This is a story about literary agents. It’s a story about good literary agents and bad literary agents and, more specifically, it’s a story about the tireless, often intangible work that good literary agents perform for their clients during the period after the contract is signed but before the book is published. Before the story can begin, however, I need to explain something about book editors: We have almost no power.

Let me hasten to add that if your editor’s title is publisher, editorial director, or editor in chief, this truth doesn’t apply. But if she doesn’t have any of those titles—and most editors do not—I’m here to tell you that your editor is one of the least powerful people she knows. You probably already know that she needed the go-ahead from several of her colleagues who work in the sales, marketing, and publicity departments, not to mention the aforementioned publisher, editorial director, and editor in chief, to buy your book in the first place. What you may not realize is that in the twelve months before your book is published, that same team of people will make a series of decisions about the promotional money and energy it will receive relative to the other books on the same list; decisions that could ultimately have far more impact on your book’s success or failure than anything your editor will ever be able to do. In fact, your editor probably won’t even be invited to the meetings at which those decisions are made. This is not because she is disliked by her colleagues. It’s not because she is bad at her job. On the contrary, it’s because if she is any good at her job she is a fiercely loyal advocate for each and every one of her books. She nurtures them, protects them, and is as deeply invested in their well-being as any mother. She doesn’t want to see any of them held back by vulgar fiscal considerations. She wants them all to be lavished with attention and praise—and promotional dollars. Which is precisely why she can’t be trusted to make objective business decisions about their potential.

This is where a good literary agent comes in. An agent who understands that at a time when there is an industry-wide blockbuster mentality that makes it harder than it’s ever been for editors to find the institutional support it takes to publish serious work well, it is more important than ever for agents to be fearless, savvy, and relentless advocates for their clients after their books are under contract. An agent who understands that the long and winding road to publication is fraught with trouble, and that her role has evolved into a symbiotic partnership with your editor. An agent who understands that in today’s publishing industry, your editor needs her constant presence and support—needling, brainstorming, cajoling, and sometimes even harassing. An agent who understands, in short, that your editor needs her help.

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"There are a lot of really sticky, messy, unwholesome situations that require the beady eye of an agent—not so much working with authors but working on the inside of the publishing track.”

It’s a sleepy afternoon in the spring and Molly Friedrich and I are talking on the phone. The first thing you need to know about Molly Friedrich is that she has the greatest voice of any literary agent who has ever lived. As you might imagine, Molly is very, very good at talking on the phone. To be honest, part of the reason I wanted to write this article was to have an excuse to talk to Molly on the phone. I work at an independent publishing house and don’t hear from Molly as much as I’d like to.

Molly is telling me stories about the many different kinds of advocacy she has to perform on the road to publication—she loves it, let’s not kid ourselves—when a sticky, messy, or unwholesome situation arises with one of her clients. Molly has made deals for fifteen million dollars and three thousand dollars and everything in between. She says that if you get more than a million for your book (“let’s say eight hundred thousand if you want to adjust for deflation”) you can usually count on having the full attention of your publisher. So Molly is telling me stories that apply to the other 99 percent of authors. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you most of them because if they’re any good they’re off the record. You get a lot of that in this business; it’s a small world. At the end of one of her stories she goes back on the record, so I can give you the kicker: “I told the editor, ‘I see what’s happening. This book is really, really wonderful, and it’s absolutely, presold, dead, and the only person who doesn’t know it is the author. And that is the saddest thing in the world.’”

The story in question was about a major editor at a major house who is also majorly ambitious. This means that he can be majorly ruthless when he needs to be. Writers don’t know this before they go into business with him. Molly knows it, but she sold him two of this author’s books anyway. Sometimes you don’t have much choice. Anyway, after the first book tanked, the second one never had a prayer, even if the writer never knew it. Molly knew it. She knew it when she tried to get a meeting before publication to talk about marketing and promotion and they wouldn’t give her one. This meant there wasn’t going to be any marketing or promotion.

I wasn’t aware that this kind of thing happened to Molly. Molly represents a lot of famous writers, and a lot of commercial writers, and I would think that gives her leverage. When I ask Molly if she considered flexing her muscles—reminding this major editor that she doesn’t have to keep submitting her major manuscripts to him—she is aghast. “Stop submitting to ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚? I couldn’t stop submitting to a major house like ❚❚❚❚❚❚❚❚.” When I express my surprise, Molly adds, “It takes years and years and years to build really reliable relationships, where you feel, 95 percent of the time, that you have the ear of that publishing house. That’s really what you’re doing when you fight on behalf of an author. It’s building relationships over time.” But even Molly is not immune to shoddy treatment on occasion. No agent is.

The other thing that Molly wants to talk about, while we’re on the subject of the sticky, messy, and unwholesome things that happen on the road to publication, is how routinely authors are being orphaned by their editors these days. Sometimes this is because the editor who acquired the book leaves for a better job, and sometimes it’s because the editor is fired or laid off. Molly says that half of her authors have editors whom they inherited. Molly says that this is really, really saying something, and Molly is right. “It takes a lot of finessing to make sure the new editor has half the emotional investment of the editor who bought the book,” she says. For starters, the new editor is overwhelmed with all the other books she’s inherited from the editor who left. “It requires the finessing of an eighteenth-century Viennese diplomat. You can’t start yelling. You have to keep the process moving along without alienating the new editor.” Instead of raising hell, Molly tells the new editor, “‘I know you’ve just inherited fourteen new books. I know you have your own list. I also know you have no assistant and that you’re overworked and underpaid in the extreme. But I want you to long to do business with me. Please take my author’s book and put it on the top of the pile.’”

I’m sorry to tell you that this isn’t how every agent handles these situations. One editor told me a story about a prominent agent who reaches for the stick instead of the carrot. “By the time I inherited the book,” she said, “the agent was already mad. I’ve never gotten a phone call from her that hasn’t been hostile. Which really doesn’t help or make me want to do more for the book. It makes me not want to deal with it at all.”

Molly doesn’t understand that strategy. She doesn’t think it works and she doesn’t think it’s good business. She thinks it’s important to be known as a friend to the entire publishing community—the assistants, the publicists, the rights people, the royalty people—that is going to be taking care of her books. She thinks the agents who get on the phone and scream at people have dropped the ball themselves. “They haven’t really done much. They haven’t really paid attention. They haven’t really been working all along on behalf of their clients.” As usual, Molly is right.

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"There’s a culture of fear right now,” says Jud Laghi, who is another literary agent who knows what he’s talking about. Jud’s voice doesn’t compare to Molly’s—sorry, dude—but Jud is still a very good literary agent. You’d be lucky to have Jud in your corner. Jud plays the guitar and has a cool tattoo and occasionally wears a mustache that makes him look like a biker. Jud has worked at ICM. Jud has worked at LJK. These days he’s on his own.

Jud is telling me about the culture of fear. “A lot of it has to do with how hard it’s been to predict which books are going to sell,” he says. “The people in sales and marketing have the most direct connection to the money side of things, so they’ve developed more and more power. The editors have had their legs cut out from under them. As an agent, you can find yourself in a position where you’re conspiring with the editor to come up with ways to impress sales and marketing.”

Jud was talking on the record just there so he was trying to be nice, but I can tell you that what he said was an understatement. As an editor, the experience of trying to publish a book for which your house has paid an unexceptional advance and that nobody else in your company has any personal investment in can make you feel like you’d have more luck wandering back in time to 1916 and plopping down in a trench in Europe. It can be quite a feeling.

I asked some editors I know to tell me what they want and need from an agent on the road to publication. Their responses read like a cry for help:

“A good agent will help us fight the battles we need to fight.”

“The most productive relationships I have with agents are the ones where I can level with them. If I can call the agent up and say, ‘Here’s what I need you to harass me about,’ and they do, I can take it to my boss, or the publicity director, or whomever.”

“There are some agents I like tremendously as people, but I know that my writers would be better off if they had someone who was more aggressive.”

“I’d rather have someone who oversteps boundaries.”

“A good agent puts the editor on the defense every now and then. In certain situations, to do his job well, he should.”

I wish I could tell you the names of the five editors I just quoted. I truly do, because they would impress you. But editors are a little afraid of losing their jobs at the moment, and because I wanted the ones I talked to for this piece to tell me things that were true, interesting, and useful instead of hot air, I promised that I wouldn’t use their names. What I can tell you about them is that they are all senior-level editors at good literary houses. You’re just going to have to trust me.

Let’s go back to the first editor, the one who said, “A good agent will help us fight the battles we need to fight.” She said something else that was true and interesting and useful: “The editor is in the position of being the defender of the house to both the author and the agent in terms of describing why we’re doing what we’re doing, but it’s also a huge part of the editor’s role to be the defender of the book within the house. Particularly when it comes to the smaller books, you have to spend a lot of time making sure people realize what a great opportunity they have on their hands.” Then she said another thing that was even more true and interesting and useful, if a bit depressing. “The problem is there’s always this one book that’s got to work, and you’re all focused on that.”

I knew what she was talking about, of course. What editor hasn’t sat there pounding the drum pointlessly for some terrific little novel while all of her colleagues are feverishly flogging the book that got a bazillion-dollar advance? I forced myself to ask her the follow-up question anyway: “What happens to everything else on the list?”

“It’s just not the thing that has to get done this afternoon until the agent makes it the thing that has to get done this afternoon.”

***

A different senior editor told me a story about a book she’s publishing right now. There was genuine heartbreak in her voice. “The marketing department is just not interested in it at all,” she said. “They’ve put their priorities elsewhere. So the book has sort of been forgotten.” The editor is very unhappy about this, and so is the agent. (It isn’t clear if the author knows that his book has “sort of been forgotten,” but I suppose he will know soon enough.) The editor told me that the agent has at least tried various things. She has pressed for a meeting to discuss marketing and publicity. She has pressed for a marketing plan. “She’s done as much as she can possibly do,” the editor said. “But there comes a point when even she realizes that she can’t force the marketing department to do anything.”

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Chris Parris-Lamb has been there. If Molly Friedrich has the greatest voice of any literary agent who has ever lived, then Chris Parris-Lamb is the tallest literary agent who has ever lived. This tends to give him a good perspective on things. “The most important part of my job is to have a sense, which an author won’t necessarily have, that things need to be happening. I never presume to know better than the publisher how to publish a book. But I’ve been around long enough to know when warning flags are going up—when things are happening that shouldn’t be happening or, more often, when things aren’t happening that should be happening.”

Chris stresses that you have to be careful not to cross the line. He underscores that you have to be careful with your tone, that you have to be careful not to become a problem. He adds that this applies to both agents and authors, and he is right. “But if you just sit back and expect that all these great things are going to happen for your book, then other authors and their agents who are making more noise and asking more questions…” Chris trails off. He is choosing his words with care. He knows that this part of our conversation will be quoted, and he is trying to articulate something in a way that is both true and responsible. Eventually he puts it like this: “Every time I pick up the phone or send an e-mail to ask the editor what’s happening with the publication of the book, and they have to go get an answer, it means that a conversation is being had about that book within the house.” A conversation that probably wouldn’t have happened without an agent like Chris to make it happen.

Chris tries to keep a cool head on the road to publication. Chris likes to assume that we’re all adults here, we’re all professionals—even if some of us routinely prove otherwise—and he just wants to get the job done for his authors. He goes into the editorial process hoping it will go so smoothly that he “won’t really be necessary.” But he’s also encountered “some frankly shocking situations of editors not editing.” With one first-time writer who realized that his first draft needed a lot of work, the editor’s comments just scratched the surface. So Chris and the author rolled up their sleeves and worked on it around the clock for four days to make the production deadline. When they delivered a totally different manuscript to the editor, she never said a word. Did Chris call her on it? “It’s very delicate,” he says. “I tend to think purely pragmatically about it. We need that editor to continue to be an advocate for the book throughout the process. So I didn’t think it was worth it to scold her for something that had already been fixed. I think it’s more a case of, ‘Well, I learned something about that editor.’”

Another time the conflict involved a book’s title; the publisher wanted to change it and the author did not. Chris framed the conflict for the author in this way: “I said, ‘If you want to fight this, we can fight it. The title is different than the cover—the title is a part of the work. But the more capital we spend here, the less we’re going to have in the bank down the road when other conflicts come up.’” After giving it some thought, the author decided that he wanted to spend the capital. “The publisher wasn’t happy about it,” Chris says, “but the rest of the process went very smoothly because the author understood that he basically couldn’t complain too much about anything else. He had to be flexible.” 

Bad things can happen when authors don’t have good agents to explain things like this to them. One editor told me, “Your agent should really counsel you on how to interact with the publishing house.” Another said, “The agent is crucial in holding the author back from being obnoxious.” Another was even more pointed: “When you’re talking about a midlist book that people in-house are moderately excited about, a lot of writers don’t realize how much it matters for them to just be a decent person. I’ve seen books totally killed because people are like, ‘He’s an asshole.’ We may like the book, but it’s not a big enough book for us to want to work with an asshole.”

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No step in the publishing process is more prone to conflict, or more emotionally wrenching, than the process of selecting a cover. Many authors view their cover as a deeply personal expression of their book. At the same time, many publishers view covers as little more than marketing devices. Both arguments have some merit, of course, and the result is that conflicts can rise to the level of blood sport. According to one editor, the bloodier it gets, the more valuable a good agent is. “When the author is unhappy with something and I think that unhappiness is unwarranted,” she says, “I will speak to the agent because I know I can explain to them in business terms why something is happening. I can say to the agent, for example, ‘Sessalee Hensley [the fiction buyer] at Barnes & Noble really loves this jacket, and that’s why we can’t change it.’ The writer may think, ‘Why does the opinion of someone I don’t know matter more than mine?’ But the agent can explain that.”

What many first-time authors don’t quite realize is the sheer number of people who need to be satisfied with the cover. “There’s a huge amount of plain old education,” says Molly Friedrich. “You have to say to the author, ‘Don’t get excited about this jacket. Don’t get attached to this jacket. This jacket has to be shared with the reps. This jacket has to be shared with the buyers. Just tell me whether you can live with it at four in the morning.’"

And then there are the internal politics within the publishing house. When it comes to covers, the variables can range from time constraints to financial considerations to the artistic temperaments of jacket designers. In a perfect world, no editor wants to show an author a cover that she doesn’t like herself. But when a deadline is looming, editors sometimes find themselves in a position where, in order to remain good team players, they can’t go back to the art department with their concerns. In that situation, one editor told me, “I have on many occasions called the agent and said, ‘I can’t put what I’m about to say in writing. But I’m going to send you a cover. I don’t think it’s bad. But I do think we could do better. My e-mail is going to say that we’re all excited about it. If you and the author love it, great. But if you don’t, this is just my invitation to you to be very explicit about why, and what we could do.’ Because in that situation I can’t really go back to the art department and get anything done without the agent weighing in.”

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Scott Moyers spent about fifteen years working as an editor before he switched sides a few years ago and became an agent. Scott is smart and cheerful and good natured. I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about him. People like Scott, and were a little surprised when he went to work for Andrew Wylie at the Wylie Agency. In case you don’t know, people do not like Andrew Wylie. I would not go so far as to say that most people in the publishing industry actively want Andrew Wylie to die, but I would say that most people in the publishing industry are excited by the idea that Scott may take over for Andrew Wylie some day. Now that I think about it, hiring Scott probably proves that Andrew Wylie is some kind of genius.

I thought it would be interesting to get Scott’s take on all of this, given his experience on both sides of the desk. Here is the first thing Scott says: “I do have some sense of what a well-managed process looks like and what best practices look like. So, on the one hand, I can help manage an author’s expectations and return him to the
reality-based community if that’s necessary. On the other hand, I can be pretty critical when I think something’s being handled in a sloppy or thoughtless way on the publisher’s side.”

Scott acknowledges that a big part of his job is to “try to have some kind of effect on the allocation of resources before the die is cast,” but adds that he tries not to be a squeaky wheel unless there is something to squeak about. I ask Scott to try to recall some of the tricks he would use to make his masters pay attention to a book when he was a powerless editor. “I would encourage agents to, you know—nudge, wink—ask me to set up a meeting before publication to talk about the launch. It was easier if it came from the agent. It’s just good to get everybody’s mind concentrated and get everybody in the room together to meet the author and just kind of kick the tires and talk things through. Things emerge in the spirit of brainstorming. People come up with things and commit to doing things for the book.”

When I ask Scott to explain why it’s easier if the agent asks for the meeting, he says, “It’s easier on the editor because a request like that can be perceived by his colleagues as a sort of implicit rebuke, even though that’s not the intent. If you ask publicists whether these meetings are necessary, by and large they would choose not to have them. A publicist would say, ‘I’m doing everything I can do. I’ve got my plan. I don’t need the backseat driving.’” Scott notes that these meetings require a lot of preparation for the people in the marketing and publicity departments and that, as an editor, you have to be careful about how often you request them. “You don’t want to burn out the circuits,” he says.

But as Scott and every other agent knows, editors have no power over their publicity or marketing departments (other than their powers of persuasion), and the point of setting up a meeting before publication is less about backseat driving than about making sure driving is being contemplated. When I ask one editor—who cops to sending the same kind of surreptitious e-mails as Scott—if it helps her when agents are aggressive in the run-up to publication, she is unequivocal. “Absolutely. I can walk around to the different departments and say, ‘I really wish you were doing more for this book,’ but if the agent comes in, then it’s somebody they need to respond to. There have been many times when I’ve asked the agent to put something in writing so I can forward it on. Believe me, my colleagues are not always happy about it, but they do feel a little more responsible to somebody outside of the house.”

The problem, the same editor points out, is that editors get so busy. “You’re working on quite a few different books at the same time and you’re not always going to notice that a book isn’t getting the attention it needs until the agent calls you up and complains. If the agent is aggressive enough about it, you do want to keep her happy. Because a good agent is someone who also has good taste and you want to make sure she’s going to keep submitting to you. I know that motivates me.”

On the flip side, the editor says, “A lot of agents sell you a book and sort of cross it off their list and go on to the next sale. And some of the agents we think of as the best agents are slackers like that.”

When I mention this comment to another editor, along with the name of a very prominent agent that I artfully edited out of the last quote—you’re welcome, slacker—she laughs and says, “I’m always surprised at how unhelpful some agents are. Sometimes I’m just thinking, ‘How is this working for you not to be helping me with this?’”

After the editing of a book is done, she says, her job is basically to have one million conversations about that book. “A good agent will help start those conversations and give me all the fuel I need to do that well. For example, a good agent keeps me completely abreast of everything that’s happening with foreign rights. If anything good happens for it anywhere, and I know about it, that adds one new thing that I can say in my one million conversations.”

When the time comes to start thinking about blurbs for the jacket, this editor, like most good editors, will call up the agent to brainstorm. Who do you know? Who does the author know? Who do we not know but can figure out how to reach? “Some agents are very helpful and gung ho and inspired about that, and some are not, which shocks me.” Don’t get her wrong. She understands that rounding up four midlist writers to comment on her midlist book is not going to launch it onto the best-seller list. “But those blurbs let me have another conversation about the book,” she says. “They let me continue trying to build enthusiasm and add to how often the people in my circle are hearing about the book. If there’s nothing new to say, I’m not going to just keep saying the same thing.”

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