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Book Riot - The Podcast
Why Literary Agents Matter with Laura McGrath
00:47:58
Prof. Laura McGrath joins Jeff to talk about her new book, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction.
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- [00:00]
Podcast Host (likely a female host from Book Riot or similar)
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Dr. Laura McGrath
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Dr. Laura McGrath
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Jeff O'Neill
This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff o'. Neill. Rebecca is out today, so with me wonderfully in her place is Dr. Laura McGrath, friend of the show. You've heard her on the show before. If you've been listening to Zero to well Read, you'll see her in the feed with us talking about Interpretive Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, which makes an appearance in the book we're about to Talk about out today or out yesterday I should say, Laura. It's been out for a day in the future as we record this. Middlemen, Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction. For those of you listen to Laura. She is interested in the nuts and bolts of how publishing works from an academic, from a scholarly point of view, whereas Rebecca and I are just peanut like the Waldorf and what's his name in the Muppet show throwing stuff from the rafter down on the stage. I feel like we're doing the publishing. Laura, thanks for joining us and talking about the publisher.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
Thanks for having me, Jeff. I'm trying to imagine what Muppet I am. If you guys are Statler and Waldron,
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Jeff O'Neill
I think that's a long dark of the soul. You don't want to go down that road, Laura. No one gets a good answer when you play that game.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
I think I'm like panic Kermit, mostly.
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Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. I think most of us hope for Kermit, and many of us end up at best Scooter, which is, I think, the most most of us can hope for. So we're writing about. You're writing about agents. You're researching agents. And I'm going to ask you some specific things. At what point did the agent become for you a locus of interest? Something you said I'm going to do something with here? Laura.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
I was working on a dissertation on literary celebrities in the 21st century. I was really interested in how authors became brands and when this happened historically and what was going on. And so I did this thing that all doctoral students probably do where I just thought I had come across something brilliant that no one else had ever discovered before, which just meant that it was new to me. But actually, the way things work, that
- [03:26]
Jeff O'Neill
literature review can be a real look in the mirror about.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
It really is. It really is. So I remember, like, walking into my advisor's office and I was working on this one author who I thought was really fascinating. And I had made this timeline where I looked at the OP eds and the essays that he was publishing around a new book release that were published in, like, the New York Review and the London Review of Books and the Guardian. And just like, piecing together this intricate timeline, like, I had cracked the case that authors publish OP EDS when their books are coming out. And I was convinced I was, like, revolutionizing the field. And my advisor, bless him, wonderful man, just kind of said, oh, okay, well, why don't you get in contact with his agent and just ask? I think intuiting on his part that this is not that much of a find, this is just kind of how things work, and someone else could set me on that path. But it was this sort of light bulb moment where I thought, oh, wait, hold on. I have spent all of this time trying to figure out how authors are making these moves and how they're presenting themselves in their books to the world as though they were somehow responsible for doing this by themselves.
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Jeff O'Neill
Independent agents, right? Just sitting down and writing letters to the New Yorker saying, I've got this story.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
Yes, yes. In the same way that, like, you know, my relatives, who are very kind, will say, well, I'm sure Harvard could hire you. Right. And so, you know, I. I thought, wait, hold on. So there's this whole world of people that are responsible for making this happen. And so I dug into the existing literature, and I found really quickly in publishing history, there was a whole lot of ink spilled on editors. A whole lot of time talking about people like Max Perkins and Bob Gottlieb and Gordon Lish. And there was really no time spent talking about agents, which was strange because I also found in this whole process that the world of aspiring writers is obsessed with talking about literary agents.
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Jeff O'Neill
That's your golden ticket, your Willy Wonka. You get an agent, like, that's your first real. Like, I'm a thing, right?
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Dr. Laura McGrath
It is all, like, the gossip and all of the sour grapes and all of the anxiety and all of the pain is around finding an agent and finding your way to break into publishing. So it seemed so odd to me that writers could think this person's so important and that scholars would have never bothered to even figure out what it is that agents actually do. Right. Like that, you know, agents aren't even the ones that are placing your piece in the New York Review or the New York Times, probably. That's probably a publicist or an author themselves. Right. And so it just seemed like this historical mystery that I wanted to dive into a little bit more to find out when agents became a big deal, why they mattered. And to do that, I realized I didn't have much of an evidentiary record that I could rely on. I had to start talking to some agents just to figure out, like, what do you do all day? Tell me what an agent does. And that. That snowballed. So that was. That was 2016. And here the book is about to come out in 2026, 10 years after I started my first interview.
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Podcast Host (likely a female host from Book Riot or similar)
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Jeff O'Neill
sounds about right for how these projects can go and the literary agent is something I think I knew in my gut. But as became clear in reading your book is this particularly difficult research subject. There's not longitudinal data, there's not huge data sets. What I'm going to play my old 10 note cards game here in A minute with Laura where I'm just throwing her sentences back at you. But before we do that, why is the Literary Agent such a difficult study for a work like this?
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Dr. Laura McGrath
Well, I think there's a few reasons. One is really practical, which is that the work that an agent does is very, very relational, which means it's not really happening on paper. And archives preserve paper. An archive cannot preserve someone's lunch. It can't preserve someone's phone call. It instead is just gossip over a
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Jeff O'Neill
glass of wine at a book launch. Stuff like that.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
Exactly, exactly. You get the trace materials of that. That can suggest a relationship and suggest a conversation took place at Union Square Cafe on this date. But that's all you get, right? You get the conversation through the receipts, but not actually the texture or the meaning of the work. So I think that's one thing. It's hard to preserve the archives, but the second reason is, you know, the agent's job is to function as the author's representative. And it does no one, no author and no agent any good to suggest that anyone other than the author is doing all of this brilliant literary work. When in reality, authors end up being often some of the worst business people to make decisions about their own work and to make decisions, you know, advocating on behalf of themselves in a contract or to think about the way that their book should be petitioned, positioned in the world. Right. Both editors and agents prefer working with each other in partnership with the author. But it ends up being much better for the book, for the project, if agents and editors do that. So agents need to. It is in their best interest because it is in their author's best interest to maintain this presentation, this fiction, that this author is functioning as this solitary, independent artistic genius.
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Jeff O'Neill
They produce a manuscript whole, they. They have the thing, and then it gets to the marketplace, untouched, unshaped, unmolded. And it's just presented to us as is. The whole industry is. Is working towards that point. I talk with marketers and publicists and executives. It's in everyone's interest to. I don't think lie is the right. The right way to put it, but to not emphasize how collaborative this process can be. And it takes so many different shapes and forms. Sometimes that's more or less true, but it's a lot less true than a lot. People want to think like you and I as book nerds, as 15 year olds, thinking this thing before me is the product of just Philip Roth's head. And that's it, right? It's this whole other process because the author is the product, the book is the product, but the author is the brand. And anything that detracts from that author, sort of singular, codified, monolithic brand becomes less interesting to a reader, is sort of how I understand it. Does that jive with what you understand, Laura?
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Dr. Laura McGrath
Yeah, absolutely. And the second that you start to admit that this does not spring, you know, fully form from an author's mind, the second you realize that there are all of these other mediating forces that have contributed to this product that you have in your hands. And one of those forces is capitalism, right? One of those forces is economic. And the second that you start thinking about, or the second that an author suggests that their decisions were in any way guided by money, then all of a sudden you've become a sellout. Then, then you don't care about the work at all, right? Then you're not to be trusted. You are entirely gauche at best, right? Like for talking about money at all. And that's, that's, that's far from what anyone wants. There's, there's a long kind of sociological history about authorial autonomy and thinking about genius and distinction from the marketplace as that which distinguishes a genuine and real writer. And agents are, if not articulating that, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, at least very, very clearly aware of and trading in the cultural capital around genius and around what it means to be an autonomous writer.
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Jeff O'Neill
From a practical point of view, the reason the agent exists. Now, agents haven't been around since, you know, the printing press started. You outline in the book some of the things that come to comp. But in the modern agents task, as I understood it before, and I think with some modifications, largely exists in this book, some follow. Something like this is there's a lot of manuscripts out there. There's a lot of people who want to be writers. There aren't that many readers. There's way more writers than there are readers in terms of the number of books and publishing. The houses themselves used to do more of the direct sourcing from writers than they do now. But a couple things have happened. One is it is in the house's best interest to get the lowest price they can for the good. Essentially, like, if I can give you a lower advance or a worse deal that's better, I will recoup the difference back to the house. On the other side of that, most authors, as you say, even if they're not bad business people, they're not business people and they don't know everything about publishing and what Terms, should they be looking for foreign rights or advances or the royalty share? So in walks the agent who is an expert in what kind of deals exist. And then more, maybe more importantly or as importantly is they know editors at specific houses that like different kinds of books. They're looking for different kind of books. So use the term multiple times. Matchmaker, say, okay, here's a book I think has something to it. I think I can do something with this. And not only that, here are the places I am going to go and position that. So a combination of gatekeeping, of just like trying to winnow the huge number of manuscripts out there to a manageable pastor, sort of a maybe first, second and third screen for the publishing industry, but then also act on the author's behalf to get them the best deal they can. Now, the best sometimes is the most money, sometimes it isn't. And that's a little bit murky at some points. Laura, have I captured there before I go to some specifics about the book, or is there anything else you want to add to that agent's function in the modern publishing?
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Dr. Laura McGrath
No, no, I think that's right. And you know, you asked, you know, as important or maybe more important, I think the matchmaking role is so much more important here in terms of what agents do beyond the mechanics of a book. One of the examples I talk about in the book is Philip Roth, who worked with the agent Candida Donatio for a period of time. She was really the agent of her generation. But Roth was doing these sweetheart deals with Roger Strauss. They became good friends themselves. And Roth said, I don't think I really need an agent taking at that point it was 10%.
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Jeff O'Neill
He thought that for the wrong reason.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
And so he ended up working with lawyers. Right. It doesn't actually take. These contracts look fairly similar. You see enough of them and it's fine. But what, what he missed out on and what the agent who ultimately ended up coming to represent him at the end of his career, Andrew Wiley, argued is like this. This is missing the actual role that an agent does, which is knowing how to place and position your book in a marketplace and knowing who are the people that are going to work well with this book. And of course that that translates, especially for Wiley, that translates into financial capital, that translates into a bigger book deal. But it was actually that, that placement in the matchmaking that was about the, the question of whether a lawyer can, can do a deal for you, can, can, you know, guide you through the process of drawing up a contract. Of course they can yes, but what they do not have is that particular embeddedness in an industry to understand the finer points of things like taste, to understand the way that. That personal. The decisions that get made still at every level of the publishing industry, and to know the particular priorities and motivations of every individual imprint who can and can't bid against each other. Who lost this other book that this other person wants, what book has been selling?
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Jeff O'Neill
What are they looking for? Are they not looking for any more? Because that's all played out. Like, you make the really good point that I think some people don't recognize is there is no school, there's no major. There's no accreditation program, to my knowledge. There's not even like the NYU publishing course or the Ordinary that was. Those were sort of publishing in a macro sense, like working for a house. I don't even know if something similar for, like, I want to be an agent or something like that. So the credentialing is like a twofold process. One is taste, which I'm going to ask you about here in a second. And the second piece that goes along with it is connectivity. And that connectivity is largely do you know the industry? Do you know the people? And do, you know kind of like maybe a slate of like a few dozen editors? Like, it's not that many people, Laura. Like, that's another thing that's pretty surprising, especially for a certain kind of a book. So there is no credentialing, but those two things are ineluctable and in a way harder to know if you are good or could do this at a, well, job. It seems to be an unusual position. I can't think of too many jobs like this where it's specialized knowledge that people kind of come into from sideways. So I'm going to get into the sentence here, but like, who are these people, Laura, that become agents? Like, what. What could you say about them en masse? I know there's differences, but, like, who do they tend to be? What kind of people? What are they interested in? Where do they come from and what do they do?
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Dr. Laura McGrath
Yeah, when I have agents come to my classes that I teach at Temple, I ask lots of people from publishing to come into my classes at Temple because by and large, people from publishing are erstwhile English majors. And so I like them to talk to my actual English majors right now. And I asked that question, you would ask them to complete the sentence like, you would be a good literary agent. If you're the kind of person who. And what I usually get is like, if you're the person, the kind of person who has to be right. Like, if you are the kind of person who leaves the movie with your friends and you need them to see your point of view, to see your take, you need to articulate it. You need to convince them, though, that your take is exactly the right take and that there's never been any other take that you could possibly take on this.
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Jeff O'Neill
They're salespeople.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
Exactly.
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Jeff O'Neill
Cultural salespeople.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
Yes, that's right. But not just salespeople. Like, the charm, I think, is a really important part of persuasion. The charisma is a really important part of this job. It's not just, I've gotten you to buy something, but I've gotten you to believe in this thing and love this thing just as much as I do. It's spinning a web of belief around a book or a project or a writer. So there is no credential. There are, you know, publishing programs that you mentioned. And especially outside of the US there are a lot more publishing programs. This is kind of like a weird finer point of US higher education. But, you know, the agents that I spoke to for this book, I spoke to more than 75 literary agents for this book over the course of the past 10 years. Almost all of them were English majors in some way, shape or form, or at least came out of the liberal arts. So some of them might have come from theater and found their way over into being a literary agent. Someone might have been in pre law or history or philosophy and found their way in. So many of them thought that they wanted to be writers. So many of them thought that they wanted to be editors and learned that the sort of granular, analytical line level work that they could do as editors would actually be more possible for them or more rewarded in the space of an agency rather than in a publishing house. So I think there is one person, I think I'm getting this right, one person that I spoke to who said, yes, I knew that I wanted to be a literary agent when I was in college. I knew what the job was, A of all, which most people don't know what the job is, and B, I knew I wanted to be one. And that was because this person's father happened to be friends with a literary agent.
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Jeff O'Neill
And it's an apprentice program, right? Like, I know there's some agents and junior agents that listen to this show. And the ones that we, I know of usually started out as an intern or an admin assistant at a literary agency. And you learn by doing like. Like you're a blacksmith in the middle Ages or something like this. Like you have a credential, you exhibit at some level a love of interested in fluency with books of some kind or other. And then you kind of learn the job as you go.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
Right?
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Jeff O'Neill
I mean, that's kind of understand how most people get into it.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
That's how it is really throughout publishing still. You know, obviously there's places like the Columbia Publishing course that you can go to and, and get very specific training in the sort of work that you might do. But by and large, you learn to be an agent based on the people that you worked for. You get access to their slush pile, you get to sit in on their client meetings, you get to see what author care looks like from that point of view. And gradually you get to take on your own clients and working under that agent and do you learn how to do the job that way? And so building a list, at least at first, is really developing clients in tandem with the person that you are assisting. Working on their desk means that you get to see their clients work, but then you also get to see other people who queried them. And maybe the senior agent passes, but maybe the assistant gets their chance to say, I'm going to try, right? I'm going to see if I can't do something with this writer.
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Jeff O'Neill
You're trying to find some overlooked or undervalued asset, right. That someone who has more credential or more of a list or more of a name than you do, it's not worth their time or they're not seeing it and you take a chance on it.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
Right.
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Jeff O'Neill
You know, kind of a speculative issue like that. Okay, Laura, let's get to some sentences. I'm just going to read them and you can tell me. I'm not trying to make you guess where it's from, you'll probably remember, but just talk about, you know, what this sentence represents and how it connects to agency. Surely it can't all depend, is it a business or not? Is it about money or not? In the end, is it an art or is it a science?
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Dr. Laura McGrath
You alluded to this earlier, Jeff, when we were talking about what a book deal is, which is the belief that every agent and editor holds that I spoke to, and I'm sure even those that I didn't, which is that the best deal for a book may not necessarily be the most money for a book. There are lots of things that go into making the best book deal and everyone's interests are aligned, which is making the best possible Book money is a big part of that. Money is a major part of that. But there are also many cases where an author is induced for whatever reason to take less money because they want to work with an under bidder. Right. They want to work with an editor or at a publishing house that they think would be a better fit and would be able to produce a better product, which will ultimately translate to, if all goes well, if everyone's hopes are fulfilled, everyone's wildest dreams come true, which will ultimately translate to readership and the better positioning of the book in the market and ideally better sales. So it's a short term gamble versus a long term gamble. And so when I say all depends, so much of this comes from the ways that agents spoke to me about their work. Right. When they would speak, they would speak to me about an individual project that they were working on. Right. And they would always talk about the exceptional cases. Well, here's a chance where, you know, someone was offered $700,000, but I got them to take 650 because they really wanted to work with this editor or whatever. And I think we have a tendency, particularly when we're looking at publishing from the outside, to kind of take that point of view with the agent, which is to say it really all depends on just this one project or what's going on in this particular moment. And I think the book sale is a good example of that. But in reality, when we zoom out from one person's perspective about one project at any given time, we begin to see that it doesn't depend that much. Right. Like there's actually very tried and true strategies and habits. And I think habits is a useful way of thinking about this. It may not be a cognizant strategy of like, okay, here's my flowchart. I've got a debut short story collection, what Am I going to Do? But these sense of ingrained patterns of what is going to work, what isn't going to work, what approaches I could take, what levers I could pull, that, that actually when you look at them, not, not the leaf for the tree, but, but for the forest. Right. You begin to see how those strategies lead to patterns which then lead to and can be followed through to patterns in the marketplace.
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Jeff O'Neill
Yeah. Even when I work with clients on the advertising side with br, like they so many times, like, well, what is your KPI? What's your goal for your, your list? And they. Well, it depends on the book and the timing and, and it's true. And it's not like most of the time they're trying to get to what the sale is going to look like, but the avenue to get there, they're going to change based on variety of reasons. For those of you who may be not as fluent in the language. So in advance for a book a publisher gives you advance is called advance because advance against your royalties, right? So if you get a hundred thousand dollar advance, that first hundred thousand dollars of what, 15% of the COVID price or 20% of the COVID price, pretty standard that goes to the house, right. To cover your advance. But then if you earn out another phrase that people will know from this industry, you've earned more than enough on the sales and then each additional sale on that you get as additional money for. So one reason you might take a lower advance is you think you have a better chance to earn out and go beyond that either for this book or subsequent books to build a career versus a huge guaranteed payment at the beginning. There can be a millstone around some author's necks if they sign a huge advance, especially as a debut novelist and the book doesn't sell very well, right. Then what do you do with that thing? Then you've got kind of the Mark of Cain on. You have someone who took a huge advantage and turned it out. So the idea here is like what is the best thing for this thing? And you're just, you're sort of mitigating risk or you're taking on more risk differently is that happened the other thing that's so interesting for someone like you who's really into data, right. If you would, you would love to have a huge spreadsheet of like agent related data that you could put in and crunch some numbers on. Each book is so different and yet similar to every other book. It's hard to know how to think of it as a field. Right. Because even a really busy agent, they're not going to do thousands of book deals a year where you might see meaningful signal in the data there. So I kind of get it. But it also can't just be like handcrafted, whittled from anew each time they're presented with that particular situation. And they seemed in your accounting, Laura, pretty resistant to tricks of the trade or Here are my, here are my moves or anything else like that. Is that because they don't want to tell them or you don't think they exist or what's your read on why they're so reticent to say, yeah, actually here's a couple levers I do pull even assuming they exist For a moment, yeah.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
One of the things that was really tricky to sort through with this book was recognizing that agents are people who are charming by nature and performing salespeople
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Jeff O'Neill
wanting to convince you of something.
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Dr. Laura McGrath
Right. And so I had to leave every interview. And as I poured over these transcripts, I wondered, like, what am I, I being sold here? Like, what am I being pitched on? And of course these are anonymous interviews, so people were speaking to me. Not off the record, of course, because you know, they're here, but anonymously. Like their names, their clients names aren't going to be in this book unless it's things that they have published elsewhere. But then I don't reveal if I spoke to them without their express permission. And so I had to wonder a lot like, is this, are they, are they like bullshitting me? Like, what is true here and what isn't? And how can I possibly know? And is my position here to be this like, gotcha journalist? Which I should say, I'm not functioning here as a journalist, but, but as a scholar. And so I had to wrestle with this question a lot like, what, what do I do with this sort of information? Like when I hear it depends, or when I hear, no, no, no, there's no tricks of the trade, like how do I sort through that? And, and I think where I ended up is I, I think, I think, I believe that they believe that, right? Like how, what is this, what is this work doing? What is this statement doing rhetorically? And what, what is the statement telling us about how people in the industry think about themselves? What is it telling me about the story they're telling about their work? I think that's illustrative. Whether or not it's true, right? Like whether or not it's true is at some point immaterial. I can't know that. I can't possibly know that. And that's not the position that I'm going into these interviews with. As a curious and open ended researcher, what I can say is it's really important for agents to tell themselves, to tell their clients to behave as though every single project matters independently and uniquely. Like that is a chief, that is a chief precept of literary publishing for readers, for people who are working here. That might not pan out to be true when you can look at things at scale, but it really, really matters to present that, to believe that to be true, to kind of participate in that collective belief, maybe collective delusion, but, but that, that, that belief is really central to be able to do this job well. And so that's kind of the, the approach that I take throughout this book is to say, you know, I, I cannot speak to the veracity of this claim, but I heard this claim enough to believe that it's at least a truism in the industry, or it at least matters to enough people that this claim can tell us something about the way that agenting and the way that publishing works.
- [29:23]
Jeff O'Neill
I think my next sentence may sort of orthogonally relate to that, so let's move along here. But the lunch also symbolizes a fundamental truth about the publishing industry. Relationships are central. What do you think about that? The lunch. The lunch as the scene of agenting. I guess to go back to the old days.
- [29:43]
Dr. Laura McGrath
Yeah. I talk about the lunch as a ritual and as a metaphor for thinking about how publishing works. And if you have an image of publishing in your mind, particularly the clubby, insidery nature of it, you're probably thinking of the three martini lunch. These sorts of boozy lunches that stretch from 11am Till 3pm when you roll back to your office and take a nap under your desk. These are lunches of a bygone era. But the lunch still matters really significantly for how people in publishing work, if not literally, then at least metaphorically. Which is to say, you know, you can learn a lot about someone's taste just by looking at the books that they've published, right? Whether you're an agent or an editor, you're looking at agents, you're looking at editors. You know, you can look at someone's list and get a really good sense of the sort of work that they like, but what you can't figure out is what they're like to work with. And so the matchmaking that agents do is both, you know, who's going to be the right fit for this project, but also what sort of editor is going to be the right fit for this client, and vice versa. So you don't necessarily want to pair together an editor who is really bullish and aggressive with an author who is perhaps maybe a little bit more meek. That's probably not going to work out.
- [30:59]
Jeff O'Neill
Super sensitive to critique or something, Right. Right line edits or something.
- [31:02]
Dr. Laura McGrath
Nor do you want the super prickly author with an editor that is going to be totally bulldozed. Right? You want to match up personalities to think about the creative collaboration that you're putting together, not just the business collaboration that you're putting together, remembering that the interests are the project. Right? Making the best possible book. What's the sort of editor that's going to really bring out what's best in this author. How are they possibly going to work well together? And an agent is thinking about their individual writer, but they're also thinking about their whole entire list. Right. So those, those lunches matter not only for thinking about, you know, who can match up with whom and the sort of legendary matches that come of putting together, you know, a Joseph Heller and a Bob Gottlieb or a Thomas Pynchon and a Quirk Smith. But they're also thinking about, like, how can I maintain really great relationships with this editor, even recognizing that a client might be kind of volatile, how can I maintain great relationships? So that way, when I want to query them or when I want to pitch them, excuse me, in like five years with another writer, I still have goodwill left in the bank, right. That my list is desirable, that my taste is trusted here. Because without that trust or without that belief in the agent's taste, there's a breakdown that ends up impacting not only how the agent can function, but how all of their clients are going to be perceived.
- [32:18]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I mean, that's something that I've learned. Again, I'm looking at parallels from what I know of my part of the business, which on the advertising side, there's not that many clients we work with, there's a few dozen. And sometimes that person in that chair moves around, but then they move to a different house. And so what you've done with them or for them or to them, as the case may be, will follow you around. Like, you can't, you can't make a career of an age, a literary agent as scamming the houses. Now maybe you can out of scamming authors who are desperate for an agent and charging them upfront fees. But like, if you are a jerk to work with, they're not going to want to work with you. And that's like maybe the one moment where working for an author specific book isn't about working for the best deal for that author, because they are thinking, I need to know the acquiring editor at fsg, like for the rest of my life. Right. And maybe that would be the best house for this book, but that the author's a dick or they're not going to work out. Right. And so I'm just not going to do it because I'm trying to protect this, like, future pipeline at the same time, which has ramifications, I think, for how the industry is put together. And that's kind of what I'm going to go next. Laura is like, okay, the Industry is sort of different. It has to be different somehow. If there's a new player involved in the 20th century, the agent. Right. And I'm going to use this sentence maybe as a bridge to that and you can talk more about that. The debut novel is the signal category of the 21st century. How does that relate to the rise of the agent, what the agents are looking for?
- [33:41]
Dr. Laura McGrath
One of the reasons why the debut novel has taken off to the degree that it has and it has, like, just to be clear, it is not a thing that anyone's gut is leading them astray about. The debut novel has increased by 157% since the start of the 21st century. In terms of just the number of debut novels that were published. The debut as a category is as big as romance is. So debut novels make up a giant chunk of the number of books that are published each year. And one reason why debuts are so significant is that they are often represented by agents who are also trying to break into the industry. They're, you know, agents take on clients in the ideal way to last over the course of a career. You want to grow up with your clients. And some of these really successful relationships of agents and writers who are with each other over the long haul of their careers were people who started together when they were quite young and did grow up together in that way. I think that was something that Michael Crichton said to Lynn Nesbitt, his agent, was when, when he asked her to represent him him, he said, let's grow up together or let's grow old together. And so that's really an operating principle of the business. And you can't continually take on clients without getting rid of others. Like lists are not endlessly expandable. And so, you know, most debut novelists end up being represented by agents that are on the newer side of their career that are trying to figure out how they can break into the business as well. Those aren't necessarily the biggest debut novels. Often the really, really big debut novel is, is the writer who breaks into the scene who's being represented by the person who also represents, I don't know, say, Philip Roth, since we were just talking about him a minute ago. Right. But the, the vast majority of debuts end up being represented by folks who are in the earlier stages in their career in hopes that they might find a writer who can massively hit it big and not only make that writer's career, but make their career as an agent too. Those first several sales that an agent makes matter really significantly for establishing Their reputation in the industry, not only for their particular taste and their particular interests, but also for their ability to be very savvy business people. And so a debut that succeeds beyond wildest belief. Those things are rare, but we love to talk about them every single year. There's always one or two. And they're the subject of great fascination that not only is great for that writer, but it often, very, very often is really great for that agent too. And that's all of a sudden setting them on a path to be the sort of agent who can be known for their particular taste in their given category or field. But also, and I think really importantly, the sort of agent who can begin to turn a profit with their list can begin to live in a way that is hopefully something closer to financial stability.
- [36:31]
Jeff O'Neill
Yeah, I think that also speaks to maybe one of the uses of the real performed it depends mode that agents operate in is, right, you don't want people to jump agents, right, you don't want people to move. If you've got an author that's successful, that's, you know, earning out, getting good advances and you're working with. Well, so it might be useful for an author to think of an agent's work as sort of not just AT&T versus Verizon, like they're an individual person and to think about switching as being riskier than switching like a mobile plan. Like if an agent all kind of does the same thing and they all have the same connections, then the perception of the switching cost might be lower, which might induce someone to switch a little bit more. That's just one thought I had in reading is like, that might be one of those uses of these are relationships. And to several. Relationship is a lot different than switching cell phone carrier plans at the same time too. So that personal connection is instrumental. And I think even if it weren't useful for an agent to present to an author as being like a friend, mentor, guide, whatever, it certainly doesn't hurt to think, well, I don't know what's going to happen to me if I go from this agent where I sort of know to some speculative other person who's going to be a completely different relationship. It's like breaking up with someone, frankly, it can be scary. And there's a reason people sometimes stick around longer than they should. Because it's scary out there by yourself.
- [37:51]
Dr. Laura McGrath
Flora, right there. There's the relationship, there's that experience of things, but then there's also the agent's cultural capital and the, the symbolic value of their taste and their reputation. I mean, that matters for writers as well. Not just what's the size of deals that you've been able to get for your writers, but, you know, are editors going to respond to your emails? Are you someone that they want to be pitched by? Are you someone that, that they respect, that they value? Your experience of going someplace is going to matter, but then also the way that you are being represented, presented to the world. I mean, I like to think about this. Cultural capital gets really hard oftentimes when we're working in this situation. But I think one way that we can understand this, to compare across fields, is thinking about college rankings. Like, at some level, we know that this is just a fiction. We know that people cheat. We know that this is not really a rigorous qualitative or quantitative measure of a college's qualitative value. And your experience at a small liberal arts college versus a large state school versus an Ivy League school, it's going to be different, right? There are things that are specific to those universities that are going to be different. But how are you going to be perceived? How is your resume going to be perceived if you are coming from Wharton to, To draw on the business, to pick on the business school that's just down the street from me, how is it going to be perceived if you graduated from my alma mater, Michigan State University? And how is it going to be perceived if you went to a small liberal arts school like, like Wesleyan, for instance? That has a lot to do with larger cultural perceptions, but also who's. Who's reading the resume, right? Is it someone who went to Harvard Business School and hates the assholes from Wharton? Well, okay, that's one way. Is it going to be read by a Wesleyan alum who says, you know, I see. I see that there's this person that's got, like the. The primo B school, but I want to take a chance on you because I see this connection, right? Those things all matter here. And an agent's reputation, an agency's reputation, their list, their taste, it's all functioning in the same sort of mesh that creates the cultural capital that can sustain someone's work and the work of their writers.
- [39:58]
Jeff O'Neill
We'll kind of end on, I think, which is the most, I guess, provocative, meaningful, potentially impactful claim that you have, which is. Here's the direct sentence. Agents calibrate their aesthetic judgments to anticipate and respond to the demands of publishers in the market, becoming administrator administrators of the logic of the corporation, thus influencing contemporary fiction. So this is at the heart of like. Like the agent is something more different than a functionary, than a matchmaker. It's. It's not just a catalyst, though, Catal, that's fraught depending on how you use it. But they shape what kind of books are in the marketplace and ultimately the kind of books that end up in our eyes and ears. Right, Laura? So how do you think through that process, how should someone who's listening to this show, you know what the show is like, how might that be interesting to them, to help them see the world, the sort of writing and publishing world around them?
- [40:52]
Dr. Laura McGrath
There's a few ways that that matters. I mean, on a very granular, practical level, what I think we miss is that agents are also functioning as editors. So if you've ever believed that an editor was important, if you're one of those book or publishing historians who spend a lot of time obsessing over Max Perkins, you can see why the agent could be really influential or important to you as a reader. If you're thinking about how the writers that you love and value were shaped as writers and how this prose of this book came to be. So that's one really practical way that agents are influencing how fiction gets made. But I think that this also happens on a larger level of what agents are and what in the industries is called positioning, which is to say, here's this book and here's how I see it in the world. Here are the steps and the decisions that I'm going to make in order to get this book to just this right pitch that's going to get it to this publishing house with this editor that's going to get it to these readers. So one of the examples that I love giving in the book is I heard this book that was talked about by an agent who sold it, and the agent loved this book, and she talked about it as one of her favorite books that she represented. It was this work of literary fiction. It was really great. She and her writer took it to a very literary publisher. The COVID got written about in think pieces. The author got profiled, all of these things. And it was a very literary book, Right? It was literary fiction. But then I heard another agent talking about the exact same book, and he said that the writer had queried him, and he said I wasn't the right agent. I passed on it. But, you know, the agent who brought it out, you know, she pitched it as though it was really literary. She took it to the really literary imprint. To me, that was commercial women's fiction. Like, there. There was nothing about that book that was especially literary, but it went to this imprint, it worked with this editor, it got this publisher, it got this kind of review coverage. So the one decision that might get made about how to pitch or position a book has all of these cascading effects which down the line matter. As I am browsing a bookstore and as I find myself walking in front of shelves of the genre that is most interesting to me and that shapes whether or not the book gets in front of my eyes. A decision that someone made like years back in an office while they were looking at like 10 pages of a query and then a query letter, right? And so I think those decisions, how they get made and thinking about their downstream effects become really crucial to understand how and why the market looks the way that it does.
- [43:19]
Jeff O'Neill
Right? Because that book then will be a comp for something else, Right. It'll be positioned in a similar way. It will now be called literary fiction because it has a. As a comp title. They can point, look how well that did with this coverage. And someone will use it as a blueprint for something else, like thus moving it, you know, like a pachinko ball farther down this way versus farther than that. Life or some kind of book or some kind of reading experience. Fascinating.
- [43:40]
Dr. Laura McGrath
And you imagine, like, what would have happened if Sally Rooney got published as romance, Right? Like there's a world in which someone could have said, eh, commercial women's fiction, Sally Rooney, we're going to send you to Berkeley. Or there's a world in which Zone one got sent to Orbit or Tor
- [43:54]
Jeff O'Neill
or, you know, any of those very reputable sci fi straight ahead. Not straight ahead, but more genre heavy categories. I think about that one all the time.
- [44:01]
Dr. Laura McGrath
Exactly, exactly. And that's not to say that there's anything wrong with those books or that there's anything less valuable than about those writers about those genres or anything of the sort. But a decision gets made at some point which has to do with what path a book is going to be set on and what is going to be set in motion around a particular book and a particular writer. And I feel very confident that Colson Whitehead would not be America's storyteller if Zone one went to orbit, if Zone one went to tour, if it went to all of those other places. And so maybe when it comes to that individual decision about, like, where to send Zone one, maybe it does depend. But the consequences certainly are much, much more significant than the sort of flippant it depends suggests.
- [44:45]
Jeff O'Neill
I like to ask this of nonfiction writers especially. It's a two part question. You can pick up one or both. What are you less interested now than you were before you started the project or in the process of it? And what are you more interested now as you've sort of come to the end of this version of the project?
- [45:01]
Dr. Laura McGrath
I am less interested in AI and I am more interested in self publishing.
- [45:08]
Jeff O'Neill
Would you like to say more about either or both of those, Laura?
- [45:10]
Dr. Laura McGrath
No.
- [45:11]
Jeff O'Neill
Okay. Self publishing for yourself?
- [45:19]
Dr. Laura McGrath
No. Okay, I'll say more about those things. I think, you know, as I was coming to the tail end of the research for this project and getting ready to turn in this book, that AI became kind of the flawed conversation.
- [45:29]
Jeff O'Neill
How panicked are your students, by the way? That's. Maybe we can talk about that some other different day.
- [45:32]
Dr. Laura McGrath
Yeah, students are a totally different conversation. And obviously like the AI and publishing question is huge and it's really open, but I am really interested in less about what Anthropic is doing, less about these large language models, less about generative AI than I am about the data that is being gleaned from all of the books that are being uploaded to Kindle Direct and to wattpad and to every other self publishing platform. This is not information that's being stolen and being input into a large language model. This is data that we are we. I'm not one of these writers, but that writers are willingly giving up to big tech. And this is in my opinion, the key to our attention kingdom. And we are just giving it away to Jeff Bezos. And that to me is a, perhaps a can kicked down the road a little bit in favor of thinking about the immediacy of AI. But that to me is really, really huge. It seems to me to be a really important way of thinking about what's going on with our reading crisis. If we are in crisis, where readers are going, what's capturing their attention, how we can learn about that, that data is being analyzed by the people who are also setting out to destroy our attention. And that to me is a huge problem. And so I would love to see our conversation around self publishing switch to what it means to kind of shift our gatekeepers from humans to algorithms and what's happening in those spaces. There's really excellent academic research that that's coming out about some of that. I am not one of those researchers, but that's what I'm going to be paying more attention to in the coming months, years, hopefully not decades, but probably decades.
- [47:16]
Jeff O'Neill
All right, Laura McGrath, middlemen, literary agents and the Making of American Fiction, if you like this show, you'll. I. As you. As you can see, it's always a fine line to walk with these. I don't want to give away the most juiciest interesting stories. So if you've listened to this, there are all. There's tea to be spilled. Some of it's anonymous tea. So, for example, Laura was in on a zoom call as a literary agency, was talking about the slush pile. I think for me, that was the white knuckling, like, most exciting moment for me in the whole book to, like, see how that thing happened. A slush pile. If you don't know what that is, that is an agency gets a whole bunch of manuscripts, they come, they open themselves up, kind of like a purchase window for a rock concert, and then you get your manuscripts and then they close to sort of process them. And I thought that was fascinating. You had a lunch with a couple of agents. You've performed the scene of the lunch there for a moment, for all that fraught moments. So there's a lot of really good stuff. I tried to only pick out some bits so that people who are interested will go check it out, request it from your library. Go ask your professor to consider it. All of you out there, Laura, thank you so much for your time. Middleman. And we'll talk to you another. We've got a score to settle, Laura. We've got. We've got our. We've got a draft to reckon with here now that. I think we're only waiting on the. On the Pulitzer still here a little bit.
- [48:27]
Dr. Laura McGrath
And I've, like, begun drafting my next year. I don't know that I'm invited back for next year's draft, but I've begun drafting next year.
- [48:32]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, if you've done poorly, you're welcome back because we're playing for money next year.
- [48:37]
Dr. Laura McGrath
I'm pretty sure Sharifah is winning. I think. I think she's got it in the bag.
- [48:41]
Jeff O'Neill
Okay. I don't know that even a Pulitzer win will get me around the corner here. Great to have you, as always. Congratulations. A book. Best of luck as you get to follow this thing into the world.
- [48:50]
Dr. Laura McGrath
Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [48:59]
Podcast Host (likely a female host from Book Riot or similar)
Thanks so much for listening today. We hope you'll enjoy this excerpt from the audiobook edition of Our Perfect Storm by Carly Fortune, read by A.J. burdell and Jack Copland, thanks to our sponsors at Penguin Random House Audio.
- [49:11]
Narrator of audiobook excerpt (possibly a character named Frankie/Francesca)
I met George St. James the day my mom vanished. The night before, I fell asleep the same way I always did, wishing for something extraordinary to happen at 8 years old, I was certain of one I was destined for great adventures. In the morning, a heavy spring rain attacked the last of the snow, liberating purple and white crocus blossoms from their icy beds. My older brothers and I knelt by the window, watching tire grooves fill with Heaven sent tears. Mom's station wagon was missing. Our dad barely spoke when we roused him, but as he sipped his first cup of coffee, he told us our mother had gone home. Only Darwin, who was 12, seemed to understand what that meant. Moby was 10, and I could tell he was as confused as me. This was our house. Wasn't this home? Dad couldn't say how long mom would be gone, but he assured us she'd come back, and we had no choice but to believe him. As soon as the rain tapered to a drizzle, we were kicked outside. Without mom to patiently comb out the tangles, my hair was a ratty mass. I was still wearing my nightgown, but Darwin made sure I put on my rubber boots and yellow raincoat. Moby fetched the basketball. I wanted to play, but my brothers wouldn't pass to me. They never passed to me. I yelled and stomped in puddles, but they kept chucking the ball over my head. Fed up, I grabbed the green butterfly net from the mudroom and set about trying to capture a creature in the thicket at the edge of the field. A worm, a grasshopper, maybe even a frog. Instead, I found something far more exciting. A pale brown rabbit sitting in the fresh blades of grass. It had long, velvety ears and a twitching pink nose. I was going to catch it, and oh, how jealous Darwin and Moby would be. But patience had always eluded me. I charged after the rabbit, twigs cracking beneath my feet, and off it went, bounding across the field. I chased it all the way to the cedar hedge that bordered the neighboring property. The rabbit didn't know what I did. The woman who lived in the big house next door was a witch, and witches had all sorts of uses for rabbits. I had to save it. I followed the dense wall of evergreen to a gap wide enough to slip through. I peered through the branches and gasped when I saw a pair of dark blue eyes squinting at me from the other side. I'd never seen the boy before. He was winter pale, with round, rosy cheeks and dark eyelashes. His hair was buzzed, short freckles dotted his little nose, and he was the same height as me. He was nothing to be afraid of. Hello. I'm Francesca. I stuck out my palm like dad taught me. But you can call me Frankie. The boy blinked, and I wondered if he might run away, but then his hand shot out suddenly and he took mine in his.
- [52:55]
Jeff O'Neill
I'm George.
- [52:58]
Narrator of audiobook excerpt (possibly a character named Frankie/Francesca)
Hands on hips, I gave him a thorough inspection. He had no rubber boots, no raincoat, and his pants had a hole in the knee. All he had to keep him warm was a hooded sweatshirt with a stain on the sleeve. Were you watching me? I asked.
- [53:16]
Jeff O'Neill
No.
- [53:17]
Narrator of audiobook excerpt (possibly a character named Frankie/Francesca)
He blushed.
- [53:18]
Jeff O'Neill
Well, not for long.
- [53:21]
Narrator of audiobook excerpt (possibly a character named Frankie/Francesca)
What are you doing over there? The big house was no place for a boy, especially one as soft looking as George. He'd need defending, maybe even rescuing. My toes curled at the thrill of it. I live here now, he said, sounding resigned. I gaped at him. You live there? I pointed at the imposing stone house behind him. With the witch?
- [53:49]
Jeff O'Neill
She's not a witch. She's my grandmother.
- [53:53]
Narrator of audiobook excerpt (possibly a character named Frankie/Francesca)
I hate to tell you this, George, I said, relishing the moment, but your grandmother is definitely a witch.