Agents & Editors: David Gernert

How did you learn to be an agent?
Well, I don’t think I ever really learned how to be an agent to the extent that in my earlier career I learned to be a publisher. If you’re an acquiring editor, you have a pretty good idea of how agents work. And then I filled in different aspects of it as I went along.

Having been a publisher is a great advantage, because many agents have never been inside a publishing company. They operate with assumptions about how those companies work, and some of those assumptions are correct, and others might not be.

What do you miss about being a publisher?
There’s one thing I miss about being a publisher, and one thing about being an agent that’s much better than I imagined it would be, and they tend to balance each other out.

If I sell a novel to you, I can share my vision of how that book should be published, but I can’t make you listen to any of it. That can be difficult for me. I can make recommendations and suggestions and beg and plead, but I miss not being able to oversee the publication.

On the other side of the coin, there is no aspect of this business more rewarding than taking on a new writer and changing his life. It’s amazing. I sold a novel a few months ago for a pretty good amount of money, and I got a note from the author that said something to the effect of, “A month ago I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife, and we were trying to figure out which bills to pay because we certainly couldn’t pay all of them. And now I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to send my daughter to college.” There’s nothing better than that.

As a publisher, if you publish a book well and it works, everyone sings and dances in the aisles, but it’s not as direct a connection. An agent’s relationship with a writer is much more personal than the publisher’s.

How often do you miss having control over the final publication?
Fairly often. Imagine that with every book you’re publishing, there’s a piano. You’ve got eighty-eight keys, and you have to determine which keys to push, how hard, and in what order. It’s a complicated process, but done right, it’s a beautiful thing.

I sometimes feel strongly that I have a sense of how to do that for a book I represent. Sometimes the publisher has a different sense. That’s because it’s such a complex process. And, today, more than ever, there are things that can be done for a book that none of us are aware of. I’m not sure there’s anyone who knows today every single thing that could possibly be done to publish a book well. There are too many digital things changing. That can contribute to the difference of opinions on how to publish a book.

Is that why you have someone dedicated to social media on staff?
Yes. She helps all of our clients understand and intelligently exploit digital opportunities. As everyone now knows, it’s not that hard to have a presence on Facebook and Twitter. But there are authors who don’t, so she works with them. She also reports back to the rest of us on new developments and changes in the digital world and social media.

How do you develop a personal relationship with your writers?
I get to know them through many conversations. I’m very lucky in that I’m pretty good friends with all the writers I represent.

Is that an advantage?
For me, it’s about the quality of life. I don’t know if it’s an advantage professionally in terms of representing them better or differently, but it makes life more pleasant.

Have you ever fired a client?
I have parted ways with clients. I haven’t fired any. It’s usually mutual, and it’s never been acrimonious. Sometimes you reach a point where you’re just not on the same wavelength anymore. It hasn’t happened very often.

Writers in the literary world do not change agents much. I find that interesting and good. If you look at the movie world, agencies are going after other peoples’ clients all the time, and a lot of those clients—actors or screenwriters or directors—change agents fairly often.

How do your relationships differ from writer to writer?
They differ primarily based on how frequently an author is published, because an agent’s interaction with a client is greatest around a publication. If you have an author who writes a book every year, you’re spending more time with them than an author who writes a book every three or four years.

I had some pretty close relationships with authors when I was a publisher. I like to think that the reason Stewart O’Nan wanted me to represent him when I became an agent is because we were good friends, and we admired each other a lot. But an editor’s relationship is different. Sometimes publishers will have news for writers that they are extremely reluctant to deliver. And in those cases, they will deliver it to the agent, and the agent has to deliver it to the author.

I’m not trying to cast aspersions on publishers, or belittle the relationships between editors and authors. But most authors, I think, probably trust their agent a little more.

What makes the triangle of relationships among agent, editor, and writer really sing? Is it having a shared personal connection?
I think so. In the ideal world, all three of those people would be very close. I don’t know often that happens. I guess it does. Certainly editors have agents with whom they're closer friends than other agents.

I’ll give you an example of one that was really good. When Josh Kendall was Stewart O’Nan’s editor at Viking, Stewart and Josh and I had a really good working relationship. I didn’t get involved in the editing; that was all between Josh and Stewart. But the three of us were good friends and had common goals for Stewart, and worked towards achieving those goals together.

Do you have a first reaction common to all the books you take on?
Marty Asher [the former editor in chief of Vintage Anchor, now editor-at-large at Knopf] said to me once, “The best thing you can say about a novel is, ‘I missed my subway stop.’” I think there’s some truth to that for fiction. If you’re so into it that the world goes away, that’s a pretty good quality. And I really like narrative nonfiction that “reads like a novel.” So for me, it would be the writing and the voice.

When an agent at the Gernert Company wants to take on a new client, do they have to get past you first?
No, they don’t have to get past me to represent something. They can represent whatever they choose.

If they are approached by someone who has some totally freaky thing they want to do and it might bring the agency a lot of publicity—good, bad, or indifferent—they always talk to me about it, but that’s very rare. It’s much more common that when they are talking to a prospective client they might come to me and see if I could help. I would never stand in the way.

What is your thought process when identifying a publisher to whom you’re going to sell a book? Say two imprints are in a competitive situation. Is passion a big factor?
It’s part of it, but we constantly compare notes about what imprints and what publishers are doing various kinds of publishing particularly well. That’s a huge part of our job—to be on top of that.

There is so much going on in publishing today that the more people you have gathering information about what’s going on in the business and sharing it, the stronger a company you are. We spend a lot of time, probably more than you would imagine, comparing notes on imprints’ acquisition strategies. There’s a vast difference in how that works. Then we also watch closely how the books are published.

Passion certainly figures into it. But we try to understand how the individual’s passion will carry through to what the company actually does.

Plenty of writers aspire to having their work become the basis for a film. How does that work?
For better or worse, I do more work in the film and television arenas than most other literary agents in New York. Most agents in New York, if they’re not at an agency that has an entertainment division like ICM or WME, work with a subagent or coagent in Los Angeles, and that person sells the film or television rights. That’s perfectly fine. We do that in many cases with our books, and there are a lot of good agents out there who do nothing but sell books to film and television.

Take me through the life of a book-to-film project.
It would take twenty-eight hours to do that thoroughly and accurately. [Laughs.] It is the single most complicated process and business you could imagine. But here’s the thumbnail version for film—let’s forget TV for now.

A book is submitted, usually by a literary agent’s subagent or coagent, to people in the movie business. There are many players you can submit to: studios, producers, management companies, actors and actresses or screenwriters or directors. The agent in LA makes the submission, and when someone bites, you generally make an option deal. The traditional option is eighteen months, with an opportunity to renew the option for another eighteen months. So let’s say the person who bought the option has three years.

In that period, they put the pieces of the puzzle together. They try to get a good screenwriter to deliver a good screenplay, and they try to get someone else attached—a director or, as they say, the “talent.” Then they go to a studio with the package: “There’s this great book, there's this great screenplay, we have a terrific director, and so-and-so would like to star in the movie.”

If the studio says yes, then there is a purchase deal. And if the budgets are acceptable in terms of the cost of making the movie and the likely revenue it will generate, they go from there.

But for all of that, there’s no guarantee that the movie will ever get made.

How transformative to an author’s career can a movie or television option be?
Film and television are very different. The money in television for the author of the book is usually pretty small unless it becomes a successful television series, because the money in television is made over time and on the back end. It used to be said that television does not sell books, but nowadays television can sell books. It’s a question of what kind of television, and other things like whether the show shares a title with the book. One can only imagine if there was a novel that had been published five years ago called Breaking Bad.

On the movie side, there’s more money for the author at the beginning of the process, which is why generally authors prefer it. You can have an option of anything from, say, five thousand dollars to five hundred thousand dollars. And then if the rights get purchased, you can again make very big money by publishing standards. And movies do sell books. A movie doesn’t even have to be a huge hit to sell books, because the marketing campaigns for movies are so much bigger than the campaigns for books.

Is there anything specific that makes a book a viable project for Hollywood to consider?
Sure, but I can’t articulate those qualities any better than you could. Sometimes you read a novel and you think, “Wow, this would be a great movie.” A lot of times people will read a novel and think it will be a great movie, but they don't factor in the cost of making it. If you think a novel set in 1452 would be a great movie, the movie people are thinking about creating the world of 1452. That costs a lot of money.

What advice can you give to an author trying to catch your attention?
Our submissions come in to us through a few ways. One is by referral from someone we know. Obviously that’s the best way. Let’s say my client Michael Harvey, a fantastic writer of crime fiction in Chicago, has a friend who writes a novel. He looks at it and says, “It’s pretty good, you should sent it to my agent.” That will go to the top of my pile.

Other submissions tend to come in digitally. I actually like reading the cover letters that come in to our website. You can tell a lot from the letter. The first thing is: Spell our names right. The second thing is: Do not refer to your book as a “fictional” novel. And the next thing is, do not write, “If you don’t like this novel, I have three more!”

The letters that catch my eye are ones that say, “I have published two novels with really good presses without an agent” or “I have published stories in McSweeney’s and Glimmer Train”—someone who has some credibility already.

I also love letters that say that the novel is based on an idea that I find intriguing. I love a letter that starts, “In 1947, there was a test of an atomic weapon in the Utah desert that was kept completely unknown to the public,” and then it spins out from there. I find that much better than someone writing about a subject I am already familiar with.