Bender: This experience of joining together has been like going from black-and-white TV to color. I was content with black and white until I knew what color was. I was really, really happy having my own agency. But this is so much more vivid. It’s much more engaging, much more rewarding.
Barer: Part of why this arrangement works so well for us is that we’ve each had ten to fifteen years of experience, either at bigger agencies or on our own. We came in with established lists and careers, and we all are equals. That’s why it was a seamless process to work out the nuts and bolts of what the Book Group would look like. We’re lucky that we came together at this time in our lives and careers when we have so much to offer each other.
Weed: A year in, we just had a partners’ meeting. We went around the room and talked about our highs and lows, and we all only had highs. That speaks to what we have: It’s a love fest.
What caused you to join forces?
Barer: Suddenly it just seemed so obvious. It evolved very naturally and then very quickly.
Weed: After we joined forces and sent an email out saying, “Ta-da, world!” Amy Einhorn [the publisher of Flatiron Books] wrote us, saying, “We all knew this was happening already.” It was a natural progress.
I’m imagining a movie montage—one of you looks up, and then another, and another, and all of a sudden you’re all frolicking on a hill.
Bloom: You’re running to the Eiffel tower—“I’m going to meet you there!” The three of us who were already sharing space started talking about it, and it felt like a piece was missing. That was Faye. It wasn’t that we had to convince you. As you say, you were living in your black-and-white world and when we opened the door, you were like Dorothy stepping in. I was like, “Come with us to the kingdom of Oz.”
You made an argument not for the love triangle, but for the business rectangle.
Bloom: I would call it the perfect square. We do have other people who we love who work with us, who are selling books and who we very much consider to be part of The Book Group. But for partners, it was a perfect square.
You’re now running an agency together. Meanwhile, some of the editorial colleagues you met as assistants have reached the tops of their imprints. It’s interesting to consider how editors and agents form a “class” that enters the business and rises together.
Barer: Yes! To see them have their own imprint, or be a publisher, or become an editor in chief. Reagan Arthur, Lee Boudreaux [editorial director of Lee Boudreaux Books at Little, Brown], Marysue Rucci [editor in chief of Simon & Schuster]—were all people we came up with.
Bloom: You wake up, and it’s happened.
Weed: You have to stop referring to yourself as the “young agent.”
Barer: And then someone asks you, “Do you know a young editor?” and you realize everybody you know is over the age of forty.
Bloom: Or when our bright young assistant is like, “We’re going to a party tonight… but it’s only for the young people in publishing.”
Barer: I am the young people!
Weed: But it starts at eleven and it’s in Williamsburg.
Bloom: We can’t do eleven in Williamsburg anymore.
Barer: It’s exciting to be in publishing when you’re young and there are all those fun parties. But publishing is also fairly friendly to women with families, and it does get better as you get older. It’s not without its challenges, but I don’t feel that I'm going to age out of this job.
Part of this idea of a class you grow with is who you learn from. Was your professional education like going to school, where you learn not only from the teachers who are a generation ahead, but also from your fellow students?
Bloom: It’s fluid. We are part of a class, but I don’t think people in a class ahead of us, like Rob McQuilkin and Sally Wofford-Girand, would consider themselves a generation ahead. I was Rob’s assistant, and they’ve all been very generous with their time.
Barer: I modeled my agency on Nicole Aragi. I was like, “She. Is. It.” I wanted to be her when I grew up. Now I consider her a friend and somebody I can go to. Everybody is on the same plane; you don’t have to be older or younger to discover a great book.
Agent Renée Zuckerbrot recently announced that she was joining Lippincott Massie McQuilkin after years on her own. Susan Golomb, who talked in this magazine about running her own agency, joined forces with Writers House shortly before that. Even the biggest agencies are merging: United Talent Agency just bought the Agency Group. It seems that agencies are mirroring publishers by joining together to get bigger. Is the Book Group part of that trend?
Bender: I would rather speak to our situation than the trend, which is to say that one of the factors for each of us is that things are changing. Contracts are changing, the e-book landscape is changing, and to have all of us together with a deeper, bigger footprint is to the benefit of everyone in this room, and in particular to our clients. To come together in numbers can be powerful.
What are some specific benefits? Are you talking about the particulars of book contracts, like rights and royalties?
Barer: I feel very confident in saying that I don’t think there’s anything other agents get from publishers that we don’t get. It’s a small business, and everybody knows what everyone else gets. Beyond that, we have opportunities we didn’t have before. Last week, two great booksellers came to talk to us about what we were excited about, what they were excited about, and what was working in their stores. You get more out of that conversation when you’re not just talking about your own list of forty clients. People I didn’t have a relationship with, because of the narrow focus of my list, are now coming into the office because they work with Elisabeth or they do nonfiction. Maybe there’s an opportunity for one of my clients there, or maybe it’s just great to have those conversations because something intangible comes out of them.
Weed: I’m the social coordinator of the Book Group. We have somebody in the office every week—a film agent, a producer, somebody from a magazine, you name it—that we wouldn’t have met otherwise. It’s interesting to think about the trend question, though. I don’t know the answer to where agents are globally.
Barer: I read the Susan Golomb interview in Poets & Writers Magazine, and she was, like, “I’m a lone wolf, man.” I think she was a lone wolf, which is what I used to say until it felt like I didn’t need to be a lone wolf anymore. I didn’t think I would start my own agency until the exact right circumstances happened, and then I never thought I would join forces with other agents until exactly the right circumstances happened.
Bloom: And I never thought I would leave Kneerim & Williams until the exact right circumstances happened. I’m not sure if the agents’ buying and selling and merging is mirroring the publishers’, but I do think there’s comfort and safety in numbers.
Barer: Certainly, once you join forces with people that you respect and enjoy, you realize how much you get out of it.
Bloom: You feel energized. I read this statistic about how a lot of people burn out in their jobs and start to look at a job change in their mid-forties. I love my job and I want to stay in my job, but I need to shake things up a bit to keep the synapses firing.
You weren’t looking at the state of the business, feeling imperiled, and looking for reinforcement?
Bloom: No. I would add that our clients were absolutely thrilled when they heard about this. We all read each other’s books, our clients read each other’s books, and our lists are very complementary. They were excited to be on the shelves together.
Is there a common level of service you seek to provide your clients?
Barer: We each come at our list from a place of strong editorial input, long-term vision, and deep involvement in everyaspect of the publication. One of the things that brought us together was that we were so like-minded about the kind of service we feel we provide to our authors.
Bender: One of the great joys and one of the huge challenges is helping an author navigate his or her career for many years and many, many books. How to help authors find their way through changing audiences and formats and public opinions about content. We are similar in how we do that.
Barer: We take this job so personally. These books and authors are so important to us, which means the joys are joyful and the hard parts can be really painful. You don’t feel like an idiot coming in and being really upset about something because everyone in the room here gets it.
Bloom: Our Tuesday meetings are really about anything and everything that's going on for our books and our authors, whether it's title issues, jacket issues, talking about a new concept for a book, talking about the best time to sell something new. We try to think like publishers. We try to think long term and way ahead.
How would you describe the ideal author-agent relationship at the Book Group?
Bloom: We take on writers. I know it sounds obvious, but we want to fall in love with their voice and style and manage their entire careers.
Bender: My dad reinforced for me some things he had learned through his business. It’s important to have a very open dialogue and follow through on what we say we’re going to do. Those are seemingly simple things that don’t happen as often as they should. The relationship with an author has so many different facets to it, but with the core of honest communication it can nurture and grow.
Weed: Transparency. With the information coming between the publisher and us, that can be hard, but our authors appreciate that dialogue. And since we’re so fiction-heavy, we all do a lot of editing.
Barer: We all value writers who take their job seriously: both the writing of the work and the collaborative process of publishing a book. As an author, when you’re working on your first book alone in your garret, it’s hard to conceive how many people are going to have their hands on those pages by the time it comes out.
I think about that too. Not just the number of people I work with or whom I need to convince of a book’s merit, but what we’re all doing between when the editing is done and the book comes out months later.
Barer: This is on our minds every day.
Bender: Maintaining and nurturing the enthusiasm from acquisition to publication and beyond is the biggest challenge we have. Even if a publisher is thrilled to buy the book and beats out many other bidders, the time between those two events can be tragic.
After you acquire a book you can get even more excited to publish it, but you can also get nervous.
Bender: Buyer’s remorse.
