For the life of me, I can't remember when I met Nat Sobel for the first time. I know it must have been around September 2001, when I developed a crush on one of his assistants. (We married two years ago, and she left the job back in 2004.) Despite my hazy memory of that time—chalk it up to a disorienting mix of national trauma and new love—my first impression of Sobel couldn't be clearer: an old-school bookman, a throwback to the glory days of publishing, a guy who you half expected to have a copy of the Racing Form tucked inside his blazer. I've since found that impression to be accurate, but only to a point. When you spend any amount of time with Sobel, talking about books and publishing, which now have been his lifeblood for almost fifty years, you are confronted with an obvious contradiction: He is also one of the most forward-thinking agents in the industry.

Sobel grew up in New York City and has been immersed in the book business since his days at City College, when he clerked in a stationery shop and paperback bookstore. After college he went to France and spent a year reading all the world literature he hadn't gotten around to in school. The reading served him well: In 1960, after he'd done a brief stint at Dell Publishing, Barney Rosset offered him a job as the assistant sales manager at Grove Press. Over the next ten years, Sobel rose to become Grove's vice president and marketing director and played a central role in the company's well-chronicled success during that period. In 1970, he struck out on his own, founding an eponymous agency that began as a consulting firm for independent publishers and became a full-service literary agency when his wife, Judith Weber, joined it in 1977.

Today Sobel Weber Associates is one of the top boutique agencies in New York City. The firm's clients include heavyweights James Ellroy, Richard Russo, and the late F. X. Toole; rising stars Julianna Baggott, Courtney Eldridge, Tom Franklin, and Aaron Gwyn; genre writers Tim Dorsey, Harry Harrison, Elmer Kelton, Joseph Wambaugh, and the late Robert Jordan; and a raft of best-selling nonfiction and cookbook authors.

This interview took place in the couple's elegant Gramercy Park townhouse—it was once the home of the artist George Bellows—which doubles as the agency's offices. During most of our conversation, one of Sobel's cats sprawled in my lap. Afterward, Sobel led me up several flights of stairs, lined with framed drawings by his friend and client Ralph Steadman, to show me his loft office at the top of the house. It is an airy space that overlooks the living room and is adorned with three huge paintings by Steadman, family photographs, bookcases full of literary magazines, and a lucky photo of Gandhi that, Sobel notes with satisfaction, "I've had in every office I ever worked in."

My sense is that you grew up in New York City. Is that right?
That's right. I was working on my own from the time I was eighteen years old. I went to City College and had to support myself. I had a dream of going to Europe to write after I graduated from college, and I did go to France and lived for a year on my savings. But I didn't write. I read. I spent a whole year reading.

What were you reading?
I had been a lit major, and I went with a suitcase full of the books I had wanted to read but hadn't had time to get to. I found an English-language bookshop in Paris that was happy to buy all of the books I read and give me other books in exchange. That was how I was able to extend my library into a year's worth of reading. I read about sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. That's when I really learned about world literature—from that year in Paris—but I didn't get much writing done. Toward the end of the year, the guys from the bookstore where I'd worked in college wrote and offered me an opportunity to come back and run most of the store in the evening and become a kind of partner. I went back and worked there until a job opened at Dell Publishing, where I worked for about a year as a salesman. Then Barney Rosset offered me a job as the assistant sales manager of Grove Press. I was all of twenty-four years old. Eventually I became the sales manager and the marketing director, all in my twenties. But keep in mind that at Grove at that time, Barney was only in his thirties. So you get an idea of the age range. We were a pretty young bunch of guys—this included Richard Seaver, Fred Jordan, a very talented group of guys—who didn't think anything of working long hours, because we enjoyed it. Even at the time, I knew I'd never get a job like that again.

Tell me how you met Barney.
It's a funny story. Barney came to the Dell sales conference. It was my first sales conference; I was sharing a room with another guy. I had been playing poker through most of my college years as a source of additional income. I heard there was a hospitality suite and there would be poker playing. So I wound up in the hospitality suite and there were five tables of salesmen all playing poker, and Barney, thinking that Dell was going to distribute Grove Press books, was one of them. Late in the evening there was only one table left—all of the winners. I was at that table, and so was Barney. I had the best hand in five-card draw I'd ever had. I can remember it all these many years later. It was the biggest pot of the night. There was a lot of money in that pot. And Barney turned out to have the best hand of all.

I stuck around, I'd been drinking, and as a result I passed out on the bed of the hospitality suite. The sales conference began promptly at eight o'clock the next morning. Barney was downstairs on the dais with Helen Meyer and the editor in chief of Dell. But I was asleep in the hospitality suite. When I finally woke up, with a very bad hangover, and went back to my room, showered, and went down to have some coffee and head into the sales conference, it was about ten o'clock in the morning. The hotel we were in was quite remote, and when I walked in, everybody wondered who the hell I was. They didn't know me. I hadn't been at Dell all that long. I could hear the people on the dais saying, "Who is he?" I thought I'd be fired. But I wasn't.

About two months later I got a phone call, and this guy on the other end of the line said, "Are you the guy who came two hours late to the Dell sales conference?" I said, "Yes, who's this?" Thinking it's a joke. He said, "My name's Barney Rosset, and I like your style, kid. How'd you like to come to work at Grove Press as the assistant sales manager?" I had the chutzpah to say, "How much are you paying?" He mentioned a price that was fifty dollars a week more than I was getting, and I was delighted to go. At that point I didn't like Dell anyway, and I knew enough about the Grove Press list to know that I wanted to go there. And I had a great time. Barney was a great pal, and I gave him a lot of arguments for many years, and then one night in a bar ten years later he fired me. But he said, "I'm going to keep you on the payroll for a year till you get yourself together." I decided then and there that I would never go to work for another publisher.

When you got to Grove, was Barney already fighting his censorship battles all over the country?
Yes. Lady Chatterley's Lover had been published. Tropic of Cancer was being published and there were some battles. The big battles came about a year after I got there, which was when the paperback of Tropic of Cancer came out and was available in a lot of smaller towns. There were a large number of lawsuits against the company that nearly put us out of business.

Were you involved in that in any direct way?
No. I was on the sales side of things. Among my duties was to go to the jobbers [distributors] once a week to pick up some money that was due so we could pay the payroll. That's how tight things were. But we did a lot of wonderful books and Barney, because he was interested in the editorial side more than the marketing side, gave me a lot of freedom. I hadn't worked in any big publishing house in a capacity in which I could make decisions, so I did a lot of things quite innovatively.

Like what?
I wanted to see all the orders that came in to the house, which caused a delay in the printing out of orders, but I wanted to have a hands-on approach to seeing the orders as they came in and get a feel for what was moving. A few years into the job, we had to fire everybody in the sales department and I had to travel the country. I didn't realize until later what a wonderful experience that was going to be for me. I had to travel to the West coast for three weeks twice a year. I had to travel to the South, the Southeast, the Northeast. I even had to train a couple of the editors to go out and sell our list. We were really just scraping by. Then, when we started to do a little better financially, with one best-seller after another, I was able to get on the phone and call a lot of these booksellers who I now knew personally and get them to get behind a particular book on the list that I thought had the most potential. We never had a large sales force, even when we were successful. But we did a lot of phone work and a lot of postcards and we got the independent booksellers behind us, and that worked very well. There were also times when we would take a gamble. We didn't do P&Ls [Profit and Loss projections] for acquisitions. We didn't have a budget. A lot of it was instinctive publishing.

I can remember a particularly episode with a book that turned out to be one of the most successful Grove ever published, a book called Games People Play. I thought it was a terrible title for a book on transactional analysis. We had three colored discs on the cover with lines going from one to the other, and I said to Barney, "With a title like that, and a jacket like that, people are going to think it's a game book." He totally ignored me. Just when the book was being published, I went to the West coast for one of my three-week trips. When I got back, I called Barney and said, "Look, I want us to do a big ad in the Times for Games People Play." Barney said, "Why? We only printed thirty-five hundred copies. I think we've gone back for twenty-five hundred more, and you want a big ad in the Times? We published his first book and it didn't do all that well." I said, "Well, I have to tell you, Barney, I think God is telling me something." He laughed and said, "What is God telling you, Nat?" I said, "Well, I went to the West coast and in L.A., in a restaurant, I saw a woman reading a copy of Games People Play. Then I took the shuttle flight from L.A. to San Francisco and there was someone on the plane reading Games People Play. I said to myself, ‘If I see a third person reading this book, with the print order that we had, I'm going to come back....'" Of course I did see a third person in San Francisco reading Games People Play, which is why I came back and told him God was telling me we had to do a big ad. The American Psychiatric Association convention, at which we always exhibited our books, was coming up, and we decided to do an open letter to the shrinks who were attending the APA about Games People Play. Fred Jordan, who wrote a lot of our ad copy, did almost a full-page letter in the daily Times. We brought up hundreds of copies to sell to the shrinks at our little stand. We sold a lot of copies. And we were selling it to the right audience: young psychiatrists. Then the media got on to us and the book became a huge success, the biggest that Grove had ever had. I think we sold something like 600,000 copies in hardcover. Nobody wanted to buy the paperback rights because they thought for a hardcover of its kind we had pretty much covered the whole audience. So Grove had to publish the paperback itself, which then sold about two million copies. Grove was the kind of place where I could say to Barney, "God is telling me something." There was a wonderful level of collegiality in the company. Sometimes we would gang up on Barney because if one of us couldn't persuade him about something, then eventually all of us could.

Why were you eventually fired?
The company was getting involved in the film business. I didn't like most of the films we were buying up and distributing. It was also taking a lot of our resources, tying up Dick's attention as well as Fred Jordan's attention, and the book publishing side was beginning to suffer. The list was not as large, it wasn't as focused, and I was the big naysayer about it. I was calling Barney on it. I kept telling him we had to get out of the film business. I became a strong voice of opposition. Whereas he took my criticism on other matters for a long time, and in very good form, I might add, on this point he was adamant.

When he began to discover that I wasn't the only one who felt this way, especially when he asked Dick Seaver to fire me—Dick and Fred were senior to me—and neither one of them wanted to fire me, he was convinced that I had gotten everybody on my side on this matter. When he fired me, he said, "I have to restore control of the company. This is mine. Not yours." Only two years later, Barney came to me with a project for which I sold the paperback rights for so much money that my commission was greater than my last year's salary working for him.

So obviously there were no hard feelings.
Not at all. In fact, Barney celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday at my home in East Hampton, which made me very pleased. My best publishing experiences were the years working for him. I realize now what a great experience it was.

When you get down to it, what made him such a special publisher?
He was a rebel. He was attracted to that which turned off other people. He loved a good battle. He had wonderful taste, and he also had a wonderful outlook on publishing that doesn't exist at all anymore.

Tell me what you mean by that.
I'll tell you about a moment in my life with Barney that had a major influence on the things that attract me as an agent, especially these last few years. At some point I noticed that on the upcoming list was a book of poetry, a fairly substantially sized book of poetry by a Mexican poet I had never heard of, and it was going to be in a bilingual edition, Spanish and English. I went to Barney and said, "You know, Barney, I don't think I can sell this book. I've never heard of this guy." Barney said to me, "I didn't buy it because I thought you could sell it. I bought it because I liked it and because I thought it was important." And the book was the first publication in English of the poetry of Octavio Paz. It's sold hundreds of thousands of copies, it's still in the Grove Press backlist, and it was a book he wanted to publish because he loved it. You couldn't help loving a guy who had that philosophy.

When you left, why did you decide to become an agent rather than an editor?
I knew how to sell books. And because Grove Press had a hardcover list, a trade paperback list, its own mass market paperback list, and a magazine, I thought I would make my services available as a consultant. Which is what I did in my first year or two. Grove was a distributor for a couple of smaller publishers—Peter Workman's first list was being distributed by Grove, for example—so I thought I would approach small publishers and offer my services as a marketing consultant. Because of the variety on the Grove Press list, and because I had traveled the country, I think I was able to help some small publishers. One of those publishers had a book that they wanted to get published instantly. I knew some of the editors at Dell from my own days there, and I knew Dell did a number of instant books, and I sold this book to Dell and got my first commission. About six months later, this small publisher had another book. It was by an NFL football player who had quit the game and talked about how he had been supported financially while he was playing football in college by the university, and some of the illegal things that were going on in football. I sold the paperback rights for fifty thousand dollars and took a 10 percent commission. I thought, "Wait a second. Maybe I should be doing this for small presses instead of offering my consulting thing."

So I started to move from consulting work to handling the subsidiary rights—paperback rights and foreign rights—for small presses. Nobody had ever done that. I kind of backed into agenting by working for small presses. Eventually, some of those presses went out of business and the writers found me because I was the one who had generated the most money for them. At about that point, Judith [Weber] joined me. She came out of an editorial background and wanted to work more with authors. Eventually we phased out of the subrights business, partially because the mass-market publishers started to develop their own hardcover lists, so they weren't so anxious to buy reprint rights from other presses. But I was still doing a little consulting work. I wanted to do other things. As an example, I started the bookstore in East Hampton.

BookHampton?
Right. I started it with two guys. One of them was the editor in chief of a company called Stein & Day, which is no longer around. His partner lived in East Hampton. He asked me about the idea of starting a bookstore, and I had bookstore experience, so I found the location and we got BookHampton off the ground, partially because I didn't know whether I was going to make it as an agent. After two years, the store started to take off.

Were you working full time at BookHampton?
No. I worked four days a week at the agency. In the first months of BookHampton, I would go to the jobbers and pick the books to take out to the bookstore. I would work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the bookstore. So I was working seven days a week. I was getting pressure on both sides. I couldn't put in any more time at the store, and my two partners were pretty much beginning to know how to run the business without me. We had a financial settlement and I was able to work full time at my agency.

What were some of the first books and authors you represented?
I still represent one of the first authors I represented, a guy by the name of Dr. Raymond Moody, and in fact I'm working on a new book of his. So he must be one of the oldest clients I have. He wrote a book called Life After Life, the first book dealing with the near-death experience. The publisher of that book was a small library press in Georgia. The publisher came to me in New York because he was trying to sell the paperback rights to this little book that was very odd for him. He gave me the galleys and I read it and thought it was an amazing book. The author was a thirty-two-year-old doctor who had just discovered these cases in several hospitals in Atlanta. The book was a huge success. We sold it in something like twenty-five countries, and it was the first big financial success the agency had. When Raymond wrote his second book, he went to the same small publisher. The publisher called me up and said, "Nat, this is not the kind of book I publish. I published that first book because nobody else wanted to do it. But I think you ought to be his agent." So he turned the manuscript and Raymond over to me. There are a lot of other stories like that, people I came to know, like best-selling Catholic priest Father Andrew Greeley. He'd been published by a small press that I was doing the rights for, and I wound up becoming his agent. But I had no idea that trying to build a list of authors, to make it as an authors' agent, was going to be such a long and difficult path.

When you were starting out as an agent, were there any established agents that you looked up to or went to for advice?
None. I didn't join the agents' organization either.

You just sort of figured it out?
I made a lot of mistakes. I took on a lot of things I shouldn't have taken on, but when you're getting started, if anybody comes to you, you think, "I'm going to do it. I can sell it." It's only been in the last twenty years, or maybe the last ten years, that I became aware, as did Judith, that we wanted the agency to reflect our tastes, rather than just take on things that were saleable. Our list is our taste. Which means that there are a lot of areas of publishing that we will not go into because we aren't interested in them. So we've never done any romances, for instance.

How is being a writer different today than it was when you started out as an agent?
I think it's easier for the writer. Today writers are a lot more aware that they need an agent than they were then. The so-called slush pile at publishing houses is almost nonexistent today—a lot of writers languished in those slush piles for years. I think writers were often tempted by ads run in the writers magazines by agents who charged exorbitant fees to have their manuscripts "evaluated," and much of that has disappeared. By and large, writers get responses from agents much quicker today because of e-mail. I think the process has fewer mines in the ground for writers to avoid. But on the other hand, it's much more difficult to get published if you're a fiction writer. It's a bit of a tradeoff.

Why do you think it's more difficult to get published as a fiction writer?
I think you have to really look at the market today. If you look at the Deals page of Publishers Weekly, nine out of the ten deals described are nonfiction books. There certainly is a very strong feeling in the publishing world that fiction is chancier—absolutely chancier—than nonfiction. Today, you have to have all sorts of other reasons to publish a first novel—other than that it happens to be very good.

What do you mean by that?
We keep hearing this phrase, "What's the platform?" What's the fucking platform? The first time I heard the word platform was at a writers conference. I was on the dais with another agent and she was talking about "the platform." I thought, "What the fuck is a platform? What is she talking about?" Well, what it is is this: What does the author bring to the table? Talent is not enough. The number of slots open to fiction on a publisher's list is being reduced all the time.

But that wasn't always the case. What do you see as the reason for that shift?
I think there are a lot of reasons. It's not just the conglomeratization of publishing and the slow disappearance of the independent booksellers. But maybe it's easier for the sales rep to go and sell a nonfiction book that he hasn't read, or she hasn't read, than it is for the rep to go in and sell a first novel that he or she hasn't read. As the sales forces of the major publishing houses have become decimated, there really is very little time for any of these reps to read the first fiction on their list. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Almost more to the point, I think, is how agenting has changed in the last ten years.

I read something where you were talking about how many agents there are now, as opposed to the old days when there weren't as many, and the importance to a writer of picking a good one.
Yes. And how do you know if you've got a good one?

Exactly.
I try to impress my client list on new writers. There may be a writer on that client list whose work you've read, whose work you really like. It should give you some sort of comfort to think, "Well, if he was so-and-so's agent then he can't be all that shabby." The client list is a wonderful tool for the would-be writer to explore. Now that so many agents are putting their client lists on their Web sites, I think that's a great way for writers to use that tool. Of course you don't really know how good an agent is until you work with them. It's like trying to determine if somebody is going to be a good sex partner without getting into bed with them. At some point, you've got to get into bed. But I think you would know fairly early on what sort of agent you have. It has to do with the level of chemistry between you—how they respond to your work, what they want you to do with it, and how they perform.

Do you think editors do less editing than they used to?
I think so. But I also think publishers do a lot less selling than they used to. They do a lot less promotion than they used to. And this really gets to the core of what I think about where agenting is going. There are a lot of editors who are basically acquirers, and there are some who are really hands-on editors. The editors in that second category are a much smaller number, and those are the people who I generally go to first with my manuscripts. But I think the whole question of editing also has to do with how much time the editor can really give to a novel. That's another reason why I think fiction is not as sought after by publishers as it used to be. You need a lot more editing for a novel than you do for a work of nonfiction—although a lot of nonfiction should be edited as well. But from the standpoint of how much time an editor has to devote to the books on his or her list, fiction is on the time-consuming end of it. So we see less time spent.

I think what is evolving today for agents is that they need to be the first line editors for their authors. Judith and I really love the editing process. We have spent years editing nearly every novel we've ever agented. We did that long before we began to discover how little editing was going on in the publishing houses. But today agents need to be far more proactive in almost every other area of the publishing process. We have to be the marketing directors for many of our books. We have to involve ourselves in looking at the jacket design, the jacket copy, the catalogue copy. We have to be very proactive in how we help direct the writer to help sell his or her book. Those are things you never thought about in agenting when I first came into it. You made the deal, you negotiated the contract, and that was it—the publisher took over.

Today the writer very much needs to be proactive. When I have writers who have the kind of personality that they enjoy going out and selling their books, and I've gotten them a big enough advance, they are smart enough, with my guidance, to put some of that advance aside and spend their own money to get the book off the ground. I think that being able to suggest things to writers, things they can do themselves to help sell the book, is getting to be as important a factor as helping them to edit the work. It's been amazing to me how much money a publisher will spend to acquire a book, and how little they will spend to make the book a success. The role of the agent today is a totally involving one—you have to be involved in the whole process. Which starts with helping the writer, as we do, through two or three drafts of the work to bring it up to the level where it is as good as we think it can be. That's not to preclude the possibility of some additional insights from a really savvy editor.

You're talking about a fairly major shift from the responsibilities of the publisher, in terms of the editing and the promotion, to the agent and the author. Tell me why that happened.
I think that nature abhors a vacuum. It's as simple as that. The vacuum that has been created in the publishing houses by the reduction in their promotion and publicity budgets, by the reductions in the size of the sales force, by the dependence on a few key accounts buying most of the print order, has led to the reduction in staffs of the publicity and promotion departments, and reductions in staff throughout the publishing house. The result is that things aren't getting done the way they used to be. It's not because the people in those houses aren't willing to do it, they're just either overworked or underfunded. So perfectly wonderful books get printed and disappear. And if you don't do something, if something isn't done by somebody...I think the writer has his or her own future in her hands in terms of what she is willing to do in order to make the book succeed.

But when you look at the landscape of the publishing industry, why did that vacuum come to be?
I think it has to do with the bottom line. If they can save money by reducing their sales force, they're going to do that.

And that came about due to the decline of independent booksellers, right? You needed less salespeople.
Yes. You could hire people in an office warehouse someplace to get on the phone and call some of the smaller booksellers. You didn't have to have book reps. Recently, it didn't get a lot of attention, but Random House fired some of its most experienced sales reps. These were people who were better paid and had been with the company for a long time. The guy who they reported to finally had to quit himself because he couldn't face having to fire some of the best reps they had, who were going to be replaced by new, young, and cheaper people. But somebody forgot along the line that these reps had built up a rapport with booksellers. They could get a bookseller to take a chance on a book that they were enthusiastic about. [See Editor's Note [3].]

Another problem is how the level of enthusiasm has been watered down by the way the publishing houses are now structured. You used to have a situation where you'd have an enthusiastic agent selling a manuscript to an enthusiastic editor, and then that enthusiastic editor would go to the sales conference and communicate her enthusiasm to the sales reps, and then the sales reps would read the book and communicate their enthusiasm to the booksellers. But now the editors don't go to the sales conferences. The sales force doesn't have that direct contact with the person who bought the book. And the sales force itself keeps getting modified so that the enthusiasms don't percolate down to the booksellers who are going to take a chance on that first novel. The system is such that enthusiasm itself has been kind of cut off, at the most strategic place, which is the editor's ability to communicate her or his enthusiasm to the reps and to the rest of the people in the house. There are some editors who are very savvy and very enthusiastic about their books. I love dealing with those people. They don't let a book die. They are going to get out and get everybody's attention. But even they can't go to the sales conference, can't deal with the reps, can't communicate that enthusiasm to the people who have to go out and sell the books.

Tell me about some of those editors who are especially good at that.
I'm not going to name any names. I'll tell you why. Because I'll wake up tomorrow and think, "Why didn't I tell him about A, B, and C? Why did I only tell him about D, E, and F?" The editors who I really respect a great deal, they know I respect them.

What kinds of things are you encouraging your authors to do on their own behalf?
It depends on how much money they get for their books. When I sold Tim Dorsey's first novel—Tim is an offbeat crime writer who's written ten novels about a very amiable serial killer, very wacky novels—we wound up selling it at auction. He was the night editor for the Tampa Tribune. The money he got—it was a two-book deal—was more than several years of his salary at the paper. I said, "Tim, I don't want you to leave the Tampa Tribune until after your first novel is published." He said, "Does that mean you think I won't ever sell my third or fourth books?" I said, "No, it's because I have an idea. I want you to write to the book review editor of every newspaper in Florida, on Tampa Tribune letterhead, and ask them if they would review your book, as a colleague, so to speak." I said, "Don't expect the publisher to spend much money promoting your book. I want you to think about things you can do to help sell your book."

And he did that. He sent out letters on Tampa Tribune letterhead. It worked very well. He came to the [BookExpo America conference] on his own and brought cartons of T-shirts to give out with his first novel. Then he spent many months traveling to bookstores in Florida and Georgia and Louisiana and Alabama. And the fact that he's up to book ten should speak for itself. He has a very proactive Web site where he sells T-shirts and baseball caps and he has an interactive Web site for his serial killer, Serge. Tim is about to make his thousandth bookstore stop. He's made the books succeed and he's made his publisher a believer in him. He's a great student of what the proactive author should be. And the booksellers love Tim.

You also represent James Ellroy. How did you meet him?
Years ago, my lawyer was, and still is, the lawyer for Otto Penzler and the Mysterious Bookshop. He thought Otto and I should get together. I've been Otto's agent for many years. Anyway, I liked Otto a lot, and we couldn't figure out how a bookseller and an agent could do anything together. I got the idea, or maybe it was Otto, to form the Mysterious Literary Agency. This was really at the point when I was just beginning to represent authors, and the idea was that Otto had this wonderful bookshop where crime writers came in all the time, and he would send writers to me who asked how to get an agent. So we started the Mysterious Literary Agency. We did a whole thing where our letterhead had no address and no phone number. If you wanted to find us, you had to solve the mystery. New York magazine did a little thing about the Mysterious Literary Agency. James saw that. James had had two paperback originals published and his agent had given up on him. He walked into the Mysterious Bookshop and said, "I am the demon dog of American crime fiction." Otto said, "I've never heard of you." James said he had this manuscript, which Otto sent to me as the first manuscript of the Mysterious Literary Agency. It was Ellroy's third novel, which I edited, as did Otto. About that time, Otto got financing to start Mysterious Press. He told me he wanted to buy Ellroy's novel for his first list. So the Mysterious Literary Agency went out of business. Of course neither Otto nor I knew that James's previous agent had had seventeen rejections on this novel. But we had done a lot of work on the book.

Tell me about that. I remember seeing some documentary where you talked about the editing work you did with Ellroy.
There are a lot of Ellroy stories. I wrote Ellroy a rather lengthy editorial report about that first novel I represented. I got back what looked like a very lengthy kidnap letter. It was written in red pencil on yellow legal paper, and some of the words on it were like an inch high: I AM NOT GOING TO DO THIS. I thought, "Oh, I've got a loony here. Somebody who calls himself the demon dog? Maybe he is a demon." But it was a very smart letter. He was very smart about what he would do, why he wouldn't do certain things. And he did do a lot of work on the book. I've edited him ever since. Nearly all of the editing is done here. He's been wonderful to work with.

But isn't there a story about you removing a lot of words from one of his books?
That's another story about how Ellroy's style developed. It was for a book called L.A. Confidential. It was a bigger book, in length, than he had ever done before. Otto was still at Mysterious Press when Warner Books bought it, but the editor in chief of Warner had heard that L.A. Confidential was finished. I called her and told her I had the manuscript. She asked me how long it was. I said it was about 850 pages. She said, "No, we can't publish that." I said, "What do you mean you can't publish it?" She said, "We publish all of Ellroy's books in mass market, and a manuscript of that size"—maybe it was even longer—"you'll have to cut 25 percent of the book."

L.A. Confidential follows three cops, and you couldn't take out one of the cops. James came to my house to talk about what we could do about it. I had the manuscript on the desk in front of me, and as a joke I said to James, "Well, maybe we could cut out a few small words." I meant it entirely as a joke. But I started going through a manuscript page and cut out about a dozen words on the page. James said, "Give me that." I gave him the page. And he just kept cutting. He was cutting and cutting and cutting. When he was done with the page, it looked like a redacted piece from the CIA. I said, "James, how would they be able to read this?" He said, "Let me read you the page." It was terrific. He said, "I know what I have to do." He took the whole manuscript back and cut hundreds of pages from the book and developed the style. That editor never knew what we had to do, but she forced him into creating this special Ellroy style, which his reputation as a stylist is really based on. It came from her, sight unseen, saying "Cut 25 percent of the book." He wound up cutting enough without cutting a single scene from that book.

How do you explain Ellroy's success with The Black Dahlia after six novels that were basically commercial failures?
It was a much bigger book, a much more emotionally involving book for James, and it dealt with a crime he'd been thinking about for a long time. So the manuscript itself was a big leap forward for him. But that doesn't explain how it succeeded after six novels didn't. James made a huge bet on himself. At the time he wrote The Black Dahlia, James was working as a caddie in Westchester. He was writing at night. He had no family and no other interests except writing. Otto [Penzler] was continuing to publish him and had bought The Black Dahlia for more money than he'd spent on James's previous three novels because he thought it was a terrific book.

Word got out about this book, and we got an offer from Warner Brothers, who optioned the book for fifty thousand dollars. That was more money than James had gotten for all of his other books combined. When I called James to tell him, he said, "When the money comes in, call me." When I did call him, he said, "I don't want the money. I want you to call Otto Penzler and ask him what the advertising and promotion budget is for The Black Dahlia." Otto told me they were going to probably spend fifteen thousand dollars because none of the books had succeeded up till then. I told James. He said, "Ask him to double it. Tell him that if they'll double the budget to thirty thousand, you'll be giving him my check for forty-five thousand dollars and we'll have an entire budget of seventy-five thousand dollars to launch my book." And when I did that, Otto agreed to increase the budget to thirty thousand dollars. He was just floored by the fact that James was going to kick in forty-five thousand dollars of his own money—all of what he was getting, after my commission, from the movie sale. James wanted the money to be spent on the front cover of Publishers Weekly, a full-page ad in the Times Book Review, and the rest of it to be spent on sending him around the country for three months. Three months. And he went. Because James has nearly a photographic memory, he remembered every single person he met, and he single-handedly made his book successful. That was more than twenty years ago.

Where did he get the idea? That's so farsighted for somebody in his situation.
He didn't get the idea from me. He was smart enough to say, "This is my chance. This is my book to get out and do it." He made it happen. Whatever success James has is entirely of his own making. He's a very thoughtful guy. He never went to college. But he's intelligent, he loves people, and he loves to go out and promote. Not every writer can do that. Not every writer's as good at it as he is. Tim Dorsey's as good as that. Others I've represented are. When you've got a talented writer and they have that charisma, it's my job to advise them about how to use those tools to make their book successful. So in effect, I am still the sales manager that I was when I was at Grove Press.

Tell me about how you find clients.
My great love, and where we've found most of our fiction writers, has been the literary journals. I don't know how many other agents read the journals. I know it's a lot more than it used to be, but I certainly read them more extensively than anybody else.

How many do you subscribe to?
I don't know the exact count, but it's somewhere over a hundred. My heroes in publishing are the selfless people who work at these journals, who either are not paid, or volunteer, and who spend their lives putting together these journals with relatively small circulations, but enjoy it. Over the years I've developed a number of friends among them. I admire them. I admire what they do. And they are responsible for many of the writers I represent, including Richard Russo, who I found in a literary journal out of Bowling Green, Ohio, which had a circulation of something like three hundred copies.

Walk me through what happened after you got in touch with Richard Russo.
He called me. He said he'd just finished a novel and asked if I could give him one good reason why he should send it to me. At that point in my career, I probably had a list of unknown writers, none of whom he would have recognized. This was the mid-eighties. I said, "If you send it to me Federal Express"—we didn't have electronic mail then—"I'll read it quickly and tell you what edits I think it needs." And Mr. Russo said to me, "How do you know it'll need any edits?" I said, "I've never read a first novel that I didn't think could be improved." So he sent it to me, and I gave him my edits.

Were they extensive?
No. I've actually given him many more notes as I've gone along with him from book to book than I gave him on the first novel. I think I was a little intimidated by the way he responded on the telephone, saying, "How do you know it needs any edits?" But he responded very well.

And what happened from there?
I sent out the novel and had it turned down by twelve major houses before I finally sent it to Gary Fisketjon, who was then doing Vintage Contemporaries, his list of original paperback fiction that was getting a lot of attention. While he couldn't give me very much money, he said he would make it the lead title on their fall list. He did a great job with the book. What I sometimes quote as a "high four-figure advance" turned out to be the beginning of a success story for Rick.

When you look back at the way he built a career—the sort of slow build, book after book after book—do you think that's still possible today?
In Rick's case, he's earned out every book he's published, and rather quickly, which has always led to him getting more money for the next book. But I think it's much harder today. I think Rick himself would say that he was lucky he got to the right editor at the right time in that editor's career. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize that with almost every successful book I've had, it's been the right editor at the right time at the right house. That's the key to all of the successful books I've ever had—the right editor.

And there's an element of luck?
Sometimes it's luck. I think that if I were to look back on my career, I would say I've been very lucky. I'm going to be the last guy to dismiss the idea of luck.

People in the business talk about how eight out of ten readers, or whatever the number actually is, are women. I think it's very difficult for young male writers to get published, especially today. I wonder what you think about that and how you've dealt with that in your career.
I certainly think it's very difficult for male writers who are not writing thrillers. They have a much tougher road. We've read a number of pretty good novels by male writers that we know just won't go. Male coming-of-age novels are impossible to sell. We've already talked about how it's getting more and more difficult to sell fiction. Let me give you a better picture of it by looking back on last year. Five of us in the agency read submissions—everyone downstairs and Judith and myself. Five of us. We have an editorial meeting on Thursdays. I never talk to Judith about what I've read except at this meeting so it's all fresh for all of us. We generally read partial manuscripts, or complete manuscripts. Everyone averages about two of those per week. So, in an average year, that's more than five hundred manuscripts. Last year, from those five hundred books, we took on three new writers. And we were only able to sell one of them. Remember that much of what we get is from writers I've written to after reading their stories in the literary journals—we get very little over the transom. So look at those odds.

They're very tough.
Damn right. We've spent a lot of time editing through second and third drafts and finally abandoning books because we don't think we can get the writer up to the level we want. We have to give up on them. Occasionally those books will get published too. But the odds are really difficult, and for the male writers it's even harder.

Is there anything they can do to make their odds better?
I'm always looking for the unusual. I think it may require writing something of a historical nature, with a historical setting. They have to be able to get an idea of what's on the best-seller list today and see that, outside the thriller genre, there aren't too many male fiction writers who are succeeding. And I don't think that's going to change for a while.

But isn't that troubling?
Sure it's troubling. I think it's troubling for all literary fiction writers today. But particularly for the male writers, who are only gradually becoming aware of how limiting that audience is. But I think you can find good male writers who can write from the woman's point of view, too. I remember a first novel I sold years ago. The writer himself was in his early thirties, but the novel was a first-person novel from the point of view of a sixty-two-year-old woman. It was entirely in first person, and it was a terrific story. It began his career. So if a male writer can write from the female point of view, or has a story that will interest a woman's audience, I think he has a better chance than somebody who's writing the kind of Hemingway-esque stuff we read in school.

You talked a little about the decline of independent booksellers. Tell me a little more about how you think that's affected the publishing industry.
It's particularly with first fiction. I think Book Sense has done a lot to try to pick up the slack there. But for first fiction, which is really the future generations of writers, it has become a real problem for publishers because they don't have the large list of independent booksellers that they can appeal to. I forget what the percentage of sales is today from the independents, but it goes down every year. I think that's affecting first fiction, particularly short story collections. I love the short story. I love the form. But who's going to take on a short story collection today? Damn few. I think that's influencing the market—the market is feeding on itself.

With all the short stories and novels you read, what is it about something that grabs your attention?
I can't say what it is that captures my attention. I just know it. I think since I've been reading all my life, I know on the first page, the first paragraph, if I'm in the hands of somebody really capable. I wrote an essay that I put on my Web site about reading the stories in the journals. I pointed out the first paragraphs of a number of writers whose novels I subsequently took on. And it was always right at the beginning that I was grabbed.

I remember reading a first novel and turning to Judith and giving her the first page and saying, "I'll bet you can't stop reading." She read it and asked, "Where's the rest of it?" I said, "Aha!" So can I describe what it is? It is entirely a visceral reaction, and it is also very personal and subjective and not easily categorized. It could be, for me, a western (I represent Elmer Kelton, who is recognized as the greatest living American writer of the western); it could be a crime novel; it could be a literary novel. It doesn't matter what the category is—but it gets me. I think that's what keeps us all going. It's the discovery. One of the best things about my job is that when I finish reading the manuscript of a first novel that I really like, whatever the time of day is, I can get on the phone and call the author, even if it's eleven o'clock at night, and know that they'll be very happy to get my call. And how often have you read a wonderful book where you'd love to call up the author and talk about it? That's what I do for a living.

How do you feel about the decline of independent publishing and independent publishers?
I like to hope that Morgan Entrekin is not alone in this field. There are some interesting small presses coming along. I'm really impressed by what they've been doing. It's interesting how many submissions they're getting from agents these days—agents who were not able to sell that really good novel to a major house because the author didn't have a platform but had a terrific book. I think we'll see more of that. Because, again, as nature abhors a vacuum, I think there's a need in this country for good writing. And while it may not be commercial, there will be an audience to read it.

Do you have any thoughts about the future of books. Have you played with this Kindle thing that Amazon has made, or the Sony Reader?
No. Listen, I was probably the last guy to get a computer at his desk. I am a Luddite. I'd rather read the finished book. I love the feel of a printed book, and I suspect many people of my age group in publishing feel the same. When you open a carton of new books that have just come from the printer, take a breath of that air and the new fresh print. It's intoxicating. The smell, when the box is opened, is intoxicating.

Do you think book reviews are as important as they used to be?
I don't think so. I don't think anybody will tell you they are. A front-page New York Times Book Review can either sell a book or not sell a book. Sometimes it's because you finish reading the review and you can't tell whether or not the reviewer liked the book. There was a time when book sales fell off dramatically when the New York Times was on strike and there was no Times Book Review. I don't think that happens anymore, unfortunately. You can see the newspapers are cutting back on their book sections. They're not making any money. The publishers aren't spending the money they used to on advertising in the book review section. Look at today's Times Book Review—the number of ads is very small. Once a book review section doesn't make money, and starts losing money, it's going to be cut back. So between the number of reviews now available, and the effectiveness of the reviews, and where they're placed in the paper, I think we're seeing the real value disappear.

Tell me what you think about MFA programs.
A number of the writers I represent are graduates of MFA programs. But in much of the material I've seen from MFA writers, they're writing about the standard stories of family trauma, divorce, the death of a parent. They're very capably written. But we've seen too much of that.

You wrote a piece in maybe the early '90s about the sameness of what you were reading.
Yes, and I think if you talk to the editors of a lot of the journals, they'll tell you that they're used to the same thing—that they see an awful lot of capable stuff that is not very engaging. I was asked this question once at a university. I was talking to seniors, and some of the writers were considering going into MFA programs. They asked me about the MFA programs. I said I thought it was great for discipline: You have to write. I mean, you should want to write, but if you find that difficult and need the discipline of going to class, then you should go do it. If you want to go ahead with a career in the university, if you want to teach creative writing, you're going to need an MFA. I think the programs do some good for people who either need the degree in order to continue in the university setting or need the discipline. But I think the originality factor is something that's suffering as a result. We're getting too much of the same old, same old. But I'm working right now with a writer who's going for his MFA, and he's writing a novel in first person that is very unusual, and I'm encouraging him to keep working on it. It's difficult to give you a blank statement about MFAs. There are good things and there are some quite negative things.