Agents & Editors: David Gernert

Does it help you when an author has already triangulated his writing in terms of other authors? Editors often need to describe one project in terms of others.
Yes, if it’s done well. Some authors will send me manuscripts and say they’re fans of a few different writers. If they’re really interesting writers, that helps. I get a million letters in which the writer says, “I’m a big fan of John Grisham.” Well, that doesn’t mean that much. But if the writer says, “I was influenced by Paul Auster and Robert Stone,” that’s really interesting.

How often do you reach out to a writer on your own?
Almost never. I wish I did. I really don’t have time.

Where have your newest clients come from?
The last writer I took on was a referral. The one before that had published with a small press.

What do you think about self-publishing?
There are some very gifted writers who start out self-publishing and grow from there. Hugh Howey is a really good example; Wool is a terrific novel. But those writers are few and far between.

I am not a fan of self-publishing in general. It removes the gatekeepers from the process, and if we come to a point where every person in America who is writing a book can “publish” it, it becomes much more difficult for readers to find the good ones. A lot of what is self-published is awful.

I would cite Malcolm Gladwell as a particularly eloquent speaker on this, but many people have made this point: At a time when we are bombarded with information from all sides, we need more gatekeepers, not fewer. What you need as a reader is someone to find and tell you about the best books, whether it’s a diet book or a crime novel or a book about Thomas Jefferson.

Let’s talk a little about subsidiary rights. You sold them in the heyday of big rights deals.
The biggest change is that publishers don’t sell the reprint rights anymore—they do the paperback themselves. Reprint rights brought in a tremendous amount of money.

It’s also true that the book clubs aren’t what they once were. In the glory days of book clubs, there were hundreds of thousands of readers who lived in places where there wasn’t a bookstore nearby. Not only did they get a book sent to them in the mail, they got a really smart editorial gatekeeper to tell them which books were the best. Now, anyone can have a book delivered to their front door in forty-eight hours.

The biggest revenue now is in foreign rights, which is still a very active arena, and one that we’re really good at.

There’s a tug of war between publishers and agents over who gets which territorial rights. What's your perspective?
I hate to say this, because I do not mean to criticize publishers, but in general agents are better at selling foreign rights than publishers are. If a publisher wants to buy world rights from me, they're going to have to pay for the privilege.

Why do you think that is?
It’s a combination of manpower and the quality of the men and women with the power. Perhaps more important, the person selling the rights is not once removed.

If we take on a book, whether it’s a big nonfiction book or a novel, our foreign rights people read it before we go out and sell it domestically. They’re invested in it. They've expressed an opinion. And they’re ready to go sell it. If a publisher sells the rights to that book, they are by definition once removed from the agent, and for every remove you lose a little of the personal touch and a little of the passion.

Is there utility to having one publisher manage a single English edition all over the world?
Let’s say there’s a book. You sell this book to a publisher in the United States, and they’re crazy about it. They want to have their British partner publish it. But who knows if their British partner is crazy about it? Who knows if their British partner is the best publisher for it in England? As I said, we spend a lot of time figuring out who might be the best publisher for a book in America. You have to make that same decision and analysis abroad. I think that corporate synergy, or whatever they call it, is nonsense.

What excites you about our business?
I feel incredibly lucky that I look forward to going to work every day. I don’t think that’s true of the majority of people, and if you’re a working adult, that’s the best thing you can say. By the time I get to Sunday afternoon, I am champing at the bit to get to work Monday morning.

There’s no feeling quite like selling a first book for someone and helping make that writer’s dreams come true. But I also enjoy the whole publishing process, because it’s so complicated and unpredictable, and in many ways unmanageable. I love the whole process of trying to figure out how to get a good book to the largest number of readers. I think that’s a great challenge, and I enjoy every aspect of it. When you do it well, and it works, it’s just amazing.

What do you learn from your clients?
Some authors are very well informed and intuitively wise about what’s going on at different publishing companies, because they pay close attention to the books those companies are publishing well.

Let’s say an author has written a novel and he’s moving to a new publisher for whatever reason. He might suggest that we show the book to a certain division of a company, because he just read two fantastic books that were very well published by that group. That’s a good idea.

Sometimes on the marketing side, authors can be enormously helpful. I represent a writer named Charlie Lovett who had a novel published by Viking early this past summer called The Bookman’s Tale. It was a very fine book and a successful publication. Charlie is a former antiquarian bookseller. When he went around to bookstores, instead of doing a traditional reading, he read like any other author, but he also had a slideshow behind him that was related to the book, and then he talked about the history of books. It was a compelling one-man show for people who care about books. And it really helped.

When you’re about to submit a book, how do you develop your pitch and deliver it to an editor?
That varies. Usually with fiction, you have a manuscript. With nonfiction there’s a lot more work on the proposal, and there are a lot of ways of doing a nonfiction proposal. As we’ve said, some of the best proposals for nonfiction are straight narrative, and some are a table of contents, a sample chapter, a marketing plan, a description of the target audience, etc. You have to work with the writer to come up with whichever version of the proposal will most appeal to editors.

Are you thinking of specific editors and how to appeal directly to them?
No. I’m thinking more of how the book can put its best foot forward.

If you’re sending to a handful of people, it’s the same description of the book and its merits.
Absolutely. I don’t think I’ve ever tailored a submission to an editor. Maybe some agents do. I might tailor my phone call when I tell them about the book, but they’re all getting the same material on the page.

Who are you competitive with?
I would say it’s more that there are several agents that I like and admire. I often see things that they do or read about things that they have done, and think, “Wow, that was really smart.”

Sometimes a writer will go and talk to several agents and choose one. For a book I’m actually out with right now, the author met with a few agents and, lucky for me, chose me. In those cases agents are directly competitive, and if we love the project we quite desperately want to represent it. But there’s not a lot we can do except be ourselves and hope the author likes us.

When I first became an agent, another agent told me, “The worst thing is the beauty contest.” You never know why the author chose the agent they chose.

What is your most powerful area of expertise as an agent?
I wouldn’t use the word expertise. I would use the word experience. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I have been directly involved in almost every aspect of the publishing world. I was never a sales rep, but with that exception, I’ve done a lot of what can be done on the publisher’s side. And then as an agent I’ve done everything from being a sole practitioner to now having a company of thirteen people representing probably two hundred and fifty clients.

Does that experience make you want to offer any grand predictions for the future of our business?
Just pray that Barnes & Noble stays healthy.

Otherwise it’s all over?
No, it will never be all over. But if B&N doesn’t stay healthy, the publishing industry will change phenomenally. Bookstores are incredibly important—not just as retail outlets, but as places where people go and commune with other like-minded individuals, many of them strangers, and talk about big ideas and compare notes on what they’ve been reading and what’s going on in the world. That is a tremendously important and valuable part of our culture. It’s much bigger than just selling books. I find it appalling that our society is turning a blind eye—maybe through just a lack of awareness—to the fact that the number of bookstores in this country is declining all the time. It’s really serious.

There are countries, and France is the obvious example, with a minister of culture who publicly says that their bookstores are an important part of their culture, and that they will not let them decline. In America, no one really—aside from people who work in the book business—seems to be fully aware of the negative impact of that development.

It’s also true that people need to see books to be able to read them. And in a time when screens are ubiquitous, people need to see books more than ever. My family lives in Pound Ridge, New York. It has to be one of the more affluent and literate parts of the country. From my house I have to drive a half hour to get to a bookstore. That’s ridiculous.

My wife and I went to the movies at one point this summer in New Canaan, Connecticut—which is a fair drive from our house. We came out of the movie theater and were walking down the street. My wife stopped in front of a bookstore and looked in the window and said, “Wow, I’m just realizing how long it’s been since I looked in a store window and saw books.” That’s really sad.

I think this is the most crucial issue right now for publishing books, writing literature, and our culture—the whole ball of wax.

What should the younger generation of writers, agents, and editors do to preserve the culture of books?
Take every opportunity to support bookstores. And try to keep reminding Amazon that while it might not matter for sneakers if people buy them only online—culturally speaking, anyway—it does matter that there are bookstores. The problem with Amazon’s vision is that they don’t believe in retail stores.

Are you concerned about the viability of writing as a legitimate source of income?
There are a couple of different ways of looking at that. An e-book often takes sales away from a hardcover edition when a book is first published, and the author makes less money from the e-book than from the hardcover. In that regard, authors’ incomes have gone down, and their agents’ incomes go down too. On the backlist side, sometimes an author makes more money from an e-book than from the paperback edition. But in general authors’ incomes are declining a little bit.

Agents can sit around and bitch and moan that a book that they used to sell for two hundred thousand dollars is now selling for a hundred thousand dollars, and that’s legitimate bitching and moaning—but that’s all it is at the end of the day.

Here’s a bigger problem: Let’s say some author is thinking about writing a book. Maybe he’s a college professor and he has a wife and a couple of kids, or he’s working as a journalist at a magazine. And the book is going to take him two years, and he will have to forgo a certain part of his income from his “real job” in order to write the book. So he asks us, “What is the book worth?” We might give him a ballpark estimate. Five years ago if that book was worth two hundred thousand dollars he would say, “Okay, I can make that work. I can pay my rent and feed my family and write this book even if I have to take off six months from my real job.” But if he has that conversation with us today and we say that book is worth seventy-five thousand dollars, he’s not going to write it. My concern is that there are books that are just going unwritten.

Let’s end on a higher note.
What’s the optimistic view? People will always read. I don’t think books are going to disappear from our culture. I think the question of what format they read in, and where they get what they read, and how they find the quality product—all of that will continue to change. But they will always read. I hope!

Is there a piece of encouragement you want to share with writers?
Write well, and write as much as you can.

Michael Szczerban is an editor at Simon & Schuster.