Fierce Elegance: Agenting 101 Discussion with Meredith Kaffel Simonoff and Me

Meredith and I did a McNally panel together a few months back; many of you were sad you couldn't meet us IRL, so here's the next best thing.

A few months back, I appeared on a panel about agenting for McNally-Jackson’s new Publishing 101 series with my own amazing agent Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, curated and moderated by McNally’s indefatigable events director Kate Dwyer. Many of you asked if we’d be able to post a livestream of the event. The answer was nope (sorry), but below is a recently acquired transcript. Read on if you’re interested in:

• What an agent’s role is (and isn’t)

• When you should reach out to one (and when you should hold fire)

• A very handy rhyme to keep in mind when writing your queries

• Whether or not you should hire a developmental editor, the relative importance of previous publications when querying, and Shakespeare in Space.

And for more from McNally’s Publishing 101 series, here’s a transcript of their panel on debut fiction, featuring my client and fellow Substacker Laura McGrath and Friends of the Stack Isaac Fitzgerald and Randy Winston.

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KATE: Let’s start at the beginning. What is a literary agent?

MKS: There's the answer I give non-industry people, maybe the person I meet on a plane or at a wedding, which is: literary agents are essentially talent managers for authors, the “middle man” who sells your book and has the key relationships and expertise to serve as successful bridge between author and publisher. But really, we wear so many hats, something I love about this work. To me, the most important hats are “curator” (when it comes to our individual tastes and the often idiosyncratic and passion-led lists we respectively build), “translator” (the demystification work we do when it comes to explaining our opaque business of publishing), and "advocate.” Advocate in this context means everything from financial advocacy, to creative advocacy, to strategic advocacy, to even political advocacy at times, depending on an author’s lived experiences and priorities. Related to advocate is our role as “the heavy”—the person whose job it is, hopefully with fierce elegance, to have the hard conversations on our authors’ behalf, so as to ensure their relationship with their publisher gets to live primarily in the generative space of the creative.

AHH: I actually would like to talk about what a literary agent isn't.

Those who don't know anything about publishing often confuse the different roles that one plays in publishing —for example, publicist, editor, agent. I started out as a publicist, so I often think about how different those roles can be. When I was a publicist, I worked at a publisher, and I was in charge of getting media for the books that we bought and were publishing. And as a publicist, I would be assigned books to work on.

There'd be, say, a list of the 40 books that are coming out this season, and among those, I picked the 8 or 10 I wanted to work on. It was a wonderful job in many ways, but I didn't have a lot of control over my list. I was also coming at the very end of an author's publishing process, after everything good — and bad — happened.

The literary agent starts at the beginning. They're your first professional relationship with publishing. The literary agent chooses to work with you, and you choose to work with them, which is a little bit different than the role of the editor and later, the publicist.

As you pay 15% commission on all books your agents sells on your behalf, you have a fiduciary relationship, and most importantly, you agent represents you in your book deals. This is our very particular—-selling your books to publishers. And the reason the job interested me is I wanted to work on books that I was passionate about. I wanted to be part of deciding what books get published, what authors get published, what authors I was bringing into my life and into the world.

But even though we're advocates in all these roles, we're not the one, say, calling up the Today Show to get you on, or getting you on a podcast, or booking your events. We can advise on those things and share contacts and ideas, but really our primary job is being your go between between you and the publisher.

Let's say I'm a writer, and I've written this amazing literary novel about a Shakespeare troupe in space. How would I get this book published? What are the basic steps?

Meredith: Most fiction is sold based on a full manuscript. So the first thing you'll want to do is make sure that the novel is in as strong a shape as you can humanly manage on your own, but also with the benefit of beta readers. You only get one first impression with your dream agents, right? The stronger the book is when it comes to us, the higher level the editorial work we can then bring to it. Then you're going to want to think about the agents who represent books that feel in spiritual kinship with your work. Writers often think they should query agents who represent books on literally the same subjects as their book, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. But I’m less inclined to want to cannibalize my own list in that way. Or to feel like something is derivative of my list, whereas it may not be for somebody else's. Better to approach agents whose writers feel like they might be literary cousins of yours—not literary twins.

Alia: To think about who those agents might be, I would go to your bookshelf and look at books that you picture your book next to on a table in a bookstore. Look at the acknowledgements and see who represents those books.

You’re going to have this wish list of agents and you’ll want it to be generational spread. You'll have older agents who have really impressive lists of award winners. But I would say, as you're thinking about whom to query, to really cast a broad net in terms of where people are in their careers. Do some research about the assistants or the younger agents who work at your dream agency. They will be much more open to working with emerging writers.

Most agent client relationships begin with a query letter, and that means that a writer is essentially pitching the novel or the proposal that they've written. Could you talk about some of the query letters that you've responded to? What are some of the things that work vs. don’t work?

Alia: There’s this phrase I love: “the book, the hook, and the cook.” If you follow this formula, you’ll want to have three paragraphs. One will say what the book is. Pull out some of your favorite books in your category and see what the jacket copy says. That's the kind of tone you want to have and that's the book. The hook is why it matters, why we should care. And the cook is you, who you are.

What makes me care? Well, first, I love when it's personalized. I love when it seems like somebody did their research, particularly as a nonfiction agent, you're writing nonfiction, I want to know that you're able to do research. If you're just sending it to me at random, I'll be able to tell, and this can also indicates a less thoughtful writer. Unless your book is actually wacky, you don't want your query letter to be wacky. If your book has a voice or a point of view, your query letter can show that. It could show that you're a good writer.

If you want to write nonfiction, you also want to be thinking about publishing in places that agents read, and there's a lot of them. We read the top-tier stuff, like The New Yorker and the New York Times, but also smaller literary magazines.

Meredith: What I tend to look for most is a kind of perceptible mastery in terms of an author’s ability to talk about their own work. To be able to talk confidently and compellingly about it, not just the what of their work, but the why of it, and not just why it matters to them, but also why it might matter to their ideal potential reader. And I look for a writer who has a sense of their ideal potential reader. When that mastery is evident, it’s much more likely the writer has already done the work to get their manuscript to a place where it’s ready enough to be seriously considered—where they're not just thinking about it as an artist, e.g. purely from the inside out, but also have begun to see it as as a reader.

Let's say your query letter has been successful, and you have signed with an agent. What then happens next? And what does a relationship with an agent ideally look like?

Alia: Once your agent agrees to work with you and you agree to work with her, you usually begin even more editorial work. This can at first feel like another obstacle. You might feel like, “But I thought my book was already great!” and you then you find you have to work on it even more. Know that you are only making your book that much stronger once you go out to publishers.

In this process, you are entitled to an agent who is responsive and transparent and is keeping you abreast of all that they are doing on your behalf and what the plan is for your book. You'll decide together when it's ready to go on submission, and they'll share with you with whom they are going to submit it. They'll keep you abreast of how the submission is going. They'll let you know about any offers that come in, or any interest that comes in. They often put together meetings for you with interested parties. They negotiate the book deal, and they're there for you too after the book deal happens, as your support and sounding board.

Throughout all of this, it’s agent's job is to have the difficult business and professional conversations so you don't have to. Any time anything comes up that's of any concern, the agent is the first person you go to to say, “Hey, this is weird, or hey, I don't know how to handle this. How should we handle it?” They're there to help you handle it together.

Agents play such an important role in the landscape of the New York City publishing industry, and in some ways, they can be the person introducing the writer to their wider network. So when I was predominantly working in media, I met a lot of agents, and I interviewed writers because I knew their agents, and they made the introduction.

So can you talk a little bit about the community building aspect of being an agent?

Meredith: I tend to exist in three modes professionally: the deep work mode; the selling/negotiating mode; the social mode. A lot of what we do is social. Going out to lunches or coffees or taking a walk with trusted publishing partners, new editor contacts, movers and shakers at, say, The Today Show, or Barnes and Noble, or The Whitings, attending a gathering of independent booksellers, or going out to support organizations like Poets & Writers or Words Without Borders. In each of these conversations and spaces, we’re both sharing what we’re passionate about and also listening, and learning, and working to build relationships and community on behalf of our authors. (To your point about New York City, I know the same is also true, tailored to their own businesses, of our LA colleagues!)

Alia: I definitely have more of an agent-brain than a writer-brain. And the agent-brain is literary matchmaker. You're thinking, “I have this book. Who's gonna love it? Which editors?” You're also thinking, “Oh, this book reminds me of that book. I should send this book to that person.” And you're always trying to bring things together. That's how I think of social relationships.

Time for audience questions!

How much difference is there between how certain agents will advocate for you financially? Is there a way to find out different deal structures that different agents have made?

Alia: Looking at their list and seeing how their authors are published, if they or their agency has a lot of books that have been published in a prominent way, chances are those books sold for a lot of money.

Do you recommend working with a paid developmental editor?

Alia: Nobody is looking for way more work to do. So you do get one shot, and you want the book to be as good as possible. But I also think that some of the resources one can get from a developmental editor, you can get from writing workshops, from community writing classes, from writing programs, from writer friends and beta readers. Meredith, how common is it for you to sign clients who have worked with a developmental editor?

Meredith: It’s very rare, honestly.

Alia: And if you are going that route, pick someone who's worked on books that you think are great, that have sold well, and that are in your category.

When it comes to deciding to represent a fiction author, to what degree, if at all, does the quantity or quality of literary magazine publications impact your decision?

Meredith: When I’m representing a short story collection, it really does help to have a handful of publications of a certain caliber already in place, because it shows you've been pounding the pavement and taking your craft seriously, and also, you learn so much as a writer about your own work and audience based on which publications come on board early. You get to start to curate your own publishing story by virtue of that constellation of early publications. But I also pay attention, especially for novels, to the kinds of unique, less “juried” data points which lend a writer’s bio a sense of authenticity and authority when it comes to a story that only you can tell.