Agents

Nearly four months ago, publishing industry veteran Rob Weisbach launched his own management agency, promising "an overall strategic plan for self-promotion, long-term financial stability and a sustained creative life in the arts" for clients in addition to literary representation. Today, Rob Weisbach Creative Management announced three new hires to help fulfill that mission statement.

David Groff (top), a former senior editor at Crown, will scout fiction and nonfiction writers, along with continuing the editorial consulting practice he's long been conducting on his own. Erin-Cox (center) will, in addition to her agenting work, develop publicity and promotion services; she was a publicist at Scribner and then the Book Publishing Director for The New Yorker. And Jake Bauman brings expertise on the film and television industries to the table—he's worked for production companies based at major studios like Dreamworks and Sony.

"“I’ve always admired the work of Erin, David, and Jake," Weisbach says in a press release announcing the group hire. "Each brings to the company distinct expertise—in promotion, editorial, and dramatic development. At the same time, they share several qualities invaluable to the business: a seasoned eye for identifying and positioning talent; a skill for nurturing artists and their work; and a
palpable entrepreneurial drive."

(all photos from Facebook)

In this week's installment of mediabistro.com's "Pitching an Agent" series, Roberta Brown reveals how she created the Brown Literary Agency in the mid-1990s because her friends were having trouble landing literary representation and she was convinced their books could sell. She proved herself right, and now she's got 42 clients who've all gotten successful book deals, many of them working various fields of the romance market. Before you start sending Brown your manuscript, though, be advised that she takes on maybe one out of a thousand submissions.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you're not a member yet, you can register for $55 a year, and start reading those articles, receive discounts on mediabistro.com seminars and workshops, and get all sorts of other swell bonuses.

In the latest installment of mediabistro.com's "Pitching an Agent," Jane Dystel of Dystel & Goderich discusses the hands-on approach she takes with clients whose books cover a diverse range of subject matter—just about anything that catches her eye, really. "I think my clients would say that I'm very nurturing," Dystel confides. "They all have my home phone number. I take very good care of them." And they can go on to great things: One writer Dystel shepherded to publiciation in the 1990s published a memoir about growing up as the son of an American woman and an African man who divorced when he was only two years old. Today, little more than a decade after the publiciation of Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama is the president of the United States.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you're not a member yet, you can register for $55 a year, and start reading those articles, receive discounts on mediabistro.com seminars and workshops, and get all sorts of other swell bonuses.

In this week's installment of mediabistro.com's "Pitching an Agent" series, we meet the agents of Larsen Pomada, founded by the husband-and-wife team of Michael Larsen and his wife Elizabeth Pomada in 1972. They took on Laurie McLean (right) as a partner thirty years later. In a recent post at her blog, Agent Savant, McLean commented on the recently reported boom in sales of romance fiction—noting that part of the gain might come from the addition of the Kroger's supermarket chain to Neilsen Bookscan's data pool, and that those gains might be offset in 2009 if Borders is forced to close any more of its stores... and she isn't just referring to the primary brand. "Waldenbooks is a major retailer for romance (as well as other genre fiction)," McLean observed, "and continued store closings at the mall-based chain could have a disproportionate impact on the romance market."

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you're not a member yet, you can register for $55 a year, and start reading those articles, receive discounts on mediabistro.com seminars and workshops, and get all sorts of other swell bonuses.

Despite the publishing recession, literary agents have been the focus of the Internets lately: rejecting failed queries, being rejected by angry authors, and most recently, letting readers be agents for a week.

Author Jean Hannah Edelstein wrote an article for the Guardian defending agents against the storms public opinion. Edelstein has worked as an agent's assistant, so she brought a unique perspective.

Here are her thoughts: "many agents spend a majority of their time in the office ... sorting out the crucial, but picky and tedious, administrative issues that often make not one iota of difference in terms of their own income, but which are crucial to authors. The fun literary reasons that agents take their jobs, the reading and editing, tends to happen in the evenings and on the weekends." (Via TeleRead)

Agent Jarred Weisfeld visited Macmillan Publishers earlier this year, shopping former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich's memoir--despite the fact that he would soon file an unrelated $10 million defamation suit against publisher.

The NY Observer went behind the scenes on the Blagojevich book deal, which did not end up at Macmillan. The article interviews Weisfeld--founder of Objective Entertainment--about his lawsuit against the publisher for "malicious, false, defamatory and anti-Semitic statements" made in a forthcoming biography of Ol' Dirty Bastard. An unidentified "senior-level employee" at the publisher said the book was not rejected because of the lawsuit.

Here's more from the article: "[Weisfeld said] 'I was like, 'This is the most selfless thing an agent can do, come to a building where they say all this nasty anti-Semitic stuff about you in a book.'' Mr. Weisfeld said he took the meeting at Macmillan because he'd been given reason to believe that St. Martin's would pay 'big money' for the book."

Today Writers House announced plans for an office in London to handle writers in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

Angharad Kowal,the British rights director at Writers House, will helm the new office. According to Bookseller, Kowal has inked deals for Nora Roberts, Neil Gaiman, and Laurell K. Hamilton during a productive year.

Here's a quote from Kowal, from the article: "I'm very much looking forward to introducing new Writers House authors to the British and Australian markets as well as continuing to support and strengthen our established authors in 2009."

Following the success and notoriety of QueryFail Day--when agents and editors shared stories of pitches that failed--the BookEnds Literary Agency opened a forum for writers to express complaints about agents anonymously.

So far, more than 250 writers have added their thoughts. Among the highlights: "Show the same respect and courtesy to writers that agents expect. e.g. Don't make rude or snide remarks about writers or their work, especially in public forums like Twitter."

Another writer added: "When an agency sends you a letter saying "Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to read [TITLE OF BOOK] I regret that..." Proof reading rejection letters and entering our titles is appreciated."

And finally: "Complaining how overworked you are and then spending massive amounts of time on Twitter and every other blog out there while clients' MS and also requested partials are left unread month after month, after month." (Via Janet Reid)

ICM agent Kate Lee is scouting sites like Twitter for book deals, and today revealed some insight into her process.

During to a recent Daily Beast piece about "Twitterature," the blog-friendly agent talked about why she landed a deal for the microblog site, Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves--a deal GalleyCat covered last month.

Lee explained what attracted her to the pithy posts about pets: "There was something human and universal behind how we all treat our pets ... From the more practical perspective, these pet books sell like mad."

Last week agents at the growing Foundry Literary + Media agency sold three books in three days, bucking the odds during an industry slow-down.

According to Publishers Weekly, McGuigan sold North American rights for Economist journalist Robert Lane Greene's "Talk This Way: The Politics of Language" to Bantam, Stephanie Abou sold North American rights for Jamal Joseph's "Panther Baby" to Algonquin, and Mollie Glick sold Jim Roberts's "Shiny Objects: How We Lost Our Way on the Road to the American Dream" to HarperOne.

Here's more about "Panther Baby" from the article: "Academy Award-nominee Joseph (for best original song: 'Raise It Up' from the film August Rush), the youngest Black Panther to be sent to jail in the 'Panther 21' case, will describe how he went on to co-found a creative arts program in Harlem aimed at bringing young people off the streets. Joseph is the first African-American to head the graduate film program at Columbia."