It must be obvious to anyone who has been following this series that I have an unabashed affection for the old guard of book publishing—and an endless appetite for their insights, their war stories, and their wisdom. But after a year in which "change" of one kind or another was never far from anybody's thoughts, it occurred to me that the series could use a shake-up. Why not give the graybeards a breather and talk with some younger agents and editors? And while I was at it, wouldn't it be more valuable to writers if I could get a few drinks in them first?

With that idea in mind, I asked the editors of this magazine to select four up-and-coming literary agents to take part in a roundtable conversation on the fine points of contemporary writing and publishing. One night after work we rode the subway to Brooklyn and congregated in the offices of the literary magazine A Public Space [3]—located in a renovated horse stable with huge wooden doors that swing in from the street, vast ceilings, and an abundance of modern furniture and art—which were loaned to us for the evening by its gracious founder and editor, Brigid Hughes.

Within moments of making the necessary introductions, it became clear that I would need to confiscate everyone's BlackBerry if we were going to get anything done (a problem that had not arisen in my previous interviews). Then the panelists sat down to a spirited conversation that was fueled by Mexican takeout, multiple bottles of wine, and several highly off-the-record digressions—some of which appear as anonymous exchanges at the end—that are probably inevitable at gatherings of this sort. Here are brief biographies of the participants:

JULIE BARER spent six years at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates before starting her own agency, Barer Literary, in 2004. Her clients include Zoë Ferraris, Joshua Ferris, Kathleen Kent, and Gina Ochsner.

JEFF KLEINMAN was an agent at the Graybill & English Literary Agency for seven years before cofounding Folio Literary Management in 2006. His clients include Robert Hicks, Charles J. Shields, Garth Stein, and Neil White.

DANIEL LAZAR is an agent at Writers House, where he has worked for six years. His clients include Tiffany Baker, Ingrid Law, Jennifer McMahon, and Matt Rothschild.

RENEE ZUCKERBROT was an editor at Doubleday before founding her eponymous literary agency in 2002. Her clients include Harley Jane Kozak, Kelly Link, Keith Lee Morris, and Eric Sanderson.

Let's cut right to the chase. What are you people looking for in a piece of fiction?
BARER: I like what Dan has on his Publishers Marketplace profile: the book that makes me miss my subway stop. I think everybody's looking for a book that you can't put down, that you lose yourself in so completely that you forget everything else that's going on in your life and you just want to stay up and you don't care if you're going to be tired in the morning. You just want to keep reading.
ZUCKERBROT: Doesn't that have to do with voice? It's about the way that somebody tells a story. It's about a person's worldview. There are probably very few new stories. We're probably all ripping off the ancient Greeks—tragedy, comedy, yada yada—but it's the way someone sees the world and interprets events. It's their voice. It's how they use words. It's how they can slow things down when they need to. It's how they build up to a scene. It's how they describe ordinary things. Walking down Dean Street, for example. If I described that it would be the most prosaic description on the planet. But a really gifted writer will make me see things I've never seen even though I may have walked down the street a thousand times. At the end of the day, for me at least, it comes back to voice.
LAZAR: On my Publishers Marketplace page I say—because I'm so wise and pithy—that I want writers to show me new worlds or re-create the ones I already know. I generally find myself liking books that are not set in New York. Give me a weird little small town any day of the week.
BARER: That's why I love international fiction. I love reading a book where I don't know anything about the setting. I have this wonderful novel I sold this year that's set in Sri Lanka. I didn't know anything about Sri Lanka when I read it. Anything international, anything historical, anything set somewhere really unexpected. This is going to sound crazy, but I read a novel this summer that blew me away, and it's science fiction. I'm not usually drawn to science fiction, but it was so inventive and original and smart, and it took me somewhere I'd never been. Finishing that book and having it blow my mind was such a reminder of why I love my job: You can read something so unexpected, and fall in love with it, and think, "I never would have thought this would be my kind of thing, but now I can't stop talking about it."
KLEINMAN: That's my second criterion: can't-stop-talking-about-it. I have three criteria. The first is missing your subway stop. The second is gushing about it to any poor slob who will listen. The third is having editors in mind immediately.
BARER: That's so important. If you can't figure out who you're going to sell a book to from the get-go—if you finish it and think, "Who on earth would buy this?" and you can't come up with more than three names—it's a bad sign.
KLEINMAN: Not only that. I want to be thinking, "Oh my God, I've got to send this to so-and-so. So-and-so would love this."
BARER: I have found myself going on and on about books I don't even represent, books where I've lost a beauty contest. I remember one book I was going after. I was so obsessed with it that I couldn't stop talking about it. I'd have lunch with this editor, dinner with that editor, and then I lost the beauty contest and the book went out on submission and five editors e-mailed me and said, "This was the book you were raving about, right? It's awesome."
LAZAR: What was the book?
BARER: It's an incredible debut novel that's coming out with Ann Godoff called The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet. Denise Shannon sold it and she did a fantastic job. It's just one of those incredibly original books and I couldn't stop talking about it. It was the same thing with The Heretic's Daughter. I kept being like, "The Salem witch trials! Oh my God! Did you know that they didn't burn people, they hung people? I didn't know any of this!" You couldn't shut me up. I was probably really annoying.

Aside from referrals, where are you finding writers?
LAZAR: I get most of my fiction through slush.
BARER: I found The Heretic's Daughter in the slush pile. The author had never written a novel before. She had never been in a writing class or an MFA program. She came out of nowhere. She simply had this incredible story, which is that her grandmother, nine generations back, was hanged as a witch in Salem. Just because you have that great story doesn't mean that you can necessarily tell it well, but it was an incredible book.
ZUCKERBROT: I still read literary magazines, and I'll write to people whose work I like to see if they're working on a novel or a short story collection. I found one of my clients—he's a landscape ecologist who has a book coming out with Abrams—when he was profiled in the New York Times.

Where else?
BARER: Bread Loaf. The Squaw Valley writers conference. Grub Street, in Boston. I found the Sri Lankan novel at Bread Loaf last summer. I heard the author read for five minutes and was so blown away that I was basically like, "You. In the corner. Right now. Don't talk to anybody else!"
LAZAR: I got a query through Friendster once. It was a good query, so I asked to read the book, and I went on and sold it. This was two or three years ago, when Friendster was still cool.
BARER: I have a lot of love for certain MFA programs. Columbia. Michigan. I try to go to those schools at least once a year and maintain relationships with the professors so they might point out people to me.
ZUCKERBROT: I actually found a writer who had a short story in A Public Space. I'm going to be going out with her collection soon. She's been published in McSweeney's, Tin House, etcetera. But I also have a lot of clients who send me writers. I hear things from writers I used to work with back when I was an editor. People in my family will tell me about writers. You sort of hear about writers from everywhere.
BARER: That's exactly right. Clients come from everywhere and anywhere. And I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions about agents that some writers have. They think we're off in our ivory towers and our fancy offices in New York City. But the truth is that we're looking for them. We're waiting for them to come knock on our doors. I don't mean our literal doors. Please don't show up at our offices.
LAZAR: I once found a client through a mass e-mail forward. It was one of these funny e-mails. It had pictures of kids sitting on Santa's lap and crying. It took me almost a year to track down where it came from, and it ended up being an annual contest that's sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. So we put together a proposal and had a nice auction and Harper is publishing it this fall. It's all pictures of kids sitting on Santa's lap and crying. If any of my clients ever win a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize, nobody's ever going to know it because I will go down in history as the agent who sold Scared of Santa.
BARER: I think finding an agent is a little like applying to college. If you know anybody who knows anybody who knows somebody who's heard an agent speak somewhere, you want to try to use those connections. And there are so many resources now. There are so many books and Web sites. The more research you can do to target your query to the right agents, the better chance you have. The thing that frustrates me is when I get queries for the kinds of books that I just don't do. Ninety percent of my list is fiction, and my Web site says I don't represent military books or self-help books or prescriptive nonfiction. When I get that stuff I think, "Wow, you just wasted all this time. You should really be focusing on the agents who clearly have done a lot of books like that."

When you're looking at all these query letters, what are some things that make you sit up and pay attention?
LAZAR: When Evan Kuhlman wrote to me about Wolf Boy—this is a novel that Shaye Areheart published—he wrote a description of the book, and you could tell from the letter that he was a lovely writer, but I remember that he wrote about one character and the "museum of fucked-up things." That one line stuck with me. I thought it was very specific and evocative. I think that's what makes the best query letters. It's hard to distill your magnum opus that you've been working on for ten years into one letter, but it's great if you can get some of the specific details in the letter.
BARER: As a writer, you should be able to articulate what your book is about in a few lines. Obviously, great novels are about a lot of things. But if you can't articulate the essence of what the story is, then maybe you haven't figured that out, which signals to me that maybe the book isn't coming together.
ZUCKERBROT: We don't need to hear about all of the characters. You guys probably get the query letters that are like, "Suzy, the housewife..." and it goes on and on and you hear about everybody in the book. I mean, we don't really need that.
BARER: It should be like flap copy. It should give you just enough that you want to read the book, but not so much that you feel like you already know everything about it.
LAZAR: I disagree with that a little bit. I've taken on lots of clients who sometimes have written rambling and kind of disorganized query letters. But there will be lines that jump out at you and you think, "Oh, I need to read this." Even if the manuscript comes in and it's rambling and long, if it has that spark that I saw in the query letter, then I don't care if it's rambling, because I can fix that. But I can't fix a lack of spark.
BARER: The one thing that scares me is query letters that come in with accoutrements. Pictures. Little food samples. And the letter is all design-y.
ZUCKERBROT: Or they come on pink paper. All that stuff is a distraction from what's important. It just tells me that they're not real writers. I mean, could you ever imagine Marilynne Robinson sending out a query on pink paper? It's not about the pink paper, and it's not about the fancy font you choose. It's about what's on the page.
KLEINMAN: I just think that when somebody knows how to write, it's so freaking obvious. It's in the voice, it's in the rhythm, and you know it immediately. It has nothing to do with anything else. It can be a letter that's three pages long or a sentence.
LAZAR: Exactly. I would buy a shopping list if it was written by Stephen King.

Tell me ten things in the query process that can make you want to reject something immediately.
ZUCKERBROT: When I get an e-mail that says, "Dear Agent..." and I can see that I'm one of seventy agents who got it.
KLEINMAN: Bad punctuation, bad spelling, and passive voice.
BARER: Is it wrong of me to say that handwritten letters make me uncomfortable? Does that make me ageist?
LAZAR: Writers who will have a lawyer send you something "on their behalf." It's ridiculous, and you also can't get a sense of the author's voice, which is what the letter's all about.
ZUCKERBROT: When people talk about whom they would cast in the movie version of the book. I received three of those this week!
BARER: Anything that says something like, "This is going to be an enormous best-seller, and Oprah's going to love it, and it will make you millions of dollars."
KLEINMAN: Desperation is always good. "I've been living in a garage for the past sixty years. Nobody will publish my book. You have to help me."
BARER: I love it when they tell me why nobody else has taken it on—when they tell me why it's been so unsuccessful.
ZUCKERBROT: Or they've come close and they will include an explanation of who else has rejected it and why. "Julie Barer and Jeff Kleinman said..."
LAZAR: If they're writing a children's book, they'll often say, "My children love this book."
BARER: Right! I don't care if your children, your mother, or your spouse love it. All of that means nothing to me.
KLEINMAN: When it's totally the wrong genre. When they send me a mystery or a western or poetry or a screenplay.
BARER: Don't lie. Don't say, "I read Kevin Wilson's short story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and I loved it so much that I thought you'd be great for my book." Because guess what? That book isn't coming out until next April. You just read that I sold that book, and you suck. You're a liar! That kind of thing happens because everybody subscribes to Publishers Marketplace, and nothing against Publishers Marketplace—I live for it, it's a very useful tool for me—but I think for writers it perpetuates this hugely obsessive cycle of compare and despair.

How else has technology changed things from your perspective?
BARER: The thing about technology that makes me sad is that we used to have a lot more conversations with people. And there are a lot of ways to misinterpret an e-mail. I sometimes have to stop and remind myself to pick up the phone. "It would be nice to catch up with this person and see what else is going on in their life. And we might get more out of it."
KLEINMAN: I have a question. One of the things that drives me crazy is when editors don't respond to me. What do you guys do?
[Expletives. Laughter.]
LAZAR: I have a trick that works every time. I use it a lot, so I should probably retire it at this point. But I write in the subject line, "People who owe me a phone call." Then they open the e-mail and number one is "The Pope." Number two is "Britney Spears." Number three is "You." Then I'll say, "If you can explain numbers one and two, that would be great, but I'll settle for number three. I'd love to hear from you." They always get back to me. [Laughter. Compliments.] It's good because it's a little passive-aggressive, but it's also polite.
BARER: I know an agent who once sent an editor who wouldn't call the client a fake phone and phone card and a whole little package of messages. Like, "Hello? Pick up the phone!" It's just astonishing and insulting.
LAZAR: I went over somebody's head once. I went to the publisher.
BARER: I hate doing that!
ZUCKERBROT: I think it's okay if you give them warning and say, "If you don't call the client, I have no choice."
BARER: But what about the editors who you leave a message with and say, "I have an offer on the table, are you even interested?" and they don't call you back. Oh my god! It takes five seconds to shoot me an e-mail or have your assistant call me if you're too busy.
LAZAR: I bide my time, and it never fails that a year later they're going to come crawling back when they need a book. "Why didn't you send me that?"

Why is that problem so common in our industry?
LAZAR: I think it's common in every industry.
BARER: There's no such thing as too busy. I have colleagues who are such huge agents, and they all find the time. I think it's an ego thing, to be honest. They feel like "You're not important enough. I don't have to call you back." Or sometimes it's because they don't want to give you bad news. That's the other thing.

I can attest to that.
BARER: The truth is, I would rather have the bad news.

In my head, I know you would.
BARER: But it's hard to give it.
ZUCKERBROT: I think it's just bad business sense. I had the good fortune of working for a publisher once who returned every phone call, no matter who it was from, because it's good business.
BARER: You never know where that submission is coming from. As an editor, obviously you're inundated with material and you have thousands of agents calling you every week trying to sell you stuff. It must be hard to figure out how quickly you need to pay attention to something from some person you've never heard of. But the truth is, great things come out of nowhere. I always say to my authors, "Be really nice to your editor's assistant. Because one day that editorial assistant is going to be an editor, and they might just be yours. This is a team sport, and if you don't play well with others and give everybody respect..."
ZUCKERBROT: I also tell them that it's nice to call your editor sometimes and just say, "Thanks. I'm really happy. I love what you're doing." That's really unusual, and as someone who used to be an editor, that goes a long way. Thank the publicist. Send a letter to the publisher. Tell them how beautiful the book looks.
KLEINMAN: I like that moment, you know, when life is going along and you have this grateful author, and all of the sudden there's like this switch. You can almost hear it—click—and all of a sudden they become entitled. It's so cool to watch that. They become demanding. It's like, "Hold on. You were really grateful last week. When did the switch go off?" I've started having conversations with authors about this.
BARER: I think that's good. There are about five minutes where they're so bowled over that they have a book deal, and then, five minutes later, not so much. What also happens is that they start to compare themselves to everybody else. "How come so-and-so got a Janet Maslin review? How come so-and-so got an ad in the New York Times Book Review? How come this person got that advance?" You know what? Stop looking around. Focus on your own book. Focus on your own career. It's not about what everybody else is getting.

Tell me some common problems that you see in the work of beginning writers.
ZUCKERBROT: In a lot of cases, the story just sort of wanders off. You can say, "Well, there's great dialogue. There's great this or that." But if there's no real story anchoring it, who really cares, at the end of the day? You can have great characters, you can have interesting ideas, but there needs to be some narrative momentum, some narrative thrust.
LAZAR: I would say to start the story where the story starts. So often, the story doesn't actually start until page five. Sometimes it doesn't start until page fifty, but page five can be just as bad. As a reader, you just don't get that far.
KLEINMAN: The big problem I see is that people don't spend enough time with their books before they send them to agents. People are way too focused on getting published and not focused enough on really working on their craft.
BARER: You should revise it, and then you should put it away, and then you should revise it again. If you're going to come back to me in three months and say, "I have a better version that you should look at," then you should not have sent it to me in the first place. It's amazing how many people do that.
KLEINMAN: Or they say, "I knew there was something wrong and I was hoping you wouldn't notice."
ZUCKERBROT: I get those queries that say, "I just finished my novel...." And I think, "Well, now you need to write it three more times."
BARER: Keep working on it for another year. Show it to everybody but me.

Talk to me about your ideal client.
BARER: I think an ideal client is somebody who is obviously an incredibly gifted writer who also understands that, these days, being a writer is more than just writing a book. A writer who is willing to participate in the publication. Brainstorming. Working with their publicist. Working with their marketing department. Getting themselves out there. Using their connections. It's hard because I think a lot of writers happen to be introverts who are shy and kind of just want to be left alone to sit at their desks in solitude. I think it's somewhat unfair that the business has changed so much and that we now rely on them. But we do. And, truthfully, the writers who are the most successful sometimes are the ones who are really willing to be a part of the business aspect of it.
ZUCKERBROT: It's a business.
KLEINMAN: I would go a step further, or several steps further. I think it's not just the author who's really well connected—it's the author who's so well connected that he's sleeping with a producer at ABC News or something.
ZUCKERBROT: You have to get out there. Now is not the time to sit at home and catch up on Sopranos reruns. If you have a high school reunion or anything where you can spread the word about your book, get out there.
BARER: If you've written a book, you should want people to buy it.
ZUCKERBROT: From reading Publishers Weekly and Mediabistro and all the newsletters we get, it seems to me that people are still looking for the magic bullet. It's not Twittering. It's not videos for books. It's not whatever the latest trend is. So a lot of that falls on the shoulders of the author.
KLEINMAN: I want somebody who's well connected and whose subject matter appeals to a specific audience.
BARER: And you have to think about what that audience is and then say to yourself, "Okay, I've written a memoir about my mentally ill son. Now I'm going to write an op-ed piece about what happens when you're poor and a single mother and the state fails you, and then I'm going to write a Modern Love column about how I met my husband and how I should have seen the signs that he was also mentally ill but I missed it and then I realized it when my son became mentally ill...."
LAZAR: This is a real client?
BARER: Yeah!
KLEINMAN: This is her life she's telling you about. Her life.
BARER: My life. But yeah, this is a client, and she's doing all of those things. She's saying, "I want to do outreach to the mental health community."
KLEINMAN: But that's a memoir. The issue is novels.
BARER: But even novels. Look at The Heretic's Daughter. The author was like, "I'm going to reach out to genealogical websites. This is a story about my ancestor and I'm going to reach out to all these places." And her publicist and online people were amazing at helping her.
LAZAR: See, that's the thing about these kinds of books. As much as an author can do, you've also got to have Little, Brown paying a million dollars for the book and having everybody focused on it.
BARER: Yes. That is absolutely true.
LAZAR: An author who really hustles can sell maybe five thousand copies on their own. But you don't have a best-seller that everybody's talking about without having a publisher who's really throwing down. And they start throwing down by paying for it. Look at a lot of the books that work in a really big way.
BARER: You need the in-house support. Whether they paid five thousand dollars or five hundred thousand dollars, you need the whole company behind it.
ZUCKERBROT: It starts with the editor.
BARER: It starts with the editor. You need to have an editor who has passion, you need to have a publisher who's behind the editor, you need to have a sales force that loves the book, and you need a publicist who really decides to put their reputation on the line for the book. Without that entire team support, it's incredibly hard.
LAZAR: Can I clarify something? I'm not saying a book needs a million dollars. When I say a million dollars, I'm pulling a number out of the air, even though it's not so out of the ordinary these days. I've never sold a book for a million dollars. [Author's Note: This conversation took place two weeks before Lazar sold Anne Fortier's novel Juliet to Ballantine for seven figures.] But you hear about these books—Jeff—that sell for a million dollars. [Whooping. Laughter.] And that's how you focus people. Unless you're an Algonquin and you're smaller and more nimble and you can get the independent booksellers behind a book. Did anybody read that long article about what they did for Water for Elephants? They didn't pay a lot of money for that book—actually, for them they paid a lot of money—but they made a concerted effort that a larger house usually wouldn't make unless they paid five hundred or a million.
BARER: It's not so much the money, it's whether or not the house decides, "We are really putting all our energy behind this book. When we go out to lunch with [New York Times book critic] Dwight Garner or People magazine, we are going to talk about this book."

But that usually only happens for a few people a season at a house.
LAZAR: Exactly. It's a lottery.

So what are the other people supposed to do?
LAZAR: They've got to hustle.

Give me specifics. Tell me what they're supposed to do.
BARER: In those situations, I end up on the phone with that author brainstorming our asses off. Using every connection I have. Calling the editor and asking who they know, who their friends are. Calling the publicist and saying, "Please, we've got to come up with something."
ZUCKERBROT: You can do a bigmouth mailing on your own.
BARER: You send an e-mail to every friend and family member in your address book and say, "Help this book out."
KLEINMAN: At Folio we have a marketing director, and this is what she does for a living. But even then, there are certain titles for which there's nothing she can do. There's just nowhere to get a toehold. As opposed to books where you can say, "Okay. We have a clearly designated market for this novel, and we can clearly go after x."
LAZAR: Is there a book that she did that especially well for?
KLEINMAN: Yes. She worked on this Civil War novel I sold, Widow of the South, when it came out in paperback. She went and got a mailing list of five thousand Civil War groups and we sent them postcards and e-mails. Who knew there were five thousand Civil War groups? The point is, if you can figure out who the market is, you can go after them in a systematic way.
ZUCKERBROT: But sometimes publishers do that.
KLEINMAN: Publishers don't do that. Publishers never do that.
ZUCKERBROT: Okay, maybe not five thousand.
KLEINMAN: They're way too busy. They're going to pay for the co-op and everything else, but they're not going to do specific, grassroots marketing. They just can't. But the main point is that you've got to get a grasp on the audience for a book.
BARER: But that can be hard for literary fiction. Sometimes you have a literary novel that doesn't have a specific audience.
ZUCKERBROT: That's where the independent bookstores are still so valuable, even though there aren't as many.
BARER: But here's the thing. I am the biggest lover of independents ever. I worked in an independent bookstore. Toby and the people at my local independent bookstore, Three Lives, hand-sold Joshua Ferris's novel like nobody's business. But at the end of the day, there's a limit to the amount of stock that they are physically able to move. I think the ABA and IndieBound are amazing, and they're looking for ways to build their presence and be a powerful force, but I think it's still in development. They aren't always able to move the same number of copies as a B&N Recommends pick. Unfortunately. I think they should. I think more people should be giving them business. Can I get up on a little bit of a pedestal for a minute? This is something I say at every writers conference I attend. If you're a writer and you want to be published, go out and buy a hardcover debut novel and short-story collection tomorrow. And next month, do it again. Buy one every freaking month. Because if you want to be published and you want people to buy your books, and you are not out there supporting fiction and debut authors, you are the biggest hypocrite in the world and I don't know who you think you are. I mean, come on, people!
ZUCKERBROT: But when you're talking about literary fiction—books that can't be boiled down to a sentence, and where you can't target a specific group—how do books like that find their audience? You're saying it's not independent bookstores anymore. Do you think reviews still play a part?
BARER: I think it's word-of-mouth. I think word-of-mouth does more than anything else.
ZUCKERBROT: But where is that word-of-mouth happening now? The Internet?
BARER: Everywhere. It has to be one of those books where everybody you know is talking about it, you see it everywhere you go, it's being reviewed on every Web site.
ZUCKERBROT: Exactly. And the publishers are asking, "How are we supposed to get that buzz going when there's so much noise and everyone is buzzing?"
KLEINMAN: You know what the answer is? The answer is the editor. I'm convinced that if you have a choice between an editor who is a great editor—who really understands fiction, how it works, how to shape it—versus an editor who is a cheerleader, I will always, from now on and forever afterward, take the cheerleader. For a long time I kept thinking, "It's so important to have an editor who can shape the book." I was such a moron.

But let's talk about what your authors are doing that's working. What are your authors teaching you about selling books today?
ZUCKERBROT: I have a client who everybody really likes. She's smart. She's thoughtful. She's genuinely nice. Across the board, wherever she goes, everyone just wants to support her. That's a huge part of it. You've got to be on your best behavior, even if you're in a crappy mood. Always write thank-you notes. Help other writers. I have another client who's like that too. So aside from being smart and writing something really terrific, I think you have to have people rooting for you.
BARER: I'm going to say something that I think will be really unpopular. It always surprises me when seemingly smart writers—I can't believe I'm saying this, it's probably because I'm drunk—who are obviously really talented choose the worst subject matter to write about. I want to say, "Look around you." I respect and understand that some writers don't like to look at other books while they're working on something. But think about who wants to read about this character. If you have spent four hundred pages writing about a deeply unsympathetic person, or an event that's already been written about ten times, or...I mean, the unlikable character thing is really hard for me to understand. If I don't like a character, why would I want to spend four hundred pages with them? Why would you write a whole book about them? Am I wrong about that?
LAZAR: No, not at all.
ZUCKERBROT: But there are some authors who you tell that to—"This character isn't likable"—and they think the character has redeeming qualities and is likable. I have an officemate who has this wonderful nonfiction writer who was working on his or her next book and picked some subject matter that was so obscure. The agent said, "Who is the audience for this?" The writer explained that he or she was really passionate about it. The agent said, "But who's supposed to read this? You may be passionate about it—"
BARER: But you do want people to buy the book.
ZUCKERBROT: Right. It's not that you have to write for your audience. But you have to keep your audience in mind. That's a distinction you have to make. Every once in a while I'll go to a writers conference and meet someone who says, "I don't read contemporary fiction." I think, "Next." I don't want to hear that you're mired in the classics. The classics are great. They're an amazing foundation to have. But if you are not reading what is being published today, and what is selling, who are you writing for?
KLEINMAN: It just depends on what you want as a writer. If you want to write literary fiction that's beautifully done but will be published by a university press and won't get a big print run, then that's great. But don't come yelling at us because we can't sell something that's not commercial enough. I just think it's a different marketplace and a different kind of attitude.

I hear a lot of writers complain about how hard it is to get an agent. What do you guys think about that?
BARER: Try how hard it is to sell a book!
ZUCKERBROT: When you see a great query letter, or a book that's really great, it stands out from the pack. Everyone's all over it. Part of the problem is that most of the query letters we see are sort of generic sounding. People say, "I've written a book" but don't tell you anything about who they are. They don't list credentials. They don't have to have credentials, but they should just say, "This is my first novel." It's not easy, but just try to write a really smart and thoughtful letter. I always think about the people in all these writing groups who spend years working on something. Share your query letter with the people in your writing group. Does your letter interest them?
BARER: I would also say that the first twenty pages count more than anything. As an agent, you have a limited amount of time, and if those twenty pages don't blow you away...
ZUCKERBROT: And you get these people who say, "I enclose the first twenty pages, but it doesn't get good until page seventy." Wrong answer! I think, "Ditch pages one through sixty-nine." I can't send this to an editor and say, "Here's this really great novel, and it gets good on page seventy."
KLEINMAN: But on the other side of the coin, it feels like what people don't want to hear—readers, editors, agents—is that the premise has been done. Or that it's so bizarre that you can't figure out what to do with it. I'll give you an example. I went to this Web site for writers that I spend a lot of time on, and one writer had written a query letter about his book. The character is this guy who is sitting and trying to do something, and this client of his comes in, sits down, and blows her brains out in front of him. That's how the book starts. It's sort of interesting, but there's also this huge yuck factor. You're reading it and thinking, "Okay, I can't imagine calling up an editor and saying, ‘So, I have this really yucky book....'" This author is having a real problem selling the book. No agent wants to even look at it. So what's he doing wrong? According to everybody else, it's all about writing a great letter. And that's what he keeps doing: He's going back again and again and again to work on the letter and make the letter great. Dude, the problem is—
BARER: You have to think about the story.
KLEINMAN: Exactly.
BARER: Every once in a while I think you can transcend that. You'll have an author like Elizabeth McCracken who writes a memoir that sounds so devastating and yet she's so gifted and it's so well done.
KLEINMAN: But that's not even the same universe as what we're talking about. We're talking about first novelists.
BARER: That's right. You're right.
ZUCKERBROT: The thing is, I don't think there are any hard-and-fast rules. There are guidelines.
KLEINMAN: Do you think The Lovely Bones would have been published if it had been her first book?
ZUCKERBROT: I don't know what it looked like unedited, so it's hard to say. I only read the edited version. But I read it in bound galleys and I was hooked from the first sentence. I couldn't put it down.
KLEINMAN: Well, I so could put it down that I actually threw it out the window. I didn't even want it in the house with me.
BARER: I was a very bad judge of that book. I really liked it, but I thought, "This will be really hard to break out because it's so upsetting."
KLEINMAN: "I've got this great book about a dead nine-year-old girl."
BARER: It's so hard to say that to a woman. And let's just put it on the record right now that women buy fiction and men do not. Step up to the fucking plate, men out there, and start buying some fiction—I mean literary fiction—because otherwise we're all just going to keep that in mind when you're trying to get published. Show yourselves! Apparently, for some reason, they aren't. I don't know why. You have these incredibly talented young male writers like Ben Kunkel and Nat Rich who are publishing books, and where are the young men who should be buying them?
KLEINMAN: Totally playing video games, and I don't blame them.

What do you mean by that?
KLEINMAN: I just find that so much fiction these days doesn't capture me.
ZUCKERBROT: Have you read Knockemstiff? Donald Ray Pollock, debut collection, set in Knockemstiff, Ohio, in the sixties and seventies? I read a lot of things and think, "Eh, I like it but I don't love it." I went gaga for this book. It's one of the best collections I've ever read. I read it and thought, "I'm jealous that I didn't represent this." Now, I don't know who's buying it. It's probably women like me who love Lee K. Abbott, Ray Carver, Richard Ford, those kinds of writers.
KLEINMAN: See, I don't want to read short fiction. I don't want to curl up with a collection of short stories. It's totally boring.
BARER: You're what's wrong with literary fiction today.
ZUCKERBROT: It's not boring at all! How can you say that?
KLEINMAN: I want to get captured by a book and find myself five hundred pages later—
BARER: You can be captured by a short story collection.
ZUCKERBROT: You totally can. Did you read Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler?
KLEINMAN: No, I keep falling asleep before I can get started on those things. I see their covers and I want to fall asleep.
BARER: Lorrie Moore? Alice Munro?
ZUCKERBROT: Did you ever read Eudora Welty?
BARER: This is why story collections are so fucking hard. Ninety percent of the world doesn't want to read them.

Tell us what isn't captivating you.
KLEINMAN: If I want to read a book, and I'm going to spend thirty bucks, I don't want to read about a bunch of characters who are going to come and go. I want to fall in love with these characters. I want to fall in love with these characters and the world they're living in so completely—
BARER: Julie Orringer! Jhumpa Lahiri! Nathan Englander! There are so many great collections out there.
ZUCKERBROT: What about the people who say, "I don't have time to read a novel"? Short story collection! You can start and finish in a short period of time.
KLEINMAN: No, to me the reason they don't have time to read is because the books are not keeping their interest.

What is not keeping their interest?
KLEINMAN: I think there's so much MFA stuff with such a standard voice and such a standard protocol. Everything is—
BARER: Jim Shepard's last short story collection!
KLEINMAN: I'm falling asleep already.
ZUCKERBROT: I think it's so personal. Seriously, that's why I love something and another agent turns it down. It depends on your life experiences that you bring to that book at the moment. Does it speak to you or does it not? It's the same thing with movies. There must be movies you love and I hate. It doesn't mean they're good or bad. I think that's the case with a lot of literary fiction.
BARER: Fiction is subjective, and I really believe that part of what I take on and what I pay attention to depends on the mood I'm in and what's going on in my life. If I have just had a horrible breakup, and a novel comes in that's all about some incredibly intense love affair, I'm probably not the best reader for that book.
KLEINMAN: I think it's much wider than that. I think the problem is that we're all sheep. I think we're all coming from the same complex. We're all either in New York or affiliated with New York and have the same kind of vision because "this is the stuff that sells." I think there's a uniformity.

Now you're talking about a problem with the publishing industry.
KLEINMAN: Let me tell you what I mean. I have a house in Virginia, and I have friends come down and visit. I had this friend of mine who edits diet books come to visit. We went to IHOP for lunch. She ordered an omelet. Have you ever had an IHOP omelet? You get an omelet and pancakes and toast and all this other stuff. When it arrived, she was frantic. She was like, "Oh my God, I can't believe there's all this food. What are we going to do? How can these people do this?" She sells diet books. That is her market. That's what she does for a living. I kept thinking, "You sell diet books and you don't even know that this is how America eats." And I honestly feel that's how it is with fiction, too.
ZUCKERBROT: People in New York are out of touch?
KLEINMAN: New York is a whole different planet. And I don't think writers and publishers are thinking about the market.
BARER: I disagree. I think there are still—and these might not be the seven-figure or even the six-figure deals—but there are still editors out there who fall in love with a story and feel there is at least enough of a hook that they can use as their marketing angle to take a chance that a book might be the next big thing. Or even if it's not the next big thing, it's still a worthy book to pursue. I have sold novels for not a lot of money to editors who feel like, "I just love this story and I can't let it go. I can't give it up." And maybe it'll be huge, because of some fluke, and maybe it won't, but clearly this writer is gifted and this is a wonderful book and hopefully they will go on to do bigger and better things and turn into somebody like...think of all those writers for whom publishers got in on the ground floor.
LAZAR: Stephen King.
BARER: Ann Patchett.
ZUCKERBROT: Lorrie Moore.
BARER: Writers who were published for years and years and somehow their third or fourth book exploded, and it was because somebody stuck with them.

But now there's so much emphasis on the first book because of how bookstores are ordering based on the sales track. If the first book doesn't sell, you can be in trouble.
LAZAR: My first New York Times best-seller was by a woman whose first book sold for not a huge sum of money. But the reason it worked was because her editor, Jeanette Perez at Harper, threw down for that book from beginning to end. She was there from the beginning of the publication to the end of the publication. She bought the author's next book, and she bought the author's third and fourth books. On the first book, they changed the title three times. They changed the cover four times. And because they didn't pay so much money for the book, it could have fallen through every single crack in the publishing floor. But Jeanette just did not let it happen. She's wonderful to work with because she will get behind a book and push and push and push. An author can make a world of difference, but the level of success we're talking about requires a publisher to get behind a book and get a lot of copies out there.
BARER: Put that book into stores. Convince your sales force that they need to convince booksellers to order that book. If the book is in stores, it has 100 percent more chance of selling than if it's not in stores. If you only print ten thousand copies and people walk into Barnes & Noble and look on the tables and it's not there, how are they supposed to know to buy it?
KLEINMAN: The publishers pay for that co-op.
LAZAR: Co-op is the most amazing thing. I have a couple of books that I'm watching, and these are not authors who are huge sellers. But they got three or four weeks of co-op and the books are selling twelve hundred or fifteen hundred copies a week. The week the co-op ends, the sales go down to two hundred. It's like the book just disappears. That's why I think it's fair to let authors know that distribution and placement are so important. If you put something in front of people's faces, they'll buy it.
BARER: Having worked at an independent bookstore, I think it's true that a lot of people don't know what to read. They want to buy a book but they don't know how to pick a book. And the easiest way to pick a book is if it's on a table. I think a lot of book buyers don't know that the reason a book is on a table is because it was paid to be put there. And I think publishers even choose which books are eligible to be paid for.
LAZAR: This is a really interesting subject because it's something we all know about and talk about all the time, but as agents, we have very little control over. As an agent, one thing that I like is having control over things. Sometimes, watching a publisher publish a book, and knowing everything that we know and all the tools you need and all the things that should fall into place, and just watching a book...it's so amazing when it happens and it's so painful when you can just feel in your heart that it's not happening.
KLEINMAN: That's the reason we started Folio. I was going so insane thinking about all these things that weren't happening. I kept thinking, "Why aren't people doing something?" So we have a marketing person, a lecture agent, a bunch of things like that.
BARER: You took it out of their hands and put it in your hands.
KLEINMAN: When Harper was publishing The Art of Racing in the Rain, they published the James Frey novel on the same day. I was just ballistic. But I could call up the publisher and say, "Okay, I know you have a book that is going to be much more media important for you," and I could at least say to them, "Let's use my person." It was this amazing power thing. All of a sudden I could feel the balance of power changing. "Oh, it's not always begging the publisher to do something." That was cool.

Do you guys think editors still edit as much as they used to?
ALL: Yes.
BARER: I think it's a myth.
ZUCKERBROT: I think it's a myth that might have been started by dissatisfied and unhappy authors.
KLEINMAN: Who says that stuff?
LAZAR: Just from having read [Michael Korda's] Another Life, it sounds like in those days, on a scale of one to ten, if a book was at three, an editor could buy it. Today a book has to be at six or seven and then the editor can take it to ten.
BARER: The difference is not that they don't edit. The difference is that they can't buy it if it's not at a certain level.
LAZAR: Yeah. They aren't any more or less talented than editors fifty years ago, but their hands are tied when a book is not at a certain level. That's why we have to spend so much time on the editing.
ZUCKERBROT: Also, editors today, as opposed to editors fifty years ago, spend most of their days in meetings. Editing is done at night and on the weekends. It's a very different thing.
BARER: I think Dan's point is really true. I will not send out a book until I've done three line edits and I cannot think of a single other thing that I can do to help it.
LAZAR: And the writers sometimes get—
BARER: They're ready to kill me! They're like, "Please, please let it go. Please, can't we just try it?" No! I will not send it out until it is perfect to me, and then it will be edited again by your editor. But it will have a chance at actually selling.
LAZAR: What Renee said about meetings is so true. This week, for some reason all of these foreign publishers are coming to meet with us. Yesterday, I had five meetings not including my lunch date. My e-mail piled up, my desk piled up, and I remember getting back to my desk and calling someone back after the whole day had passed and thinking, "I will never again get mad at an editor I like who takes a day to call me back." Now I understand that I may have caught them on the day when they had their editorial meeting, their jacket meeting, and their positioning meeting, and they just physically were not able to call me back. I remember getting back to my desk and going, "Where the hell did my day go?"

How else have things changed? Did everybody read that end-of-publishing article in New York magazine?
LAZAR: I read it and couldn't decide if I should buy up every issue I could get my hands on and throw them off the top of the HarperCollins building, or if I should throw myself off and make it faster. But I talked to Amy Berkower and Al Zuckerman and Robin Rue, who have been in this business for a lot longer than I have, and they all said, "We read that same article every single year."
BARER: People who are not in the business say that to me all the time. "Oh, isn't publishing dying?"
ZUCKERBROT: But the music industry is dead. Of all the media that's really dying or dead, it's music. Books are healthy compared to music. But when people talk about the Kindle and the Sony Reader? Books are pretty much a perfect technology. So all this stuff about how e-books are going to—
KLEINMAN: You freak! What are you talking about? These things [grabs a book] are Paleolithic!
ZUCKERBROT: It's portable. It lasts. If you want to read something, what's broken about it?
KLEINMAN: I don't want to read it there. I can't search that. It's heavy.
ZUCKERBROT: Are you serious?
KLEINMAN: I'm totally serious.
LAZAR: I agree with you, but I don't think the Kindle is the answer. It's going to be something that's not here yet.
ZUCKERBROT: Maybe in fifteen or twenty years.
LAZAR: But whatever the iPod of books is going to be, it's going to come sooner than we think. It's going to change things.
ZUCKERBROT: But does that change the fact that people don't read the way they go to the movies or the way they buy music? That's the question.
KLEINMAN: No, the point is that you simply have to make the device and the medium more interesting to people who do listen to music and go to the movies.
ZUCKERBROT: Don't you have to make the words on the page more interesting? Or is it a combination of the two?
LAZAR: Yeah, I think it's both.

I just don't see how the iPod-for-books analogy works. Books and music are different. The problem with music was that you had to carry around all these CDs or tapes. But you're only reading one book at a time. Most people, anyway. And you want people in the café to be able to see what you're reading so you can look cool and pick up girls.
BARER: It's always all about picking up girls.
KLEINMAN: My wife and daughter do books on tape, and they love them. They take them to the car, then they carry them in to the CD player in the house, then they carry them upstairs and listen to them in the bedroom. The idea that an audio book is different from a printed book strikes me as just ludicrous. They're the same thing.
LAZAR: I listened to audio books all through high school, and I loved them. But it's different.
KLEINMAN: It's a different experience, but it's the same stuff, whether it's on the page or you're listening to it. It's the same book. I'm saying that we should be thinking about something totally different. There should be a device that deals with the text in whatever medium it's in, and obviously that's why Amazon bought Audible.
ZUCKERBROT: Reading the words on a page and listening to them are not the same experience. I wish I was a neuroscientist so I could really explain it.
KLEINMAN: You're doing the head of the pin thing. It's not important. The point is that you have content that you're downloading into your brain, and it doesn't matter if you're reading it or listening to it or touching the page with Braille. Words are traveling into your head, and however they're getting there, they're getting there. We need a single device that will do that and make it somehow interesting and exciting and fun and interactive. There's all this stuff that books can do, and they're not doing it. The answer is always, "This [holds up a book] is the perfect device. It's perfect. It's been perfect for five hundred years...."
ZUCKERBROT: What I meant is that when we talk about how to create more readers, people aren't not reading books because carrying them in your bag is so difficult, or opening it to the page is so difficult.
KLEINMAN: I think it is.
ZUCKERBROT: It's not. This is a technology that's been around for a long, long time, and it works, unless you happen to leave it out in the rain.
LAZAR: I bet the Kindle would break if you left it out in the rain, too.
ZUCKERBROT: The point is, how do we create a new generation of readers? That's one of the many reasons why Harry Potter has been so fabulous. We have to grow new generations of readers. And technology can help. I'm a dinosaur. I grew up with books and typewriters. But this new generation wants all the gadgets. They want to be able to play with it and they want to be nimble.
BARER: I have to say, I really hate this debate of either/or. That we're either going to become this electronic world or we're going to be dinosaurs. Hopefully we will continue to grow readers, and people will read in several mediums, whether it's on their computers or on their e-book-version whatevers or on the printed page. The goal of agents and publishers is to keep finding ways in which we can reach as many of those readers as possible and provide as many opportunities for them to read our books as we can. Not just one way, but many ways.
KLEINMAN: That's the problem. I don't think that's what publishers are doing now. They are going by the same old Paleolithic ways of doing things. They are translating this ancient technique of reading into the Kindle. But it's the same thing. And I think it needs to be something different.

How do you feel that the consolidation of publishers has affected being a writer today?
KLEINMAN: It's totally a drag.
ZUCKERBROT: As an agent, you have fewer places to submit. It's supposed to be about competition. But if you go to Penguin, only one imprint can bid. At Simon & Schuster there's a house bid.
BARER: At Random House they can bid but they can't be bidding against just each other.
KLEINMAN: It's not just that, it's the loss of personalities.
BARER: They all used to have such distinctive personalities.
ZUCKERBROT: And now every house has like twenty-five imprints. The editors have their own personalities and their own styles, but sometimes I can't differentiate which houses want what because there's so much crossover. After a while, they lose their identities. What's the difference between Imprint A and Imprint B?
KLEINMAN: It's so insane when you go to these various imprints that sound so similar—they're doing the same kinds of books—and they say, "This isn't the kind of book we publish. This isn't right for our list." You're like, "Dudes, your lists are all generic now. What are you talking about?" You don't always get that, but sometimes you do.
BARER: Look at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I love HMH. But I loved being able to go to both of them because I felt like they had distinct flavors.
ZUCKERBROT: It goes back to what an agent can do with your book, and how to place it. That's where it hurts writers.
BARER: Here is what kills me: Everybody is looking for a big book. Nobody wants to take the chance on a kind of unknown, odd debut novel that maybe you don't pay a lot for. Even the houses that you used to think of, now they read the book and say, "We're not sure we could get out fifteen thousand copies, and if we can't do that, we don't really want to do it." It's like, how do you know you can't get out fifteen thousand unless you buy the book and convince yourself to try? They want a sure thing.
KLEINMAN: But you don't know who the market is, you don't know how to position this thing, you don't know how to sell it to somebody. It's a commodity.
BARER: But I also think it's about the fact that every publisher wants a book that everybody reads. And when we're talking about fiction, it's impossible to know.
KLEINMAN: No. They just want books for which you can clearly delineate the market. It has nothing to do with everybody.
BARER: But I'm talking about literary fiction where maybe...I'll give you an example. Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is one of my favorite books of the last decade. I must have recommended that book to at least fifty people, half of whom were like, "You're right, this is one of the best books I've ever read," and half of whom were like, "You're fucking crazy. I don't get it. It's weird. What is this book supposed to be? Is it science fiction?" If that was a debut novel, if it wasn't Ishiguro, and I had said to a publisher, "Here's a book that some people are going to love and some people are going to think is fucking weird," it's possible that a publisher would have said, "We're looking for something that everybody's going to love. We want a book that has mass commercial appeal." That is not that book, and the times when publishers are willing to take chances on those books are fewer and farther between.
LAZAR: It's true. But I think one of the reasons why agents exist is that after a while, fingers crossed, you get to a point where something like that can be a big book because you say so. "Because I say this is a big book, this is a big book." Even if it's weird. Look what Eric Simonoff did for The Gargoyle. Whether or not it sold well, he said, "This is a big book," and it was.
ZUCKERBROT: If Nicole Aragi says, "This is a big book," you don't think editors sit up and listen?
BARER: Now we've just convinced all these writers to send their books to Nicole and Eric instead of us!
ZUCKERBROT: Everyone already knows who they are.

That's an interesting point. How do you guys compete with people who have been around longer?
LAZAR: I compete. I either lose the author or I win them over with my enthusiasm, my speed, my ideas for their book, and the books I've done that I can point to.
BARER: I am so picky about what I take on. I really don't take on a lot of stuff. So if I am so crazy about a book that I want to take it on, somewhere deep inside of me I believe that it's not possible for somebody else to be as crazy about it as I am. So you will never have as passionate an agent as you will have in me.
ZUCKERBROT: But you also talk to them about your vision for the book.
BARER: You do a lot of editorial work with them.
LAZAR: You give free notes.
ZUCKERBROT: And sometimes you lose.
BARER: Sometimes it works against you. Some writers don't want those notes. I have lost books where I have said, "Here's what this book needs. I know exactly how to take it to the next level."
LAZAR: Then you know what? You would not have been the right agent. For example, when I read The Art of Racing in the Rain, I admired it very much but I thought it needed a little more x, y, z, let's say. I remember writing a very nice note to Garth and saying, "This is very impressive, but blah blah blah." Well, the next thing you know, some other motherfucker sells it for $1.25 million the way it was. [Laughter.]
KLEINMAN: Call me a mofo.
LAZAR: Okay, a mofo. If I had taken that book on the way it was, I either would have put him through editorial hell or I would have sent it out the way it was and maybe—not intentionally—underpitched it and if someone tried to preempt it for, you know, a hundred thousand dollars, I would have been grateful.
KLEINMAN: You want to know how I handled that, just because I think it's kind of interesting? I read the first fifty pages and knew exactly what was wrong with the book. I called him and said, "Here's what you need to do to fix it." He said, "Do you want to see the rest?" I was like, "No. There's no point. I know you have to fix this first." He was like, "Yeah, you're right. I see exactly what you mean." All I can say is, I don't feel like I'm competing against other agents.
BARER: You never feel like you're competing against them?
KLEINMAN: I don't want to think about it like that. I feel like I've got to have a relationship with the author, and it's me and the author.
BARER: Do you ever lose things?
KLEINMAN: Constantly.

Do the rest of you feel competitive?
LAZAR: I feel competitive with a certain pool of agents.
BARER: I feel competitive all the time. But some of the people I compete with the most are the people I admire the most. So when they get a book that I really wanted, I feel validated and really happy for them. But it's impossible to not feel competitive in this industry.
KLEINMAN: What I hate is when you don't know if something is out with other people. I had this woman, and I should have known that she had her book out with other agents. I wrote her this nice rejection letter, gave her my comments, and thought I was sort of done. Then she calls me up and we have a conversation about the freaking book. Then we meet at some conference and I talk to her about the book. She implements everything and sends me the book, and a week later I get, "I have an offer of representation."
ZUCKERBROT: But maybe she was taking comments from a whole bunch of agents.
KLEINMAN: Probably.
ZUCKERBROT: And you could have asked her.
KLEINMAN: Oh, yeah, I totally should have. But I don't think about it.
BARER: You don't have to give exclusives to agents, but you have to be up-front and say, "Other people have this."
ZUCKERBROT: I hate it when I'm in the middle of reading something and somebody e-mails me and says, "I just want to let you know that I've received an offer of representation and I'm taking it."
BARER: Yeah, kiss my ass! Thanks so much for giving me an opportunity! But I think it's okay to say, "I've gotten an offer, I'm considering it, and I'd love for you to read it as soon as possible and let me know."
ZUCKERBROT: That's the way to do it.
BARER: There's no clock on this. If one agent offers you representation, and you have the book out with other people, that offer, if it's genuine, will not evaporate. Take your time. Ask questions. Give other agents a chance. Don't jump at the first guy who offers you a ring.
ZUCKERBROT: But they get scared. The other thing to remember is that you're hiring an agent to work for you. It's been flipped in such an odd way. You have all these writers who are so desperate. But the truth of the matter is, they're hiring us to work for them.
KLEINMAN: So much of it's about responsiveness. My favorite story is about this book I got from a doctor in San Francisco. He'd written this novel. He sent it to me on a Wednesday, and I was doing the whole "I'm going to be an important literary person" thing and I thought, "I'll read it on my at-home reading day on Friday." So I took it home on Friday and read the book and totally loved it. I called the author and said, "I would love to represent you." He said, "Well, Elaine Koster just offered representation, and I'm going to go with her."
LAZAR: Oh, man.
BARER: Not even a conversation.
KLEINMAN: The book was called The Kite Runner. [Extended whooping and laughter.] And I think he did absolutely the right thing. She was totally on the ball.
LAZAR: You lost The Kite Runner? I lost The Art of Racing in the Rain, but you lost The Kite Runner? That trumps everything.
KLEINMAN: The point is, I think so much of this business is egotistical agents who make writers wait.
BARER: But you weren't making him wait.
KLEINMAN: I totally did. I was like, "I'll read it on Friday."
ZUCKERBROT: But that's only forty-eight hours!
LAZAR: You know what? Thank God for those agents who make people wait. Because then we have an advantage. We're faster.

What should writers know about agents that they don't know?
ZUCKERBROT: We're human.
KLEINMAN: Nooooo.
LAZAR: Don't tell them that.
ZUCKERBROT: We're overworked like everyone else?
BARER: We're subjective readers.
ZUCKERBROT: We're basically decent people who are just overwhelmed with submissions. What I always hear is, "Agents never get back to me. They don't do this, they don't do that."
BARER: I had 175 e-mails today. I just can't humanly get back to everybody in one day!
ZUCKERBROT: We're always looking for new writers, but our priority is our existing clients. It's a balance between taking care of our existing clients and finding new writers.
KLEINMAN: I have two things to say. First of all, I think all agents are sheep. I think they all follow the herd. They're subjective, but they're subjective within a limited vocabulary. They want to do certain kinds of things. So if they do commercial fiction, they like the same kind of commercial fiction. Because they know it sells. So that's the first thing—agents are sheep. And the second thing...crap, I had this really good second thing and now I can't remember what it is. Forget it, there's only one thing.

What about you, Dan?
LAZAR: I'm so irritated by what he just said that I can't think of anything.
BARER: I have to agree. I think that's so wrong. I'm not a sheep.
ZUCKERBROT: Maybe a lemming.
BARER: I'm not a sheep or a lemming!
KLEINMAN: I just remembered the other thing. I think agents are absolutely no busier than any other human being in modern times. So Julie got 175 e-mails today. I'll bet you most first-year lawyers get 175 e-mails a day. I honestly think it's a job like everybody else's—it just may take a little longer than others.
BARER: I'm not complaining about the fact that I get 175 e-mails a day. But I do want to speak to the busyness. Just because it may take me two or three days longer than another agent to read your material doesn't necessarily mean that I won't be the best agent once I read it and fall in love with it.
KLEINMAN: I actually agree. Because you could have a bad agent read it fast.
BARER: Absolutely.
KLEINMAN: However, I think responsiveness is important. I think there's a huge problem in this business because the balance is so shifted. I have gone out to lunch with big agents and felt like we had to order for three—me, the agent, and the agent's ego.
BARER: But to me it's not about ego. To me it's that I want to give all my clients everything I have. I spend my day giving my clients as much attention as they need. Which means that it's harder to find the time for new writers.
LAZAR: It's also supply and demand. There are just a lot more writers out there who need agents than there are agents.
BARER: But the thing is, I'm always looking for new writers, and I want to represent new clients, but I really want to take care of the clients I've already made a commitment to. So if I have a client who calls me and is having a meltdown because they're stuck in Arizona or something or they can't finish a chapter....
LAZAR: What are you, a travel agent?
BARER: Yes! I am shrink and mom and lawyer and editor and marriage counselor. There are days when I spend five hours handling problems for somebody.
KLEINMAN: I think that's a woman thing. I don't feel like I do that at all.
BARER: That is 50 percent of my job.
LAZAR: That's a dangerous thing to say: "I think that's a woman thing."
ZUCKERBROT: You don't get calls from clients who say, "My husband's left me," or "Oh my God, my house burned down"?
BARER: "I'm stuck on this chapter and my kid's in school now and I think that's part of what's making it so hard"? My job is to help them get through that.
LAZAR: You do become sort of an amateur therapist and an amateur financial advisor.

What is getting harder about your job?
BARER: Selling books. Selling good literary fiction is getting harder.
ZUCKERBROT: BookScan. If you have a literary writer with great reviews, but the sales aren't going in the right direction, it's really tough. The editor punches in the ISBN and there's the sales history. It's really tough if the writer's third book hasn't taken off.

So what are you guys doing, or trying to do, for writers who find themselves in that situation?
KLEINMAN: This is why we have people on staff. We have a marketing person and a lecture person. I think it's really important for people in this business to be thinking outside the box. I really feel like so many of these agents are dinosaurs. They have a model that works for them because they have a huge backlist. Those backlist books keep selling, and that's the way they work. But I don't think that's going to work in ten years. I think you have to be thinking of other ways of doing it. One of them, for instance, is speaking. People are speaking in different kinds of venues and selling books. The question is, How can you get those books tracked through BookScan? But there are answers to that kind of thing.
BARER: I think it's important to think carefully about what the next book is. I often say to my writers, "What are you thinking about writing next, and why?"
KLEINMAN: But that's still passive.
BARER: I disagree. I've had writers who had first books that didn't perform extraordinarily well hand me fifty or one hundred pages of their second novel and I've said to them, "This will not break you out. I can sell this book. It will keep you in the midlist, but it will not help your career. Put this book aside and start something else." And they have.
KLEINMAN: Can I ask a question here? I want to figure out how to change the dynamics of the power. Because no matter how you're doing it, it's, "Okay, write another book." It's always us saying to the publisher, "Please get that co-op." It's all about distribution. And we are powerless.
LAZAR: We aren't powerless. But we can't do everybody's job. If that were the case, then I should just quit being an agent and become a publisher and do it myself. Which I'm not going to do, because I don't know how to do it.
KLEINMAN: If you do, can I come work for you?
LAZAR: No.
KLEINMAN: He means that in a nice way. But to me a lot of it has to be a question of shifting the power and figuring out what the publisher can do really well and how we can get them to focus on the stuff they do really well. And the stuff that they can do really well and we can't is distribution and co-op and getting those books into stores.
LAZAR: And they can do it aggressively and excitedly when they have a book that's exciting. I think Julie's point is a good one. I had an author whose first book, without going into too many details, just tanked. It probably sold less than a thousand copies. We had a long, long talk, and she's really smart, and she changed her new book around. She got a new idea. She looked at books that were working and changed the way she constructed her second novel. And if that first book sold under a thousand copies, the new one isn't going to sell a million copies, but it's probably selling between five and ten thousand copies. Which is a step in the right direction.
BARER: It can sound really crass to talk in those kinds of terms. Sometimes I'll meet writers and they'll say, "Well, you're not talking about the craft, you're talking about the commercial aspect." No, I'm talking about both. If you're a really strong writer, then you should be able to really think about story. What story is going to appeal to a large number of people and what story is going to appeal to five people? The books that don't work these days are those wonderful little books that I loved in the eighties—those very quiet, introspective, interior, family coming-of-age books. I loved those books. But they just don't work anymore.

What is the worst part of your job?
LAZAR: Rejection on a book you love. When no one can see how brilliant you are. You think, "This book is brilliant and I'm brilliant for loving it," but nobody agrees.
KLEINMAN: For me it's getting fired. I've been fired by two authors so far, and I will never, ever forget it.
BARER: I would say that not being able to sell a book and having a book that you've spent two years editing, selling, and publishing die upon publication are equally horrible experiences. The other thing that writers may not realize about agents is that I lie awake in bed at night and I think about the books I couldn't sell or the books I sold that didn't work and it's all I can do not to cry myself to sleep. It hurts us as much as it hurts them.
ZUCKERBROT: And you do postmortems. I sometimes think, "Why doesn't everybody see this book's brilliance? Did I somehow not do my job selling it?"
BARER: "Did I let the author down? Was there another editor I could have tried?"
ZUCKERBROT: "Did I go to the wrong editor at this house?"

What's the best part about your job?
ZUCKERBROT: Discovering a great new voice and having lots of editors want to buy the book and then making a great deal. That's really what it's all about.
BARER: I have to agree. I think the first part is the greatest part of the job. When you finish a book and think, "Oh. My. God. This book is so amazing, and right now I am one of the few people in the world who knows how incredible it is, and pretty soon everybody will know. And I will help make that happen." But nothing comes close to calling a writer and saying, "Your book is going to be published."
LAZAR: Selling the book that you've had a hard time selling, and then having it work. Calling the author is really cool too. Their reactions are so funny because they range from dumbfounded silence to screaming in your ear. I'm like, "I'm not fucking kidding you, I'm not fucking kidding you." One of the absolute coolest things is being on the subway and seeing someone reading one of your books.
KLEINMAN: I like plotting. I love the whole process that you're all talking about, but I also love when you're sitting down with this team of people and coming up with these plans, and you're thinking it through, and you feel like you're all working together. That's really cool.
BARER: Acknowledgments! I love the acknowledgments! I love going to a bookstore and being like, "Look, there's my name!"
LAZAR: Authors should always do that. When I get a finished copy of a book and it doesn't have acknowledgments, I don't feel bad, but it feels much better when you get acknowledged.