A few months ago, I was at lunch with a literary agent who shall remain nameless, and the conversation turned to the subject of our favorite movers and shakers in the industry. When Molly Friedrich's name came up, my lunch companion—no small dealmaker herself—lowered her voice and said something that surprised me. "If I were a writer, I don't see why you would sign with me or any other agent when Molly is out there. What else could you possibly want in an agent?"

It's a sentiment that's hard to dispute. The daughter of two children's book authors, Friedrich was born in London, raised in suburban Long Island, and graduated from Barnard in 1974. She began her career in publishing a few days later as an intern at Doubleday. Over the next two years she was promoted twice, first to assistant editor and then to director of publicity at the company's paperback imprint, Anchor Press. After a year in publicity she took another new job—and a risky step backward—as an assistant to the agent Phyllis Seidel. Soon she moved again, joining the Aaron Priest Literary Agency, where she remained for the next twenty-eight years. In 2006, she set out on her own and formed the Friedrich Agency.

I don't think I can adequately convey the whirlwind of charm, passion, and sheer personal magnetism that Friedrich has spent the last three decades unleashing on the publishing world in service of her clients. Like many of her authors—Melissa Bank, Sue Grafton, Frank McCourt, Terry McMillan, Esmeralda Santiago, Jane Smiley, and Elizabeth Strout among them—she is a force of nature. But behind the deep voice and the big laugh, there is also a Long Island girl who was forced to grow up fast under challenging circumstances; a young wife who left the corporate world because she didn't want to raise her kids by telephone; a brass-knuckle agent who admits she will go to the wall for any novel—flawed or not—that makes her cry three times; and a mother of four who wrote a children's book, You're Not My Real Mother! (Little, Brown, 2004), after her adopted daughter told her precisely that one day.

When I arrive at Friedrich's office in New York City for our conversation, I am ushered in by another of her daughters, Lucy, who just graduated from college and is working as her mother's assistant for the summer. Friedrich's office is bright, warm, and unpretentious. The walls are painted with wide yellow-and-white stripes that run vertically from floor to ceiling. But its most remarkable feature has to be a memento that hangs on a wall in the corner: a framed newspaper clipping from Christmas Day 2005, when two of her clients' books, Sue Grafton's S Is for Silence (G. P. Putnam's Sons) and Frank McCourt's Teacher Man (Scribner), sat side by side atop the New York Times best-seller lists for fiction and nonfiction. As my lunch companion might have observed: How the heck are you supposed to compete with that?

I always like to start with a little background. Where are you from?
I'm the daughter of two writers. I grew up in a family in which language was very important. The one who is known, my father, is the one who got published and didn't raise the children. My mother, Priscilla, is the one who raised us. The two of them collaborated on thirteen children's books. The best book they wrote is called The Easter Bunny That Overslept, and it's been in print since 1957. It has been illustrated not once but three times and was even made into a miserable television show for a while.

The first exotic thing about me is that I was born in London. My parents met in France and were married in Paris—they were both writing, my mother was painting—and they lived a kind of faux-glamorous expatriate life. They had three children in quick succession. The first was in Frankfurt, I was in London, and my brother was in Paris. Then they moved from Paris to Long Island, and they were penniless. They had no support from either set of parents. Those were the days when even if you were educated and had children, you were expected to suck it up and fend for yourself. The first place they lived was with William Gaddis's mother. She had a home in Massapequa and her house had an unrenovated barn. And that's where we lived—in the unrenovated barn. My one claim to literary fame is that apparently there is a scene in The Recognitions in which the main character is describing a naked two-year old on a summer lawn who's putting pennies into a Woolworth's plastic beaded purse. Apparently that is yours truly. When I learned about it I thought, "God, full circle! Even then I was counting money!" But I haven't gone back to see if it's true. It's a piece of family lore. I'm not going to egomaniacally go back through that very long book searching for a possible portrait of my two-year-old self.

I guess the point is that I grew up very comfortable around books, comfortable around writers who would come out to dinner parties and were always sort of around. My father started out at Newsweek and then was at the Saturday Evening Post for years. He started writing books then. He wrote a couple of honestly not-very-good novels and then he wrote many books as a cultural historian. But he never gave up his journalistic work. He needed to earn a steady, consistent living because by then there were five children, the third and fourth of whom were retarded. Today I am their guardian. The fifth child was born eight years after the fourth one, and he's the one who died in a plane crash. So it's a large and noisy family that's complicated in the way of all interesting families.

Where did you go to college?
I went to college at Barnard and graduated with a BA in Art History. My father would not allow me to major in English. He felt very strongly that if he was going to pay tuition, which he did, and that if I was going to be reading books all my life, then there was absolutely no reason for him to underwrite four years of studying Melville. So I tried to figure out the thing I could study that would be the one thing he didn't know about, and that was art history. I studied the early Italian renaissance. Then, of course, there was the question of "What do you do?" What do you do with a BA in Art History from Barnard, when you basically can't do anything but analyze the diagonal composition of a great painting? Not useful! My parents were very consistently clear that when we graduated there would be no support. We were not to have any kind of meltdown, we were not to reveal any learning disorders—if we had them we were to keep them to ourselves. We were to get on with it, and sort ourselves out, and always live within our own incomes.

How did you get started in publishing?
When I was still in Barnard I was renting a room from Connie and Tom Congdon, who was an editor in the apex of his fabulous commercial book editing life because he was the editor of Jaws. Tom said, "You should go into publishing." I called my father because he was the one who could be counted on for an honest response. He said, "Absolutely not. Publishing is what people go into when they don't know what else to do." I said, "But that applies to me!" Congdon said not to pay attention to my father. He said he'd get me an interview at Doubleday. And I do give good interview, as you will learn by the end of this evening. I was a great interview—very confident—and I had done all kinds of interesting things because I'd been working every summer from the age of thirteen on. I'd also gotten pretty poised about being around adults, kind of old beyond my years, I guess, especially with my brother and sister as they were.

But then I had to take the typing test. They knocked off ten points for every mistake, which gave me a score of negative thirty-five. They said, "We'd love to hire you, but..." and I went away. I decided to spend the second semester of my senior year typing the op-ed page of the Times every day. I went back for that typing test two more times, and I was finally hired at thirty-seven words per minute as an intern at Doubleday. I think I was hired really for tenacity alone. It was a great program that they have long since discontinued. You got to spend about two weeks working in every conceivable department: the different editorial departments of Doubleday, the copyediting department, rights and permission. You got to go out to Garden City and deal with the purchasing offices. You got to go on the road with a sales rep and watch books not get placed. Even back then, in 1974, books were skipped. It was really a devastating experience to observe secondhand.

At the end of four months you got to choose where you wanted to go, and naturally I said editorial because I have no imagination. I had the choice of working either in Doubleday trade or Anchor paperback, which back then was about eleven people. It was really big. I went to work as the assistant to Loretta Barrett, who was the editorial director. It should be noted that almost everybody who was at Anchor at the time—aside from Bill Strachan, who has no sense—has become an agent. Marie Brown, Elizabeth Knappman, Loretta Barrett herself, Liv Blumer. We are all agents.

Tell me what those early days were like for you.
Anchor's list was fairly academic back then. There were about 135 books published a year, of which 60 percent were reprints and 40 percent were trade paperback originals. The fact is, I had grown up in a family of extremes. My youngest brother, Tony, was brilliant, and so was my older sister, Liesel. I didn't test well. I didn't learn easily. And I didn't consider myself especially bright. But I was a huge overachiever. It wasn't until I went to college that I realized that if I simply worked harder than anybody else, I would do fine. I saw the same thing at Doubleday. It was great. People would give me work and I would do whatever I was told. I had all kinds of time because my husband was still a sophomore in college—I'd gotten married by then—and he had no time to talk to me anyway. In those days you also got paid overtime, which was essential because I was making six thousand dollars a year. We were really quite penniless, and overtime was what kept the wolf at the door. So I did whatever I was told. I wrote flap copy. I put books into production. I consulted the art department on jackets. I gave books their titles when no one else could think of one. I read whatever I was told to read and even what I was not asked to read.

Mostly, I taught myself how to do the job. When I started working for Loretta, I had inherited this adorable little office—it was really an outer office—with a huge window. But I had no view because the window was blocked by old filing that was stacked up and covering it. I decided that I was going to see my view by the end of six months. That was my goal. Very Prussian. So every night I would stay late and file. And I never filed anything without reading it. That's how I learned how things worked. I learned how people were presenting books, who was buying what books, what Sam Vaughan had decided to publish as opposed to what Lisa Drew was doing in trade, etcetera. I honestly had nothing better to do than to be ferociously ambitious. And there was nothing stopping me.

And you immediately knew that you enjoyed the work?
Oh, yeah. It was great because everybody was so grateful. People were so happy that I was there. Loretta would always thank me. The authors were grateful. But even then I think I had a sense of myself. I remember there was this one agent who called up for Loretta. I guess Loretta hadn't returned her call, and the agent just started screaming at me. I said, "Excuse me. You are not speaking to Loretta. You are speaking to Loretta's assistant. You may not talk to me like this. Would you like me to have her return your call? And if she doesn't, you can count on the fact that it is not because I didn't tell her. But do not scream at me." This woman immediately backed off. When I met her years later, I said, "You're the screamer!" She had no recollection of it at all. But I guess even then, if I think about twenty-two-year-olds and how easily frightened they are, I had one thing that was working to my advantage. I didn't realize it was an advantage until I was in the business a little longer: I had a really good voice. I had a voice that was low, and a voice that bespoke an authority I did not feel. I could use my voice to help me wing it. I would speak to authors who I had never met—they were all over the country—when I was impossibly young as though I knew what I was talking about. I would just try and get the job done, solve the problem at hand, give my boss as little as possible to get aggravated about. And the response from Loretta was enormous gratitude.

So I'd put books into production. I'd say, "Would you like me to edit this book?" She'd say, "Well, yeah." And why not? Who says that I couldn't edit? Why not learn by doing? What is editing, really, except an experienced eye learning how to respond to a manuscript? Learning when a passage in a manuscript simply falls apart. Obviously Loretta read all the editorial letters that I wrote at midnight and one in the morning, showing off for her. My job at Doubleday was to distinguish myself. And I did.

How did you work your way up?
Oh, fast. They had a sort of indentured servant system. You know, first you were an intern, then an assistant, then an assistant to the editor, then an editorial assistant, then an associate editor.... I mean, talk about hierarchical! You could die waiting. You could be thirty. I had no time for that. I'd been there for about two years. Everything was going very well. I was a fully contributing, noisy person. I went to all the editorial meetings. People were learning that they could count on me. If somebody gave me something to read, I would never let them down. I might let them down with my opinion, but I wouldn't let them down by making an excuse of my life. I made it clear that I was somebody who could be approached for almost any problem. I spent a lot of time socializing, going to the cantina, whatever. I'm very social.

So then the Anchor Press publicity director, Liv Blumer, left to become the director of publicity for Doubleday trade, and I was offered her old job as head of publicity for Anchor. That was a big jump. I wasn't sure that I wanted to be in publicity, but I recognized it for what it was, which was a big jump. It seemed like a really good thing to do—to learn how to run something, to hire people, to learn how to promote and publicize books. And I knew I'd be good at it. That job was very good training for me when I became a baby agent, a year later, because it taught me how to present books that no one really wanted to hear about.

Did you like doing publicity?
In my opinion, the two jobs that are the most exhausting in this business are the jobs of the foreign scout and the publicist. The reason is that there is never an end to the job. If you're a scout, there is always another book you can cover, another house you can do well by, another report you can write. If you're a publicist, for every eighty letters you write, and eighty ideas you try, there are seventy-nine that don't work. But the only ones that the author hears about—and the editor hears about and your boss hears about—are the ones that work. It is a thankless and really difficult job. But I did it.

Were you any good at it?
I had one fabulous moment. I'd started, and I was doing everything. I had hired a woman who had no experience in publicity. She had just finished getting her MA in Shakespeare's Apocrypha at NYU, which proved to be totally useless. So there were the two of us—clueless. Meanwhile, the big book on Doubleday's trade list that year was Alex Haley's Roots, so no one wanted to listen to a publicist for Anchor Press. Everyone was deliciously over-focused on Roots.

After six months at the new job, I decided I had earned a vacation. One of the books I had been publicizing was from the "Foxfire" series. It was a wonderful book by Eliot Wigginton called I Wish I Could Give My Son a Wild Raccoon. In my reading I had come across a newsletter that was written by a woman named Kay Sexton. It was a newsletter called the "B. Dalton Newsletter" that was put out by the bookstore chain. I read the newsletter and thought, "This woman really needs to know about the specialness of this book." So I wrote her one of my two-page letters introducing myself and telling her what the book was about and why she had to know about it and get behind it. "All the proceeds are going to Reading Is Fundamental.... Eliot Wigginton is wonderfulness himself...." I never heard a word from her. So I was going on this two-week vacation, and before I left I told my assistant that I was going to call at the end of the first week to check in. This was in the days before cell phones, obviously. So I called my assistant from a payphone in a bathing suit and said, "Anything going on?" She said, "Molly, you won't believe it. You've got three bouquets of flowers!" I said, "What?" She said, "It's so exciting—your entire letter is the subject of the ‘B. Dalton Newsletter.'" Kay had written something like, "In all my years of doing this newsletter, I've never heard from anybody at Doubleday until I finally received this extraordinary letter from one Molly Friedrich, who urged me to take a serious look at I Wish I Could Give My Son a Wild Raccoon. Her letter is so powerful that I print it here in full. Please adjust your orders accordingly." The reason I was getting flowers is that you could see a direct difference from before the newsletter came out and after. Usually, the marketing people, who pay the advertising people, are always taking credit. You never know whether you have actually, tangibly made a difference. Except this one time. So that was my terrific moment in the sun.

Why did you leave Doubleday to become an agent?
I did the publicity job for a year and then I got a phone call from an agent at the time, Phyllis Seidel. She worked out of her Upper East Side brownstone and she'd never had anyone work for her. She said that she was interested in turning her cottage industry into something a bit more fast-moving and professional, and she said she'd heard wonderful things about me from two people who were so different that she was intrigued. She asked if I would come up for an interview. By this point I had learned that it is incredibly important to never say, "No," and I'd been in the business long enough to see that agents were really essential to the industry. I had also been in the business long enough to see that, on the publishing side, there were a lot of meetings. There was a lot of time spent gathering your insecurities together and having them reflected in a group meeting where you got to shore yourselves up. You know: "Well, nineteen of us like the jacket, what do you think of it?" That kind of thing. There was a lot of inefficiency.

Plus, I was married by then and knew I wanted children. I didn't know if corporate America was that hospitable to having children, at least for somebody who really wanted to be around them and actively help them grow up. There weren't a whole lot of senior people at Doubleday at the time who had young children. I decided that I wanted to find an angle of this business that would allow me to continue working but to work around my life and my children. It was a really conscious decision. I also had been exposed to a lot of agents—some of them wonderful, some of them appallingly bad—a whole raft of agents from the sublime to the really questionably professional. But I had been around that angle of the business long enough to see that if you really worked hard to build up a stable of great writers, it might be a good way to earn a living.

So with that sort of young, unformed knowledge in mind, I took the subway up and interviewed with Phyllis. She offered me two things. First, she was willing to allow me take on writers of my own if it didn't intrude with the business. That was really important to me because, after all, I had been a boss already and this was already taking a step back and becoming an assistant again, apprenticing myself to her in order to learn the business. And second, she said she would give me 4 percent of anything I brought in, which was kind of the carrot before the donkey's nose. It wasn't going to cost her anything to give me 4 percent, and I don't think she even thought I would bring in anything interesting. So she did it. But it sure was useful later on, and it set a precedent that I used as part of my negotiation when I left a year later to join Aaron Priest. I took that 4 percent commission with me as part of my negotiation.

Tell me about some of your early clients.
The very first client I sold was Phyllis Theroux, who has a book right now that I'm trying to sell and will die trying. I began working with Aaron Priest in 1978, and six months into working for him—it was just Aaron and me, impossibly small—Aaron decided that he wanted to move to California to open an office in L.A. This was a huge job change. He had made it very clear when I started that he did not want me to take on clients. He wanted me to be his assistant. I said, "Fine. But can I work on finding clients as long as it's not at your inconvenience?" He said, "I don't care what you do, just don't inconvenience me." So I would work at night because my husband was busy with law school I was writing letters to short story writers at Redbook, all that stuff. When Aaron got in his car and was driving across the country with his wife and kids, he would call once a day. He'd say, "Hi. I'm in Iowa. Anything doing?" I'd say, "Nah." But by the time he got to California, five days later, I had sold three books. I had literally been waiting to be released. And the first book was Phyllis Theroux's, which I auctioned to Julie Houston at Morrow for twenty-five thousand dollars. It was called California and Other States of Grace. It was absolutely wonderful, and she went on to write others. But that was my first book, which makes me sentimental about selling all of her books.

Eventually it became clear to Aaron that I might be more valuable as a baby agent than as only his assistant. I said, "Come on, let me hire an assistant part-time. It's not going to cost that much." Then, when Aaron came back from California six months later, there was no question. I wasn't going to go backward. I got very lucky that way. I could have been his assistant for four or five years without ever having the opportunity to really step out. It was his decision to go to California that really gave me the breathing room I needed to show off. To show what I wanted to do. To show what I could do.

How did you build a list in those early years? Were you getting referrals, was it the letters you were writing, were you reading the slush?
Certainly I was reading slush, and nothing was coming out of the slush. Some of it was the letters I was writing. And I never said, "No." Let me give you an example of what I mean. There's a movie agent named Geoff Sanford. One day he came blowing through the Aaron Priest offices. When he walked in, Aaron wasn't around. Don't forget that I had this scary voice, the gift of gab, the ability to make someone feel at home, whatever you want to call it. I said, "Geoff! Come on in! How are you?" We talked for a while and he said, "Oh, you're going to be great." We didn't do any business, but about a year later he called me up and said there was this writer named Sue Grafton. He said he really liked her, she was a really good egg, and she had written a book called A Is for Alibi. Then he told me she was leaving her agent and asked if I might want to take a look. I said, "Are you kidding? I'm starving to death. Of course I'm interested." But I also said, "Why does she want to leave her agent?" And Sue had told him and I can tell you because Sue has always been very straightforward about it. Kathy Robbins was her agent at the time, and Kathy was in the process of taking her authors from a 10 percent commission to a 15 percent commission. Sue liked Kathy enormously, but she felt, like death and taxes, that no one should ever charge more than 10 percent. She just felt very strongly about it.

What is the lesson there, beyond never saying "No"?
When you're an agent, you must be open to every single person. There is no one who doesn't have an opportunity to see me. I really mean that. There is no little person who will be turned away by me. I mean, why not? What on earth does it cost me? The business of being an agent is the business of forming relationships, and everything is a seedling. If you go to a writers conference, as faculty, you will probably not take on anybody at that writers conference. But within five years, if you have done your job and been open to the universe—not to sound too California—you will eventually have a terrific client approach you who knew somebody who was the brother of someone who was at the conference five years ago and scribbled down your name. This has happened over and over and over again.

I'll give you another example. Many years ago, an editor at the Atlantic suggested to me that there was a writer named Elisabeth Hyde who was working on a novel. He thought I should check it out. So I wrote to her immediately. You know, "I hear from so-and-so that you're working on a novel." It turned out that she had just signed on with an agent. The letter I wrote back was something like, "Oh, drat. I have a two-year-old so I'm not allowed to swear. Well, best of luck to you, be well, blah blah blah, and I'll look forward to reading your book between hard covers." Well, she held on to that letter. A couple of years ago—when my daughter who was then two was now twenty-five—Elisabeth Hyde wrote back to me. She sent me the letter I had written to her more than twenty years ago. She said her agent retired, and she inherited another agent who didn't much like her work, and then she went with another agent who didn't like her novel at all. She asked the agent if it was all right for her to try to sell the book on her own. This agent, apparently, said, "Yeah, sure. Fine." She said, "If I find a publisher, will you help me with the contract?" He said, "Yes." So she finds a publisher on her own, MacAdam/Cage, and the agent negotiated the contract for zero advance, a fifty-fifty world rights split, and took 15 percent. I mean, honestly! At that point it occurred to Elisabeth that maybe she should find an agent who really liked her stuff. So she went back to her file and that's when she found my letter.

See how important it is to be remembered in this business? When you interact with someone, you want to make the molecules in the air change a little. You want somebody to say, "God, she's good!" You want to be remembered. You want to make an imprint. As an agent, you have to be able to do that.

I just read this great novel you sold by James Collins called Beginner's Greek. He came to writing late, and I'm curious how he came to you.
He came to me recommended by a magazine editor. I'm not going to tell you who it was because if I do, then all the hard-working agents, if they're really doing their jobs, will call this editor up and ask to buy him or her a meal. I have to keep some of my fabulous contacts to myself. But I was totally in love with this book and really, really wanted to get Jim Collins. I knew that he was seeing three or four other people, and I knew that he was well connected. I knew that my competition was going to be horrible. Hateful. You always want the competition to be someone who is really different from you, not just someone who is another version of you. So I didn't know what to do to distinguish myself. Jim decided to come to New York to meet with people. Of course I had read the book really carefully. I thought, "I'm going to take this guy to lunch. I've got to get this guy."

So I blow-dried my hair and put on a suit and put on Erase under my eyes. I'm taking him to Patroon—this very manly place, a guy place—and of course I get there early because I'm nervous, which is so typical of me. I don't know what he looks like. I'm waiting in these seats against the wall. There's a guy next to me who is also clearly waiting for somebody. We're both waiting. So I decide to balance my checkbook in order to stay calm while I wait. A guy walks in and I ask him if he's Jim, and he says no. He goes off and sits with this other guy. About five minutes later, another guy sits down. And I say, "Oh, I love your book." He says, "You do?" And I start to go on and on and on about how amazing his book is. He looks at me and says, "I can't tell you how sorry I am not to be the person you are expecting." I say, "You're not Jim Collins?" He says, "No. I'm the owner of the restaurant. You ate here once before, so you're in the computer, and I was coming to introduce myself and say hello." I couldn't believe it. I was like, "Now I've lost all my mojo! Get out of here!"

So finally Jim came in and I said, "Are you Jim? You had better be Jim Collins." I was so exhausted by then that it was just ridiculous. But it was him. He looked kind of formal, in a double-breasted suit, and very tall, and slightly nervous, but in a way that was deeply appealing. I was just as nervous as he was. And we just talked. I asked if I was his last meeting—I wanted to be his last meeting—and then I told him that I thought he should not be allowed to leave the table without saying yes to me. "Just say yes!"

You said that?
What did I have to lose? I think he was charmed, and he could see that I was serious. What does a writer want? A writer wants your passion. They want you to see the book in the same way that they've written it, and they want you to go to your death trying to sell it. They want to see that you are able to speak coherently and articulately about why you love the book. And I told him it was too long. I told him he needed to do this, that, and the other thing. I told him there were places where it was overly precious, where there was too much throat-clearing. I was very open with him. But he didn't disagree. So I did the best I could to win him over. He was one of those very intimidating people because he really listened. I hate it when people listen too well because then I tend to fill in the blanks and start talking too quickly and get really Latinate and formal and nervous. Anyway, it was a great meeting. I said, "You have to let me know. I really don't wait well. Please." And I told him something else. I told him there were other agents who could sell this book as well as I could, but nobody could sell it better. And then he called me up. Now it's in its fourth printing. It's doing very well, and it's gotten very widely reviewed, and we've sold it around the world. It's just been great.

You also represent Melissa Bank, who has gotten all tangled up in this issue of chick lit. Tell me what you think about that.
I don't consider her chick lit. I don't know what chick lit is. First of all, is there anybody out there who doesn't know that the easiest thing to sell is plot? But the thing that everybody wants is an original voice. And the thing that's kind of stuck in the middle is character. So here we have a collection of short stories—The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing—that doesn't have a single plot because it's made up of loosely connected short stories with one story that isn't even part of the rest of it. But what everybody loved about that book is what is absolutely not genre. I mean, chick lit has become a category, right? But I didn't sell that book as part of chick lit. First of all I wasn't even sure that I knew what chick lit was. And the thing that everybody, to a person, loved about Melissa's book is that it had an original voice.

Now, what is an original voice? Well, think of it like this: Go to Bonfire of the Vanities and close your eyes and pick a page and have someone read you two paragraphs. If you can't identify those paragraphs as the rhythms and cadences that belong to Tom Wolfe, you're finished. I'm convinced that eight times out of ten, with Melissa Bank, you could do the same thing. Now that is saying something. So I don't know. What is chick lit? Does it mean fiction that primarily attracts the interest of women readers? Well, that would include Jane Austen. Is Jane Austen chick lit? Absolutely not. Has Jane Austen ever written about anything other than marriage proposals, linens, china, and who has a good dowry? No. I adore her. I read her every year. But that is what her books are about. So is she the queen of chick lit? I don't know. It seems kind of silly to me, to be honest. If I read a short story by Melissa Bank, I can always identify it as Melissa because of the voice, and my view of the world is altered for having read her work. That's a lot for a short story to have succeeded in doing, and that's what her stories do. So I don't know, and I don't care, whether Melissa Bank is considered part of the chick-lit world. What I do know is: One, that I love her; and two, that I respect her. And there are many writers who I love and many writers who I respect. But there are very few whom I both love and respect, and Melissa is in that small group.

Tell me how Terry McMillan came to your attention.
Terry was recommended to me by a young editor at Houghton Mifflin named Larry Kessenich. She had sold her first book to Houghton Mifflin, and she didn't like the contract and she didn't like the agent. Right in the middle of the deal, she decided that she didn't want anything to do with the agent, and it just fell apart. She wasn't under contract yet, and it just fell apart. Larry put my name out there as an agent she should talk to. I always tell editors, "You don't have to recommend me exclusively. I know that's a terrible burdensome thing for you if things don't work out. But just put me on a short list. Or put me on a long list. Just put me on a list. I promise you I will read this quickly. I will not embarrass you. I will read this well. And if it's really wonderful, I won't necessarily send it to you exclusively, but I won't fuck you over, either." I was always good to my word, so it was easy for me to be recommended.

With Terry, I was on a short list of maybe six agents. I loved the pages, and she came to meet me. I said, "Oh, you're great. You're going to be a star. I don't know how effective I can be, but I will fight very hard on your behalf." She had already seen four people and she said, "I want to go with you. I like your energy." But I said, "No. Wrong. You've already made an appointment with this last person, who comes very highly recommended, and I want you to see that last person." She said, "Why?" I said, "Because if you and I ever have a fight, or a temper tantrum, I don't ever want you to wonder what that other agent would have been like. I want you to come to me with a full education of having met five other people who were highly recommended to you. Besides, you made an appointment and it's wrong to cancel your appointment. Go ahead and continue your education of finding an agent." So she did, and in the end she came back and told me that she still wanted me, which was great.

What was it about her writing that you responded to?
I fell in love with Terry's writing because she had an original voice. Go back and read the first page of Mama, when Mildred, the mother, is wielding an ax. It's like, "Whoa!" It springs off the page. That's why it happened. But Terry built a career by believing in herself more than anybody else did. She really worked hard. She had a two-year-old son, and she was living in a sixth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. She was doing programming or something in a law office. Things were not easy for her. But she just got on the phone with all these bookstores and said, "I want to set up a reading" and "You're going to want me" and "You must want me."

I remember that Houghton Mifflin got an offer of ten thousand dollars for paperback rights. This was before we knew how Mama would perform. I called them up and said, "No, no, no, no, no. You have to understand who you are dealing with. You are dealing with a force of nature, and it's a force of nature has not been felt yet. You will make a terrible mistake if you sell reprint rights for ten thousand dollars. Believe me, if you hang on a little bit longer, you'll be rewarded." And they did, and they were.

So to go back to your question about how you build up a list, the answer is that you just keep fighting on your authors' behalf. Sometimes the fighting is not effective—it doesn't work, it doesn't matter, it doesn't make a difference. But sometimes it is effective, and when it is, and your efforts have been proven right, people start to remember. They start to think, "Maybe she knows what she's doing." Then it gets to the point where it gets out of control with editors who want to see your submissions and become really upset if they don't.

Tell me about that.
I remember one editor who started to cry at lunch. This was one of the people to whom I did not say "No." She's crying and she says, "I just really want to know what I can do to get on your submission list." I thought, "This is really appalling. I am now in an official tight spot." Sometimes you have lunch with people and you know by the time the breadbasket is empty that you will not be submitting to them anytime soon. It's usually when somebody says, "So! Tell me about your list!" I think, "You jerk. You moron. How dare you have lunch with anybody and not know that stuff." When I have a first lunch with anybody, I know what they've published. I know how to spell their name. I take the time to learn who my audience is.

But when this person started sobbing and saying, "What can I do?" I was very gentle with her. I said, "The thing is, it's not easy." I'm not a mean person, and there is a part of me that's deeply maternal. But I knew she was a disaster. I said, "You have to find your own people in the beginning. You can't expect agents to just submit their most beloved thing to you. If they haven't done business with you, that is a huge risk for them." I said, "Tell me about some books you have published that you have found on your own and won and done well by. Books that you've really published well. And this is not a test. I don't mean to put you on the spot. But if you don't have an answer—and I suspect you don't because you are, after all, very young—then two things have to happen. One is that you have to build a list a little bit, and the other is that you have to be right about a book at least two times in the next five to seven years. If you do that, people will start to send you things, because you will have stepped out on an editorial limb and proven yourself right. That's the way to get attention. You have to be right."

I think that's how it works. You hang around long enough, and you insist, like Scarlett O'Hara just before the intermission, "As God as my witness...this book will sell!" And if it does sell, and you were right, and everyone else was wrong, then you build up credibility. But it takes time. Here I am, thirty years later. I'm old! I'm fifty-five years old! But seriously, it is a business of staying with it long enough to really build up credibility and respect and a reputation for honesty. Always for honesty. God, this is a small business. I can tell you exactly which agents exaggerate the interest they have. I can tell you who lies. They're out there. I know who these people are. It's my job to know.

How should an author choose which agent to go with?
First of all, I don't think an author should approach an agent before they have a manuscript. I had an author come to me who didn't think he'd be ready for seven to ten years. He'd had a huge first success and he was leaving his agent and wanted to sign on with somebody new. I asked him why he was leaving his agent. It was clear the agent had done a wonderful job selling the book, a wonderful job on foreign rights. And now the author wanted someone new to exchange letters with him—talk to him, be his friend, be his sponsor—for five years or seven years before his next book was ready? He said, "I've left that agent because I want someone more prestigious." I said, "I don't want you. I don't want to read what you've written. I don't want to read what you will write in seven years. I don't want you. I want you to go back to that first agent and show some loyalty, because you have a really shabby reason for leaving that agent. That agent has done everything possible to secure and establish your career. You've done something too—you've written a good book. You have every reason to write a second good book. But for you to leave because you want someone more prestigious? That sucks. Bye!" He wrote me a letter saying he admired my moxie.

But you know what's really sad? That author did go with someone else, a very well-known agent, and that very well-known agent sold the book for three hundred thousand dollars. So you know what? I'm sorry to say it, but this author was sort of right. Not right to leave his agent, but right to think that going with an agent who was very well known might have helped him. We'll never know what the poor, sad, sorry, hardworking first agent who would have gone to bat for life for this guy would have done. But would that editor have paid ten times what the first book was sold for? I don't know, but it really stinks.

So how is an author supposed to know whom to choose?
Okay, so the first rule is that an author should never approach an agent until they have something. If I met every person who wanted to just have a chat before they sent their book, I'd go out of business. If they have a book and they are sending it out, they should always say in the letter if they are doing multiple submissions. That is common courtesy. I would also say that I want to know the circumstances under which I am reading something. Have you sent this to ninety-five other people? Have you sent this to one other person? Do I have this exclusively? Because if I push aside my own reading, which is the tyranny of all our lives, in order to be fast, at least tell me what I need to do. The other thing is that the author should agree—if the author is playing consumer here and sending it to five agents who want to read it—that he's not going to make a decision until he has heard from all five people. You should respect an agent's time. Do we get paid for our time? No. Respect a busy agent's time. The thing I want to kill someone for is when I read something over the weekend and I'm about to pick up the phone to tell them it's the most wonderful book since War and Peace, and they say, "Oh, sorry, I've signed on with Joe Blow who called on Sunday morning." No. No, no, no, no, no. That is really wrong. Be fair. If you are going to put us on the spot, give us all a fair chance.

The first thing you are going to look for is: Who responds? The second thing to look for is: What do they say? And what do they think about the book? Now this is where it gets murky, because a lot of agents get the author by saying, "Oh, it's wonderful! Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!" Then they sign the author on and begin the hard work of getting the book into shape. That tends not to be my style. I tend to be very up-front about what I think the book needs from the very beginning. And I have lost authors because of it. Sometimes I wonder, "Should I become dishonest?" Should I say, "It's great!" to get the author and then deconstruct the manuscript over the course of twenty painful weeks? I don't know what the answer is. I know you always have to be true to yourself and your own style, and my style is to be utterly frank about what I think the manuscript requires, how I would position the book, and what I would do on its behalf.

Then the author may say, "Oh God, I can't decide! You're all so wonderful!" If that's the case I would say to get on a plane and come meet us. Figure it out. You should never be afraid to talk to your agent. Some authors are terrified of their agents. On the other hand, there are some agents who have very different styles and are overly friendly. They become "the girlfriend." They become so close with their authors that we arrive at what shrinks call "the boundary problem." This is also problematic, because then the agent loses the authority they are supposed to have in the author's life.

What kind of questions should an author ask potential agents?
You are fully within your rights to ask an agent whom else he represents. You are also within your rights to ask an agent to tell you about a couple of authors whose books he's sold recently. You can't live on your laurels and sit around bragging about your top five best-known clients. "What have you sold recently, and how'd it go?" And maybe ask, "What did you love that you weren't able to sell?" Everyone thinks I sell everything I touch. Wrong, wrong, wrong. There's loads of stuff I take on and don't sell. It's extremely painful. So I think it's fair to talk about these things. I think you want to see what kind of a match you are. Can you talk with this agent frankly? Do you feel comfortable?

But it also goes the other way. It's a mutual interview process. There are many people I talk to and realize that I may love this person's work but I do not love this person. This person is going to be trouble. Big trouble. I had one author who I took on. It was a beauty contest, and I won her. She was a nonfiction writer, and I don't have much nonfiction, so I want nonfiction. She'd been published before and had a raft of fabulous journalistic credits to her name. I worked with her a little bit on the proposal—you know, shoring it up—but she was a true pro and didn't need much help. I got three offers and sold the book for six figures. It was great. But by the time the contract arrived, this woman had so exhausted me that I called her up and said, "I'm not going to tell the publisher this because I don't want the publisher to be nervous about it, but once the contract comes in and it's signed, I want you to know that I am leaving you. I'm giving you my full 15 percent. You can take it. I want you to thrive. But you have exhausted me. I'm sorry, but it just isn't a good match." Nonfiction books don't take six months to write. They take years to write! And the prospect of having this woman in my life for years filled me with such a chill that I thought, "I can't do this. Let's solve this."

Tell writers one thing they don't know about editors, something that you know and they don't.
I would say that they must view the fawning, deeply complimentary praise that marks the honeymoon phase of their relationship with an editor for what it is. They must not buy into it. They must realize that editors will say almost anything to get a book when they have to have a book. The problem is that what you need from editors is to have them be there for the long haul. Not just the long haul of the publication process, but for the next book and the book after that as well. When the first review comes in and it's terrible, you need your editor to say, "That fucker! He didn't understand the book at all. Ignore it and go on." An editor needs to be deeply, lastingly loyal to an author and a book that he decides to buy, because bad things will happen and that loyalty will be tested.

Tell me what you're looking for when you're reading a first novel or memoir.
That's so easy. I'm looking for the first page to be good. Then I'm looking for the second page to also be good. Really! The first page has to be good so that I will go to the second page and the third and the fourth. It's true that sometimes I get all the way to the end knowing that I'm going to turn a book down—I've come under the book's spell but the spell is not holding me—and then I may feel committed to reading it and showing off with a fabulous editorial letter. That does happen. But the main thing I look for is immediate great writing.

I think the world of memoir is divided into two camps. One camp is the memoir of an unbelievably fascinating life. Huge! Can you top this? Death, famine, child abuse, all kinds of terrible and extraordinary events...but the author can't write. In the other camp you get beautiful writing—magnificent writing—with a kind of pointillist attention to every marvelous detail in the course of a life in which nothing interesting has happened. It's usually one or the other. So when you can combine those two things in one book—an interesting life and good writing—then you have pay dirt. But it's hard. It's hard to sell memoir, especially if it's not big in an obvious way.

What about with fiction?
Fiction is being published less and less. The stakes are higher. All editors say the same thing to me. They say, "I've got money to spend. I'd really love to do business with you. I'd love to buy a book from you." That's code. What they mean is they'd love to buy a book, for which they can possibly overpay, that is big in obvious and immediate ways. And most books are not big in obvious and immediate ways. They simply aren't. Something has to change.

I have sold books for many millions of dollars and I have sold books for two thousand dollars and pretty much everything in between. I have experienced the fantastical joys of selling books for a whole lot of money. It is a joyous moment. But it isn't necessarily the best thing in the world. It isn't. Perhaps it's blasphemous for me to say that. But if you sell a first novel for a million dollars, you are putting so much pressure on that book to perform at a certain moment, in a certain season, at a certain level. And most books don't perform immediately. Something, I think, has to give.

If I'm going to say that maybe we shouldn't take a million dollars for a first novel, that we should take less money, then it seems to me that we all have to think more imaginatively—we agents and editors and publishers, all of us collectively. I think the place to do that is in the royalty rate. You're always taught, coming up as an agent, that the royalty is the thing in the boilerplate that essentially doesn't change. You know: 10 percent on the first five thousand copies, 12.5 percent on the next five thousand, 15 percent after that. We are told that these percentages are pretty inviolate, certainly for most fiction. But where is it written that you have to stop at 15 percent? If you don't want the burden to be up front, with the large advance that sunders all plans if it doesn't work out, then change the royalty structure. Give the writer 20 percent. Go on, do it! And if you're a small publisher, definitely do it. Hold on to your writers!