Now that we’re back on campus, I’m sure we’re clued-in to our friends’ various summer adventures. Many of us dedicated time to summer internships, experiencing the 9-5 work-day far different from our all-over-the-place college lives. Me? From a walk-up East village apartment I leased in New York City, I woke to my 8 a.m. alarm, dressed in my business-casual wardrobe, and walked the five blocks over to the offices of Curtis Brown Ltd, the professional literary agency where I spent the duration of my summer.
I had some basic knowledge of what literary agents do, but it took really being there to understand the roles and responsibilities that “agenting”, as my co-workers affectionately call it, truly entails. Their main job is to “sell” that brilliant author manuscript to a publishing house editor. The agents of the firm directly represent aspiring authors; as experts on publishing lingo and the business of the industry, they protect their rights throughout the acquisition, editorial, and production process.
This isn’t to say that a business-savvy agent isn’t a key figure in the editorial process. Agents, well their interns really, in tons of forwarded-emails, receive at least 20 queries a day, consisting of the story proposal and the first 10 pages of their creation. If an agent is drawn in, he/she requests a larger portion of the manuscript and then the full. From here, he/she decides whether to represent the author’s work.
This, in large part, was my job. Each day I’d parse through queries detailing supernatural monsters at battle, goosebump-inducing ghost stories, Judy-Bloom-esque relationship sagas, and zillions of paranormal-romance-thrillers. And I learned that anyone and everyone wants to be a writer. The eager-to-be published were prior financiers, teachers, accountants, and doctors. My bossed received manuscripts from third-cousins and babysitter’s-daughter’s-neighbors that she didn’t even know existed. What flabbergasted me the most when I gawked at my filled-to-the-brim inbox wasn’t how many people wanted to be writers, but how many people actually sat down an
d did it.
At first, I sometimes found it challenging to separate my personal opinions from what I felt was objectively “marketable.” It was super tempting to think about what would, logistically speaking, end up on an editor’s table, or what would resonate most with trend-following crowds. But I soon realized that today’s “niche” genre was hardly a measure to go by. In fact, I would hear my boss remind her clients not to write to today’s fad genres, so as not to compromise their personal creative inclinations. Considering their thickening overload in the market, my boss was often hesitant to consider paranormal-romance novels for her list (which could be a good sign for us all).
My first-day on the job, I was immediately sent to “work” on a new young adult manuscript Pastureland, a story about talking horses living in a post-apocalyptic world. At some point between the horse-to-horse romance and climatic war-scene, the clock struck five, and my work for the day was over. I remember giddily thinking to myself on my way out the door: so this is work?
After the first day, predictably, my work schedule became a bit more occupied. As a literary agent’s sole assistant, I found myself responsible for anything and everything that cropped up in her busy work day. My main task was to write editorial letters to clients and lay out my criticisms: lapses in plot/character development, opportunities for layering and depth, and suggestions for strengthening and revising. This of course is highly subjective; there’s always the fear that what an agent feels hinders the story (or what their intern feels), could be the very factor that reels a publisher in. But throughout the summer, I learned to stop questioning myself and trust my literary-inclin
ed gut. And nothing felt better than seeing the agent forward on my responses to talented authors and having them, gasp, actually agree with my suggestions.
Along with catalyzing the editorial process, the busy agent also must “sell” an author’s work once it’s perfected and ready-to-go. Another task involved crafting compelling, catchy submission letters to editors, in part resembling the teaser description you’d find on a book’s back cover.
And then there’s the rejection letters. Although significantly shorter, finding the least-painful way to reject someone’s heart-felt work was extremely difficult. As a writer myself, so personally invested in my own work, I couldn’t help but feel I was crushing dreams on the other side of the creative process. But what made it well worth it were the successful author clients, the ones who managed to claw through the slush piles, impress a picky panel of editors, and thrust their undiscovered gems into the public light. And the feeling of telling an author that his/her story has been loved by a big-name publishing house, and was en-route to being published? Pretty fantastic.
