Wylie: “Trying to Represent Quality With Discipline”

Friday afternoon, Portfolio posted Lloyd Grove‘s interview with Andrew Wylie, considered among the most powerful agents in the book business, perhaps even the most powerful. And it doesn’t take too long into the Q&A for Wylie to kick into high gear:

“The key point in the business is that the investment is made in the wrong areas in the business, and I think that quality—which is more valuable over time—has been undervalued, and quantity—which is less valuable over time—has been overvalued. And I think this is a reaction to the dominance of the influence of the chains. In England right now, this is a catastrophe. The retail side is leading the business by the nose, and publishers have not reacted with sufficient strength, and they should have. And so the business in England is just in the tank basically.”

The pull quote comes a little later, when he describes publishing as “a very odd, very small business, that no one should get into unless they have no other occupation that they want to be involved in.” (Still, he notes, because his business model is basically “50 percent U.S., 50 percent outside of the U.S., which is pretty much the same equation that the film industry operates on,” he feels very upbeat.)

Some readers will be entertained by Wylie’s dancing around the whole “Raymond Carver‘s first drafts” story, or his more straightforward example of consolidating Philip Roth‘s intellectual property interests; personally, I was struck by his explanation for representing “nonliterary” writers like Larry Ellison, William H. Gates, and David Rockefeller: “One of the benefits of the job is if I become interested in an area, I can go charging off in that area and find the person that I want to have write about that. For instance, we got involved in representing historians, really quite recently, I mean within the last five years, and we now represent a raft of historians—but that was a program, really.”

(photo from a 2003 Guardian profile)

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.