Lawyers look for the next blockbuster as literary agents
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A week after returning to LA from Lim’s book-signing party in September 2018, Levine was still on a high. “It was the biggest thrill,” he says, to see the look on Lim’s face when she held the first copy in her hands.
Even after decades of representing authors, Kleinman echoes that feeling. He says there is only one way to describe what he most enjoys about being a literary agent: “Making people’s dreams come true.”
Those dreams have materialized for many of his clients, whose works became runaway best-sellers and Pulitzer Prize finalists. Among his recent big-time sales are The Snow Child (Eowyn Ivey), The Widow of the South (Robert Hicks), The Eighty-Dollar Champion (Elizabeth Letts) and Mockingbird (Charles J. Shields).
Wild success puts an agent in the spotlight with his client at book-signing parties and down the road at awards ceremonies, as Doraswamy recently found. A book she represents, One Part Woman, was a 2018 National Book Awards finalist. (The winner in her category of translated literature was The Emissary, by Yoko Tawada with translation by Margaret Mitsutani.)
Such pinnacles come infrequently, but even so, who would want to go back to practicing law after that?
The accidental agent
Doraswamy almost did. Unlike most agents, she entered the literary world by default.
“This job found me. I’m not kidding,” she says.
A former deputy attorney general who prosecuted securities fraud cases in Newark, New Jersey, she thought she was on a temporary hiatus from law when her husband accepted an offer to head Citicorp’s commodities business for the Asia-Pacific region. It took them to Singapore for several years, where she met a literary agent whose children attended the same school as theirs. The woman had opened an agency in India and asked Doraswamy whether she would help her in Singapore.
Priya Doraswamy: “I’d send letters to publishers in the U.K. and say, ‘I’m coming to the London Book Fair. Can we meet?’ It was at a very grassroots level. Everyone has to start somewhere, and for me it was pretty much at the bottom.” Photo courtesy of Priya Doraswamy.
“I’ve been a voracious reader all my life, but I had no idea what a literary agent did,” recalls Doraswamy. She had been looking for part-time work, mainly for mental stimulation, and figured there was no downside to giving it a try. First she apprenticed pro bono, and later the two became partners at Jacaranda Agency. They worked mainly with publishers in India and the United Kingdom and attended large book fairs in London and Frankfurt.
Without a publishing background and contacts, Doraswamy had to be inventive. “I did lot of cold-calling and emailing,” she says. “I’d send letters to publishers in the U.K. and say, ‘I’m coming to the London Book Fair. Can we meet?’ It was at a very grassroots level. Everyone has to start somewhere, and for me it was pretty much at the bottom.”
Doraswamy and her family eventually returned to the United States, where she founded Lotus Lane Literary. She did not resume practicing law.
“I decided to stay in literary work because I could set my own parameters—even though I work about 12 hours almost every day—and be around when my kids got home from school while balancing a career.”
In today’s publishing world, if you don’t have experience and contacts, the only viable way to become a literary agent is to take Doraswamy’s route, says Kleinman. But he notes that apprenticeship “can be hard if you’re used to running the ship and then have to take a much more menial position.”
I am not a salesperson. That’s not what I do. I share books I love with people who I think will also love them.
—Jeff Kleinman
On top of that looms a steep learning curve. “It takes time to learn who the players are, how the sale of a book is done, how authors get compensated,” says Levine. “Even when you figure out which editor at which house acquires which kind of material, it doesn’t do any good unless you can get him to consider your pitch. A literary agent’s job is to be a ‘buyer finder.’ ’’
Kleinman has a different take: “I am not a salesperson. That’s not what I do. I share books I love with people who I think will also love them,” he says. “Writers think you’re selling widgets. It’s like, ‘I wrote a 5-foot-high, 7-foot-wide gray thing. Can you sell that?’ But you’re not selling a product. It’s much more of a feeling thing, like when you go into someone’s house and think, ‘Wow! This is beautiful.’ ”
Putting legal skills to work
No matter how you look at it, selling books is a tough game. The publishing industry, cautions Levine, “is not for the faint of heart, and it’s not for somebody who is fresh out of law school.”
Even so, what you’ve learned in law school equips you with some important skills in the literary world. Doraswamy says that regardless of which milieu you’re in, you’re a storyteller.
“As a lawyer, you’re telling your client’s story to the judge and jury. Your mandate is the four corners of the law. It’s a story steeped in facts, yet it’s also advocacy. How do you tell the story with the tools you have to convince the court it’s the right story?” she asks.
Although a novel is crafted for a different audience, Kleinman says it presents the same challenge: making the story resonate with the reader. He was in law school when he learned what he still considers his most valuable lesson about getting a message across in writing.
“I didn’t really care about grades as a law student. People would check their grades, and if they got a B, they would burst into tears,” he says. “All I cared about was getting better than a D because that meant I passed. But in legal writing class, I totally cared about grades because I knew I was a good writer. I figured, ‘At least in this class, I’ll get an A.’ ”
Surprise, surprise: His first paper came back marked with a giant B. Incredulous, Kleinman asked the professor why. She said he didn’t have any transitions between paragraphs. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “Every paragraph flows from the one above. I used all that language you’re taught to use as a writer to link points in an essay. Didn’t you see all the ‘therefores?’ ”
The professor explained that wasn’t what a transition was. She told him transition means “first,” “second,” “third,” “fourth”—indicators of building an argument step by step. “I’ve never forgotten that. It has been insanely helpful, and not just in legal writing,” says Kleinman.
“I’m very nonsequential. That’s how my brain works. I make leaps from one thing to the other. But in order to write a nonfiction book proposal or a novel, you have to go from A to B to C. The chapters have to build sequentially. You can’t leap over things. As an editor, I’m really good with building characters and creating narrative urgency, and that’s because of what I learned in law school.”
Darlene Ricker, a legal affairs writer and book editor based in Lexington, Kentucky, is a former staff writer and editor for the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times.
