. There was kind of an explosion around 2020 and a lot of things were selling for a lot of money. There was sort of a catch-up game happening. Naturally, I think that’s wonderful; I want bazillions of books by all kinds of people to be in print. My only fear ever is that work by people of color, by feminists, by queer people, I never want that to be a fad. I never want that to be something that’s in vogue for a period of time and then sort of drops off the radar again. But I was here in 2000 when that happened; there was a sort of vogue moment where they discovered Black writers and then it kind of fell off again.

So my hope is that we see the incredible value that having truly diverse, truly integrated publishing gives us as a nation; that it is the heart, the beating heart of our democracy, that it is what helps to fulfill the promise of democracy in this country. We understand that democracy is imperiled around the world right now and that we must attend to that in the most mindful ways possible. As people who have committed ourselves to the written word, it’s incumbent upon us in particular to hold the line.

Do you worry that that might happen again now?
I always worry that things can become a fad as opposed to ongoing, serious, invested commitment. Your politics in some ways are like a marriage. You need to put in the work, and you need to commit for life. And by politics I don’t mean some rigid dogma that you subscribe to, but rather an evolving sense of how to be of service in the world to best help people thrive. I don’t understand the pleasure of a world that isn’t communally rooted. So for me, thinking about what’s good for community, what’s good for the world, what’s good for the future, what’s good for our children, what’s good for our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren—I mean, it would be nice to leave them a habitable planet. So in that sense, I don’t see any way that you could ever stop caring about these things and evolving in your thinking and becoming more complicated in your ability to understand the motivations of people and what’s driving them and to try to operate from compassion while being politically committed.

Community is so important. What does it mean for you?
There are different kinds of community I am in. I think there’s the community with my writers, which is very rich and vibrant and a community in which I joke sometimes. Every day I wake up and I get to talk to the smartest people in the world, and they’re brilliant and they’re passionate and they’re talented and they’re poetic and they’re quirky and they’re just magnificent. And there’s the community of my family and friends that I’ve always had, and they, by virtue of my own interests, are also largely political people who spend their downtime thinking about politics in the world. And even if we go see a movie, dinner afterward, it’s always a pretty passionate debate about the politics of the movie, regardless of what it is, about representation.

So I think community for me is a place in which you gather with like-minded people and try to enhance the good in the world. And then there’s the broader community of the town you live in and the country you live in. It is painful for me how increasingly violent the community of America feels for so many of us and that we don’t feel like we can be in community with our fellow citizens. America has never been an easy place to live if you look a certain way or love a certain way; we’ve always known that. And yet we see these moments of possibility. I think the community that I envision is always working toward those possibilities, working toward a place in which there can be divergent political opinions, but we don’t actively seek to harm our neighbors.

I feel like there are parallels in publishing, too. We can choose to be better in the ways we publish and the books we want to publish. And so what are you looking for? What are you excited about?
I am always looking for incredibly powerful ideas and voices that teach me something that I didn’t know about the world I live in, that are going to go out there and open the eyes of people and allow them to have a deeper, richer experience of how they’re living. I love work that is feminist. I love intersectional work that really at its heart takes in whether you are a person of color or a white person. I don’t believe you have to be a person of color to understand the structures of white supremacy in this country. White supremacy is a language, and we all learn it. And if it’s a language and we learn it, then you can learn the rules of it and understand how it’s constructed. You can understand white supremacy, and you can actively choose to divest from it, to choose against it.

So I think for whoever I represent, I want them to be on that journey of divesting from structures that are the underpinnings of subjugation in this country. I also want people of color to be free to write beyond what is sometimes perceived as what we must write about. I want people of color to be free to make connections to the natural world, to climate, to art. I want us to be free of the burden of feeling that we must account for race in the world. At the same time I love writers who can seamlessly incorporate that part of their identity to enrich whatever broader work they’re doing, because we bring everything we are to everything we do.

Why is intersectionality so important in the work?
The great gift of intersectionality is that it allows us to be more completely who we are in a simultaneous way. We can’t cherry-pick all the different locations of identity that we have. Intersectionality allows us to understand that they’re all coming together. I am a Black woman with a certain kind of history, and intersectionality allows for me to account for the multiplicity of identities that I have. And in that sense, it’s profoundly liberating. It’s liberating for people to be able to express themselves as who they are. And it also allows us to see the way in which power moves against certain aspects of identity and not others, and maybe even splits us inside of ourselves. I mean, I think intersectionality does a lot of important work in terms of allowing us to be clearer about who we are and what’s impacting us, and therefore freer in who we are as we express ourselves.

Vivian Lee is a writer and a senior editor at Little, Brown.