I like to ask editors and agents what they enjoyed reading when they were growing up because my own early reading experiences were so formative. My parents enforced strict time limits on watching television and banned The Simpsons from our den, but I could go to the library and read almost anything. After I exhausted the meager Juvenile Literature section I moved on to the spinning racks of mass-market paperbacks nearby. The summer after the fourth grade, I scored a dog-eared copy of John Grisham’s The Firm before a family vacation to the New Jersey shore. I was hooked on his writing before we even reached the motel. Little did my family know that in the backseat I had been racing through a tale of corporate malfeasance, murder, and money laundering in the Cayman Islands.

I can trace one reason why I am now an editor back to that car ride: Grisham taught me something new about the power of stories. Before The Firm, I knew that a book could make me laugh or cry, but I didn’t know that it could make me itch while I wasn’t reading it, or make my chest feel like it was going to burst if I didn’t get to the next page. I had never read a thriller—and certainly not one that made me feel so potent and alive after finishing it.

When I sought out the literary agent David Gernert for an interview, I admit I had an ulterior motive. In these tumultuous times I can think of no one better to offer an opinion on contemporary publishing than Gernert, a seasoned professional who has a depth of experience both as a high-powered editor and the head of a prestigious agency, but in truth I wanted to hear how he came to edit and publish The Firm twenty-three years ago, and what it has been like to work as Grisham’s agent for the past seventeen years.

Gernert made his start in the book business as an assistant to agent Nat Sobel, and was hired shortly thereafter by Doubleday for its training program. After joining Anchor Books, an imprint of Doubleday, as an editorial assistant, Gernert worked in the rights department and other areas before becoming Doubleday’s editor in chief. After years of successfully publishing Grisham and others, Gernert left Doubleday to start his own agency. Grisham was his first client.

Today the Gernert Company employs thirteen people and represents roughly two hundred and fifty authors. Among Gernert’s clients are Michael Harvey, Robert Kolker, Mike Lawson, Will Leitch, David Levien, David Lindsey, Charlie Lovett, Stewart O’Nan, Chris Pavone, Peter Straub, and Walter Walker.

I’d like to know a little about how you grew up. Were you always a reader?
I grew up in a little town in New Jersey, New Vernon, straight west of New York City as the crow flies. My father worked on Wall Street.

I was always a reader. But one of the things I think about now is that when I was fourteen, the possibilities for me on a Tuesday night were to watch TV, to read a book, or to pursue what might be called a hobby: chess, or playing the drums. That was pretty much it. For a fourteen-year-old today, playing computer games may consume more time than any of those things, or all of them combined. That’s a difference the book industry has not completely grappled with.

People in publishing often ask, “Will someone pay twenty-five bucks for this book?” But I think the question should really be, “Will someone pay ten hours of their time to read this book?”
I agree. I was a big reader—I read more than a book a week, almost exclusively fiction. But I loved television. I wonder if I would have read as much if there had been the kind of television there is today.

Many years ago I was talking to Joe Savago, the executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club when it was a big deal and they had all the great books. He told me that in the mid-1980s there had been a national convention of movie-theater owners, and at this time, VCRs were brand new. The theater owners were scared to death that people could sit at home and watch a movie on TV. The keynote speaker was a top executive in the movie business. He said, “Don’t worry about the VCR. Every piece of exit data we have as an industry says that the first decision people make when they go to a movie is to go out. You’re not in competition with a VCR.” Everyone thought that was wonderful. What they didn’t realize was the VCR was going to compete with reading, not with going to the movies.

If you look at binge watching season three of Breaking Bad, that’s a very similar experience to reading a novel. It’s a lot closer to it than most other ways to pass the time. When House of Cards came out on Netflix, each episode was called a “chapter.” They clearly wanted it to feel like reading a novel. What does this mean for reading? It’s a big issue.

But my point is that when I was younger, there wasn’t that much to do at night. So I read a lot.

Which writers most influenced you?
Probably American masters like Ernest Hemingway. I read all of Hemingway in one long burst, and I also read science fiction and popular fiction. I remember reading John Cheever and thinking he was amazing. I confess that I did not read a lot of classics—I did not read Tolstoy. Later, early in college at Brown, I discovered really contemporary American fiction. And that is what got me really jazzed about writing.

Why Brown?
I went to a private school in New Jersey, one of those schools where everybody goes to college. I was trying to figure out which college to go to, so I went out and got a book called The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges. I read it cover to cover, and every time I found a college that sounded interesting, I folded over the page. I went back and reread all of the folded over pages, and the one I liked the most was Brown.

I told my college counselor that I was only interested in going there. He said, “Well, that’s a lovely idea, but you need a few other schools in the mix.” I said, “No, I’m just going to go to Brown.” He was really saying that I had no chance of getting in. [Laughs.] But I applied early and got in. Never applied anywhere else, never thought of going anywhere else.

Brown was quite progressive for the Ivy League at that point. It is less so now. I had an interview with a woman who had some very strong, fairly radical opinions about education. As luck would have it, I had been intrigued by alternative education and read A. S. Neill’s Summerhill when I was about thirteen years old. We got into a huge argument and were really going at it. When I walked out—the interview lasted an hour and a half—I thought, ‘Either I’m going to get in or not based on that.’ I loved it.

What did you at Brown?
In high school I had edited the yearbook and the literary magazine. When I got to Brown, I did some writing. Providence had a little weekly newspaper that wanted to be the Village Voice when it grew up. It was called Fresh Fruit. I wrote for them a little bit—some film reviews, one big investigative journalism article about dog racing—I was trying to demonstrate that it was fixed. And I did work a little on the literary magazine.

There were a few very good writers at Brown when I was there. I was in the writing program for a while, even though I was majoring in, dare I say it, semiotics. David Shields was writing short fiction that was terrific. Susan Minot was in my class. Nancy Lemann. Really good published writers.

What did you plan to do after you left school?
A friend of mine had started a little music business at Brown and asked if I wanted to go with him and another friend to make it big and successful elsewhere. We promoted bluegrass, blues, and Irish music in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

I did that for a while. And when I got tired of having absolutely no money—I mean, we were really broke—I moved back to my parents’ house in New Vernon, New Jersey, to look for work. I went to an employment agency and they asked what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to work with books, music, or film. Those were the three areas I was really passionate about.

At first the agency tried to get me jobs as a paralegal. If you had gone to an Ivy League school, they figured paralegal was the job for you. But I had no interest in that. Then they got me my first job, which was as an assistant for the literary agent Nat Sobel.

What do you remember from your time with Sobel?
Nat explained to me that a very low percentage of novelists made a living from writing fiction. I hadn’t realized that. And he asked if I had any thoughts about finding emerging writers. I had a real fondness for small literary magazines, so I told Nat that there were some really good short story writers who probably didn’t have agents. So we started writing letters to them, and I’m pretty sure Nat found a few clients that way.

At some point I had lunch with a good friend from college, and I remember him asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be the editor in chief of a major publishing company. So I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to do at that point.

How long did you stay with Sobel?
Not very long, but through no fault of Nat. He was very good to me and I liked him. But when I had been there for only a couple of months, I was offered a position in Doubleday’s summer training program. At the time, if you completed the program, they guaranteed that they would find a job for you. They just didn’t guarantee that it would be in any particular part of the company. All of the trainees wanted to work in editorial, but you could have been offered a job in production, or the business department, or publicity.

One day I was in the cafeteria and an assistant to an editor came over to me and said, “Just between us, I’m leaving, and you should apply for my job.” I did and I got it.

Who did you work for?
Bill Strachan at Anchor Books. Back then Anchor was all smart, primarily narrative nonfiction—a lot of course adoption. They had started as a reprint company, and by the time I was there, they were doing hardcovers. It was a great imprint, and it had a lefty feel, which fit nicely with my Brown education.

I was just saying to one of the young people here at the agency that it’s almost impossible for them to understand how different it was. When I went to college there were no computers. It was a different world. At Anchor, I literally had to wear the headphones and use the foot pedal to play the dictation machine.

You got your foot in the door. Then what?
There was a long period that I don’t remember very clearly because it was a period of great tumult within the company. Doubleday and Anchor went through many changes, and I cruised along under the radar. No one noticed me. Years later, after I became the editor in chief, someone asked how I had done it. I said, “I stayed.” [Laughs.] I hung on while everyone else left.

How long did you have to hang on?
It was quite a long time, because there was an interlude in which I worked in the rights department. I had been an editorial assistant for longer than anyone had—for three and a half years or something, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. So a guy from the rights department came and said, “You should come work with us. It’s a great department, you’re a smart young guy, and you’re not getting anywhere in editorial.” [Laughs.] So I went to work in the rights department, and it was really fun.

In those days, the rights department was making all the money. I sold book club rights to the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild, and it became a tremendous resource for me. It was much the same as a job I had in college, restocking paperbacks in the fiction section of a bookstore. I memorized the fiction section by spine and got a cocktail party knowledge of these different novels without ever reading them.

Such a useful thing!
A very useful thing. People would mention writers later and I’d be like, “Oh yeah, I remember him.” I could tell you the name of the book he wrote—I just never read it. [Laughs.] I had a similar resource—but better—when I sold to the book clubs. I discovered that the people who worked at, say, the Mystery Guild had a voluminous knowledge of mystery writers, and I would ask them, “Who’s the best mystery writer that people have never heard of?” I used that time to get to know more about different kinds of fiction.

How did you wind back up on the editorial side of the house?
Eventually, Doubleday hired a new editor in chief, Herman Gollob, and I screwed up my nerve and went into his office one day and told him, “I want to be an editor, and I think I should be an editor.” He said, “Why?”

I had wanted to do this for so long that I talked for twenty minutes without taking a breath. I literally went into a rant. It included things like “I play basketball in a league with John Sayles” and other crazy stuff about why I would be a good editor. [Laughs.] I went on and on and on. When I finished, Herman looked at me and said, “Shit, kid, I think you should have my job!” We became very good friends, and I remain close with Herman, who I represented when he wrote a book.

So he brings you over as an editor.
I was an associate editor, yes. I went around to the literary agencies and begged for them to send me things. Then there was a funny turn of events. I might not have this completely straight in my memory, but I believe Doubleday hired Nancy Evans, the woman who ran the Book-of-the-Month Club, to be the publisher, and then I was offered the job of running the Book-of-the-Month Club. I was still an associate editor, but they remembered me from when I had been selling rights. When I told Doubleday that I was going to leave to go to the Book-of-the-Month Club, Nancy said she wanted me to stay. So they gave me a big promotion to stay and I leaped up the career ladder. I think she made me the associate publisher. [Laughs.] I had a crazy job title.

How old were you then?
Thirty? In my career, I’ve had the good fortune of people believing in me and giving me opportunities even though I was young. I try to remember that now that I’m an old fart, because you must give people who are young an opportunity. No matter how much talent or skill or ability they might have, without the opportunity it’s not going to do them much good.

Then Steve Rubin became the publisher of Doubleday. He remains one of my closest friends. He asked me what I might want to do. I was now an editor, and the company had been restructured. Susan Moldow was the editor in chief, and I was having a great time. I said I thought I was a good leader, and someday I’d like to have a few people working for me. When Susan left, Rubin offered me the job of editor in chief.

Some people say that the way to move up in publishing is to move around a lot, but you stuck around.
I really, really liked Doubleday. “Liked” is not strong enough a word. I was pretty devoted to the place.

Still, you must have demonstrated some aptitude for the job.
It probably had something to do with the fact that I had brought in John Grisham.

Tell me how that happened.
I got a call from a friend who was a scout for film producers and she told me there was a manuscript being shown to producers that had not been submitted to publishers. The agent thought if he could make a movie deal first, he would have better luck selling the book to publishers. That’s an interesting idea—it’s not done very often, but occasionally.

She said she had just read it and that it was fantastic, that it was going to be a great movie, and that I would love it. She told me the name of the agent, Jay Garon, and I called him up and asked if I could read it. And he said yes, I'm sending it to any editor who calls and asks. I read it and loved it, and I acquired it. That was The Firm, which did of course get made into a movie.

What was publishing The Firm like?
It was great fun. It was not one of those books where the publisher announces a 250,000-copy first printing and a huge marketing budget. The first printing was fairly modest—30,000 copies—but we did really nice advance reading copies, and the reading responses were terrific, particularly from Waldenbooks. They were a huge player at that time, and the buyer for paperbacks loved it, the buyer for hardcover fiction loved it, the merchandise manager loved it. They said, “We think this book could be a best-seller.”

The day it went on sale, there had been no publicity other than a couple of advance reviews and some buzz because people had heard it was bought by the movies. I went out to lunch, and when I came back there was a message from the sales rep for Walden. The book was flying out of their stores.

Then John came to New York and we went out for a walk. Doubleday was at 666 Fifth Avenue then, and there were three major bookstores within a few blocks. In each store, we saw The Firm on the front table, and while we were there, a couple of people picked it up and took it to the cash register. John said to me, “People are buying my book. Is this normal?” And I said, “No! This is freaky!”

The Firm had an interesting sales history. It never was number one on the best-seller list, but it stayed on the list for something like a year.

What did you love about the novel? Simply the fact that it is a page-turner?
That was part of it. But The Firm is a novel that was really of its time. It wasn’t successful just because of the plot or because it was about lawyers. The book captures a feeling of being on the corporate treadmill that really struck a nerve at the time.

I also went out and got a copy of John’s first novel, because The Firm was his second. The first was A Time to Kill, which had been published by Wynwood, a very small press. It was very different from The Firm, and that made me think this guy could write a bunch of novels. And lo and behold, he did.

Did you think The Firm need editorial work when it came in?
A little, yes.

Tell me about that.
It was easy. Luckily, John and I hit it off and I gave him my thoughts. There was only one aspect of it that I thought really needed work. He completely agreed—in fact, he said that what I wanted him to take out was stuff he had put in at other people’s suggestion.

It was simple: I thought that the violence should be offstage. In the book’s original form, you saw each of the lawyers get killed. I said, “Put that offstage, because it’s somehow more chilling if Mitch goes to work in the morning and finds out that this lawyer died over the weekend, instead of showing it all.” And John said, “Great, that’s easy.”

You work on his next book, and the next. And the success grows.
When an author of fiction writes a book a year, as John did, the paperback helps build the new hardcover, but when you get a couple movies thrown into the mix, it snowballs the whole thing. There was a moment when John had a new hardcover at number one, a paperback at number one, and a movie that was out.

All those early novels were made into movies, and they were very good and very successful. In that regard, John was lucky, because Lord knows, someone could have made an awful movie, but they didn’t.

How did John decide to write a book a year?
I believe he was at a lunch or a dinner early in his career with some wholesale sales reps, and one of them said, “All of the really successful bestselling novelists publish a book a year. That’s important.” John thought that was really good advice, and he took it.

At that time, the way many fiction authors were built was that you would publish the hardcover, then you’d publish the paperback, and that paperback would help the next hardcover, and the paperback would grow. Over four novels, the paperback might go from 40,000 to 80,000 to 150,000 to 250,000 copies, and that would grow the audience for the hardcovers, too. This was a long time ago. It’s less true today because the mass-market paperback business is not quite what it used to be.

How does a publisher grow a novelist’s audience today?
That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. How do you grow a novelist? Boy, I wish I knew. [Laughs.] Fiction publishing today is as difficult as it’s ever been. Publishers are working hard to identify new ways to promote and sell fiction. A lot of those new ways are in the realm of what might be called digital marketing. But it’s really hard.

I have a theory that a lot of fiction over the years has been bought by people going to a bookstore because maybe they read a review in the New York Times, and it’s a new thriller by Lee Child, and the Times says it’s great. So you run to the bookstore to buy Lee Child, and while you’re there, you happen to see a book that looks really cool on the front table next to it, and you see another one, and you end up buying several books. A lot of fiction was helped by that kind of buying. All those really good-looking trade paperback novels on the front table—you’d go in, look at them, and pick a few.

People don’t buy books that way online, and it’s hurt fiction. Novelists don’t have the same kind of visibility. And there aren’t nearly as many places to be reviewed, which is crucial to novelists who are not well known. The buzzword for publishers is discoverability—how do people discover new writers?

Are there publishers who are enabling discovery particularly well?
I think there are several. I will tell you, without going into specific titles, that we at the agency watch the books we represent, and we’re involved in their publications pretty closely. If you look back at those publications, a lot of times the performance of a novel is not directly tied to how well it was published. I’m talking only about fiction now. We have had a couple novels in the last year that were published really well and didn’t work terribly well. We’ve also had a couple novels that were published less well, but which sold really well.

There’s a big element of luck involved. In a world where Amazon can anoint a novel “the novel of the month,” that really matters. The publishers influence that stuff, but they don’t control it. I wish there were more review outlets. The number of them online is growing.

Were there risks you took at Doubleday that didn’t work out?
Oh, yeah. [Laughs.] There were. Although I don’t remember them so much as the ones that got away. There were a few books I really, really wish I had published—that I had a chance to publish and didn’t.

Now you have to tell me what those were.
When I had been an associate editor for a little while, an agent called and said that her agency had just read a first novel that they all had all loved. They wanted to send it to five or six young editors because they thought it was a young person’s novel, and they sent it to me. I read it overnight and loved it.

The next day, I said to Herman Gollob, “At the risk of sounding crazy, I think this might be the best first novel we get the chance to publish this year. It’s really, really good.” And he went and closed the door to his office—Herman was like this—and read it on the spot. He came back into my office and dropped the manuscript on my desk and said, “Kid, you might be right.” He always called me kid, and still does.

We participated in the auction, and I ended up being the underbidder. It went for what at the time was the largest amount of money ever paid for a first novel, which wasn’t that much by today’s standards at all. I think that I went to $150,000 and it was sold for a little more than that. It was The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon.

That’s an auspicious near miss.
Those are the ones you never forget. In that case, the good thing was that Doug Stumpf bought it for Morrow, and they published it better than I would have.

Walk me through what a great publication would have been like. Did Morrow do something you never would have thought of?
It wasn’t a specific individual thing. They just did a really good job all the way around. It was a combination of a great jacket, a lot of advance buzz, great reviews, and terrific author promotion. They made that book the talk of the town. It was the novel everybody had to read. That can be done—but it’s very difficult.

What needs to line up for that to happen?
You need to build within the publishing company a little team of your allies, who all believe in the book as much as you do. Ideally, you would have a publicist who loves the book, and a marketing person who loves the book, and maybe you get lucky and the art director loves the book. When you get the collective effort and influence of the company behind the book it has a good chance.

Is that something an editor can cultivate?
An editor can pick and choose who reads it. You can pick the right publicist and urge them to read it. But the book really has to deliver.

It’s certainly true that in some cases, someone in the company just does an amazing job. On the publication of The Firm, the publicist did an unbelievable job. She came up with this idea of doing one campaign for it as a novel in the way you would do all other novels, and a separate campaign to lawyers. Her husband was a lawyer and he loved it.

One of the great books you edited is Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore.
God, I love that book.

You were the editor, and Amy Williams was your assistant at the time. Richard Pine was the agent. Now all three of you are principals of major literary agencies.
Richard Pine called and said, “I have this incredible proposal. I think it’s one of the best proposals I’ve ever read and represented.” And he sent it over. It was the best nonfiction proposal I’ve ever read. It was so good that we distributed it. It wasn’t an outline. It was a narrative that started to tell Mikal’s story and then talked about what the story was going to be. It was fantastic.

Some of the best nonfiction proposals I’ve read don’t have the standard structure—overview, contents, competitive analysis, sample chapter one.
Yes! Let’s be honest: That book was all about the voice. There are certain kinds of nonfiction where you’d rather see the table of contents, if it’s a diet book or something. But if it’s a piece of nonfiction that’s all about the voice, you want to hear it.

What other stuff did you publish?
Primarily novels.

Mostly commercial fiction?
No—which may be a little surprising. When I became an editor, I was leaning more toward literary fiction. My favorite writers were Don DeLillo and Raymond Carver.

At one point, before I worked for Nat Sobel, I interviewed with a different literary agency. They asked me what my favorite novel was, and I said it was Gravity’s Rainbow. I didn’t get the job, and I remember thinking, “Wrong answer!” [Laughs.]

I lean towards the literary, but because I acquired and published The Firm, I started to get a ton of submissions for thrillers. I had always loved them and read broad range of fiction. At Doubleday, I did acquire and publish what remains one of my favorite first novels of modern times, Stewart O’Nan’s Snow Angels.

I think he’s great. I would call him a literary writer.
Absolutely. I published a very commercial novel that was a best-seller by Phillip Margolin, who writes very successful crime fiction and mysteries. I did sports stuff, too. I liked to work on athletes’ memoirs.

I was a young editor when the editor of one of Mickey Mantle’s books left, and it was assigned to me because I was into sports. Mickey Mantle was my number one hero when I was eight years old. I had the great good fortune of meeting a lot of amazing athletes. I met Gretzky—what a great guy. I wish I had published his book. I did publish Bo Knows Bo by Bo Jackson, which was the most successful sports book of its time.

What did you learn at Doubleday?
It goes back to remembering the ones that got away. If you're an editor, and you're crazy about a book, do whatever the fuck it takes to acquire it and publish it. Passion is all that matters.

I remember another one that got away that drives me berserk. If I had bid a couple thousand more dollars I would have published Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Why did I let it go?

I was in London and visiting a publisher, and saw the cover of Nick’s first book, Fever Pitch, on the wall. It intrigued me, and I got a copy and read it on the plane. I wanted to publish it, but to get an American publisher to publish a book about a British guy’s obsession with a football team—there’s no chance. But they sent me High Fidelity, and I was outbid me by a modest amount of money.

You’ve got to have the courage of your convictions. If you love it, buy it. Publish it. Don’t back off. Don’t back down. I’m not saying that because I’m an agent now. The ones you love but don’t buy bother you more than the ones you buy that don’t work.

Last year, I was preparing a P&L for a large offer and was nervous about it. One of my colleagues told me, “Mike, remember, it’s your job to take risks.”
Absolutely right. [Former Random House CEO] Alberto Vitale said once that editors do not participate directly in the financial success of the books that work because no one would ever ask them to pay for the ones that didn't. You have to support editors evenly across the wins and losses. Everyone has the ones that didn’t work.

But you know what, the book that you were doing the P&L for will probably work, at a level. It’s not going to sell no copies.

Editors need to have the courage of their convictions. At some companies, if an editor is passionate about a submission and wants to acquire it, they go into some kind of acquisitions board or committee. A committee’s decision-making is supposed to be rational and pragmatic. Decision by committee is designed in part to remove the passion from the equation. But really good publishing is about passion. It’s the editor’s job, if they love a book, not to back down and to just go for it.

You were in a position at Doubleday to enable that passion. What if I was one of your editors and we had a real difference of opinion on a novel that I thought was amazing, but you thought was dreck?
If you came into my office and said you wanted to buy this book, I would take a look at it first. Then we would have a conversation about your vision of how to publish it: Who’s the audience, how are we going to reach them, how much is it going to cost, what kind of marketing are we going to do, and so on. But that’s a one-on-one conversation. After that, I would factor into the equation how strongly you felt. That’s an important piece of the puzzle.

I read an interview years ago with Barry Diller. When he was running a movie studio, he had an unwritten rule that if one of his executives came in and said, “I just heard this pitch for a great movie. We’ve got to make it,” but Diller was not excited about it, he would say no. If that executive came in the next day and said, “You’re missing the point. This is a great project,” and he still didn’t see it, he would still say no. But if the person came in a third time, he would always say yes. If a person sees it that strongly, you’ve got to let them go with it.

How did you become an agent?
Sadly, Jay Garon, John Grisham’s agent, died—he suffered a pulmonary embolism. I told John that he needed to choose a new agent and that I would walk him through a detailed snapshot of several agents that I thought he’d like. And he said, “That’s a good idea, but I’d like to have that conversation in person.” I went down to visit him, and he picked me up at the airport and then we stopped at a coffee shop. After we sat down, we started talking and I said, “Okay, John, so there are a half-dozen agents who I think would be good for you.” And he said, “Wait a minute. I want to change the conversation. I don’t want to work with anybody new. Would you leave Doubleday and be my agent?” And I said yes.

This was not only a wonderful thing in that I got to start an agency and my first client was the most popular novelist in the world, but it was also a fairly tumultuous time at Doubleday. I wasn’t completely thrilled with the direction the company was going in. It was a good time for me to leave.

I was excited. I had never thought about being an agent. I worked with agents, obviously, but I didn’t want to be one. I was happy being a publisher. So I said something along the lines of, “Do you want me to work only for you?” He said, “No, start an agency. I’ll be your first client.” And I started the company. It was just me and Amy Williams, my assistant at Doubleday—and truthfully, she did all the work starting the company.

Since I had never really thought about being an agent, it took me a little while to become an agent. I think I was smart in one way and stupid in another way. The smart thing was that for the first couple years, I really focused on trying to do a really good job for John.

What did that involve?
John has never wanted a film agent, so the first thing I had to do was sell the film rights to his new book. I knew nothing about selling the film rights. But I figured it out, and we made a great deal. The hardest part is getting to know people—it’s like publishing in that way. And John is published all over the world. He had another agent who was doing his foreign rights at that time, so I was working in collaboration with that other agent.

Do you still edit John Grisham?
Yes.

What is that like?
It’s great, and it’s pretty familiar to both of us. We’ve done it so much that we have it down to a science. He generally talks to me about a book when he’s starting it, and shows me the first rough hundred pages. We discuss it, and he talks about where the book is going. And then I usually read it again when it’s two-thirds done and then when it’s done—usually three times.

It’s important to point out that John has gotten better and better as a novelist. I don’t know if that is evident to people reading the books, but it is to me. A couple of the earlier books, we kind of messed with. But now John writes a pretty solid book with no help from anybody. My job got easier. There’s still some line editing, and the conversation is important—just talking it through.

The smart thing was taking the time to really serve your first client. What was the stupid thing?
Not growing. It stayed just Amy and I for a couple years. I wish I had grown a little sooner. Eventually I began to think that it would be better to have a slightly larger company. Now there are thirteen of us. I love the size we are. There’s a handful of agencies this size, but not many.

What are the benefits of being a midsize agency?
A lot of it is sort of a gut feeling, of what feels right. I don’t have a lot of evidence for this, but I wanted to have an agency that had enough agents to have a book on submission pretty much all the time. I felt that it would be advantageous to be in constant conversation with the editors and publishers you’re submitting to.

The other thing is that the more business you do with a publisher, the better your relationship is with them, in theory. Sometimes you might get a little leverage—not very often, to be honest. You could probably achieve that as a solo practitioner, but I think would be harder.

It’s also true of course that as a midsize agency we have a very strong foreign rights department, and we do, partially because of John, a fair amount of film and television work. It gives us a stronger position in general.

For an author who might be choosing between you and say, William Morris Endeavor, is there an advantage that you have in being smaller? When I talked to Eric Simonoff at WME, he mentioned how important it is to be on a big ship in a stormy sea.
There’s some truth to that. I think our ship is plenty big enough. WME is maybe not the best alternative, because if you’re at WME or ICM, you're choosing to be a part of a very large company that is in fact driven by its work in the entertainment business in Los Angeles. For some people that’s a good thing. Others would rather not have that. If you’re a novelist, and one of those companies sells your book, they’re also going to sell your film rights. Some writers would rather have a different agent on the film side.

What did you look for in the people you hired at the agency?
People that I would be happy to see every morning was priority one. I had the good fortune of being able to hire whoever I wanted, as long as they were interested in working here, and I didn’t really need anyone.

I would meet someone, or someone would contact me and say they wanted to talk, and over time I found people that I thought would be a good fit for the company. We are a pretty tight-knit group, and we oftentimes have an all-hands-on-deck mentality. I might say at a staff meeting, “Who has a really good friend at magazine X? I need to talk to them about an article someone’s writing.”

We share all kinds of information, which is another advantage of being bigger. You cast a wider net in terms of your contacts and the people you know well, and the number of “friends” that you have in the business is bigger. But I always thought priority one was someone who would fit in well with the ambience and character of the company.

If I went out to poach a superstar agent who worked somewhere else, I think they would bring their culture with them, and it might not mesh well with ours.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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