How has your job changed as the
industry has changed?
I think there is more frustration.
We have to deal with all kinds of bureaucrats. We spend a lot of time arguing
about contract clauses. Every time a publisher hires a new lawyer or contract
manager, they decide to have new clauses and you have to argue about the
wording. And the bigger the firm, the less flexible it will be. Also, there
aren't that many publishers around, so they're all, in a way, in cahoots. It's
not that they would sit down together and say, "From now on we're going to do
this," because then they would have the antitrust people after them. But they
might ask the assistant house counsel to call his or her buddy who's the
assistant house counsel at such-and-such house and say, "What do you people do
about this?" And they find out that everybody—that is, the six big firms—are
now paying, say, 25 percent of net receipts on electronic rights. Okay, so
there may be a smaller firm that pays 30 percent, but why can't they all pay 50
percent of net receipts like they did a few years ago? They can't because they
have done a very close cost analysis and come to the conclusion, after weeks of
analyzing—analyzing what, nobody knows, because there are no figures to use
for this—that this is the figure. That
it really should probably be between 19.25 percent and 23.2 percent, but
rounding it out at 25 percent is a generous gesture and, in addition, that's
what everybody else is doing. Now, does this matter at all, since there are no
sales of electronic books to speak of? I don't know. But we spend a tremendous
amount of time dealing with these things because it might be worth something
and, like everybody else, we agents feel that if the publishers think it's
worth something to them, it must be worth something to us.
But basically we do what we've always done. I remember something my French mentor said to me years ago when there were other issues. He said, "In the end the only thing that really counts is the poor author in his attic in front of his typewriter with his blank piece of paper and what he puts on it." The only thing that has changed is that maybe now he is no longer writing in the attic, and he has a computer instead of a typewriter. But it's still what goes on the page that counts. And everything else really doesn't. Eventually publishers sort of have to do what the more important authors want. Look at the electronic thing. If electronic publishing really takes over, the authors may discover that they don't need the publishers at all. But the publishers will always need the authors to write something.
What would you change about the
industry if you could change one thing?
I would love to see half a dozen
sons or daughters of millionaires start their own firms, the way it used to be.
I think it would put pressure on the established houses to pay attention to
things they don't pay enough attention to anymore. But I don't think that will
happen. This question also isn't something I think about very much because of
my own temperament. I'm very empirical. I feel that you deal with a certain
situation and make the best of it. I don't really spend much time dreaming
about what could be. I'm not really interested in that.
One thing that always interests
me is how people view their jobs and their various responsibilities. How do you
view yours?
The main thing, obviously, is to do
the very best we can for our authors. To advise them as best we can. It's
really different from author to author. It's not necessarily advising them to
do what brings in the largest amount of money in the shortest period of time.
We have to think of their career—where they are, what their needs are—so it's
different with each one. It's not as complicated as it may sound. It's usually
fairly clear and simple. But you have to be able to figure it out, and then you
have to find a way to come as close as possible to getting them what they want.
Practically any of our more successful authors could make more money by moving
to another house—you always get more when you're auctioning the rights. But
you don't want to do that with every book. With some authors the amount of the
advance is not the essential point because there's a constant flow of money
coming in from their earlier books. For some authors, ego is the main concern
and the mere thought that someone else may be getting more money is much more
important. So everything has to be taken into account.
It feels like there are a lot of
different threats to authors out there today. What do you think is the biggest?
The main issue is that people may
read less. But there's nothing I can do about that. It's true—it's always been
true in this country—that people seem to read a lot in college and then get
out of college and get a job and basically stop reading. We have two
granddaughters. They read when they're on vacation, and one of them—the
younger one—has been reading all of these Stephenie Meyer books. But they
don't read the way I read or their mother read. They don't read regularly or
with the same kind of passion. They're busy with their computers and phones.
They're constantly chatting with each other in one way or another. And all of
that is changing reading. On the other hand, I'm encouraged by the fact that
more and more people are going to college. Some of our books that are read in
college—the Michel Foucault books, for example—are probably read more from
year to year. Beckett is probably read more. So all of the signals are not bad.
But there's no point in worrying too much about things over which you have no
control, and where your opinions have absolutely no effect one way or the other
except possibly to get you depressed.
Do you feel competitive with
other agents?
I don't really feel competitive. I
sometimes feel envious. Most people don't like to admit to one of the cardinal
sins, and envy is perhaps the worst, but I think we all feel envy. Authors feel
envy when they see a book, even if it's by a friend of theirs, reviewed on the
cover of the New York Times Book Review.
We're all human. So yes, of course I feel envy, just as you would feel envious
if one of your best friends, who is an editor at God knows where or even at
Grove, gets a manuscript that becomes a hit and is written up everywhere.
Are editors different than they
were thirty or forty years ago?
I think they used to feel more
self-confident because they were rarely fired. Now, nobody knows if they'll
still have a job the following week. I think they used to be allowed to spend
more time with their authors. In the old days, saying, "I don't know how Joe is
progressing with his book and I'm going to spend a week with him to find out"
would not have been considered just another expression of the editor's laziness
and unwillingness to do some real work in the office. The editor might even
have been encouraged to spend time somewhere with the author. Maxwell Perkins,
who is always held up as an example even though he turned down Faulkner for
Scribner's, spent a tremendous amount of time editing two of the authors for
whom he's best known, Fitzgerald and Wolfe. But now I think Maxwell would be
called in to his boss's office: "You're wasting too much time with this author.
His previous books haven't sold very well and this probably won't do any
better. Can't you bring in somebody like Dan Brown who will really bring us
money?"
What do you think the best
editors do for their writers?
First of all, they encourage them.
They stay in touch with them without nagging too much. You have to find the
right balance. It varies with each author. But they should try to spend some
time with them. I think most authors would like to have a close relationship
with their editor. I have several authors who were so disgusted with their
editors that they have an editor whom they pay to edit their books before they
get sent in to their editor at the publishing house. Nobody ever hears about
it, and if they win the Pulitzer Prize or whatever, the official editor is the
one who gets the credit.
You're not going to tell me who
those writers are, are you?
No. [Laughter.]
But can you tell me what editors
you work with in that capacity? Is it people whose names we would know?
The one who has done quite a bit of
this and is supposed to be terrific is Tom Engelhardt, who used to be at
Pantheon years ago. But there are others. Many editors who have been fired do
it.
What is your biggest frustration
with editors today?
The main frustration is one I share
with them: They can't make a decision on their own. They have to go to
marketing people or other people who know nothing about what the editor and I
are talking about to get an offer approved. It's not even just the
amount—different firms have different rules about whose approval you need in
order to go above a certain amount of money—as much as it is the mere
decision. When Bob Gottlieb was at Knopf, I'd send him something and he'd call
me three days later and say, "Why should I be publishing this thing? This is
not for me. This is not for Knopf." Or he'd say, "Okay, what do you want for
it?" I'd tell him. He'd say, "That's fine" or "We can't pay that much." One time
I even remember him saying, "The author can't do this book for that little.
I'll give you such and such," and it was more than the amount I'd asked for.
But the whole thing would take five minutes. When Jim Silberman was the editor
in chief at Random House the negotiation would take two minutes.
Now you have the feeling that it's such a cumbersome process. Unless you have an auction going for a book that everybody wants. Then, of course, it immediately moves to the upper levels within the publishing house. I remember that Valerie had an auction for a book that we'd gotten from England, and all of a sudden she had six or eight editors bidding on it and people whom I won't name but who are known to be totally unreachable were calling her and saying, you know, "Just call me on this number and I'll do blah blah blah." But that involved seven figures. At that level everything is different. But at the normal level, things are more complicated and you feel less of the enthusiasm. The enthusiasm gets eaten away by the bureaucracy. But there's still some of it. The amazing thing is that publishing still attracts a lot of really good people—young people, interesting people—who really love to read and want to make it work. They just accept that it's more difficult. And so do we. There's no choice.
That's a frustration you share
with editors. Is there anything that frustrates you about the way editors have
changed, or the way that younger editors are?
They aren't very different than
they were before. I mean, some start speaking this sort of corporate language
but others remain themselves. There are some things you see less often now, but
you didn't see them much before either. I can give you two examples. One
involved Bob Gottlieb when he was the editor in chief of Knopf. He was doing a
book of ours by a French doctor that was called Birth Without Violence. It was a new method of giving birth that involved
giving birth in the dark and so on. I remember that Bob called me and said, "We
just got the cover in for this book. I think you'll love it. Are you in the office? Can I bring it over?"
There is no editor in chief in New York today who would do that. But there
wasn't anyone else then either.
I also remember—I probably shouldn't say nice things about other agents, but I can't help it in this case—something that Steve Wasserman did when he was an editor at Random House. I sent him a long manuscript by Ted Draper, who used to write for the New York Review of Books. Steve called me the next day and said, "I started reading this in the office yesterday and all of a sudden I realized that it was eleven o'clock at night. This is terrific. Of course we want to publish it." I don't remember if he'd actually finished it, or if it took another week to do the deal, but that's the kind of reaction I'd like to get more often: people who act on their instincts; people who are genuinely excited about something. I don't get it often, but I never got it often.
Who else do you admire in the
industry? And what makes you admire them?
I admire people who have managed to
stick to their guns and do, essentially, what they set out to do. People like
Nan Talese, Kate Medina, Jonathan Galassi, or several of the editors at Knopf.
Of course they're influenced by the environment—we all are—but they've
essentially been doing what they've been doing all along. So has Morgan, for
that matter. I don't really know Morgan all that well, but I'm sure he could
have chosen an easier way of living. But he's stuck to it. I greatly admire
Drenka Willen. The main reason I'm not mentioning other agents is that I don't
really know them that well. Editors know agents much better. We know of each other, but we don't really know what we're
like. I've never seen another agent dealing with his or her authors. I've never
seen an agent dealing with an editor.
Tell me about some of the high
moments in your life as an agent.
One was meeting General de Gaulle
when I was in my early twenties. When I was a kid during the war, he was God,
and the only hope one had. If I'd stayed in France, of course, I never would
have met him. But because I'd come to America and done this thing that nobody
else was doing, it sort of made me different. So after I'd sold his war memoirs
here, his French publisher took me to see him. He was not in power then, but he
had these offices on the Left Bank. He was surrounded by nothing but people who
were six feet five and six feet six and so on. I went with his publisher, who
came from Monte Carlo and had this short Mediterranean build. So there we were:
two dwarves in the land of giants. That was incredibly exciting and heady for me. There was also an
interesting moment. The publisher, like many people from southern France, had a
tendency to talk a lot and very freely. He accidentally mentioned the name of a
magazine editor or journalist who was quite prominent at the time but had been
a collaborator during the war. When he realized what he'd done he tried to sort
of backtrack. But de Gaulle said, in a very kind voice, "Well, I know he was a
collaborator. But he isn't a collaborator any more." [Laughter.] So that's one highlight. I realized that I'd done
something with my life that led me into territory where I never would have been
otherwise.
But as the years have gone on I think I've become a bit blasé. There have been many highlights—when my authors have won prizes and so on. It gives me great pleasure, but it has become more frequent. For example I was with Anne Applebaum when she won the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag. But I was also with her for the National Book Awards when she didn't win. I was with her at the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes when she didn't win. I may have been with her at the National Book Critics Circle Awards when she didn't win. And just as I suffer from envy, I'm also a sore loser and I don't like to go to these events unless my author wins. But the Pulitzer Prize is much more civilized because you know in advance and it's not a public humiliation. So that was wonderful.
I also remember when Charles Johnson was nominated for the National Book Award for Middle Passage. I pretty much knew he wouldn't win because you only have one chance out of five and why would your author win instead of the four others? It's a black tie event and I hate wearing a tuxedo. I was trying to put on the little studs in the shirt that are very pretty and belonged to my father, one of the few things I have, and I was having trouble with them. I asked Anne to help. All of a sudden I saw that my white shirt had little pink polka dots all over it. Anne had pricked her finger with one of the studs and there were little spots of blood all over my shirt. So I had to change the shirt. Thank God I had a second one. I don't even know why I did because I never wear the wretched things. I thought we'd be late and I was in a foul mood. We sat at the Atheneum table. Atheneum had been bought by Scribner, which had been bought by Macmillan. The head of Macmillan was there, and the editor of the book and the publicist. But the head of Macmillan, who didn't know either of them, thought they were a couple. They were just two employees. But they happened to be young and good looking, so I had to explain to him that they were his employees and not a couple. Anyway, the whole thing was stupid and ludicrous, and I was becoming more and more annoyed, and somebody made a long speech, and then Charles won the National Book Award. [Laughter.] The mood changed totally. I can't remember any moment in my life when I had such a quick change in mood. The book had sold six or seven thousand copies and I remember that people came over from Macmillan saying, "Barnes & Noble just placed an order for x thousand copies" and so on. All of a sudden the book had become a best-seller. I remember Charles asking me, "What's happened? Isn't it the same book anymore?" And I said to him, "No, it isn't!"
When are you the most proud of
what you do?
It's usually when we have a new
author and I feel that we have really been able to change his or her life. That
would not really be true of people like Elkin and Coover and Gardner and Yurick
who had already been published. But it happens sometimes. I recently met a
writer whose life I feel I sort of changed because she didn't have a life as a
writer before in a sense. It's a young woman named Olivia Judson. She is the
daughter of a friend of Mike Bessie's, who as I told you was one of my mentors.
He called me and asked if I'd be willing to see her as a favor. She had a
doctorate in biology from Oxford and had been deputy science editor of the
Economist and was coming to America and
needed some advice. I immediately knew that she was incredibly bright. The
Economist had allowed her to do two columns
under the name of Dr. Tatiana. They were a sort of mixture of Dr. Ruth and Dear
Abby. Animals would write in about their sexual problems and Dr. Tatiana would
give them an answer that was totally accurate scientifically. They would ask
something like, "My wife bit off an important part of my anatomy last night.
What do I do?" Dr. Tatiana would say, "Well, that's what women are like, but
don't worry about it, you'll grow it back." I'm making that up, but I do
remember learning from her that most seagulls are lesbians. I was so surprised
that I'd gone through life without knowing that. Anyway, I told her she should
write a book. We sold it to Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan. It was called Dr.
Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation and it
did extremely well. We sold it all over the world. It was serialized in France
in Le Figaro, which is a daily
Parisian paper. We sold movie rights to the Canadian Discovery Channel,
although the result hasn't been shown in this country because the Americans
found it too obscene. Now she's writing another book for Metropolitan. She's
written a number of op-ed pieces for the New York Times. She's making a living as a writer. And she's become
a good friend. I love the idea of improving somebody's life.
There's also Bob Fagles, who did the translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I met him at a dinner party. He was complaining about the fact that he'd translated a play that was supposed to be part of a series of translations for Oxford or somebody. But nobody else had delivered their translations so the project was stuck. He was very frustrated. The next year I met him again at the same friend's. Nothing had happened and he was even more frustrated. I said, "I'm sure your contract must have a pub date. You can probably cancel it and take the book somewhere else. Show me the contract." I sold the book to Viking, and then he did another one, and then he did the Odyssey, and then the Iliad, and then the Aeneid, and it totally changed his life.
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
It's
when you can bring good news to one of your authors. Their book just went into
a fifth printing. We found a home for that short story that we both liked but
so-and-so didn't want. Or we just sold, say, Catalan rights to their book. Or
Basque rights. I didn't even know there was such a thing! I knew there was a
Basque dialect but I didn't know that people actually read in Basque. To be
able to make those phone calls gives one so much pleasure. Every day brings
some kind of crisis and unpleasantness, but just about every day also brings
something like that. I don't make the calls about the translation rights anymore
because that's our daughter Valerie's domain. But I get a vicarious pleasure
out of the pleasure she feels, and the author feels, when she gets to make one
of those calls.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.