Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2018 by Bloomsbury Publishing

Author:Bloomsbury Publishing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Literary agents

How literary agencies work

Catherine Clarke gives an insight into literary agents, both large and small.

When I joined Felicity Bryan as a literary agent in June 2001, I knew I would be making one or two adjustments to my professional mindset. But I didn’t fully appreciate how different working for a small agency would be from the publishing job I had left behind – several years as a publishing director for trade books at Oxford University Press, having come up through the editorial route. OUP is a large organisation with a corporate structure and hierarchy, and several divisions which operate effectively as separate companies, not only in the UK but in offices all over the world. I was now joining an agent who had previously been a director at Curtis Brown in London, and had successfully set up her own business in 1988, and who up until this point had operated on her own, with an assistant and a bookkeeper, from a small, pretty office in north Oxford. It was with something of a sigh of relief that I left behind the regular weekly and monthly meetings with colleagues from various publishing departments, which even when they were fun and useful seemed to take up such an inordinate amount of time, and set about learning what the differences were between representing authors and publishing them.

The first eye-opening lesson was that even though the agency itself consisted of just two agents and two staff, it functioned as the hub of a vast, informal network of relationships, not only within the UK but right across the globe. On the day that I started work, an auction was in progress for a new book proposal, a memoir co-written with a ghostwriter. The authors were based in London, but the publishers bidding for it (by phone and email on this occasion) were in Germany. The bids were relayed to Felicity Bryan by our German translation sub-agent at Andrew Nurnberg Associates in London, specialists in translation rights. Felicity called the authors to keep them up to speed with what was happening, and eventually made a recommendation to them for which offer to accept. The deal, once it was done and announced in the trade press, kick-started auctions for the book in many other territories, including the UK and the USA. While all this was happening, Felicity picked up the phone and talked to a London-based agent who deals with film and television rights and agreed that, given the intense interest in the book, it would be a good time to submit it to production companies in London and Los Angeles and get the proposal on track for a film option or sale. The authors were, naturally, over the moon.

Meanwhile I, the novice agent, was learning fast from this on-the-job induction, and was also busy setting up meetings with editors and publishing directors in all the London publishing houses, particularly those who specialised in serious non-fiction – books by historians, literary biographers, and philosophers mostly, as

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