Category Archives: Lauren

January 07, 2010   DG&B   about us, fun, interns, Jane, Jim, Lauren, Michael, Miriam, optimism, Stacey, subsidiary rights, why we are agents  
11

Why I Am an Agent (Michael)

by Michael

I figure it’s my turn to explain why it is I do what I do, as Jane, Jim, Lauren, Chasya, and Rachel have—if only to satisfy the clients who keep asking when I’d do one of these!

It all started at the end of the last decade, December of 1999. It was my senior year, and I really needed a job. I had no idea what to do, and was thinking of finding something in retail, as I love a good discount. But my friend Jim McCarthy told me that the literary agency where he was interning was looking for another paid intern. Now, Jim had told me what he was doing, but frankly I never quite understood. These people were agents for authors? Why did authors need agents? And isn’t publishing for rich kids who want a hobby career? Though I didn’t think it was the job or industry for me, I figured it couldn’t hurt to go in and interview.

Like Jim, I was interviewed by Stacey Glick. If you talk to her, she’ll tell you that I had blue hair at the time. This is not true. I had bright, bleached-blond hair. The blue hair came later. (And the blue dye largely ran out of my hair when I had to make a delivery to one of our most important clients in the pouring rain that summer.) I believe she hired me on the spot, and I started working Friday of the same week.
I had no idea what I was doing in the beginning. I did what people requested, paid lots of attention, and started asking questions. Slowly, but surely, I came to be very interested and involved in what was going on at the agency. I’d loved books growing up, but I’d not been the same kind of reader in college. It was great to get back to reading things that were fresh, new and contemporary. And, as I looked around, I liked what I saw: a group of smart, creative, engaged, interesting people helping authors manage their careers. Just a few short months later, I was hooked—on publishing, agenting, and DGLM. When Jane and Miriam offered me a job in September of that year, I was honored, and I jumped at the chance.

When I started full-time, I was doing much of what I did as an intern, along with managing royalties and helping Jane with submissions. But quickly, I took on new responsibilities. I began assisting the rights director, learning the ins and outs of the foreign and domestic rights markets. When she left the agency a few years later, I took over the agency’s rights, eventually attending the London Book Fair with Jane and selling rights around the world. At the same time, I was building a list of my own, something Jane encouraged me to do within my first year at the agency. I started representing children’s books at Jane’s suggestion, something I was unsure of at the time(!). But quickly I found that I had a passion for middle grade and YA books, and my career as an agent really took off then. Several years ago now, I became a full agent, and the talented Lauren Abramo took over as our rights director, freeing me up to focus on my own projects.
Last year I was very excited to be promoted to vice president at the agency, and just as pleased this past December when I moved to Los Angeles to open a West Coast office for DGLM. I tell people all the time—I’d never have had these opportunities at any other agency or in any other job, and I’m forever grateful to Jane for that.

Our industry is going through big, drastic, challenging changes, and I’m glad that Jane, Miriam, the rest of the DGLM staff and I are working together to attack them head-on. My ten-year journey with the agency has been full of amazing experiences and opportunities, and I am just as enthusiastic about the ten years to come.

January 04, 2010   DG&B   advice, Lauren, publishers, queries, selling, submissions, what we're looking for  
9

Questions to ask yourself

by Lauren

Just came across this really handy item that SCBWI’s Kathy Temean posted on her blog: Top Ten Questions Dutton Editors Ask Themselves When Looking At A Manuscript.  Very useful for all writers, especially novelists, whichever market they write for and whether or not Dutton would be interested.  I recommend you consider these points about your own manuscript before you share it, because most of these are questions that’ll be asked down the line throughout the publishing process, in many cases all the way up to readers buying your book.

(via Janet Reid)

December 18, 2009   DG&B   fun, Lauren, music, reading  
9

Oasis, Alanis, Anne Rice, and Gilbert Grape

by Lauren

What do those four things have in common, other than being convenient markers of my adolescence?  I used to be unable to hear Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill or Oasis’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? without being transported to Anne Rice’s Lousiana or the Iowa of Peter Hedges. This GalleyCat post on music to write by made me think about the ways in which I experience music and reading together.  As a person who tends to listen to the same album incessantly, not switching up till I never want to hear it ever again, there have sometimes been albums intrinsically tied to a novel I was reading–though apparently the effect lessens over time, because I now can’t recall which CD above went with which book.  Every time I hear Brandi Carlile, it calls to mind a novel by a client that I devoured in a couple sittings with The Story on repeat in the background.  (I also experience this with apartments:  Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head = my senior year in Ditmas/Flatbush; John Mayer’s Room for Squares is two apartments later, on the Upper East Side.  My musical taste = ever so slightly embarassing.)

I’ve always loved the power that music has to do this–feeling reinserted into the world of a beloved novel can sometimes be like coming home.

I recently discovered a new version of this phenomenon: my client, Michael Gavaghen had been having a bit of trouble diving back into his novel to do the edits he and I had discussed.  When he’d first worked on the novel, he’d been listening to a lot of blues music, and since then had shifted his listening habits.  In fact, he’d been working on another novel as well.  When it came time to revisit the first novel, he had trouble re-immersing himself in that world.  But as soon as he put back on the blues, he recaptured the rhythm and voice of the novel.  Handy trick!

Does anyone else experience this, either as a writer or a reader?  And does anyone actually have a strong sense memory from simply reading about music rather than hearing it?

December 11, 2009   DG&B   book to film, Lauren, Rachel  
5

The age old debate on adaptation

by Rachel

Lauren touched on the subject of film adaptations in her post-Oscars blog entry, but with The Lovely Bones opening in theatres this weekend, and with films such as Alice In Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes also coming to us on the big screen, I thought I’d throw in my two cents on the ongoing book vs. film adaptation debate.

Today’s NY Times review of The Lovely Bones was mixed. A.O. Scott writes that while Alice Sebold’s novel showed audacity and effective art, the film shows less audacity and too much art. The film, he says, “skitters and lurches from set piece to the next” and never achieves the “delicate emotional coherence that would bring the story alive.” He then goes on to say that one of the problems with the film is that there are hard decisions to be made when trying to put Sebold’s work into a motion picture: What should be highlighted? What should be left out?

I’d like to know how filmmakers make such decisions. Obviously you can’t transfer every minute detail from a book to the screen–an audience doesn’t really want to stick around for more than a couple of hours to catch every last event that occurred in a book, but by having to be so selective in film adaptations, are we missing out on details that only reading books can bring us?

The film Adaptation comes to mind when I think about the great book vs. film adaptation debate. What was meant to be a film adaptation of Susan Orlean’s The Orchard Thief, turned into a film about how to adapt a book into a screenplay–better yet, I think the film poses the question of whether or not it’s possible for a book to be adapted for film at all. The movie certainly makes you think whether or not this is possible. Sure, Adaptation is a wonderful film, but it’s a film about a man having writer’s block while trying to adapt the book to the big screen.

So, I wonder, are there some books that just can’t be made into films? Or, do you believe films ‘give life’ to books?

December 11, 2009   DG&B   e-books, future of publishing, Lauren, Miriam, opinion, publishers  
1

Power, not sales

by Lauren

Adding to the discussion of e-book pricing earlier this week, the always insightful Mike Shatzkin of The IdeaLogical Blog rethinks the controversy and comes to the conclusion that the move to delay e-books is not about fear of cannibalizing hardcover sales (which, as Miriam argued, does not sound like an effective strategy) but about wresting control of the future of e-books from Amazon. Publishers cannot collude on e-book pricing legally, and thus far Amazon has been in charge of the whole shebang. But if publishers withhold product, they take back some of the power from retailers and put it back in their own (and, as an extension, the authors’) hands, not just on those specific books, but for the future. I’m still thinking this through, but I’m intrigued by the argument, and I’ve long agreed with many people that we as an industry have been heading down a dangerous path here—one that puts publishers at risk in the same way MP3s damaged music studios that underestimated and responded poorly to a change in the way their world worked. So what do you think? Is Shatzkin giving the publishers too much credit here for the hidden agenda, or is it a very savvy move that’s been a long time coming? Or, alternatively, is this as nonsensical as doing it for fears of siphoning sales?

December 08, 2009   DG&B   advice, Chasya, Chasya's Questions Corner, conferences, Jim, Lauren, Michael, pitch sessions, Stacey  
8

Chasya’s Questions Corner: On Pitch Sessions

by Chasya

Another excellent question from one of our readers:

What are the biggest mistakes writers make when pitching their work at a writers’ conference?

Answer:

I asked around to several other agents here to find out what sorts of things make writers stand out to them during pitch sessions–and not in a good way. These were some of their replies:

I think the biggest issue I have is when people over-rehearse. It sounds so phony and it’s not engaging. I want people to talk naturally about their work, and while they should be able to do so easily, I don’t want it to sound like they’re reading from cue cards (or even worse, ACTUALLY reading from note cards).

-Michael

I don’t know that I’d classify it as a big mistake, but I don’t like it when pitches go on too long, they need to be concise, and it’s hard to be objective when the pitcher gets really emotional, so I’d say keep it professional.

-Stacey

I’d say the biggest mistake is pitching a book that isn’t done: not complete, not revised, not read by a critique group or trusted friends and then revised again. It’s a waste of everyone’s time. An author that has a pitch session lined up before figuring out that they should have been further along in the process is better off taking the time to ask more general questions than pitching a book the agent can’t consider that the author might never complete—or that might be a very different book by the time they do finish.

-Lauren

I’d say being completely and utterly terrified. Or too reliant on a script. People trip themselves up and forget that all they really have to do is talk about their book. It’s better to be enthusiastic and calm than it is to be super-precise. Oh, and don’t bring props.

-Jim

We need more of your questions! Please send inquiries to news@dystel.com.

December 04, 2009   DG&B   about us, Chasya, fun, Jane, Jim, Lauren, Michael, Miriam, subsidiary rights, why we are agents  
2

Why I Am an Agent (Lauren)

by Lauren

Since Jane, Chasya, and Rachel have already weighed in on why they are agents, I thought I’d take my turn.

I came to agenting as many people do in publishing, somewhat by accident. When I finished grad school I moved home: jobless, apartment-less, and broke. I’d worked in bookstores in college and grad school and at a non-profit between, so I was pretty confident that I’d be happy in either field. As with many of the uninitiated, the only real jobs in publishing I could think of were editorial, marketing, and publicity, and I didn’t think the latter two were for me. Neither the editorial job I wanted nor a position at a non-profit were especially easy to find. Out for dinner with friends one evening, having borrowed money from my mother to come into the city from the suburbs, I whined as usual that I wasn’t finding a job and was going a little stir crazy. My friend Beth, fortunately, threw me a lifeline: two of her college friends, Michael and Jim, worked at an agency, and she knew they sometimes hired freelance readers. It’d be a foot in the door, an excuse to come into the city, and a bit of money to make it happen. The next day she put me in touch with Michael, and I luckily applied for a reader position just as Jane’s assistant Leslie was moving off to Peru. Michael asked me if I was looking for a full-time position and wanted him to pass on my resume, and the rest is history!

So that’s how I got to DGLM, but 4 1/2 years later, why am I still here when my plan had been to work in editorial? Because it turned out to be a perfect fit. Not only did Jane encourage me to take on my first client as soon as she felt I was ready while still assisting her, but working for her that first year gave me invaluable experience in just how agenting works. Most of us at DGLM started in our first job in publishing as an intern or as Jane’s assistant, and it has made a tremendous difference. Jane knows the business inside and out having worked on both sides of the desk, and while the office is run on a complex set of systems (and anyone who has seen me work knows I love systems more than almost anything in the world), once you have a hang of them you have a real leg up on managing your time and serving your clients’ best interests. And even though Jane’s constantly busy, her door is literally always open–we don’t even have to knock.  Jane makes a point of explaining how things work and why.  Just before my anniversary with the company, I was offered the chance to move up–take on more clients and work junior to Michael in our rights department. I was able to continue learning, not just from Michael, who taught me the ins and outs of subrights and patiently gave me advice and answers probably more often than he had time to do. I also got to move desks to sit just below the loft Miriam works from, and just from hearing her do her thing I’ve learned a great deal in the last few years about how to put out fires, give editorial feedback, and make sure clients are on the right track and feel supported. When another year or so later the time came for Michael to give up rights selling to focus on his ever expanding client list, Jane and Miriam once again trusted me to climb another rung of the ladder.  Jim might’ve regretted being so easily accessible at the next desk when I couldn’t wrap my mind around a contract clause or royalty statement—or when my job, regrettably, called for me to use numbers. As an agent, my list overlaps slightly with just about every other agent’s, so there’s always someone to give me an informed second opinion, to suggest an editor who’d be perfect for my submission list, and to give me feedback on my pitches.

As the agency’s Subsidiary Rights Director and an agent, I still learn new things all the time, but I’ve also had the pleasure of being the one who sometimes knows the answers. It means a lot to me that others ask my advice now, even if it’s perhaps just rightful payback for the time spent at their desks with a confused look on my face. And I’ve gotten to see Chasya, who started as an intern back when I was Jane’s assistant and then took over the front desk from me, make a similar journey within the agency, even joining me in the back room at Jim’s old desk now that he’s got his own office.

So I’m an agent because I found myself in a supportive environment where I could grow, learn, and thrive, and where my obsession for detail and order would come in handy.  And yes, like everyone else really, I’m an agent because I love to read!

December 04, 2009   DG&B   about us, book club, Chasya, favorites, fun, great books, Jane, Jessica, Jim, Lauren, Michael, Miriam, Rachel, reading, Stacey  
3

Book Clubbing at DGLM

by Rachel

 
This week, the DGLM office talked more books, as another book club meeting was held around the all-purposes back office table.

The book club is a little different to any I’ve been involved with before because, for starters, we don’t all read the same book. The DGLM book club usually involves all of us reading a different book–this time we chose novels from the great books lists that were compiled over the summer by staff and interns. Another thing that makes this book club different is that we’re not only evaluating books as readers, but as people in the publishing industry. The reports we give involve ways we would pitch the book, offering our real opinions (some in praise, some…not so much in praise), and then talking about how they performed and whether we’d have picked them out of slush.

This time around, here is what we read:

  • Jane read The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken
  • Miriam read Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
  • Chasya read The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
  • Jessica read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
  • Jim read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
  • Lauren read The Secret History by Donna Tartt
  • Stacey read Ordinary People by Judith Guest
  • I read After All These Years by Susan Isaacs

Following the DGLM book club this week, a few of us were eager to get our hands on books others had reported on, so the idea of a book club where everyone reads a different book is especially great because it allows us to hear about books we might not have heard of or seen in bookstores, and it also introduces us to amazing new authors. I really like this concept because bookstores can sometimes be overwhelming with all those titles on display, and it can be difficult to know what or who to start reading.

  

And, believe it or not, we’ve already chosen books to read for our next book club meeting next month. This time we’ll be reading books from the New York Times Notable Books of 2009, which Jim wrote about recently. I’m excited about this because I’ll be reading from an author I’ve never heard of, and discovering new writers is a passion of mine. Have you discovered amazing authors from book clubs? 

December 02, 2009   DG&B   Chasya, DGLM Recommends, favorites, fun, Jane, Jessica, Jim, Lauren, lists, Michael, Miriam, our website, Rachel, reading, Stacey  
0

DGLM Recommends

by DGLM

Just in time for the holidays, new staff recommendations from us here at DGLM to add to your shopping or wish lists!  Check ’em out!

November 23, 2009   DG&B   about us, Chasya, Jane, Jessica, Jim, Lauren, Michael, Miriam, Rachel, Stacey, Thanksgiving  
3

What I’m thankful for

by Jane

It’s Thanksgiving and every year at this time especially, I think about what I am thankful for.

One of the main things I am thankful for is our team at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. They really are the best at what they do:

Miriam Goderich–Partner, Senior Vice President and Editorial Director: The foundation of our company, a great editorial and administrative mind with an awesome sense of humor. I am so thankful that she is my partner and very close friend.

Michael Bourret–Vice President: A tireless agent; an incredibly hard worker and a risk taker. Michael is setting up a California office of DGLM. I have such admiration for him and am rooting for his success.

Jim McCarthy: A brilliant editorial mind and a superb agent, Jim has incredibly good taste and a wonderful sense of humor. I am constantly astounded by Jim’s insights and so proud of his enormous growth over the years and his recent successes.

Stacey Glick–Vice President: A terrific agent with a growing list of practical non-fiction, Stacey has a very good nose and is incredibly persistent. I am constantly amazed at all that Stacey accomplishes in her increasingly busy life and thankful to have her as part of our team.

Jessica Papin: Jessica is a passionate and amazingly hard working agent who is building a very exciting client list; we are so lucky to have her back.

Lauren Abramo: Our Rights Director and in-house techie as well as an agent in her own right, Lauren is always on top of everything. With a small list of clients, which she is growing carefully, we are very lucky to have her.

Chasya Milgrom: Our Royalties Manager and newest agent, Chasya is building a list and growing beautifully with the agency. I am so thankful to have her with us and to watch her develop as an agent.

Rachel Oakley: My assistant and our newest staff member–I am thrilled to have her here and know she is going to be a huge and important member of our team.

Thank you all for your support, your tenaciousness, your good taste and your wisdom; you all add to my life and to DGLM in enormously important and meaningful ways.

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