What wisdom or practical advice can you give agency assistants coming into the business now?
Barer: The agent path takes many years. It’s a long build before you really have a sense of your taste and what you’re good at, and it takes time to understand the marketplace and all the players in it. It’s several years before you’re selling enough to support yourself. Look, we work on commission. We eat what we kill, so if we don’t sell a book, that’s our salary.
Weed: Unless your first book sells for seven figures, it takes most agents take three to five years of selling before you really can stand on your own two feet.
Bender: There are some differences that would make agenting really fun to get into now. When I was starting out, I tried to find authors by going to the newsstand and coming home with a bag of literary journals. It'd take forever to actually read them, and then I would write a letter. But how would you find the right address for the author? Now you can find people more easily. You can see who's talking about which ideas and more easily get a sense of who the experts are.
Weed: I remember what Dana said when we hired her: “I’m looking at this as an apprenticeship.” I think you have to go into this business with that mindset.
What are some of the best parts?
Barer: It’s an incredibly exciting business to be in, because of the role we get to play in shepherding books through this process to get them into readers’ hands. When you have somebody come up to you at a party or a relative write to you to say they just saw your name in the acknowledgments of a book they loved—that is the best feeling.
Weed: It is the best.
Bloom: What’s a surprise to me is that, when I wanted to be a doctor when I was young, I had a sense of what a doctor was. I interned for a doctor in high school. But I had no idea this career existed. Even when Jill Kneerim offered me the job I was like, “I’m a little unclear about what an agent does, but it sounds cool.”
Bender: It’s so fun to show my kids that I love what I do. I think it’s important and meaningful to provide the role model of someone who loves what she does.
Bloom: I have copies of all the books I’ve ever done at my apartment and my kids love showing people the acknowledgments.
Barer: Note to authors: I never get sick of looking at the acknowledgments.
What is a good pitch, and how do you craft one?
Weed: There’s so much importance that’s been put on the pitching, because that’s how you get an agent.
Bender: It’s really important for an author to demonstrate a certain level of understanding of the business. To say, “I’m pitching my work to you because...”
Barer: It helps if they can contextualize their work in the current landscape.
Bloom: I’ve been thinking about this lately. You all might disagree with me on this, but I don’t think it’s critical that an author be able to pitch his or her own work initially. Eventually they need to understand how to talk about it. But I can think of a number of projects over the years that I fell in love with not because of how they were pitched but because of the writing and the voice. It’s more introducing yourself and communicating in your writing that you have mastery. I go to lots of conferences, and writers always want to know how to pitch their books. I kind of want to say, “Focus on the writing.”
Barer: There’s something intangible that’s important in a query letter, but it isn’t necessarily distilling the elevator pitch for your book.
A writer doesn’t have to grab you in the first two sentences with a perfect description you can put into your submission to editors?
Weed: They don’t have to do that. That’s our job.
Barer: Writers are primarily talented at writing their books. Writing a query letter is a different skill set. When I look at a query letter, I’m more looking at what the story is about and the voice of the letter than I am asking if they nailed the jacket copy. Communicate what the story is about in a compelling way. It’s not whether you have the perfect elevator pitch but about whether you made it sound interesting enough for me to want to see the manuscript.
How do you then take a writer’s work and come up with your pitch to editors?
Barer: Some of it is very instinctive. After being in the business for seventeen years, you know certain editors for a decade and you’re friends with them and you know their kids. Some of it is picking up a phone and just being like, “I know you, this is your kind of book. This is our kind of book,” and telling them a little bit about the story and a little bit about the writer. Some of what we bring as experienced, successful agents is those relationships and that personal knowledge.
Bloom: The matchmaking part of this business is one of our favorite parts. We are so fond of the editors we work with. Getting to know them and their taste and making sure that we stay in touch…that’s why these lunches and everything else we do are so integral. When it comes time for that novel that’s about a horse ranch in Wyoming, you need to know, “Andrea loves horses.” Keeping that information current is very important.
What would you love to change about the business?
Barer: Blurbs. And God, I wish there was a way for authors to still get paid and for all of us to make money and for books to be less expensive, so that literature was more widely accessible. Asking someone to spend almost thirty dollars for a hardcover book is a lot, and for some people it’s just not possible. I wish there was some way to make those metrics work differently.
Weed: The system of making decisions based on track record. I know publishers have to talk to accounts who are saying, “No, we’re not going to take that author because the last book didn’t sell.” But the next book could be the best thing ever! I’ve had to change an author’s name and sell it to a small publisher because of the track, and guess what? It became a best-seller.
Bender: I also think we have to continue the conversation about inclusiveness and diversity, of writers and characters in books and for people in publishing. That’s something we all need to work toward.
Bloom: This isn’t what I would change about the book culture, but there’s so much competing for people’s attention. The Internet, obviously—and TV is having a golden age. TV is taking on the format of novelistic storytelling, in which you get a lot of the satisfaction you get from a novel: great character development, a sort of slow unfolding of a story.
Bender: And a finite start and finish.
Bloom: And you can watch TV easily with someone else, so you can share the experience. We need to remind people that there’s so much value in reading great books and expanding your mind that way, and making sure that stays an integral part of our life. The fact that we have a president who’s a passionate reader and whose favorite book of the year was a literary novel is really something. The culture is heading in a direction where books should remain the centerpiece of our cultural conversation.
Weed: And independent bookstores are having a comeback, so it’s not all doom and gloom.
How do you plan for the future of your business? My naive view is that you think, “I sold this many books and had this amount of money coming into the agency last year. Let’s try to do the same thing this year.”
Bloom: That’s basically about it.
Bender: We’ve all been doing it long enough that we can develop a sense of what seems to happen—the royalties coming in and that kind of thing.
Barer: You also know after this much time that it ebbs and it flows, so hopefully you build in a little bit of room for that in your planning. There are going to be some really good years, hopefully, and some less good years. The economy is going to influence that in ways that are out of our control.
Bender: Royalties are such a beautiful thing. In the leaner years, when you have less to sell, it’s great to have a backlist that can sustain you.
Barer: That’s another reason it’s nice to be partnered with each other. We’re looking out for each other in that way and talking about it with each other. How is this year going? How are you feeling about next year?
Bender: It’s something that I wouldn’t have thought to ask myself, but at our recent partners meeting the question was posed: What are your two-year goals? What are your five-year goals?
Bloom: We did some strategic planning and thinking about our goals and what we are going to do to achieve them. What steps are we taking? It’s helpful to think about the authors you have, where they are in their careers, and how to help them go to the next level. I think our motto is, “Everything in advance.” We’re thinking about what we’re doing tomorrow and what we’re going to do next year.
What’s next?
Barer: An even better year! We would be thrilled if all the joy and success and collaboration and enlightenment that came out of the first year of our partnership continued on and on.
Bloom: We’re always hoping that the next e-mail is something that’s just going to blow our minds. It’s so interesting how it just…happens. You’ll be having just a normal day and the e-mail will bing and there it is: something that’s so perfect for you, you almost couldn’t have dreamed it up. You just roll up your sleeves, get out the pen, your mind starts churning, and the wheels start going.
Michael Szczerban is an executive editor at Little, Brown.
