Category Archives: Jane

March 19, 2012   Jane   e-books, future of publishing, Jane, nonfiction, opinion  
12

The demise of physical copies of reference books

I knew this day would come and am actually surprised it didn’t arrive sooner.  On Thursday it was announced that there would be no more copies of the physical edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica.

Many years ago, before I became a literary agent, I was the publisher of The World Almanac.  During the years I was there its circulation increased from a million copies a year to two million copies a year.  Indeed, my colleagues thought the sky was the limit, but hearing the initial stirrings about this strange phenomenon “the Internet” I had a feeling things were going to change.

Change is exciting; in this case though, it is also kind of sad. As a kid, I remember always being told to refer to the encyclopedia or the dictionary or the thesaurus when I needed to know something.  Now, at least for the latter two, I always go online.  And the time has finally arrived that if I want to use an encyclopedia, I will use the Internet as well.

Soon there will cease to be printed copies of the phone book that will (or has that happened already?) and then, what’s next?

Last week over dinner with a client and old friend, she asked me if I thought there would come a time when physical copies of books wouldn’t exist.  I replied that I certainly didn’t think so; but for reference books of any kind, I do believe that end is upon us.

What do you think?

March 06, 2012   Jane   advice, conferences, Jane, opinion  
11

The value of the writers conference

Truth be told, I hadn’t been to a writers conference in years.  I am often asked, but I usually suggest that our other agents should attend in my place.  I remember years ago at a conference in Seattle, one of the other (inexperienced) agents asking me why I was there – suggesting that because I had a full client roster I shouldn’t be looking for new ones when neophyte agents needed the exposure.

But when I was invited to attend last weekend’s ANWA Writers Conference, I remembered how much I could get out of the experience.

Of course, we agents all like to think that our presence at these meetings provides useful information to the participants.  And there is always the possibility that one of the attending writers might even find representation for their work.

But I found that I, too, came away with so much from the experience:

First, I got away from my office and that always gives me perspective.

Second, I met some really wonderful and interesting people:  a lawyer who traveled to numerous third world countries to represent clients; a woman who is a men’s athletic coach; a “story teller” (she was amazing — I didn’t know that there are professional story tellers — people who attend events and, as a kind of performance, tell stories).

Third, I learned about what other agents not in New York are thinking and how they do business and about some smaller publishers on the West Coast.

And finally, I am very hopeful that as a result of my being there, and talking with so many people, I will find some exciting new material.  Over the years I have indeed found some wonderful new clients at these events and, as a curious person, I am always looking.

I am so grateful to be given the opportunity to share my years of experience with others; I enjoy public speaking and I enjoy talking one on one about book ideas.  So, hopefully I will not absentmindedly pass along future invitations to conferences when I feel I can both make an important contribution and benefit from participating.

I would love to hear what your writers conference experiences have been like.

February 21, 2012   Jane   Brenna, changes at DGLM, Jane, What's New at DGLM  
1

Welcome, Brenna Barr!

It is always a pleasure to welcome someone new into our company.  Today, Brenna Barr is joining us as our shiny, brand new royalties manager.  In time, we are hopeful that she will build her own list of authors as well.

Brenna graduated from Northeastern University and has financial, marketing and some agenting experience.  We are very excited to have her with us.

I hope you all will join me in welcoming Brenna to the Dystel & Goderich family.

February 06, 2012   Jane   advice, Jane, opinion, writing  
22

The lost art of communicating

This last week, I found myself having to evaluate entries for a fellowship in publishing.  There were five of them from students in a prestigious master’s program at a well known university.  Sadly, I was shocked not only at the lack of creativity exhibited in these entries but (more importantly) by the level of the writing.

Over the last several years, I have noticed that even young people who have PhD degrees have writing skills that are poor and ineffective.  It seems that communicating clearly and effectively has become a lost art.

It is one thing to write “pretty” sentences in a novel, for example, but I am discovering today that good technical business writing is extremely hard to find.  We need to do better; and the people I am talking about are all intelligent.

I wonder why this is happening.  One of my dear publishing friends has suggested it’s due to the internet, and I suspect that has something to do with it, of course.

But I think there is something else — a lack of focus on the actual process of communicating by the written word.  Young people especially, I think, have to be aware of what they are doing in this regard and how they are doing it.  With so much competition for jobs today, their writing skills are going to become an increasingly important factor in the kind of job and maybe ultimate career they can have.

I would love to hear what you think about all of this — whether you have noticed what I have, why it is happening increasingly now, and what can be done about it.

January 23, 2012   Jane   about us, Jane, what we're looking for  
6

The more things change…

It’s the beginning of a new year and I thought that I would look back to when I began as an agent in 1986 to see what I was representing and selling then compared to where my interests and successes are today.  It has been fun to look back.

When I started out, practical non-fiction – self-help – was all the rage and I certainly represented my fair share of books in that category.  Soon, I began to represent cookbooks and one author spoke to another who recommended me to another and another and before I knew it I had a fairly large cookbook list.

Then there were the true crime titles.  Again, I picked up a lot of writers who were interested in this category (one that sold very well for years and years).  Initially, these books were published in hardcover, followed by paperback editions, but after a number of years, they were only published as original mass market paperbacks.

I did some business books, both practical and narrative non-fiction along with some biographies.  I slowly started adding some fiction, genre and non-genre.

All of this is vastly different today, both because the marketplace has changed enormously – current reading tastes are very different than they were over twenty years ago – and because my tastes in what I want to represent have changed as well.

Looking at what I have sold in the last couple of years I find:

Fiction:  Women’s fiction, thrillers, mystery, romance – historical and contemporary —  fantasy, including urban fantasy and historical fantasy, literary fiction, and some horror.

I am also representing many more memoirs than I have in the past.

A constant on my list, then and now, is narrative non-fiction by award-winning journalists. This has always been something I have been interested in and over the years I have represented a number of Pulitzer Prize winning authors.

And, yes, though I am handling far fewer cookbooks, I still am representing some of my favorite authors in the food world.  I am still handling true crime as well (although it seems the distribution system for true crime has totally collapsed making it harder and harder to sell into this category).

In short, it is very interesting to look back and see how my interests have changed as reading tastes have changed.  And it is exciting to look forward as well.  What are you reading now that you didn’t read 10 or 20 years ago?  How have your tastes changed?

January 09, 2012   Jane   about us, advice, Jane, social networking, Twitter  
15

@jdystel

Happy New Year everyone!

So, after resisting the urge to join Twitter, I just read this piece in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review written  by Anne Trubek, and I decided it was absolutely time for me to get on board.

Quite frankly, I haven’t been certain that being a part of this community would be useful and, considering that all we have is time, I am very aware of how I use mine.  But Trubek’s piece makes some very good points about being isolated from those we really should be communicating with and so I am learning.  It is going to take a while, but I actually think this could be even more fun than Facebook.

I would love to hear what benefits you get from being on Twitter. Any and all opinions are welcome as I am at the beginning of my learning curve and as with everything I do, I would really like to get it right.

December 19, 2011   Jane   Jane, lists, reading  
8

Twelve months of reading

I am a big Wall Street Journal reader and in the “Review” section of  this weekend’s paper, there are several pages with different lists of “the best books of the year.”  Of course we have all been reading these year-end lists for weeks now. Many of them are repetitious; some are enlightening.

Still, I am confused as to what I should read when I go on vacation later this week.  I am so immersed in the manuscripts and proposals that I review for work throughout the year that when it comes to what I might enjoy for pleasure, I am often stymied.

And, so I thought I would ask you guys what your favorite books were this year and why.  Perhaps you can help me put together my reading list for the next couple of weeks.

December 12, 2011   Jane   advice, future of publishing, Jane, opinion, optimism  
8

Moving forward positively

I spend almost every weekday lunch with an editor or a publisher talking about, among other things, our business; what has been happening and where it is going.  Sadly, most of the time these days, my lunch companions are bemoaning the state of things.  Fewer books are being published, editors are losing their jobs, and advances are going down.

Perhaps I am being a Pollyanna, but I don’t see the future as anything but positive for writers.  Of course it can be more challenging to sell a book these days – as I have stated in this blog more than once, publishers appear to care more about platform and credentials than they do about the actual contents of the proposals and manuscripts they are considering.  But there are still those out there who do care about the writing and, even if the particular material presented to them isn’t quite right, many do want to help the author develop a book that will work.

What’s most exciting to me though, is the developing world of ebooks and online publishing.  There are now so many more possibilities for unpublished and even traditionally published authors.

We at DGLM had a very interesting meeting last week with some publishing executives from Amazon who are launching a large number of publishing initiatives.  It has been such a long time since there has been really original thinking in our business and I, for one, am hugely encouraged by what I heard.

And then, of course, there is the Wild West world of online publishing.  Last Friday, Alexandra Alter wrote this article in The Wall Street Journal about one woman’s success in this area. Though Darcie Chan’s experience is unusual and very few will be able to duplicate it, the piece does point out that there are so many new possibilities available to writers who have previously been turned down by publishers.  This also opens the door to those who never really aspired to be published by a traditional publisher as well as to those whose books are out of print and who want to breathe new life into them.

The DGLM online publishing initiative is something I am very excited about building – just as I have helped to build our agency over the last twenty-five years.  It would be wonderful if my colleagues on the publishing side, rather than seeing the negatives in today’s publishing landscape, looked forward to the future with excitement and a willingness to change.

As I have said all along, digital publishing has increased reading and book buying.  Looking into the future, we all need to help to build that world so its foundations are strong and it can offer more possibilities to more writers and readers. As always, I am eager to hear your thoughts and comments about this.

December 05, 2011   Jane   authors, Jane, opinion, selling  
30

Why not an older novelist?

Several months ago, I submitted a new novel by one of my bestselling clients to a house that hadn’t previously published him and to an editor who was a great fan of his.  The editor loved the novel – he should have, it is brilliant – but when he presented it to his colleagues, they turned it down.  A couple of weeks later, I had lunch with one of this editor’s co-workers who told me the real reason the novel was turned down was that my client was too old.  I was absolutely dumbfounded.

Then I read this piece in Publishers Weekly and I realized that in this day and age, when it’s all about youth, older authors are sometimes discriminated against simply because of age.

How incredibly stupid is that?  These writers have not only honed their skills over many years, they also have so much more life experience to draw upon in their writing.  Older novelists, I find, have the skill and patience to create stories with depth and well drawn characters.  While there are many brilliant young novelists, we should not discount the contributions of our literary “elder statesmen and –women.”

So I wonder, what you think about all of this?  Have you read any interesting well written fiction lately by someone who is, say, over fifty or sixty?

Oh, and about that client of mine – the one I spoke about at the beginning of this blog?  I sold his novel to a much better publisher than the one who had claimed he was too old. We have great expectations that the novel is going to be a huge success.

November 28, 2011   Jane   fun, Jane, reading  
8

It’s not what you read but where you read

Over the weekend, in between wandering through the Motown Museum in Detroit and watching the fantastic Michigan Wolverines beat Ohio State for the first time in eight years, I read this piece in the Wall Street Journal.  It made me think that we spend a lot of time talking about what we are reading in terms of subject matter and what we are reading on (i.e., Kindles, tablets, phones, and other electronic devices or actual physical books) but we don’t spend a lot of time, though, thinking about where we like to be when we read for pleasure.

For example, I work every night in my home office, editing proposals, answering e-mails, reading query letters.  But when I want to read a book for pleasure I immediately gravitate to a big comfortable chair in my living room where I can curl up and really enjoy the whole experience of reading.  Oftentimes, one or both of my dogs will join me which makes the experience all the more cozy.  I actually find that I cannot read for pleasure anywhere else in my house (except perhaps in bed right before I go to sleep).

Then, of course, there is the beach where we try to go for vacation at least once a year—I can sit under an umbrella and read on the beach for hours at a time.  In fact, I’ll be on a beach with a good book in just a few weeks when we close our offices for the holidays.

It seems that I’m not the only one thinking about reading comfort zones (check this out!) so tell me, where’s your favorite place to read?

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