getting some face time with new york’s prominent literary agents!

The majority of emails I receive hail from emerging writers who either want to be published because they like the idea of being published (although they’ve never written anything, but they want their name embossed on a shiny book!!), or writers who are passionate about their work and are looking for outlets in which they can be discovered and read. Unless you’ve been living under a rock getting published these days is difficult with massive corporate restructuring in book publishing (read: layoffs or read: a temporary band-aid for a bigger problem) and fewer and fewer of those “quiet” small books finding their way out into the world. Publishers are acquiring less and paying less, agents are overworked and particular, and writers are stepping up their game in a major way in terms of realizing that being a writer is simply not just being able to write a book. Ah, the good old days.

Years ago when I embarked on my agent search, I did research. A lot of it. I , I read acknowledgments, I scoured dozens of websites, and I asked friends for recommendations and suggestions. It took me nearly a year (eight months, I believe) to find the right match, and I wouldn’t trade any of that work for an easy referral. Because, in the end, I know I’ve found my ideal agent. So instead of randomly typing off an easy email asking for the work to be done for you, I encourage you to roll up your sleeves and research. Your agent will be managing your career, your money, so don’t you want to be well-informed? Don’t you want to understand your options and the market? How your book (and by extension, you!) fits into the mix?

Magazines like Poets & Writers are terrific resources of information. They offer exhaustive listings of writing contests, grants, and awards, as well as articles by published writers and those in the trade. In the most recent issue of Poets & Writers magazine, writer Jofie Ferrari-Adler sits down with four of New York’s up-and-coming agents (Julie Barer, Jeff Kleinman, Renee Zuckerbrot, and Daniel Lazar) as part of his extended series of interviews with players in book publishing, and asks them all the questions burgeoning writers are dying to know: how do agents choose new projects, where do they find writers (so you can get noticed), query letters that make them sit up and take notice, the easiest way you can get rejected from an agent, and ten things writers should never ever do.

The agents are honest and some questions are answered very candidly, off the record. Below is an excerpt from their transcripted chat. To read the entire exchange, click here.

Let’s cut right to the chase. What are you people looking for in a piece of fiction?

BARER: I like what Dan has on his Publishers Marketplace profile: the book that makes me miss my subway stop. I think everybody’s looking for a book that you can’t put down, that you lose yourself in so completely that you forget everything else that’s going on in your life and you just want to stay up and you don’t care if you’re going to be tired in the morning. You just want to keep reading.

ZUCKERBROT: Doesn’t that have to do with voice? It’s about the way that somebody tells a story. It’s about a person’s worldview. There are probably very few new stories. We’re probably all ripping off the ancient Greeks—tragedy, comedy, yada yada—but it’s the way someone sees the world and interprets events. It’s their voice. It’s how they use words. It’s how they can slow things down when they need to. It’s how they build up to a scene. It’s how they describe ordinary things. Walking down Dean Street, for example. If I described that it would be the most prosaic description on the planet. But a really gifted writer will make me see things I’ve never seen even though I may have walked down the street a thousand times. At the end of the day, for me at least, it comes back to voice.

LAZAR: On my Publishers Marketplace page I say—because I’m so wise and pithy—that I want writers to show me new worlds or re-create the ones I already know. I generally find myself liking books that are not set in New York. Give me a weird little small town any day of the week.

BARER: That’s why I love international fiction. I love reading a book where I don’t know anything about the setting. I have this wonderful novel I sold this year that’s set in Sri Lanka. I didn’t know anything about Sri Lanka when I read it. Anything international, anything historical, anything set somewhere really unexpected. This is going to sound crazy, but I read a novel this summer that blew me away, and it’s science fiction. I’m not usually drawn to science fiction, but it was so inventive and original and smart, and it took me somewhere I’d never been. Finishing that book and having it blow my mind was such a reminder of why I love my job: You can read something so unexpected, and fall in love with it, and think, “I never would have thought this would be my kind of thing, but now I can’t stop talking about it.”

KLEINMAN: That’s my second criterion: can’t-stop-talking-about-it. I have three criteria. The first is missing your subway stop. The second is gushing about it to any poor slob who will listen. The third is having editors in mind immediately.

BARER: That’s so important. If you can’t figure out who you’re going to sell a book to from the get-go—if you finish it and think, “Who on earth would buy this?” and you can’t come up with more than three names—it’s a bad sign.

KLEINMAN: Not only that. I want to be thinking, “Oh my God, I’ve got to send this to so-and-so. So-and-so would love this.”

BARER: I have found myself going on and on about books I don’t even represent, books where I’ve lost a beauty contest. I remember one book I was going after. I was so obsessed with it that I couldn’t stop talking about it. I’d have lunch with this editor, dinner with that editor, and then I lost the beauty contest and the book went out on submission and five editors e-mailed me and said, “This was the book you were raving about, right? It’s awesome.”

LAZAR: What was the book?

BARER: It’s an incredible debut novel that’s coming out with Ann Godoff called The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet. Denise Shannon sold it and she did a fantastic job. It’s just one of those incredibly original books and I couldn’t stop talking about it. It was the same thing with The Heretic’s Daughter. I kept being like, “The Salem witch trials! Oh my God! Did you know that they didn’t burn people, they hung people? I didn’t know any of this!” You couldn’t shut me up. I was probably really annoying.

image courtesy of P&W magazine

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