Bloom: Passion unites the four of us, and everyone in this business, in some way. That love of the written word, the way we get moved by stories told well. It starts there for us. When we come in to tell each other about an exciting new project we're taking on, we always start with, “What is it about?”
Weed: Sometimes we'll be so excited but we’ve never pitched it before, and somebody else will say, “Oh, that's not a good pitch.” It’s great that before I pitch the book to an editor, I can test it out here and they’ll be honest.
Barer: We hear each other’s passion and help home in on the message.
Bender: The path is always so much clearer when it's not for an author you represent or a book you are working on.
Bloom: That’s really true when you’re in the heat of the moment in an auction, and you need perspective.
Weed: Oh, every time! I feel like I’ve never done an auction before and it’s my first time again and again.
Bender: Meanwhile, everyone else is totally calm: “Here’s what you should do.”
Barer: The exciting and challenging thing about being an agent is that you wear so many hats. You’re an editor while you’re getting the proposal or manuscript into shape. You’re a negotiator when you’re doing the deal. And then you’re an advisor. I like to refer to myself as a consigliere, like I’m in The Godfather.
Weed: Not a squeaky wheel?
Barer: Sometimes I feel like a squeaky wheel.
Bloom: My husband calls me Jerry Maguire.
Barer: “Help me help you.”
Bender: All four of us try gracefully to be that squeaky wheel—without being angry, cantankerous, or unreasonable.
Barer: You have to remember to keep the publisher perspective in your mind when you're asking for things. It’s a team effort.
Weed: And the longer we’re in this business, the more we have really good, collaborative relationships with editors. We can call them on the phone and say, “Let’s have an honest talk about this and figure it out together.”
For all the passion, agenting is still a job. What do you enjoy the least?
Bender: Negotiating the actual contract itself, which is why we have a fantastic lawyer who does it for us.
Bloom: Asking for blurbs. I feel like if there's a revolt in publishing it will be to storm the barricades of blurb tyranny. But then you get an amazing one and you’re like, “I love blurbs! Blurbs are amazing!”
Bender: Passing bad news along to authors is incredibly hard. We are so invested in the book that it's bad news for us and then we have the double whammy of having to call the author to pass it along.
Bloom: I have learned to make those hard calls first thing in the morning.
Weed: But sometimes bad news comes in the afternoon!
Bloom: Sometimes it comes on a Friday afternoon and you’re like, “Am I going ruin my author's weekend? Or am I going to ruin my own weekend? Or should we both just suffer together?” That’s hard. It’s also hard saying no to projects that come through, saying no to a good friend. Saying no is hard.
Barer: Another hard part is that this is a business with a budget and a bottom line and advances and salaries. Books are art, but when they go out into the marketplace, they’re also products you’re asking people to pay for. Sometimes having the conversation about art and commerce is uncomfortable. “Why do they want to make my book look like this other book?” Well, because people like to buy things that look like other things that they liked. I wish it wasn’t true but it is. Or, “Why are we all listening to the person at Barnes & Noble?” Well, because Barnes & Noble is a huge part of our marketplace and we kind of have to. Some writers aren’t very comfortable with the notion of commodifying their work. I respect that. But if you want to be published and read, we are part of an industry.
Bloom: This goes back to why the jacket is such a conundrum. It’s the first time you're seeing the commodification of your work. I think that’s the psychological reason these discussions tend to be so fraught. We’re not just talking about a book jacket, we’re talking about selling something. It’s the difference between calling a book a “unit” instead of a “copy.”
Let’s talk more about that. Some of the most difficult conversations are the most necessary, and the jacket is a prime example.
Bloom: I think jackets are becoming even more important than anything else—even blurbs—because we’re in such a visual culture right now.
Barer: We all are informed readers and it's very easy for us to navigate a bookstore. We have a gut instinct about what we like or where it is in the store or how to ask for it. But that’s not how the majority of America feels. I can tell you from having worked in a bookstore: People walk in and say, “What should I read? I have no idea what to read.” It is really important to work a lot on the signifiers in the title and on the jacket and in the jacket copy and blurbs. It’s hard for writers and people in publishing to remember that other people don’t have that internal compass when it comes to picking books, and they don’t all read as much as we do.
There have been a lot of think pieces lately about the use of the word “girl” in a book’s title, and what it means. Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, Luckiest Girl Alive…
Weed: There were several pieces in the last month.
Bloom: I’ve been thinking about this because our assistant just sold a big debut novel called Girl in Snow, and they’re now wondering if they should keep the title or change it. I have a lot of friends who probably read a book a month—mom friends, friends from home, all over the place. To them, the “girl” in the title is a signifier of a certain kind of book. It has become that. It’s undeniable. They’re looking for that next...
Bender: Psychological thriller.
Weed: That goes back to why certain covers might get ripped off again and again.
Bloom: I can see why writers resist those signifiers but I can also see why publishers need them.
Did you ever feel self-doubt about your paths as agents? I’m curious about the difficult moments along the way to where you are now.
Bloom: One was in 2002, when it became clear that for personal reasons I needed to move to New York—my husband’s job was moving here. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to become a full agent. I had been working with Ike Williams and Jill Kneerim for two years, and I’d sold a couple of things. But I was scared to call myself an agent. I didn’t feel like I was ready—I felt an agent was someone much older, much more experienced, and much more successful. Jill sat me down and said, “You have got to start calling yourself an agent. Just take the lunch meetings.” Later, one of the hardest conversations I’ve had in my life was telling Ike and Jill that I was leaving, because I love them so much and am so grateful to them for believing in me and for every opportunity they gave me.
Barer: When I started Barer Literary, I had spent six years saying, “This is Julie Barer calling from Sanford Greenburger Associates.” I was like, “Do I say this is Julie Barer calling from Barer Literary?” That just sounded redundant. And in the beginning I didn’t have an assistant. “When I answer the phone, should I pretend that I'm my assistant or just be me?”
I don’t think there is anybody in this business who hasn’t gone through that period of self-doubt. If they say they didn’t, they’re lying or they forgot. But somewhere along the way I stopped feeling those things. Will I ever have another book to sell? Will I ever do a deal for this much? Will I ever have a best seller? Will I ever sell 100,000 copies? Will I ever sell a million copies? You set all these bars for yourself, but then at a certain point those little things that you think are meaningful stop mattering. Whether you've reached them or not, you just are in it.
It’s great that in books, if you dream it you can become it. But you can feel like an impostor when confidence in your dream wavers.
Barer: We were all there.
Bloom: Yes, it never ends.
Barer: It’s a business built in dreams. It is about a belief in yourself and a little bit of fake-it-till-you-make-it.
Bender: I did the Radcliffe publishing course [now the Columbia Publishing Course] when it was still at Radcliffe. There were ninety of us, I think. I remember watching people defect into other industries, and it was like the peeling off the layers of an onion. More and more people who I felt were my people in this business were leaving and making more money and enjoying success in other places—while I was feeling like I had worked so hard in college to answer someone’s phone and stand at the fax machine. The frustration!
Barer: The years that I was an assistant while my friends had assistants…
Bender: That self-doubt manifests itself differently the further down the path you get and the more success you achieve. It’s never fully gone.
Bloom: I think it helps drive us. That little piece of, “I’m only as good as my last deal.” I think has everybody has been there. Even Jill Kneerim, who is so seasoned and has so many Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, talks about that feeling. I don't think it’s necessarily a female feeling or male feeling, it’s just a feeling when you really love what you do and you want to be taken seriously.
Do you think it’s different starting out in this business now compared to fifteen years ago? Brettne and Elisabeth, you mentioned that your assistant had a great but unusual experience with one of her first books.
Bloom: Her experience is quite unique!
Weed: It’s a really good story. Dana Murphy is our assistant and she had an intern here named Danya Kukafka, who read for us for about a year, and they became good friends. Danya left—we helped her get a job with Sarah McGrath at Riverhead—and then sent Dana the manuscript and she loved it. Dana came to us and said, “Danya’s written a really amazing book, what do you think?”
Barer: It was the first project she sent out, and it sold within forty-eight hours.
Weed: I think she had ten publishers in the auction. I don’t think she had one turndown, at least that we were aware of.
Bloom: It was pre-empted by Simon & Schuster.
Weed: Brettne and I have so enjoyed mentoring Dana in this process. We read it with her, we offered feedback, we helped her with her editor list, we made phone calls to introduce Dana to the editors she was sending it to. Now she’s having lunch with all of them. It’s great—such a success story. But it’s unusual for that to happen. None of us had that.
