The Wordsmiths Project Journal

While I have long been pleased to say my friends span nearly every living generation, from teenagers to octagenerians, I have had reason to consider myself young. I’m the younger sister. I’m [mumble] years younger than my husband Daniel. And I’m often the youngest person in social gatherings — particularly those made up of the higher age range of my friends. So, it came as a rude awakening to recognize that a new, younger generations has come up and is changing publishing.

Ben Salmon, an agent at Rights Unlimited, is one of the New Breed making an impact on what books are now being published. When I photographed and interviewed him, I asked him to help me understand what defines and distinguishes his generation. After all, as an author, I need to know what they want.. what would sell to them.

Needless to say, Ben is young. (”Not that I believe that age has much to do with talent,” he told me. ”But let’s stick with mid- to older twentysomething”). Angular and thin, with a slightly spikey faux-hawk haircut, precisely trimmed goatee, and explosive laugh, he has a presence and style somewhat reminiscent of bas-reliefs I’ve seen of ancient Assyrian kings. Looking through the camera lens, I couldn’t help but feel that he’s managed to make himself into the embodiment of the type of books he likes…. Edgy.

The first task in understanding a new generation is to “get” their language, the vernacular they use to describe what they like — and what they don’t like. “Edgy” is a word I hear frequently these days. They all seem to want books that are edgy. Yikes! What the heck is that supposed to mean?

Ben explained it within context. “A lot of what I do tends to be a little edgy or a little quirky or a little sexy, a little young. A little bit of something – attitude, personality – I call it the outer ring of mainstream. So, it’s still going to have mass appeal. It’s still going to make the New York Times bestseller list, but has something that makes you cock your head and say, ‘Wow! That’s an interesting perspective, that’s something new.’” In fiction, he feels that ”Bee Season” by Maya Goldberg or “Or the Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time” by Mark Haddon are good examples, for their successful quirkiness. 

Of course, every generation struggles to define itself as different, not realizing how much has already been done before. (”Everything old is new again.”)  In this case, however, the young agents and editors I’ve been meeting recently definitely have a distinctive, common manner, and many acknowledge that they share a similar mindset.

But when I asked Ben what that mindset was, he had difficulty pinpointing exactly what it is. “I think there’s a lot more outward energy and passion involved. We’re becoming more nimble and we can move faster; we might be a little more empathetic to the author, but not quite as tweedy. Tweedy. You know, like the old tweed jackets and the two martini lunches. Although I also think that’s partly a societal and partly a gender thing. Because it used to be the old boy’s club and it’s changed to… well, the joke is that it is changed to women and gay men in publishing now. People in publishing, especially in the younger set, are more likely to put emotion and passion and energy into their projects. And they make them personal.”

Older agents also talk about passion, how they have to be excited about a book and author, before they will want to handle it. But the New Breed is more effusive in their passion. They certainly use more exclamation marks. Not only in their lively, highly communicative emails — you can actually hear it when they talk.

Ben feels that one of the important differences about his generation of agents is their career paths. For example, he knew exactly what he wanted to do when he was just beginning college: he wanted to be a literary agent. Most of the older agents I have known started out wanting to be editors… or, if you dig even deeper into their psyches, writers.

As he sees it, in previous generations, agents tended to be former editors or editorial directors. Sometimes, they were fired from their jobs. Or, they had been promoted so high that they had become corporate managers, no longer involved in the day-to-day handling of books. One way they could get back to the basics – working directly on books, relating to individual authors – was to hang out their shingle as agents. According to Ben, the New Breed of agents are what he calls “born and bred agents.” They tend to start as assistants in literary agencies (or move over to agencing rather early in their careers) and stayed there, making their way up the ladder within that one branch of the industy. “You don’t necessarially have to have proven yourself in the publishing house for twenty years, and then move over to agenting when you’re 45. You’re moving over to agenting when you’re in your twenties. You start as an assistant and then move up, and there’s a different kind of energy involved. You don’t have old school editors becoming agents now. You have these people who are seeing things differently because they weren’t always in a house or never in a house. And I think it’s a different mindset with a different style.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is that, even in this Internet age, a lot of publishing business still requires face-to-face personal connections and networking. “Let’s do lunch” is as important a phrase as ever, and how often such invitations are accepted can be an indication of just how successful and repected you are. Some agents may make as many as three lunch appointments a week, though just as often, a date will be cancelled, because one or the other person suddenly has other obligations or crises to handle.

“But you know what is done over lunch?” Ben confided. “It’s relationship building. I work so well with editors who I have a relationship with, and they know my sensibilities and I know theirs. And they trust my instincts and I trust theirs. We just generally enjoy each other’s company, which makes for better business dealings. While to a certain extent you have to keep the personal and the professional separate, the personal is professional, and the professional is personal.”

In other words, publishing is still a small village. And, as in any such community, the young generation is doing its best to flex its muscles. It will be interesting to see how they mold the industry, and what effect they will have on what we will be reading (and writing).

One of the ways my 91-year-old father keeps his mind sharp is with his daily Internet fix of U.S. and international newspapers. Every morning, he browses the world seeking stories that intrigue him. He prints out the most interesting articles (or the ones he feels might have some value to us), to share with my mother, my sister, me and my husband Daniel.

Recently, Dad gave me an article from The International Herald Tribune, titled “Book agents explore borderless world” by Eric Pfanner. In it, Pfanner discusses a trend among agents in which he says, more and more literary agencies are handling their own foreign rights sales rather than sub-agenting to specialists in the field of international sales. He sees this as “reflecting shifts rippling through the literary agent business as English-language publishers increasingly look for big borderless hits.” 

I found myself thinking about that article as I prepared to photograph Ben Salmon, an agent with Rights Unlimited. Rights Unlimited has long focused on foreign rights (for over 20 years) — hence, the name of the company. Among their more notable sales have been the international rights for the first 14 John Grisham books, Fern Michaels, Dr. Robert Atkins, John Lescroart, Dr. Ruth and others. But, in an apparent reverse of the phenomenon that Eric Pfanner wrote about, Ben was brought on board to give Rights Unlimited more of a presence in the domestic market (i.e. primary sales to North American publishers). As Ben explained, “Rights Unlimited… had a reputation for representing New York Times best-selling authors internationally. But the international climate has changed. Not that books aren’t doing well internationally, but they’re not being farmed out as much to international agencies.” Not only are the primary agencies going into international sales, he added, but publishing houses have become more aggressive in selling books internationally on their own.

So, one of the first thoughts that came to my mind was that, if primary agents and publishers aren’t using sub-agents as much, why are we, as authors, continuing to sign traditional contracts in which we agree to pay higher commissions for international sales versus domestic sales? Now, I’m certainly happy to have my agent earn a nice percentage of any sales she makes for me. Heck, one of my dreams is that she will become quite rich on her sales commissions of my books. But the traditional justification of international sales commissions being at least 20% (depending on the country), rather than 15% for domestic sales, was that the primary agent would have to split that with the sub-agent.

Ben had a very reasonable response. “The thing to remember is that there’s a lot of processing and administrative work associated with international rights. It’s a bit different than in the domestic realm. And the deals tend to be smaller. Often, you have to make many international deals to come close to what you could make with one domestic one. (I mean, how much money can you really get by selling Estonian rights?) But we like to get as many international deals for our authors as possible, even if it ends up costing more overhead money to make the deal happen than we actually recover in commission.”

What’s more, sub-agents are still an important component of the process. You can see proof of it in Rights Unlimited’s own offices. Of their five agents, only Ben focuses on domestic sales. The other four continue to concentrate on functioning as sub-agents, selling the international rights to books represented domestically by other agencies.

So, when I recently signed with my new agent (Mollie Glick at Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency), one of the things I didn’t argue about was the higher rate of commissions for international sales. As I said, before, I hope she becomes quite wealthy selling my novel — whether or not she uses a sub-agent.

What do you think?