Author Enthusiast: 10 Questions With Literary Agent Christopher Rhodes

Christopher Rhodes

By Daniel Ford

My usual correspondence with literary agents tends to involve a lot of weeping and angst, so I’m always thrilled when an agent takes the time to patiently explain the publishing process to our readers.

I connected with Christopher Rhodes, a literary agent for The Stuart Agency, after I heaped praise on his client Taylor Brown’s Fallen Land. It was one of the rare times I gave an agent homework knowing it would result in positive answers (okay, so I slipped him my query letter and a sample chapter, I’m not an idiot)!

Rhodes’ insights into the publishing realm should give aspiring authors all the knowledge they need to sensibly chase their literary dreams.

Daniel Ford: How did you get your start in publishing?

Christopher Rhodes: I grew up in New Hampshire and I worked at a bookstore in high school and this gave me experience enough to land a job at the Borders’ flagship store in New York City at the World Trade Center.

I started working at Borders shortly after it opened in 1996 and stayed through 1999. The three-floor store was insanely busy from 12:00 to 2:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, and I loved working the cash wrap and learning what people were buying. Booksellers gain a wide knowledge of the book market just by seeing and touching books on a daily basis.

While at Borders, I took on the responsibility of maintaining a local interest book kiosk at Windows on the World, the restaurant and bar on the top floors of the North Tower. For a kid from small town New Hampshire who dreamed of living in New York City, this was pretty exciting stuff. Eventually, through friends, I met a man who did publicity for Simon & Schuster and he got me an interview for an entry level sales position there. Off I went to Rockefeller Center and a career was born. From sales I moved upstairs to marketing and worked for the inimitable Michael Selleck before getting hired by literary agent Carol Mann who taught me this side of the business.

A handful of us from that Borders have gone on to really exciting careers in publishing and many of us are still friends. Maybe you’d call it being in the right place at the right time, but I’m also the right person. I fell in love with books as a teenager and I just can’t imagine doing anything else. Publishing was lucky to find me!

DF: Since entering the publishing world, what major changes have you seen?

CR: One major change I haven’t seen since entering the publishing world is that e-books have not beaten up print books and stolen their lunch money.

I started working in the sales division of Simon & Schuster in 1999 and if you had asked me then, I would have told you that the printed book would disappear in three year’s time. There was a fear in the air surrounding the unknown technology and what it would mean to trade book publishing. Turns out the fears were justified, except it wasn’t the e-book we should have been afraid of, it was Amazon.

Lessons are still being learned but I feel like the beginnings of a silver lining have started to appear, especially evidenced in the revolution of the indie bookstore and its power to drive the market. I have two debut novels publishing in January—Taylor Brown’s Fallen Land (St. Martin’s Press) and W.B. Belcher’s Lay Your Weary Tune (Other Press)—and both of them have received enormous pre-sales support from indie bookstores, Brown’s predominately in the southeast where he lives and where the novel is set and Belcher’s predominately in the northeast where he lives and where the novel is set. This kind of specified, regional support is immeasurable and so meaningful to the success of a book. To be able to put an author in front of a bookseller, to have them shake hands and have a conversation, and then to have the bookseller tell her customers about the book, I get chills thinking about this philosophy of salesmanship. I’m very grateful to the publishers my authors are working with who understand the importance of putting a human face behind the books they are selling: St. Martin’s Press, Other Press, Tin House Books. To me, this is a throw back to old school publishing and bookselling, pre-Internet days, and I’m glad it isn’t a major change.

DF: What steps do you recommend an author take when trying to land an agent?

CR: The first step, and the one that is often overlooked by would-be authors who email me asking for representation, is the step of becoming a writer.

Over and over again, in reading submissions and queries, I notice that writers are trying to find an agent too soon in their careers, and this is true for both fiction and nonfiction writers. I would love to believe in the myth:

Unknown writer connects with big name literary agent! Seven- figure deal and film option follow!

That’s all very Lana-Turner-sipping-a-Coke-at-a-Hollywood-drug-store, but it isn’t reality. What I do as an agent is meet an author after she has put in the very hard work—writing, publishing in journals and national magazines, building a marketing platform, winning awards, being noticed for her work, or becoming an expert in her field—and navigate her through the business of trade publishing and get her the best possible deal (which doesn’t always mean the biggest advance).

As an agent, I don’t see myself as a star maker but as a star enthusiast who walks with an author on the last mile to shape her book project into something that will catch an editors eye. Then, if I’m lucky, I get to stick around to manage her career. I also get to be a confidant and business adviser to the writer, but writers make themselves a big deal by being good at what they do and by devoting time and energy to their craft. I read a lot of fiction query letters and nonfiction book proposals and the first things I look at are the author’s credentials. If you are asking me to represent you but have not proven yourself as a writer, I can’t help you.

Other important steps include writing a strong query letter (more on this below), being persistent but professional, especially if you have the credentials to back up your persistence. Remember that I am busy and that although reading query letters and submissions is a most necessary part of my job, it is also a part that I have to do on my own time. Having a roster of active clients means that book projects are always in various stages of the publishing process and active clients are given priority. When you are an active client, you will expect this to be the case. Trust me.

The final step I’ll mention here is perseverance. If you are talented, have strong credentials, have written a fantastic query letter or book proposal, and have been persistent and professional with an agent, then don’t give up. On more than one occasion I’ve seen a book project I’ve passed on that sold a few weeks later by another agent. Just because I don’t understand how to sell a certain concept or I don’t fall in love with a novel enough to go to bat for it, doesn’t mean that another agent won’t feel completely differently about it. In the mean time: see you at Schwab’s!

DF: How can writers develop a quality query letter that catches an agent’s eye?

CR: I think writers should stop trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to query letters. There are plenty of examples of good query letters accessible via the Internet and all you have to do is pick one and mimic its format, paragraph by paragraph, but with your own original content.

Bear in mind that I read a lot of query letters and instead of this fact translating into, “he must want something fun and quirky and original with a pink font and a bunch of non sequitur information about my goldfish,” it means I value consistency above all things. I like to know that I can skip to the bottom of the query letter to glance at your credentials, or that I can bring my eyes to the first paragraph to read the brief description of the book.

My pet peeve is when writers give personal information in a query letter. I am not your therapist. A few weeks ago my college intern emailed me to say she didn’t know what do do about a query we received from a man who wrote in the first line of his letter that he was dying and that we were his last chance to have his book published. That’s a lot of pressure for a 21-year-old student getting ready for final exams! I had her forward me the email and I deleted it without reading. That might sound harsh to you, but it is impossible to be objective about the work if a writer is making it personal from the very beginning.

I can see through gimmicks and to me they are signs that in all likelihood your book project isn’t very strong. Let the work stand for itself and give me the facts.

DF: What is the most common mistake you see from first-time authors?

CR: It is hard to pick the most common, but a mistake I see over and over again from writers is that they are unwilling to have their work vetted or work-shopped by their peers. I work with a lot of debut writers, both fiction and memoir, and the best relationships I have are with those that are used to having their work critiqued. The revision process with an agent can be brutal.

Many writers get used to this process in an MFA program but an MFA is not a requirement to publishing a book. Many towns have writing groups and if not, you can start your own. Ask people (not friends and family) to read your work and be willing to listen and take feedback.

Consider this: if you send me a manuscript and I like it very much, I’m going to ask my intern Lori (who is fantastic) to read it and to weigh-in, then I’m going to ask Andrew Stuart, owner of the agency for which I work, to give me his opinion. Then, if I take on your project and we are fortunate enough to find an editor who responds to the manuscript, that editor will have to convince his fellow editors, his publisher, the sales force, the marketing team, and others at the publishing house that your book is worth taking on. It is well worth your time to get a number of people to help you shape your manuscript before you start submitting to agents. I always tell potential clients that their manuscript needs to be 100% complete as far as they are concerned before they send it to me and then they have to be prepared to be told there is a lot more work to be done.

DF: What do you look for when you're reading a manuscript?

CR: I’m always looking for beautiful language and a distinct voice, but currently I’m desperate for plot. I keep getting my hands on gorgeously written manuscripts that don’t take me anywhere and I have to say no because the books are too quiet. Look at 2015’s big fiction successes: A Little Life, A Brief History of Seven Killings, and Fates and Furies. These books are sweeping and epic and that’s what I’m looking for right now. I love for a novel to take me on a journey. It doesn’t have to be far but I want to keep moving. I have to be compelled to turn the page. I was indoctrinated into novel reading by the works of Morrison and Steinbeck and Tartt and Cunningham, and I’m very sensitive to voice, prose, and plot all working together to propel a story forward. It’s elusive, but it’s out there. 

DF: You must read a ton during the day. Are you able to unplug from your professional persona and enjoy reading when you’re off the clock?

CR: Actually, I don’t read all that much during the day because there isn’t time. I hear this from other agents and editors as well and the general consensus, I think, is that we do our reading for work on our own time.

Part of my job as an agent is to know and to understand the current book market, and this means, on top of reading solicited and unsolicited submissions and revisions of manuscripts I am working on with clients, I also have to keep up on current books that are selling. I need to read books that are working and apply that knowledge to projects I’m considering. I have taught myself to call this latter type of reading “pleasure reading” as it doesn’t directly correlate with a specific business project.

And, like any good bibliophile, I keep a list of books, old and new, that I want to read and I am adding to this list constantly. Being an agent means being a book enthusiast and this trait can be a double-edged sword because there is so much I want to read and if I overhear someone talking about a book excitedly, I get so overwhelmed that I’m willing to drop everything and start reading it immediately. I have trained myself to be the type of reader who has many books going at once and right now, other than manuscripts I’m reading for work, I’m reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus, Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, and Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. All of them are blowing my mind, by the way.

To answer your question: for this literary agent, when it comes to reading I am never off the clock, but there are times when I am less on the clock than other times.

DF: Who are some writers you’ve discovered that readers should be aware of?

CR: I’m hesitant to use the word “discover.” If anything, I feel like I’ve been fortunate to have great writers discover me. I’ve never had to talk myself into taking on a novel but I have had to talk writers into letting me take on their novels. Also, for every novel I’ve taken on, I have known from page one that I love the book. No exaggeration. I can’t offer representation based on page one, but in every single case, in hindsight, I’ve known that I love the book based on the first page. That’s what good writing does.

In the case of Belcher’s Lay Down Your Weary Tune, I read the first chapter and had to have my friend Beth Staples, editor for Lookout Books and Ecotone, talk me out of calling him and offering him representation before finishing the novel. The first novel I sold was Jennifer Pashley's The Scamp (Tin House Books) and the first line of the manuscript (it was changed in revision) was “She killed the baby.” Come on!

My favorite story about signing a client is Andrew Hilleman’s. Andy’s manuscript World, Chase Me Down (Penguin, 2017) was 172,000 words and I was loving it! But it was so long that I couldn’t read it fast enough and Andy had a couple of other agents considering the book. I was scared I would lose the novel so I ended up offering him representation before I was halfway through the manuscript. He accepted my offer based on the fact that I had recently sold Taylor Brown’s debut novel. Andy had ordered Taylor’s short story collection in the meantime, loved it, and wanted to be represented by the same agent who represented Taylor. Since then, Taylor has read World, Chase Me Down, given it a fantastic blurb, and raves about it at dinner parties!

I’ve also been fortunate enough to work with fantastic memoirists Gwendolyn Knapp, After a While You Just Get Used to It (Penguin Random House) and Peter Selgin, The Inventors (Hawthorne Books, 2016)

DF: What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

CR: Stop talking about writing and write.

DF: Can you name one random fact about yourself?

CR: As I type this, I’m wearing a sweatshirt that belonged to my maternal grandfather, Alton Nelson. It is blue with yellow lettering and it reads: "It’s hard to be humble when you are Swedish." My good friends, writers Xhenet Aliu and Timothy O’Keefe, suggest I sell the design to Urban Outfitters, collect my millions, and take an early retirement.

To find out more about Christopher Rhodes, visit The Stuart Agency’s official website or follow him on Twitter @CR_agent.

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Agent Talk: 7 Questions With Literary Agent Rob McQuilkin

Rob McQuilkin

By Sean Tuohy

Literary agent Rob McQuilkin has seen the print world turn digital during his more than 20-year career in publishing, but has always kept his hand on the pulse of the market for his clients. Best of all, he’s a really interesting guy.

McQuilkin took time away from his duties at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin literary agency to sit and talk about what he has learned while helping writers realize their publishing dreams.

Sean Tuohy: Tell us how you got your start in publishing.

Rob McQuilkin: As a Columbia undergrad at the tail end of the 1980s, I thought originally that I'd major in art history, with a minor in English. The idea was to go on to work in museums, so the internships I pursued during freshman and sophomore years were all based in the art world: for example, the chairman's office at Christie's and  the Old Master Drawings department at the Morgan Library.

Then, the summer before junior year, I had this wonderful internship at The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., working with the archivist there, Gene Gaddis. At the time Gene was circling a possible book project, a biography of the legendary museum director Chick Austin. And so over that summer of 1989, between all of the labeling of objects and other administrative duties deep in the bowels of the Atheneum, I worked as well to help Gene out with research for the book proposal he was drafting, and to edit the text of the proposal.

It was fun.

Two notions began to take shape in my mind throughout that experience:

First, that the sort of professional latitude Austin had enjoyed back in the 1920s and 1930s (when he was showing and buying the first Surrealists, for example, and building the first International Style museum pavilion, all the while nearly single-handedly re-establishing a taste and a market for Mannerism and the Italian Baroque, which had not been anyone's favorite for quite a while by then) had been, well, a wonderful aberration—a whirlwind of provocation and achievement unlikely ever to happen again in quite that way.

Also taking shape in my mind that summer was the notion that putting together a book project, on the other hand, might allow for—albeit in miniature—just the kinds of risk and reward and, for lack of a better word, "play," that had distinguished Chick Austin's career.

Leaning forward on the edge of my seat as Gene regaled me with stories about the figures he'd been interviewing for this biography of Chick—exquisitely articulate folks like Lincoln Kirstein and Marguerite Yourcenar—or as he brought me up to speed, say, on his latest meeting with a prospective editor (ultimately the project would go to Knopf's Judith Jones), I was soon enough smitten by the process. And it was not long after this that I switched my major to favor English, pushing Art History down into the second spot. Because I began to realize, you know, that publishing was maybe the likelier destination.

Fast-forwarding a few years, I would work first for Jamie Raab, then a senior editor at what was called Warner Books (a decade later she would become publisher of the well-re-named Grand Central Publishing) who, in addition to doing the paperbacks of people like Lorrie Moore and Scott Turow, was publishing huge New York Times best-sellers like Ekaterina Gordieva's My Sergei and Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook. After that I went to Anchor Books/Doubleday, where I worked on the paperback editions of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, edited Anita Hill's Speaking Truth to Power, and acquired Lois Gould's classic memoir, Mommy Dressing: A Love Story, After a Fashion.

One thing that was soon clear during my time on that side of the desk was that I was predisposed to see the author's side of things, and maybe less so the publisher's. One of my bosses (not very happily) pointed this out to me once, and I thought: "Well, she's kind of right." Then again, I'd grown up the grandson and son of writers, and so had some idea of how things could look from the other end of the "supply chain"—just how things could come off to someone who'd spent his or her time drafting, revising and submitting, rather than, say, attending marketing meetings.

Maybe it was inevitable that I would become an agent. Certainly the job felt right the moment I took it on.

I cut my teeth as an agent working for Jill Kneerim and Ike Williams at what was then the Palmer & Dodge Agency—an unusually conceived outgrowth of the intellectual property division at a mid-sized Boston law firm that nonetheless had a staggeringly good list of writing clients, ranging from E.O. Wilson, Joseph Ellis, and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas to Edith Pearlman, Stephen Greenblatt, and Robert Pinsky. Jill and Ike were hugely generous with their time and expertise and helped me to get the hang of things on this side of the desk.

By the time I went out on my own, soon taking on as partners Will Lippincott (previously publisher of The New Republic and strategy + business magazine) and Maria Massie (previously with The Witherspoon Agency and later Inkwell Management), I knew that this was how I was meant to make a living. I also knew how important it was to enjoy and respect both the people you're working for (the clients) and the people you're working with, which means not only the colleagues alongside you within an agency, but also the editors and publishing colleagues with whom you labor to "put on a show."

It's not always the easiest of jobs, this one, but, when it's all coming together smoothly and with the right results, it's pretty hard to beat!

ST: What do you look for when you're reading a manuscript?

RQ: Making a point of keeping an open mind, all practiced skepticism banished for the moment (but not too far!), I dive right into the manuscript before me, you know, ready to be impressed—by language, by wit, by commanding expertise—whatever the fundamental appeal may be, wherever it may lie.

One of those things, though, or some combination, will need to ignite fairly readily, within the first few pages even, in order for the project at hand to seem viable not only to me, but to anyone else I can imagine asking to dive into some form of this same manuscript at some stage down the line.

Best case, there is some sort of ignition in short order; then it just needs to hold, as one turns the pages—to hold and to develop; to take us on a journey of some sort that will somehow reward the reader, be it simply with the power to entertain, with the rush of language working at a high level, or with some new perspective that will leave the reader changed.

It's a tall order, no doubt! And the people lucky enough not only to have the chops to work that magic but also to have hit on just the right idea or subject or scenario in this particular manuscript—an idea or subject or scenario that is genuinely fresh, but also recognizable in its contours and its significance—are, well, few and far between.

ST: What is the most common mistake you see from first time authors?

RQ: Well, I hate "rules," I should say at the outset—you know, do's and don'ts—so am loath to point a finger at particular "mistakes."

It's not that writers tend to do anything wrong, seems to me, at least when we're talking about their work as writers, so much as that they may not end up doing the thing or things that will be uncommonly right.

Having said that, there are some easy bits of advice I can deal out here on a few very basic matters:

First, when querying and submitting to agents, make an effort to familiarize yourself with those whom you're targeting, and try your best to tailor each query in a way that seems thoughtful and not simply rote—let alone half-cocked, with names misspelled, clients misattributed, or your rationale for targeting the agent in question so vague as to be recognizably, you know, one-size-fits-all.

Oh, or perhaps the very worst botch of all: sending out a mass e-mails with other agents in the visible "to" or "cc" field (How to write to a hundred people and receive zero replies).

Farther down the line, assuming you've avoided some of those missteps and begun working with an agent: try and be careful of getting adversarial, for lack of a better word, with that person, particularly at those early stages, before the two of you have even had a proper chance to get to know one another, to find a working rhythm together.

One thing I see again and again are newly signed clients, determined not to be "saps," who feel they ought to run their agents' Author/Agency Agreements through lawyers who may be friends, or come highly recommended as "entertainment lawyers," but who in fact may be entirely unfamiliar with book publishing agreements, industry convention, etc. Not only is this likely to rankle, but it rarely achieves much in the way of concessions, as the vast majority of clauses in any reputable agent's Author/Agency Agreement are apt to be industry convention and thus there for a reason.

The long and short of it, though, is that the agent you're beginning to work with at the outset of a project, and, with any luck, a long-term working relationship together, is at the very center of your publishing team, and you want to keep the emotional baseline of that partnership as friendly and productive and collaborative as humanly possible, right from the start. Sometimes I see authors come into the relationship supposing clearly that they'd be "fools" not to adopt a more jaundiced eye on this new working relationship, and perhaps even an adversarial stance. This of course makes no sense whatsoever! It's just not that kind of business. And it doesn't, in general, attract the sort of individual who relishes that worldview. Least that's the way I see it.

ST: What steps do you recommend an author take when trying to locate an agent?

RQ: This will be, I think, the same answer every good agent gives, but:

1.) Get a subscription to Michael Cader's Publishers Marketplace and make good use of the Deals and Dealmakers database, in particular, in order to familiarize yourself with the agents out there who seem to be having luck with the type of material you see yourself as working in, selling to the types of houses you might imagine appropriate for your work. Let this kind of homework inform the list (not too long, not too short, but always thoughtfully made) of agents you make a point of reaching out to.

2.) Make a habit of flipping through the Acknowledgements section of books you see as being like yours, or what you'd like to see your book as becoming in a perfect world, books you have particularly enjoyed, and that have had the kind of life out there in the marketplace that you'd like to see for your own book. This list of agents should inform the very top of the list of agents you want to query.

And again, make good use of the titles that have brought you to a particular agent. It's one of the very easiest ways to draft a query letter likely to catch an agent's eye, other than dropping the fact that, you know, you're a full professor at Yale or Oberlin, or that you just won a Guggenheim, or have a story being published next month in The Paris Review!

ST: Since entering the publishing world, what major changes have you seen happen?

RQ: Good lord, where to begin?

It's been a period of at once significant growth and painful contraction throughout book publishing these last 20 or so years. At the center of all that flux, of course, is that gruesome American creature that is Winner-Take-All yet boasts a very Long Tail, the beast that broke both the Chains and the Big Boxes, the beast that thrives in this new digital rain forest we find ourselves in now.

With ever more titles being published, by the hundreds of thousands at a jump, the vast majority of them by means of self-publishing or tiny start-ups and glorified vanity presses, the lists within what we see as conventional publishing grow ever tighter, ever harder to sell into, with the good old mid-list a thing of the past.

In a world where everyone's gaze is trained on success, a project that's going to excite one editor is apt to get more than a few others excited, too; one can be forgiven sometimes for imagining that everyone wants the same few things. Just as they do not want everything else. This is not entirely fair, of course, but the perception does engender a certain wariness at every level, every stage, of the publishing process, such that never has "Nope, not interested" been either so reliable a response or so inevitable.

As for the electronic publishing and marketing of books, it is for everyone as much a lifeline as a threat. It is, either way, the reality. The new normal. Few of us, I think, would not prefer to go back to the state of the industry in, say, 1995 or 1997, or 1999, but...here we are. Trying our very best. And still, on a good day, managing to make it work.

ST: Is it possible to predict what genre of book is going to be the next big hit?

RQ: I can't really say, as it's just not the way I approach the business, or my work within it.

ST: What is one random fact about yourself?

RQ: I once performed in a pigskin mini-skirt in an early evening reading of Dennis Cooper's rather transgressive novel Frisk at The Kitchen, on 19th Street, only to catch a cab back up to the fraternity where I was to don a jacket and tie to run the weekly meeting, with all of those musty robes and morbidly ossifying candles: two kinds of drag that went not especially well together!

To learn more about Rob McQuilkin, visit his official website or like his Facebook page. 

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