Andy Ross(Literary Agent Update)

Andy started his literary agency in February, 2008. Andy represent authors who write books in a wide range of subjects including: narrative non-fiction, science, journalism, history, current affairs, contemporary culture, religion, children's books and commercial and literary fiction.

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Hello, every want to welcome tothe writer's class. And I know this
is going to be one of theshows y'all all like to hear, because
everyone loves when I interview a literaryagent. They just keep coming back and
back and back. I Austin wonder. I'm like, I interview actual CEOs
of publishing companies, and y'all like, yeah, the lipary agent. I
feel like those are the celebrities ofthe literary world. Anyway, I haven't

(00:22):
known that. I remember to introducemyself to me. Okay, I'm sorry,
professionalism, I'm back again. I'mback to the professionalism anyway. Books.
Yeah, yeah, I occasionally thisphase with that. That dance has
occasionally interesting things to put on apage. Imagine that. Yeah, it's

(00:44):
just as interesting as it is silly. Oh yeah, now you're gonna go
buy the book. Anyway, Herethey are there, And I thought being
grown up was easy, and Ithought the worse was bad. If only
are mere Remember are in Verse fourand Coffee, Widdows Web and Widows Debt.
You can get those books wherever youfind audio books, because those are
our seven audio six audio books.I can can't count, but I sure
can write. Oh, if yougo to wwwd and I thought Ladies dot

(01:08):
com, you can see where wehave another eleven books, giving us the
grand total of seventeen books. I'selfto me for writing seventeen books. I
feel like I did something worthwhile.And if you don't agree, I'm a
narcissist. I don't care. Oh, but you don't even hear about me,
which is something a narcissist never said. You're gonna hear about our wonderful

(01:29):
guests. Wonderful guests. Would youlike to introduce yourselves? Well, I'm
Andy Ross and I'm a literary agent. I live in Oakland, California.
I've been an agent now for aboutfourteen years, and before that I owned
a bookstore and at Cody's Books,which was on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley,
was sort of a famous bookstore.And I got into the book business in

(01:53):
nineteen seventy two, so at onepoint I was twenty six or something.
I was a young term. NowI'm an old turkey, And you know,
I've loved being in the book business, and I really love being an
agent because it's the other end ofthe book business from being a bookseller.
But I get to work with verycreative people, and I do more than

(02:15):
just kind of negotiate contracts. Iget involved in the creative process. I
do a lot of editing, andI meet very interesting people and surprisingly interesting
people. I thought when I gotstarted, I would be dealing with people
in Berkeley, which is where Ilived for thirty years. But I have

(02:36):
clients all over the world, andsome of them I've never met in real
time. But it's it's just reallyexciting. It's fun. I love how
you said you thought you were goingto be dealing with people in Berkeley.
It's the first time ever I thought, you know, that's a great place
to go if you're going to beyou know, that is there for thirty

(03:00):
years, So I am I ama little jaded with Berkeley, but that's
okay, Okay, what about BrownNow I'm joking Pripos would be a writer,
But little actual questions for you,like I'm gonna try to put my
professional ribbon on there. We go, Okay, go ahead, and that's
all right. Everyone wants to knowfirst and foremost, So let's get this

(03:22):
out of the way. What doesa literary agent look for in a quarry
letter and a manuscript? I knowyou've never heard that question before, first
time anyone's ever at that, right, I get, you know, I
go everywhere to writer's conferences and Igive classes in writing query letters and book

(03:42):
proposals, and actually I have writtena book on how to write a book
proposal and it's it's I think it'sthe best book out on the subject.
But you can decide for yourself whatdo I want in a query letter?
The first thing is it shouldn't bethat long. I usually wanted half a
page or less for the simple reasonthat agents are busy and they get ten

(04:06):
to twenty to fifty query letters aday and they don't have time, so
you have to begin a query letter. A query letter has three parts.
The first part is just the facts. What's the genre, what's the title?
How many words is it? Okay? Then the second part of the

(04:26):
query letter is to try to articulate. This is the hardest part. What
is the high concept of your book? And hopefully it has a high concept.
That's a term that comes out ofHollywood, which means you can kind
of describe what the book is ina sentence, you know, like like
I have. One of my clientswrote a memoir of being a successful paparazzi.

(04:51):
Okay, that's the concept. Youknow exactly what the book is about.
There are a lot of books whichare really fine books that don't have
a hig sept Like if you've read, for instance, The Glass Castle or
The Liars Club, you know,one of these literary memoirs. They don't
really have a high concept, butthey were fabulously successful. So a high

(05:13):
concept doesn't make a book a betterbook, but it does make it easier
to sell. So that so youwould try to articulate your concept. Sometimes
you want to give some equivalence,like you know such and such, meats
such and such. You don't haveto do that. And then the third
part is just a paragraph about yourself, who you are, and hopefully what

(05:36):
whether you have a platform or notplatform. It's very annoying. That's a
very annoying term. Platform. Itell people it's either you have an endowed
shair at Harvard or you're sleeping withOprah's hairdresser, preferably both. So you
have a you have authority to writeabout your subject and access to promote it.

(06:00):
I love the ary letter. I'mgonna have to find out who opens
hair dressed those now that's my throwawayline. I don't think I'm ever going
to be able to do the Harvardthing, so I'm just push that to
the side. Yeah, okay,So my next question is mostly about you

(06:20):
and how did you get started asa literal No, you said you're a
bookseller. I was a bookseller andmy store closed because people they're buying habits
changed. They all started buying online. So I didn't really know what I
was going to do. I've beena bookseller all my life and all my
adult life, and I thought perhapsi'd be sacking groceries a safeway since I

(06:42):
had no expertise in anything else.But I decided that I would do the
next best thing to sacking groceries,and that was become a literary agent.
And you know, I didn't.I was sort of a I woke up
one night and said, maybe I'llbe a literary agent. There was I
didn't do my due diligence, butthat's what I did, and I've been
lucky. It's been great. Ohwow, okay, you I just love

(07:09):
that. I wanted to know whatkind of mindset do you have to go
from from selling books to being aliterary agent, or does those two skill
sets actually cooperate with each other tomake you a better literary agent. Well,
I mean it's very different because we'reat the either end of the of
the book of food chain, right, you know, we I work when
a book gets started and a retailertries to sell it after it's being complete.

(07:35):
But I do know the territory,which has been very helpful. I
know who the publishers are. Iknow what kind of books they publish.
I know I know the different genresof books and how popular they are because
I sorted them and put them onbookshelves and so they were selling. So
it was it was useful. WhatI didn't know were how to negotiate contracts,

(07:58):
and I didn't know how to editbooks. I didn't know how to
do book proposals. I didn't knowhow to write a query letter. So
I had to learn all that stuff. Oh okay, so let me understand
that you're a lot like us,because we had to learn all of this
stuff. When we a lot likeeverybody, you know, you know,
you have to fake it for abouta year and then you know you get

(08:24):
imposter syndrome. But after a while, you know you know about it.
So I've become an expert. Okay, odd question, just letting you know
before I even ask it. So, what do you think is part of
the literary agents job that most peoplewould be like, huh, little agents
do that too? Well? Mostpeople think that. I asked people when

(08:48):
I have I give classes on,you know, how to work with literary
agent, and I ask people whythey want to work with one, and
most of them will say, well, we have to because publishers won't accept
books that our agented, large publisherswon't. I remember the legendary publisher Alfred
Kenoff many years ago said agents areto a publisher as a knife is to

(09:11):
a throat. But that's changed,and publishers expect us to be the gatekeepers.
And one of the things I alwaysthought that we sort of, you
know, be kind of middlemen,that we match things up and then negotiate
contracts. But it's a lot morethan that, you know. I some

(09:33):
of my most successful books were Iyou know that people would come to me
with a really bad idea or withtwo ideas, and I'd say no,
but you do have a good ideaover here. And that happens a lot
so and that's fun and I doediting, which I wasn't expecting as well,
So I'm very much involved in thecreative process. And you know,

(09:56):
I mean, one of the thingsyou have to do before you submit a
book is write a book proposal.You don't have to do that with fiction.
You have to do with nonfiction.And what's a book proposal. It's
a business plan, and most peopledon't know how to write them, at
least until they read my book.Then they know all they need to know,
but they it's a lot of it'san ordeal for most authors to write

(10:20):
these book proposals, but I havefound that it's a really important part of
the process. And when they writethe proposal, they have to think about
structure, who the audience is,how they're going to promote the book,
and it really helps them develop theidea of their book. I mean sometimes
the book completely changes as a resultof having to write a book proposal.

(10:43):
So I feel pretty good about that. Oh and I love the fact that
you said one of the great placesand to go to learn how to do
this book proposal correctly is a bookproposal written by Andy Ross. Absolutely,
I just wanted to be real clear. Everyone knows where to go now,
listen, I make a quarter ineach book. So that's good, thank

(11:03):
you. Okay, So we've discussedquite a bit, and I wanted to
know again this is the throwaway question, and then I swear, we're like,
we'll be done after this. Iswear. What I wanted to know
was what are the three pieces ofice that you would give any author out
there who was looking right now tobe like, oh, I'm ready to

(11:26):
go ahead and start looking at literaryagents or publishers. Well, one thing
is make sure your book is perfect. By the way, it's it's very
different for fiction than nonfiction. Forfiction, you have to complete your manuscript
and it has to be perfect becauseyou're in you know, there is a
lot of competition out there, andthere's a lot of rejection, and you

(11:52):
have to be you have to beable to handle rejection. You know.
It's like Hollywood, if you're anunknown actor, you have to be resilient,
and it usually it isn't about you. If you have an agent,
it means your book is good enoughto get published, but it still doesn't
get published because publishers make decisions basedon mark marketing. So it has to
be perfect. And if it's nonfiction. You you have to have a

(12:18):
good book proposal, and you haveto know what your concept is. And
it's got to be a publishers youknow you you think a concept is really
brilliant and then cast the light onsomething important. And publishers are going to
say, who's the audience for thisbook? That's their first question. So
you've got to be able to thinkabout who's actually going to read it?

(12:39):
And that's and then you have tomake a good book proposal has got to
answer the questions the acquisition editor isgoing to be asking. And the first
question is going to be, who'sgoing to read this book? I love
that, I love that you boughtin that you have to answer the question
of let's be that's part of myjob since most authors don't know that.

(13:05):
And then one of the one ofthe really important things I think that most
self published people like myself because I'ma poet, no that you need to
be like, is it going tomake money? Because that's what your mostlisher
is asking. Your publisher is askingthe same thing, is it going to
be successful? It is the samething publishing as self publishing is easy to
do but difficult to succeed at becauseyou're the publisher. You have to market

(13:26):
your own book. And writers,you know, they're they're writers. They
live in a solitary life. They'renot good at marketing for the most part,
they don't understand marketing. But ifyou're going to publish your own book,
it's your job exactly. I wantto thank you so much. Oh,
which I was about to say,I want to thank you so much
and wrap this up, but thenI remember that last question that I need

(13:48):
to ask. I have to askthis. It's a hard time out here
for publishing, it, I hear, so does it has the literary agents
job taking on any new aspects dueto like you know, Amazon and self
publishing and that sort of thing.Are are y'all still just rolling like good
old times? Well, it's alwaysit's very hard to get books published.

(14:09):
I mean, the book business asa whole is doing well or it's not
doing badly. But a lot ofthose books are by kind of name brand
authors like James Patterson. It's areally successful kind of commercial author. Probably
a third of the books in theUnited States are his. But you know,

(14:31):
it's for if you're a debut author, if you haven't been published before.
It's tough. It's tough to getan agent, and what an agent
finds it tough to get a publisher. I tell people my life is a
little like my social life in highschool. I get a lot of rejections
too, and it's not a lotof fun. And and then once you

(14:52):
find a publisher, it's difficult forthem to find readers because there's so many
books out there, so a lotof you know, they A conventional wisdom
is three quarters of the books don'tmake money, and they have to rely
on the one quarter. So it'sa tough business. And but it's a
wornding business. It's an enjoyable business. I'm not satisfying. It is fun,

(15:20):
right, all right, thank youso much for being here. Can
you tell people where to find yourbook? My book is the easiest place
to find My book is online inAmazon. I have an e book and
a print on paper book as well, So I'm gonna go ahead and wrap
us up. Then, okay,all the questions I'm I questioned out,

(15:41):
thank you for having me here,right, I'm will know it on one
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(16:03):
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