Literary Agents — "Everything to Everbody"

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Victoria Skurnick of LGR Literary  (and my own beloved agent) was on Jungle Reds a few months ago, talking about no-nos when approaching literary agents with your book proposal.

But what do literary agents themselves actually do all day? Drape themselves artfully on silk settées and read manuscripts 
while eating bon-bons? (OK, I can hear Victoria laughing now....)

The truth is that literary agents don't have a set job description and every day brings a different challenge. The great literary agents are adaptable, proactive, relentless, positive. They love books and champion their authors.

Read on and learn one agent's perspective of the other side of the desk…..

VICTORIA SKURNICK: You can’t be everything to everybody. That’s what my mother would tell me when she felt I was spreading myself too thin.  Well, turns out, what I get paid for is exactly that: being everything to everybody.

It’s about the only description of what an agent actually does that is at all true.  We get to be greedy nags (at least, that’s how an editor might describe us), editors (God forbid a manuscript not be perfect before we submit it to publishers), mommies cum psychoanalysts to anxious writers [ahem—trying not to take this personally—ed.], accountants to harder-headed clients, literary critics, beggars, wheedlers, gypsys and thieves. 

Okay, forget the gypsy part.  Even when we manage to leave our offices, we’re lugging mountains of papers with us, which makes it hard to move around very far (I wasn’t that fond of the Kindle even before the Big A started acting up).

What we also get to be is busy and fascinated.  A day in the life of an agent might consist of many hours of reading, or it might be running around town trying to work of enthusiasm for a project, or preventing a publisher from going out with thousands of copies of books containing huge mistakes, or arguing with clients about plot points, or reworking proposals.  

On any given day, we might go from feeling like geniuses to considering ourselves horrible, stupid failures.  I know of no agent – not one – who does not spend some hours every month thinking, what if I never sell another book!?!   And that goes, I assure you, for the biggest names in the business.

I became an agent seven years ago, after several different paths, most of them in publishing.  But my last job was as editor-in-chief of what was then a powerful book club.  When you’re the editor-in-chief of a powerful book club, not only do people return your calls, but they actually call you – voluntarily.  

When you’re an agent, you’re the one making the calls, and the one whose emails do not necessarily get answered.  When, after three or four (or eight or ten) months, you’re sending the third or eighth polite email or making the fifth or twentieth call, asking an editor a question like, “Gee, I wondered if you’d had time to read  Book X yet,” and getting no response for the third, fourth, eighth or tenth time, you get to know what it’s like on the other side.  You get to internalize words like abject and powerless. 

But, when you’re at your desk and you pick up a novel that reads beautifully, then it’s all worth it.  The sense of excitement, of discovery, is remarkable. The wonderful knowledge that you are in a position to do everything possible to bring this to the attention of hundreds or thousands or millions of people.  This is the payoff; this is what we live for.

That, and the learning.  I just sold a book on the presidency of Chester Arthur, and the subject turns out to be incredibly interesting.  Who knew?  I’ve learned more about England in World War Two from Susan’s Maggie Hope novels than I ever thought possible.  A friend of mine who’s now a publisher, but who was an editor for decades, describes herself as “a talking book.”  And that pretty much sums it up.  Writers are smart people. 

Publishers are smart people – except when they turn down my clients’ books, that is.  

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Thank you, Victoria! 

Reds and lovely readers, do you think you would make a good literary agent? Why or why not? (I'd be TERRIBLE — too many people…..) 

Does Victoria's perspective give you and sympathy for those on the other side of the desk? 

Please share in the comments!