Category Archives: Lauren

January 28, 2011   Lauren   about us, Lauren, selling, What's New at DGLM  
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What’s new at DGLM, you ask?

Sometimes, dear readers, we’re asked what’s going on around these parts beyond the precious gems we post here on the blog.  Of course, our days are primarily filled with emails and phone calls and meetings and convening by the copier to ask someone else to tell us if we’re actually idiots or some proposed contract language genuinely makes no sense.  That’s all well and good, but it’s not much fun to report.  However, to give you all a peek into what’s going on here, we thought we’d share a news update with you about some projects we’ve been selling.  (One caveat: sometimes we don’t announce deals right away for specific reasons, so this isn’t a comprehensive report!)

Stacey kicked off the year’s sales with Dr. Larry Rosen’s iDisorder, which will focus on how the overuse of technology is making us sick.  Laurie Harting at Palgrave bought this book by the author of Rewired, who is an expert on the psychology of technology.

In the narrative nonfiction Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America, which Jim sold to Mitch Horowitz at Tarcher, Linda Godfrey investigates reports of bipedal wolfmen that have appeared throughout the country over the past 70 years.

Then Jane sold veteran journalist John Coston’s Homestretch to Jackie Wehmuller of Johns Hopkins University Press.  This narrative nonfiction book will be the untold story of a fundamental transformation that is taking place in long-term care models for America’s senior citizens.

Justin Schwartz at Wiley bought Shauna James and Daniel Ahern’s next book from Stacey:  Gluten-Free Girl Everday is the second cookbook from the couple and will focus on more mainstream and simple, yet delicious and flavorful, gluten-free recipes.

Jim sold Leah Hultenschmidt at Sourcebooks The Whole Warm World, which is the YA follow-up to Geoff Herbach’s forthcoming Stupid Fast, following younger brother Andrew Reinstein’s efforts to get to the bottom of family mysteries.

From Michael, Emily Easton at Walker Books for Young Readers bought Suzanne Selfors’ The Milkmaid, a charming YA fantasy novel about an outcast girl who can magically turn milk into chocolate (which is but a myth in her world), the boy who loves her, the monarchy that tries to use her, and how she uses her talents and wits to not only improve her own life, but the world.

In subrights, Brodi Ashton’s Everneath trilogy went to Oetinger in Germany at auction.  Also in Germany, Chicken House bought German rights to James Dashner’s The Scorch Trials.  Audible picked up audio rights to Victoria Laurie’s forthcoming Vision Impossible, the ninth book in the Psychic Eye mysteries.  Richelle Mead’s Taiwanese publisher, King-In, bought the second half of the Vampire Academy series (Blood Promise, Spirit Bound, and Last Sacrifice), the last of which also found a home in Turkey with Artemis, who published the first five books in 2010.  In the Czech Republic, Alpress picked up David Morrell’s latest thriller, The Naked Edge.  Gallmeister in France bought his classic First Blood, which introduced the world to Rambo, and Albatros in Poland bought The Brotherhood of the Rose and The Fraternity of the Stone.

So that’s a bit of a window on what’s happened in our world in January, other than copious amounts of snow.  What happened in yours?

January 21, 2011   Lauren   fun, Lauren, reading  
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Weathering the storm

There’s something about snowy weather (like what’s happening right outside my window now) that makes me long nostalgically for an experience I’m not sure I’ve actually ever had*:  curled up near a fireplace, sipping hot whiskey, and reading some engrossing and compelling tome or another, possibly some captivating narrative nonfiction.  Unfortunately, much as this winter’s slushy delights have given me more than my fair share of this desire, there really are few fireplaces to be had around these parts.  Fortunately, books and whiskey abound.

Though I’ve never really thought about it before, for me, the act of reading is one that feels really tied into the weather.  Hot weather makes me want to bike to the park to relax in the grass with something fun—my NYC equivalent of hanging out on the beach with a trashy novel is relaxing in Prospect Park with some clever but largely frivolous navel gazer by the “next big thing” on the scene.  When it’s pouring rain, I want to be curled up on the couch, in a room that’s not too brightly lit (which my eyes probably aren’t thanking me for!), close enough to hear the rain hitting the window, with something moody and a little dark and maybe historical.  For a cool but sunny spring day, I’d like something bright and youthful and a lively but quiet enough outdoor place to read it.  Maybe a childhood classic—right around Easter, when it starts to stay brighter for longer and my walk home from the subway is accompanied by children playing out doors, I start to feel an intense longing for childhood.

Anyone else?  Like me, do you like to match your reading material to what’s going on outdoors, or do you dig for stories set in sultry, exotic climes to warm yourself up when it starts to get brisk?  Maybe see what Zhivago or Shackleton are up to when the heat gets a little too oppressive in August?

*Surely there’s a German word for that?

January 14, 2011   Lauren   favorites, fun, Lauren, opinion, reading  
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Permanent ink

According to the Guardian, publisher Black Ocean is giving a lifetime subscription to the books they publish to anyone who gets a tattoo inspired by one of them.  I’m too straitlaced for tattoos in general, but the idea at least of literary tattoos pleases me.  Unlike, say, a tattoo of a cartoon character (why do people do that?) or the name of a person you love (and better hope you love forever, because not everyone’s going to be able to pull off a “wino forever” tattoo).  By the time you’re of likely tattooing age, you’ve probably got some serious literary passions.  And it’s a testament to the permanence of certain literary enthusiasms in our lives that this Christmas saw three members of my family exchanging the latest in a series they’d all started reading back in the 70s (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant).

I know that at least some DGLM clients have inspired tattooing among their fans (Jacqueline Carey and Richelle Mead in particular spring to mind), and it’s something that I can get behind, even if I can’t imagine getting one myself.  But I still like to think about what literary tattoo I might get, if I woke up one day the sort of person who’d want a tattoo.  The problem is most of my favorites don’t lend themselves well to such things.  Looking back at my “great books” list from August 2009, not one of them seems to lend itself to tattooing—Mrs Dalloway’s flowers?  The light from Gatsby?  A 1984 tattoo probably actually makes sense, but I think that might send a more complicated message than “Wasn’t George Orwell great?”  If I look back to childhood for something that’s of lasting significance (so I’d know I wouldn’t hate it in a week), I’m just not sure a Laura Ingalls Wilder bonnet is something I’m going to ask someone to ink onto my flesh and something Dr. Seuss is probably just going to look like a bad idea I had while drunk.  So maybe it’s for the best that I’m not the tattoo type.

What about you?  Do any of you have literary tattoos?  If you could get any literary reference tattoo, what would it be?

January 10, 2011   DG&B   about us, advice, calendar, changes at DGLM, conferences, DGLM Recommends, Facebook, feedback, fun, Jane, Jessica, Jim, John, Lauren, Michael, Miriam, opinion, our blog, our clients, our website, Rachel S., Stacey, Stephanie, technical help, Twitter, what we're looking for, What's New at DGLM  
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Welcome to the new DGLM blog and website!

Welcome to our shiny new home, blog readers!  For the new year, we bring you a new DGLM site, a merger of our website and blog.  Thanks to everyone who made suggestions a couple months ago on features and tech questions—where possible we’ve incorporated your feedback, and other things we’re keeping in mind in case we can implement them in future.

We’ll be blogging as usual over here at www.dystel.com now instead of at Blogger, and there are also some other things for you to explore over to the right (unless you’re not currently reading this on the site itself, in which case you might want to just poke your head in and take a look!).  You might be interested in learning more about us and our clients.  If you’re an author looking for representation, perhaps you’ll want to peruse our FAQ, Submission Requirements, Who We Are and What We’re Looking For, and Nonfiction Proposal Guidelines.  Need something new to read?  Check out our Staff Recommendations, Recent and Forthcoming Titles, and What We’re Reading in the column on the right. Maybe you want to know where we’ll be?  We’ve got a calendar with our upcoming conferences and events in that sidebar as well!  Of course, if you’d like, please feel free to use the links over there to Subscribe, Follow, or Like us and share our site with others!  The new blog should start feeding into our Twitter and Facebook accounts today, so if you’re already following us there, you don’t need to do anything.  If you’re reading us in a blog reader, please subscribe to the new RSS feed.

Make yourselves at home!

As always, we want to hear from you!  What do you think of the new digs?  Any suggestions for improvement?  Glitches we may not have caught?  (We hope not, but let us know if so!)  New features that you’d like us to consider?  We can’t always implement everything recommended to us, but we’re always open to hearing your ideas.

December 20, 2010   DG&B   advice, fun, Lauren, queries, what we're looking for  
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Three tiny kids and a guy

by Lauren

Looking up some contact information in our database, I was reminded of my very favorite thing about it: small notes, devoid of context, that give a strange glimpse into our conversations with editors.  The stand out stars of the “notes” section of our contacts are surely that one editor has “three tiny kids” and another (whose name is not one you’d come across often) “is a GUY!”  I like to imagine the shock and surprise of the assistant who’d picked up the phone to discover a deep, masculine voice attached to a name he or she had previously assumed belonged to a woman.  (I also am not entirely certain that one wasn’t me, back when I was Jane’s assistant an alarmingly high number of years ago.)  I also imagine the kindly editor who sat across from one of my colleagues at a lunch meeting and showed off pictures of her miniature children, perhaps posed next to objects of regular stature for comparison purposes.  That note has been in there long enough that the tiny kids are probably not so tiny any more.

Most of the notes, though, are actually quite useful—such and such a person is obsessed with dogs or used to be a ballet dancer or absolutely cannot stand misery memoirs. When we submit our projects, we’re working not only on the parameters of a publisher’s and editor’s list and our personal interactions with them, but with the company’s collective knowledge of what makes them tick and gets them excited. Excitement is the huge intangible of the publishing process. And when we just happen to have a book about dogs or dance or misery, we know where to go—or where not to.

For authors looking for agents, I suspect the best resources out there are the blogs and websites and Twitter feeds and what have you of the agents themselves.  We do suffer sometimes from too many queries quoting our own bios back to us, sending us things that are far off base because they might have a common keyword.  I think all the agents who’ve been here a while have at one point or another edited a reference out of our descriptions of ourselves or our lists, because we found it led too many people down the wrong path.  But more often than not, these little factoids about us and our interests point people the right way.  While we do share queries amongst ourselves and know each other’s taste well, it’s always nice to look at a batch of newly arrived queries and see that several of them are on a subject that we’re already really enthusiastic about—it doesn’t guarantee success, of course, but a book on a subject that usually bores us has to be that much more amazing to even catch our eye.  Much as agents train themselves to see the difference between “I like this” and “this is good” (and “I don’t like this” and “this is bad”), we’re still human, and with all the reading at night or on the weekends, it’s a real pleasure to come across the projects that we’d happily buy off the shelves if they had nothing to do with us.

So when you’re querying us, if it’s because an off-hand reference in one of our blog entries made you realize we just might be the right advocate for your book, please do let us know!  It always helps us to know why you wanted us to read your work.

December 10, 2010   DG&B   author events, contest, favorites, fun, Lauren, reading, short stories  
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Short stories and glory

by Lauren

Twice this week, I spent my evenings at Symphony Space, soaking in culture at some great literary events. On Monday, I was lucky enough to see Emma Donoghue for the second time—rather than doing a reading, this time she was discussing the fabulous Room with Michael Cunningham. Then on Wednesday, Jim and I went to the Selected Shorts program’s evening with Colum McCann, who I’ve also had the privilege of seeing before. If you feel about Let the Great World Spin and McCann’s work in general as we do, you’ll be happy to hear that the series is actually recorded for radio broadcast, so you can listen to it here. On this particular night, Colum McCann hosted Amy Ryan reading his story “Everything in This Country Must” (from the collection of the same name that first introduced me to one of my favorite writers!), Mary-Louise Parker reading “(She Owns) Every Thing” by Anne Enright, and Michael Cerveris reading Nathan Englander’s “Free Fruit for War Widows.” It was a phenomenal performance all around, and I think I’ll be attending far more of these events in the future. As Jim said, Mary-Louise Parker should read everything.

Tucked into the program I found a flyer for the Selected Shorts Writing Contest, which I thought might be right for some of you. The 2011 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize with guest judge Jennifer Egan will result in a $1000 prize for the winner, whose story will be read as part of a Selected Shorts performance and recorded for possible broadcast. Plus Jennifer Egan saying you’re worthy is no small thing in itself. The deadline is March 1st, and you can read the rules here. Anyone planning to submit? If so, good luck!

December 03, 2010   DG&B   about us, advice, Lauren, what we're looking for  
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You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers

by Lauren

Recently, we’ve been asked a number of related questions about aspects of the query process, so I thought I’d try to tackle them here to give prospective clients a helping hand. 

  • Which agent should I query for my work?

There are a fair number of us here and even if you’re reading the blog, it can be tough to figure out just which of us might be the right agent for you.  On our website, each agent has a bio listing our areas of interest, and that’s a very good place to start.  Beyond that, most books have an acknowledgments section that will tell you who represented them.  If you feel your book would sit comfortably alongside others on the shelf (and you should know which those are before you query anyway), try the agents who represented them.  And if you’re querying us because you think your work would appeal to the same readers as something on our list does, let us know in the query!

  • What if I have a few options and the person I select doesn’t bite?  Should I query another agent at the agency for that project?

There’s overlap in categories and finer points of taste that are hard to suss out if you don’t know us well.  Fortunately, we do know each other’s taste very well.  It’s not unusual for us to pass a query along to a colleague because we feel they’d be a better fit.  Even after we’ve read a partial or manuscript, we regularly share with our colleagues here to get another opinion or see if it might be up their alley.  That does mean a rejection from an agent here is a rejection from the agency, and you shouldn’t try us all in turn.  You especially shouldn’t try us simultaneously.  We won’t compete internally, and no one likes to spend their time reading something only to find that another of our colleagues is already pursuing it. 

  • What if you’ve already rejected my manuscript, but I’ve thoroughly revised it?

First, I’d caution you to be honest about how thorough your revisions are.  If you’ve genuinely made it substantially different (and, one hopes, better) then we don’t at all mind if you come back to us and offer it again.  Just be up front about it when you do, and if we think that a re-read might be to our and your benefit, we’ll be happy to do so.  No one knows better than us how much difference revision can make! 

  • If you turn me down, can you give me editorial feedback?

If we haven’t offered it ourselves in the rejection, no.  There are times when we feel we have constructive feedback to give and in those cases we do provide it.  We might say that we don’t think it works, and we think we know why.  We might say that we think there are key issues that if revised might make the book work—and if we feel strongly about that, we might ask you to consider resubmitting to us if you make those changes.  If we don’t offer editorial feedback in our response, it’s because we don’t have it to offer.  Either we have no vision for what’s wrong and needs fixing, or we don’t feel confident that we have the right grasp on the project or enough enthusiasm for it to point you in the right direction.  It’s too subjective for us to make pronouncements on the problems with everything that doesn’t work for us, and we could easily lead you astray and send you off working on edits that will hinder rather than help your chances of finding the agent who does get what you’re doing.

  • If you turn me down, can you give me a recommendation to another agent?

The nature of the business allows us to know what editors are looking for much more than what other agents seek.  As such, we can’t offer recommendations for agents outside the agency.

I hope this is helpful!  Keep in mind that not all agents feel the same way about all things, but these general guidelines apply to the way we work here at DGLM.  It pays to do your research on the agents you’re targeting, rather than assuming that they will feel the same way on the questions you might have.

November 19, 2010   DG&B   about us, advice, feedback, fun, Lauren, opinion, our blog  
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What do you want?

by Lauren

Thanks to everyone who joined Jim yesterday for our first DGLM blog chat! If you missed it, check out the entry from yesterday to replay it and read the answers to all the great questions he got. Lots of good query information in there, especially. We’re going to be doing more of these, so if you have any suggestions for topics, please let us know in the comments!

More excitement that’s coming your way, dear blog readers, is a revamp and relaunch of our blog and website. Primarily we’re going to be combining the two into a single site, but we’d love to add some interesting and helpful new features in the process. That’s where you fine folks come in. What would you like to see? We’ve gotten some fantastic tips from all of you in the past, and we’d love to hear what more we could do that you’d find useful. As much as possible, we’d love to work the things that you want into our design!

Once the blog is moved, we’re also going to look to better integrate our blog and Facebook page (Related: do you like us, but not yet “like” us? If so, follow us here!), so if anyone has any thoughts or tips on that, we’d love to hear them.

Part of the revamp means a move to WordPress, because we wanted to be able to host our website and blog as one. I know we had some readers who hoped we’d stay on Blogger when we first suggested it (and that’s why we didn’t move then just to get more bells & whistles) so I’m wondering what we can do to make the transition easy. I suspect most of you can just as easily follow us on WordPress, but I think the problem will come for Google devotees who don’t use a Google Reader. Have things changed on this front in the last year? Anyone know of a way we can keep things simple for the Blogger fans?

Let us know your thoughts below!

And on a final note, with Thanksgiving coming up next week, it’s a perfect time to say thanks to all of you for making our first year of blogging in earnest such a fun one! We’re so grateful for all the feedback we’ve gotten: from technical help, to reading suggestions, to your thoughts on the issues of the day. Thanks to you all for joining the conversation and for forming a little community for us to take part in! It’s not always easy to find time or a subject, but you do make it a pleasure!

November 12, 2010   DG&B   fun, Lauren, writing  
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The fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages

by Lauren

Courtesy of our beloved former intern Bridget, I bring you this list of “awesomely untranslatable words from around the world.”  Some I’ve heard of (litost, from the Czech, meaning roughly “a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery”), one I’ve used (schadenfreude, naturally), and others I never knew I needed but definitely do (tartle, “the act of hestitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name,” which comes courtesy of the Scots, a linguistically ingenious people who also bring us “to haver,” from that one line in The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” that no one understands).

It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I think ultimately I have to go with torschlusspanik, the word that roughly means the title of this blog post.  The words people use say a great deal about them in a broad sense–about what a culture values enough to discuss or does not–but surely it isn’t merely the Germans who experience torschlusspanik.  I find myself lamenting of late that even if I woke up tomorrow as an extraordinary visionary genius, I’m no longer young enough to be a wunderkind (there’s those Germans again).  As a teenager, I was sad to discover that I could never be a prodigy at anything, because my parents hadn’t set me on a path to remarkability while I was still in diapers. Torschlusspanik is a sentiment close to my heart.

Which sentiments do you find you could really use a word for that doesn’t seem to exist?  Is there a word for being thoroughly disappointed in a thing despite conscious awareness that it’s not in the least worth being upset about?  I feel like that would come in handy. 

November 05, 2010   DG&B   advice, fun, Lauren, technical help  
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The sharpest tool in the shed

by Lauren

I’ve had technology on the brain this week.  Recently, our server failed us in catastrophic fashion (apparently Outlook doesn’t like it when you save all your emails forever and ever just in case you need information later–who knew?), and as the company’s liaison to our IT company, it’s been my good fortune to orchestrate its replacement and the lengthy process of moving from one to the other.  On top of the system upgrade, I’ve been working on a couple new things for the blog (stay tuned for fun changes coming up!), so I’ve been thinking a lot about how dependent we are on technology and how tough it can be to figure out what’s new and worth investigating.

Finding a new tool can change everything.  My mind was blown a couple years back when I found out that you could change existing text from ALL CAPS to various other options in MS Word with the press of two buttons: Shift+F3.  And I can’t imagine how I managed to regularly read any newspapers or magazines or blogs before I found Instapaper and Feedly.

So I’m wondering, as writers or editors or readers, what technological tools do you find that you couldn’t live without?  Have you found, say, a trick in a common program that changed your life?  Or an app that makes you more productive?  What websites make your social networking efforts easier to manage?  Any techniques to make editing easier?  Let us all know below–who knows how many hours you might save of us!

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