Category Archives: what we’re looking for

February 04, 2013   Jane   about us, genre, Jane, nonfiction, what we're looking for  
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Something “new” for me

This piece from last week’s  New York Times attracted my attention and although I totally disagree with the notion that just because the facts concerning a non-fiction book have changed since its original publication, its content should be arbitrarily updated, it did make me think about non-fiction in general.

For many years, most of what I represented was non-fiction and then recently and very deliberately (and because I truly love it) I have been concentrating on fiction, all kinds of fiction – commercial and literary – and have had great success with indie authors and more traditional types.  But my yen for good narrative non-fiction is still very strong and I would love to see some new ideas.

Of course, as you all know, in this category the author needs to have a solid platform and the credentials necessary to write authoritatively on a subject – these things have become increasingly important. And there has to be a great story, one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. With those elements, I would love to consider some compelling new nonfiction in the areas of science, history, biography, politics, and business.

I hope that some of you reading this blog will keep this in mind, send me your work, and spread the word.

December 14, 2012   Lauren   holidays, Lauren, subsidiary rights, what we're looking for  
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All I Want for Christmas

In honor of the holidays, I thought I’d share with you my Christmas wish list:

  • A universal territory schedule: If you have a book deal in English, you might’ve seen a long list of countries in the back of your contract, often labeled Schedule A.  That’s the territory schedule, my nemesis.  You see, the world gets carved up into blocks by the publishers buying rights, so there are a variety of territories you can sell, most often World (which includes translation rights as well), World English, US/Canada, or UK & Commonwealth.  Anything excluded from that is either reserved to the author, licensed exclusively to a second publisher, or part of the Open Market, which is primarily the world’s non-English-speaking countries, where US and UK publishers are typically free to distribute competing editions.  Sounds simple enough, right?

Except that apparently we can’t just agree that when we said UK & Commonwealth, we meant, you know, UK & Commonwealth.  There are the most common exceptions, like Commonwealth Canada going on over to the US side and non-Commonwealth Ireland getting grouped in on the UK side, for proximity reasons.  And then there are the many inane fights I have every year about whether Malaysia is Open Market or Commonwealth.  Hey, guess what debate is easily settled by the Commonwealth of Nations website?  (Fortunately we’re not believers in granting exclusive Europe to UK publishers, because otherwise I’d have to add “Israel is not in Europe” to my list of regular grievances.  This isn’t Eurovision or UEFA, my friends.)  And yet, we must argue these things all the time.  If you want to fight with me about whether or not you should get to sell books in Tristan da Cunha, I need you to fly me there and show me your distribution chain.  I will then contemplate your argument for several days on the beach and get back to you when I’ve decided.  Alternatively, I’d accept a Universal Schedule A that all of us in publishing agree to now, so we can stop having this conversation ad nauseam.  Then anyone who wants to pretend South Africa’s not a Commonwealth country or Iran is will have to say so, up front, when making their offer.

  •  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Popular science and interdisciplinary nonfiction.
  •  Mandatory naptime.  Look, I work in foreign rights, and it’s really important for me to be in tune with cultural differences.  So I’m going to start taking siestas.  I really think it’s going to do amazing things for our list in Spain.
  •  A robot that can be programmed to clear up my office clutter to my exact specifications each night when I leave, because I am very very particular, very very busy, and very very sick of tripping over the books that I knock on the ground each day.
  •  A wall-sized magnetic world map and teensy tiny book cover magnets so that when I sell a book, I can put it in the appropriate country, because how cool would that be?
  •  Peace on Earth, good will towards men.
  •  My two front teeth*
  •  You**

 

*Worst Christmas song ever?

**Best Christmas song ever.

November 26, 2012   Jane   Jane, opinion, self-publishing, what we're looking for  
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The self-published author—what does an agent look for?

Last week, Laura Howard, an Indie author, asked whether I would write about what an agent looks for when offering representation to someone who is in the self-published community.  Since we represent a significant number of authors who originally were/are self-published, I was delighted to accept her request.

The first thing I look for in any author, self-published or not, is the quality of the writing.  If the work is poorly written, then we cannot represent it no matter how strong the sales are initially (substandard writing will not sustain high sales in my opinion).

An author’s sales numbers and how they build over time are also very important.  Unit sales are critical but so is the author’s position on the lists of the various e-tailers—Amazon.com; BN.com, etc.  A prolific author will often see each subsequent book in a series build up the sales of the previous books.

The author must be very active on social media—having an effective, accessible website and/or blog is important, as is a solid presence on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and other networking sites.  Positive reviews of the author’s self-published books by the target readership are critical as is a willingness to interact with and be supportive of other writers in his/her category.

Finally, I always like to talk with prospective self-published clients to make sure that what we think we can offer them matches their expectations; we try never to over-promise although we do assure all of our clients that we will do our very best to help them build their careers and have a positive experience doing so.

The goal is to sign up writers who have a solid future in Indie and traditional publishing, or a mixture of both.  So far, it’s working out very well for us and we’ve learned a tremendous amount.  I am happy to answer any questions regarding this subject which is becoming an important one in our business.  Let me hear from you.

October 18, 2012   Jessica   authors, fiction, Jessica, what we're looking for, writing  
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Fall for Fiction

Trees are ablaze, apples are sweet, air is crisp, and for me, fall spells fiction.  My to-read pile is as deep and inviting as the leaf pile on my lawn, with Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, an ARC of Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs  and Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety.  Reading good books makes me hungry for new projects.  Very hungry.  It’s not unlike having a tapeworm.  So e-mail me your queries, attach your first chapters, and know you have an interested audience.  My tastes are wide ranging—recently I’ve liked The Forgiven (shades of Paul Bowles and Laurence Durrell) the twice Bookered Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, Ann Patchett’s glorious State of Wonder  and  J. Courtney Sullivan’s intergenerational tale, Maine, whose  characters were as real (and prickly) as folks I know.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m always on the lookout for smart nonfiction, but today’s post is an open invitation to the novelists among you.  I do represent polemics on my nonfiction list, but I am suspicious of novels conceived to further an obvious agenda—whether political, humanitarian, or spiritual. When a query letter begins cause first, story second, I worry. In the framework of a novel, it seems to me that readers care about characters and not issues, and nothing is worse than a story inhabited by sock puppets, each rehearsing the arguments of their author.  I am a fan of historical fiction, characters that travel to far flung settings, first person narration, and rueful humor (think Lorrie Moore).

I’d love to see a well-turned spy thriller, a literary fantasy along the lines of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians or Susanna Clarke’s masterful  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,  or a novel that plumbs the relationship between sisters (I have three) .  I have trouble with high fantasy and space opera—my knowledge of the genre is just too shallow–and I am too lily-livered to linger much with horror, serial killers or kids in peril.   So with those few caveats, drop me a line. I’d love to see my inbox ablaze with fiction!

October 18, 2012   Stacey   advice, cookbooks and food writing, middle grade, nonfiction, Stacey, what we're looking for, why I signed up, why we are agents, writing  
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Stacey Glick interview at Writer’s Digest

It’s been a while since I wrote about the kinds of projects I’m looking for, and since I answer that question and many others in an interview I did that was recently published on writersdigest.com, I thought it would be nice to share it with our loyal blog readers.

The interview goes into some detail on my background, my list, and my thoughts on many different aspects of the market, where it is now, and where it is going.

I thought Ricki’s questions were really targeted to my interests and as a result we managed to squeeze a lot of information into a fairly brief interview.

I hope it’s useful to anyone reading, and if I didn’t answer all of your questions or you have others you’d like to ask, ask away and I will do my best to respond to each and every one. Promise! Enjoy.

July 13, 2012   Lauren   Lauren, queries, what we're looking for  
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Calling all queriers!

As rights director for the agency, I’m grateful for the freedom to both work on subrights and maintain my own small client list. I love subrights—the nuances of various markets are really fascinating to me, and it’s amazing to be able to call up an author to tell them people in a country they barely know exists want to read their book—but it’s also exciting to be able to shepherd authors on my own list through all stages of their career.  I’ve been really happy of late to be extremely excited by what I’m reading, both published and looking to be published, and it’s really helped me narrow down what I am, right now, most interested in seeing more of.  So without further ado:

 

  • The thing I’ve always wanted, but rarely found, is popular science.  I am a science nerd but also easily confused by it, and my brain shuts down when things get too tricky.  My litmus test for pop sci is: Am I excited about this?  Do I know what I’m excited about?  If you’ve got the project that can get me to say yes on both of these, please, please, please send it my way.
  • I’m likewise interested in pop psychology—if you’ve got the credentials and the voice to talk about why our brains do what they do, I want in.
  • Beyond our own minds, I’m interested in the world at large.  I’m always on the look out for accessible, important, well credentialed reportage.
  • As I think so many of us are, I’m also looking for those books that are nebulously described as “Big Think” or “like Malcolm Gladwell.”  One of the things that I’ve always wanted to be able to do better is to draw together insights from different facets of life to put things into context, so I love interdisciplinary nonfiction that makes me think in ways I would never have come up with myself.
  • I have also been looking for a long time for some serious but irreverent cultural study of the internet age—I’m endlessly fascinated by the politics of online communities, the way people interact online, the strange ways that social networks transform our thoughts and speech, the impact of the digital age on how we integrate perhaps unreliable information, etc.  Someone with the vision to unpack all of that in an engaging and relatable way would be very welcome on my list.
  • And on a similar note, I’m always fond of treatments of pop culture that take things just shy of too seriously.  There’s nothing I love more than nerdy obsessiveness with things that theoretically don’t matter, but can give us insight into the world if given their due.
  • Of course, I’m also still looking for fiction, which I do get a ton of queries for, running pretty much the full span of genres, which I appreciate.  Right now the two things I don’t think I’m seeing as much of as I’d like are middle grade adventure and grounded YA.  As with anything else, I’m looking for something that’s got the whole package, whether commercial or literary:  voice, characters, and plot.  Why settle for one when you can have all three?  And I remain a sucker for an exquisitely executed sentence.

 

So writers, start your query engines.  I’ll be waiting for you at labramo@dystel.com.  (Personal preferences:  Email queries, please, with the query in the body of the email, sample material in an attachment, in Word if at all possible.)

June 05, 2012   abby   Abby, about us, agents, changes at DGLM, fun, what we're looking for, What's New at DGLM  
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Hello World!

It’s my very first blog entry as a full-fledged DGLM employee! However, I’m not totally new to the office and have been around for quite some time. I’ve been working in the office as the Project Manager for DGLM’s digital publishing program, and before that I was an intern in the office. Until recently, I was focused solely on developing the digital program, but I’m branching into agenting now, and I can’t wait to get started.

As a reader, some of my favorite books have been historical fiction—Les Miserables, Atonement and Gone With the Wind, to name a few. But I also love a book that challenges me, like Lolita, the His Dark Materials series or Last Exit to Brooklyn. For more about me and what I am interested in reading, check out Who We Are and What We’re Looking For.

My very first experience with a literary agency was here at DGLM, and I am so grateful to have been able to turn my internship into a position at the company. I’ve always wanted to work in publishing and I am very excited to be a part of this team.

March 29, 2012   Michael   commercial, fiction, memoir, Michael, nonfiction, thrillers, what we're looking for  
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Not about middle grade

I have to apologize that this week’s post isn’t a continuation of my middle grade conversation with Molly O’Neill (you can find posts here and here). We’ve both had some fun recently, being sick on back-to-back weeks (me earlier this week), and we just haven’t had the time to connect and get you the conclusion to our conversation. But we’ll bring you more informative goodness next week, and we really appreciate all your comments–it’s been a fun experience for both of us!

Since I’m not talking about children’s books, I thought this might be a good time to remind blog readers that I also represent projects on the adult side of the business. And, at the moment, I’m very actively seeking new adult projects, both fiction and nonfiction. As for novels, I’d love to find a compelling thriller with a fresh point of view, maybe even something a bit more literary that the usual. And I’m always in the market for something that’s upmarket trashy, like A Secret History (and yes, “upmarket trashy” is a compliment–A Secret History is in my top 5 books). I love those books that have compelling (and even provocative) plots, but also have a little more going on. Dark and psychological never hurts, either, and things that border on horror (but don’t quite get all the way there) definitely appeal to me.

On the nonfiction side, I’m always on the hunt for great memoir. I love authors with a sense of humor about themselves, even in the toughest of circumstances. Though addiction and affliction memoirs are probably tough at this point, adversity seems to be at the core of most of the books I’ve sold, and having a strong personal conflict is an important piece of the puzzle. I’m not as drawn to political books as I once was, probably due to the 24-hour news cycle, but I do enjoy investigative reporting about political issues, both at home and abroad. I especially appreciate writers who can explain the big issues through smaller, more personal stories; it’s hard to sell a book when there isn’t an individual story at the heart of it. I’m particularly interested in finding science writers who can distill complex concepts into something people like me can understand; if you’re the next Neil deGrasse Tyson, please find your way to my inbox.

So in addition to sending me your amazing middle grade and young adult, be sure to keep me in mind for your fantastic adult projects, as well.

March 21, 2012   Stacey   cookbooks and food writing, memoir, nonfiction, parenting, Stacey, what we're looking for  
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What I’m looking for now

It’s been a long time since I talked about what I’m looking for so I thought I’d share a few words about projects I’m working on, projects I recently sold, and projects I wish I’d sold.

If you check me out on Publisher’s Marketplace, sales categories over the last year include cookbooks, memoir, narrative nonfiction, commercial fiction, children’s fiction, and a business book (full disclosure: the author is one of my oldest friends who came to me to help him after being approached by a publisher). The last few weeks have brought several nice sales and new projects in categories that include narrative nonfiction, cookbooks, commercial fiction, and young adult fiction.

My list has always been eclectic and continues to be comprised of a mix of projects that excite and inspire me. I’ll admit the formula is unpredictable and timing and instinct have a lot to do with it. I think most of my colleagues would agree that they know a Stacey project when they see it (public thanks to Jim for the recent referral), even if that might seem hard to define.

Given the market, the size of my list, and raising 4 kids, I’ll admit I am very selective about signing up new authors, but I am doing it and I’m eager to see new submissions.

In particular I’d love to see more science-based or medical nonfiction, like the upcoming book by pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert H. Lustig about his groundbreaking research about sugar’s effect on our health. Or Dr. Dale Archer’s Better Than Normal, which talks about how key traits of human behavior can be seen as strengths rather than weaknesses.

I’d like to see more smart, original parenting – I just sold a soon-to-be announced book about a particular component of our dysfunctional parenting culture, and my most recent staff recommendation is Mind in the Making, a research-based parenting title that was widely praises as one of the best recent books in the category.

I’d also like to see more food and nutrition narrative. The latest book by Marion Nestle just out, Why Calories Count, is a great example of that, and I’d love to find a book to rival Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter.

For cookbooks, I’m always interested in smart, savvy food bloggers who bring a new twist to an existing topic, and can open up conversations about family and food that draw readers in. And I’m open to hearing from chefs and food writers who are doing something original and different.

As for memoir, I continue to be drawn to deep, dark psychological stories (and as previously mentioned, I seem to have found a successful niche of powerful mother/daughter stories that began long before I had my 4 daughters!) that showcase real people overcoming crushing adversity. Jennie Perillo’s in-the-works memoir about the sudden loss of her husband is an example. Soon-to-be published titles include Perfect Chaos, a mother/daughter bipolar memoir; I Am Intelligent, a mother/daughter memoir about a nonverbal autistic girl who learns to communicate; and Have Mother Will Travel, Claire and Mia Fontaine’s second memoir following the remarkable Come Back.

And for children’s, as well as adult fiction, I am drawn to strong, believable protagonists who find themselves in difficult situations that require an emotional epiphany to survive and thrive.

Thanks for listening and hope this gives you some more insight into my interests and that I’ll hear from you with new projects soon.

February 22, 2012   Brenna   Brenna, what we're looking for, What's New at DGLM, why we are agents  
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Hello!

Thank you, Jane, for the warm introduction. It’s been a whirlwind of instructions and introductions, so please bear with me. I recently moved back to NY after a 6 year stint in Boston, where I had my first job in publishing at a boutique literary agency. Ms. Carolyn Jenks was a terrific mentor for over a year and I’m happy to say that we still keep in touch. I have her to thank for taking a chance on me and opening my eyes to what I now know is my dream job. Books have always fostered my insatiable appetite for learning, and I look forward to that in what I hope will be a lengthy career at DGLM. I’m thrilled to be a part of the team. What a remarkable group of people, as I’m sure you all know by now! For a brief biography and personal essay, please visit Who We Are and What We’re Looking For.

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